Burton Richter on Climate & Energy

Here is a video of Burton Richter talking about climate and energy and promoting his book Beyond Smoke and Mirrors:



I agree that the truth on climate is between the two extremes. I think I'm more toward the denial side than Richter. I'm not convinced the CO2 is that big of a deal. I think water vapour swamps the effect and I think Svensmark's geoclimatology theory trumps the effect of CO2. But I feel I could have a debate with Richter and we could come to an agreement. He isn't a fanatic.

Here's a critique of Burton Richter by Luboš Motl and his comments on his blog The Reference Frame:

Natural gas vs oil

The world's proven reserves of natural gas are 180 trillion cubic meters or so; Russia, Iran, and Qatar (combined) have more than 50% of it.

In the U.S., one cubic meter costs about $0.25 and produces 10.8 kWh of gross heat when combusted.

Various products and ratios may be useful. The price of 1 kWh of gross heat is about 2 U.S. cents, or $0.02, which is, of course, well below the price of electricity in the U.S. around $0.12 per kWh (but don't forget that you can only get a fraction of the energy if you burn the gas, and you must pay many other things).

The 180 trillion of cubic meters in reserves cost $45 trillion at the price I indicated. These proven reserves would produce 1900 trillion kWh of gross heat when burned.

Oil

The world's proven oil reserves are about 1.3 trillion barrels. At the current price of $78 per barrel, the total price of the proven (and revealed) reserves is about $100 trillion - which is twice as much as the price of the natural reserves.

The energy/heat content of one barrel of oil is equivalent to 153 cubic meters of natural gas. So the proven reserves of 1.3 trillion barrels of oil contain as much energy as 200 trillion cubic meters of natural gas.

You can see that this is almost exactly the same amount as the proven natural gas reserves - it is only 10% higher (but the accuracy is much worse than 10% here).

What about the price of one kWh of gross heat? Well, one barrel of oil costs $78 but produces 153 x 10.8 = 1650 kWh of gross heat when combusted. That's almost $0.05 per kWh. So indeed, the energy from natural gas may be by a factor of two or three cheaper if you neglect everything else.

You see that both oil and natural gas are comparably cheap and produce comparable energy per dollar. Well, there are way too many things that may be more important and that go well beyond the price, energy, and reserves.

The world's electricity consumption is 17 trillion kWh per year. I noticed that the natural gas contains 1900 trillion kWh of gross heat. Together with the slightly higher amount from the proven oil reserves, we have 4000 trillion kWh of gross heat.

If there were no losses, that would be enough for 235 years of electricity consumption. ;-) Of course, the electricity consumption is actually not covering all the types of energy we consume.

I didn't know what numbers I would get but if the prices were what they seemed to be and if there were no other major issues, I would agree it is sensible to try to burn the natural gas first because it's cheaper.

The main disadvantages of natural gas are expensive pipelines, extraction side effects, and the toxic nature of the gas. While someone who is only obsessed with the "bare price" or "energy content" or "CO2 emissions" could easily miss all these "more subtle" issues, they are actually behind the fact that the natural gas is replaced by coal or oil in many applications.

So even though the simplest calculations of the energy efficiency (and price) seem favorable for the natural gas, it makes no sense for people with a limited knowledge of these "engineering" issues - e.g. Burton Richter - to dictate what the "right" mixture of energy sources should be.

I find the above conversion estimates very interesting. I agree with Motl that they are seductive. The actual engineering effort & safety concerns & financial feasibility are left out of Richter's viewpoint.