110# Of Rice

The wife and I bought 110 pounds of rice in the past two days. I bought ten pounds of basmati rice and today we bought 100 pounds of jasmine rice.

The Tilda brand basmati rice cost about $13.00 for the ten pounds, this is not way out of line with my expectations. However, the store I bought it from was out today and who knows what the price is going to be when they get more in stock.

The jasmine rice cost us about $40.00/50# and the store proprietor informed us she was about to raise the prices by about $2.00/50#. The rice price is rising faster than gasoline. Last I recall paying for a 50# bag of rice was about half of that, $20-$23.

A lot of noise is being made how this is all ethanol's fault. While I think it wrong-headed to provide subsidies to divert food products into energy products (energy for non-humans) I am very skeptical about ethanol's culpability in the rice crisis. There are reports the rice harvest this year was way down and producers are limiting exports to cover their own nutritional needs. I think that the most likely cause. Domestic US rice prices were still reasonable. I do not believe many of the lands where there is a rice crisis subsist on cheap corn and are forced to eat rice due to corn diversion. Central and South American nations may be in that situation, but my guess is Southeast Asian nations are not.

The rush to blame ethanol production is more blame the US for the world's woes.

What else may be underlying this? Oil costs. Don't think by oil costs I mean gasoline. Oil means a lot more than gasoline. Oil means fertilizer, oil means plastics, oil means other vital synthesized chemicals vital to our modern life. I mean gasoline and more.

Still I am not convinced it is all petroleum.

Energy

Michael Ramirez draws this cartoon on the Left's approach to energy policy:

Tapping the Earth

For energy.

One of the saddest things Marcus is that we have a "green" energy source inside this country that has the power to completely supply our entire electrical grid and everyone refuses to touch it.

It produces NO byproducts, recycles its own energy transmission source. It requires no new technology7 and it is both inexhaustible and utterly reliable. What is the sacrifice? We have to exploit 2 of our biggest national parks for energy.

Both the Japanese and Iceland make extensive use of this power and have for decades.

Look down, Marcus. Enough power for millennium lies beneath or feet. Geothermal energy could supply all of our electrical needs.

At Yellowstone and Long Valley in California are 2 of the biggest Calderas on Earth and using them to power our electric grid is the single most intelligent thing we could do.

Source: Blogger Beer Comments – Wayne I have been looking into various alternative energies. Wayne is very correct on the above comment however, in my opinion the market is not quite ready for prime-time, but when it goes it will be great.

What is standing in the way? Mass market mass. That is to say, the demand for it is not yet great enough for serious production of the gear needed.

Still Costly

The Empress and I are building a house. I have a bid from a local company for a traditional heating & cooling system. The system is bid out at about $11,000.00 for the duct work, the furnace the air conditioning (AC), and venting. They wanted about another $11,000-$12,000 for an earth-heat pump system.

Now, I am quite willing to consider this as an investment that will pay off given the time. Reading I have done says many of these installations pay off in two to ten years time. Not bad, that time frame is something I am okay with.

However, the bid did not come with an analysis of likely savings so it is a shot in the dark. So, I am going to either punt on this, call and ask where the analysis is, or go somewhere else. The outfit did not impress me.

How Earth Heat Pumps Work

Essentially it is an AC unit.

Using the principles of physics your basic AC (or refrigerator) collects heat and moves it from one location to another. The AC moves the heat from inside of the house to the outside. A refrigerator moves it from inside the refrigerator to the outside of the refrigerator. Simple, no? A furnace, on the other hand is a heat source, you convert one form of energy to heat energy and move that heat about your house. For most of us the energy we convert is the chemical energy of natural gas, fuel oil, or wood (or any other combustible) to heat energy. Some of us use electrical energy as the heat source.

Heat pumps rely on the difference in temperature to generate heating and cooling. In the summer the earth heat pump transports heat from the house to the earth and in the winter the pump reverses and moves heat from the earth into the house.

Understand, heat and temperature are not the same. A spark generated by metal on a grinding wheel has a high temperature but next to no heat. It will dance on your skin and startle but not harm you. The earth down in the ground stays at about 50° F but is able to absord & give massive amounts of heat without a change in the temperature. This is the key.

The heat pump through its action concentrates an amount of heat into a liquid which is (you can put it through your water heater first) then pumped into the earth and then the earth cools the liquid to 50° F or close to it. The liquid returns and is ready to be reheated. Again, in the winter reverse the process, send cool liquid to the earth and then on return concentrate the heat in the liquid and distribute through the house.

In fact, some heat pumps do not go into the earth but will just use the outside air as the heat sink/source.

Two General Types of Systems

Vertical & horizontal. If you have a lot of land you can have a horizontal system where a shallow trench is dug and tubing is laid out and buried. There you have your heat source/sink. If you do not have a lot of land then a vertical sysem is in order. A deep shaft is dug and the heat and the piping is buried in the shaft. Obviously vertical systems are more expensive.

I will have to do a bit more research on this for us.

Sugar Plum Petroleum For...

Plastics & medicines. Surprised? The song goes:

Black and viscous - bound to cure blue lethargy
Sugar-plum petroleum for energy
Tightrope-balanced payments need a small reprieve
Oh, please believe we want to be
in North Sea Oil
New-found wealth sits on the shelf of yesterday
Hot-air balloon - inflation soon will make you pay
Riggers rig and diggers dig their shallow grave
but we'll be saved and what we crave
is North Sea Oil
Prices boom in Aberdeen and London Town
Ten more years to lay the fears, erase the frown
before we are all nuclear - the better way!
Oh, let us pray: we want to stay
in North Sea Oil

Source: Lyris of Jethro Tull's North Sea Oil from the Stormwatch Album The songs sings of energy and that is what most people think when they hear the word petroleum. However, another very important part of petroleum is for the chemicals we derive from it. Many plastics are petroleum based that is why when I am green minded I get the paper bags not the plastic bags from the store. To replace a tree is lot quicker work than replacing the petroleum used to make the plastic bag (plus the fact paper degrades a lot more quickly).

What I wonder is, if we get off of gasoline as a primary means of fueling consumer level locomotion, will refiners be able to redirect their processes to refining other chemicals? That is, can a refiner alter their process to turn what is now gasoline into other products? I suspect they are unable but I do not know (and I do not have time to google it). In any event, the petroleum dependence is not over with new sources of consumer locomotive energy.

Aluminum + Gallium + H20 =

Energy for our industrious and mobile society?

Possibly. What happens, is the gallium acts as a catalyst and prevents the aluminum from oxidizing and when you add water, the aluminum pulls off the oxygen from the water molecules and then the H₂ can then be utilized as either a combustible or to energize a fuel cell. There are waste products involved but those consist of water (exhaust) and aluminum oxide & the gallium.

However, discharging water as exhaust is unlikely to get people worked up and the other two wastes are recyclable and can be processed & returned to the energy cycle.

Is it a wonderful development full of limitless energy? I do not know but a few concerns on my part that constrain possibilities.

How plentiful is gallium? Some quick googling leads me to believe gallium is a rare element. Will there be enough of it? How hard is it to extract from the earth?

How costly in terms of energy is recycling the aluminum oxide? There is no free lunch especially with energy. You can not drive this process by utilizing the aluminum gallium energy process we will need to utilize nuclear, coal, or some other source for that.

Very intriguing. Combine the above with fuel cells and we may finally have a practical alternative to petroleum as a fuel (however, recall petroleum is used for more than just fuel).