I had thought that the short thread that has run through my last few posts – relating to the imminence of a fuels crisis, and the lack of political perception of the problem, had run out. And then I read the piece from Salon that threadbot had as the top story on Drumbeat on Sunday. Taken with a conversation that I had with the Nurse (who lives in Ottawa) today, it led me to this additional comment. And to put that in context, for those who live further South, while Ottawa might get about 100 inches (250 cm) of snow in a normal winter, this year it has had more than 166 inches (421 cm) and the snows are not over. Part of the reason that I bring this up, in context of the Salon article, was the line in that article that said (and I recognize that I am taking it a little out of context)

And for that only one alternative fuel is even remotely plausible — carbon-free electricity.

And my tiny mind asks, where, with a 20-inch (50 cm) snowstorm does one find this source to supply a city of 1,148,800 inhabitants in the short term.
[break]
My worry is that there seems to be a lack of understanding about what we are really talking about when we talk about post-peak oil. I started this thread back with an article on Botswana that began

The habit of bargaining has become so engrained that statements of shortage are quite commonly read as bargaining positions leading to a price hike, rather than that you literally can’t have any. But we are now in a time when the reality of growing shortages, and in more than just crude oil, is going to start imposing such a disconcerting awareness.

The pre-supposition that underlies many of the articles, we see about the need to change the sources for our fuel supply, such as that in Salon, is that we have plenty of time in which to make those decisions. The reality is that we do not.

When I quoted from “Cape Wind” I mentioned that one way that New England coped with the natural gas shortage of 2004 was to close the schools. This was also one of the ways of coping back when we had the energy shortages of the 1970’s. But it is not a permanent solution to anything, The hope is that we might have learned some of the lessons from those experiences. However, the problem is that we may not have learned enough, and there is enough supply, in the short term to slip discussion just long enough that other remedial measures won’t be taken.

Natural gas usage in the United States went up 6.2% in 2007, with residential consumption going up 8% and electrical power use rising 9.9%. ( Natural Gas –Year in Review 2007 (pdf) ). At the same time the production of natural gas from the Gulf dropped 4.5%, while the increase in supply came from the Barnett Shale and the Rocky Mountain region. However it has been noted that the life of wells in the former is likely to be less than four years, with production per well halving after the first. In the very short term the relief in supply will come from the natural gas surplus from the West will make its way through the Rockies Express pipeline to needy customers in the East, even though it is currently held up by bats. The pipeline should reach full delivery capacity as far East as Missouri this year, and then, shortly thereafter be able to deliver some 1.6 Bcf/day out to Clarington, Ohio freeing up supplies to go all the way up into New England. In the process it is driving up the prices of natural gas in the West, which until now did not have sufficient market for the gas they were producing.

A survey by The Associated Press found that households across the Rocky Mountains buying natural gas from major utilities pay as little as $6.36 a decatherm, a heat value roughly equal to 1,000 cubic feet of gas, depending on the quality.

In other parts of the continent, notably Georgia and South Carolina, natural gas can top $25 a decatherm. Hawaii has the country’s highest average prices at more than $34, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.

As those fields are now able to more easily supply the nation one wonders how long the available supply will last. Current estimates of sufficient supply to meet national needs for ten years may shorten as demand continues to increase, and questions of storage have not completely gone away.

Increasingly the Western supply will look to the development of unconventional gas supplies, such as coal bed methane. And it must be remembered that as the fields decline so the number of wells that must be drilled each year must go up. Over a period of ten years, for example, the number of wells required to sustain production from Canadian fields increased threefold. And now there are increasing concerns with the supply from Canada, because of increased costs and continued lower well productivity.

The increasing demand for natural gas offset by the short-term increase in availability is going to lead to more comments that we cry “Wolf” when we look at the energy supply situation. After all we are increasingly able to get LNG from different sources. In the past year we have increased supply and drawn it from a wider resource base, with supplies now coming from Trinidad and Tobago, Egypt, Nigeria, Algeria, Qatar and Equatorial Guinea.

But this abundance is very transient and will unfortunately in that short period sap the strength from the message of concern over longer-term supply. And, it occurs as other nations in need are also competing to purchase supply not only for the short-term, but with longer-term contracts. If, in the short-term we do not need that much, by the time the longer term rolls around the option to purchase may have gone away. We also tend to neglect the growing needs of the economies of the producing nations. There is already evidence that the Export Land Model will apply to natural gas supplies from the Middle East, with Leanan drawing our attention to the developing shortages of natural gas supply among the nations of the Middle East.

Unable to gain access to gas from Qatar or Iran, the northern emirates of Ras al Khaymah and Al Fujayrah have been obliged to import diesel and coal to meet their power generation needs, said Simon Williams, a senior economist with HSBC in Dubai.

“Demand has accelerated more quickly than anticipated and additions to supply have fallen behind,” he said. “They’ve had little option but to look to alternative sources of energy supply. The irony of the Gulf importing hydrocarbon energy is not lost on anyone.”

There is also the continuing lack of success in finding natural gas in Saudi Arabia again, from Monday’s Drumbeat.

New discoveries have fallen far short of expectations.

Meanwhile, Saudi Arabia is seeing a huge increase in domestic demand for the fuel as a feedstock for everything from desalination plants to heavy industry and power generation.

With the interesting comment from Sadad al-Husseini, former head of exploration and production:

“It is just unfortunate that so much money has been spent to confirm what we knew already,”

The Hearst report noted that it would take around 20-years to find and develop new technologies and supplies and to put them into place. We do not have the sense of urgency to impel us to do so. The message of “Sorry, there is none,” when it comes will mean that the years of grace are over. And as the scale of the problem then becomes evident we will probably, again, blame the fuel companies, rather than those politicians who fail to recognize and address the underlying problems.

[Comments fixed.]

The Engineer-Poet recently had a post on The Cogeneration Stopgap at the Oil Drum, which looked at how the combination of cogeneration (generating combined heat and power - CHP - using natural gas) and heat pumps could be used to heat North American homes much more efficiently and extend the life of North America’s dwindling natural gas reserves for a period of time while houses are retrofitted to make them more energy efficient and natural gas use is replaced with electricity. The only example of cogeneration technology touched on in the article was from Climate Energy, whose CHP unit is made by Honda.

An Australian company working in this area called Ceramic Fuel Cells was in the news recently after landing a $240 million deal with Dutch energy company Nuon to supply 50,000 CHP units by 2014. The company still needs to meet a number of commercial requirements set by Nuon - in particular improving the durability of the cells from two years to four.

The company is hoping that production will begin by June 2009 in a new €12.4 million factory in Heinsberg, Germany, which aims to produce 10,000 2 kW units per year. The cells are expected to emit 60% less carbon dioxide than traditional combustion generators. The company is also partnering with Britain’s Powergen, Germany’s EWE and Gaz de France.
[break]
Ceramic Fuel Cells

Ceramic’s fuel cells have been under development for several years, listing on the ASX in 2004 and the AIM shortly after. The company specialises in solid oxide fuel cells, which convert natural gas (and presumably biogas) into power and heat without burning the fuel. The cells convert about 50 per cent of the energy in the fuel to electricity - traditional gas-fired power stations manage around 30 per cent - with another 35 per cent of the potential energy captured as heat from the catalytic process.

The company doesn’t have any plans to market units in Australia in the foreseeable future, preferring to concentrate on the European market due to higher energy prices, specific CHP rebates in Germany, feed-in tariffs and possible carbon credits for trading on the EU emissions trading scheme (set up under the Kyoto protocol).

CHP in Britain

Reuters reported that boilers containing Ceramic’s units could be sold in Britain in 2010 if utility company Powergen orders units this year. The article estimates that fuel cell units for home units will be priced between 1,500 and 2,000 pounds and that larger units priced at over 3,000 pounds will be operated by utility companies. The same report goes on to speculate that because utilities will save so much money by producing electricity using CHP (which they believe is twice as efficient as centralised generation and sending power through the grid), that they expect utilities will eventually start giving next-generation boilers to customers for free, with the units having a 4-5 year payback period.

Powergen has also previously looked at a different micro-CHP approach using Stirling Engines attached to water boilers. I can’t tell what happened to this plan, though the company is assume was the prospective supplier - Disenco - is still marketing a CHP product (although full production isn’t due to begin until this year, which may explain the absence of progress).

Another British CHP company called Ceres Power received an order for 37,500 units from British Gas owner Centrica in January, for delivery from 2011. These units are smaller but cheaper than Ceramic’s units. Carbon Commentary have looked at this unit and claimed the main challenge facing CHP vendors in the UK is a the lack of feed-in tariffs - which would presumably affect Ceramic as much as Ceres.

Bloom Energy

Another company that has received a lot of attention in the fuel cell market is US company Bloom Energy, who are also developing solid oxide fuel cells (though there is some legal argument underway about who actually developed the technology in this case). Bloom Energy

The company is investigating using natural gas and ethanol as fuel for the cells, and most reports speculate the cells will be able to generate 100 kw of power (the company’s web site says absolutely nothing). One report from Business 2.0 claims the company is aiming to sell units for around US$10,000.

Bloom is backed by a number of high profile investors, including the omnipresent Kleiner Perkins Caulfield Byers, and has raised US$100 million in funding. According to Vinod Khosla, the company is currently building a “massive” facility in Mumbai, India.

One possible application for Bloom’s fuel cells is in data centres, with the cells used to eliminate the need for uninterruptible power supplies (UPS’s) and thus (in some cases) the need for additional disaster recovery (DR) facilities.

Japan

Japan has also seen trials of hydrogen fuel cells for CHP, with the hydrogen coming from reformed natural gas. The cells are leased for 1 million yen (US$9,500) for a 10-year period from Matsushita Electric Industrial Co. Toyota, Honda and Toshiba are all also working on fuel cells, usually as part of efforts to develop fuel cell vehicles.

The Japanese Government is spending 2.4 billion yen (US$310 million) per year on fuel cell development and plans for 10 million homes (25% of Japanese households) to be powered by fuel cells by 2020.

The Air Car

One last note - a commenter on the “Air Car” articles noted that MDI’s main business seems to be a variable-fuel stationary power supply, so presumably they could be a vendor in this market at some point as well.

Crossposted from Peak Energy

In his second new TV spot of the day ??? this one now playing in Pennsylvania ??? Barack Obama’s campaign releases a 30 second ad that takes a strong stand against Big Oil, saying he ???won???t let them block change anymore.???

My question to you is: Does he have it right? Is this the correct political frame? Is it a winning political frame?

[Hat tip: NY Times Political Blog: "Obama's Big Oil Ad Draws Fire"...go there and fly the TOD flag if you are so inclined.]

Andris Piebalgs continues this Friday his blogging on bio-fuels, addressing some of the concerns expressed by the readers of the last blog-entry.

I agree that a radical change in consumer behavior is needed if we want Europe to be more energy efficient. At the same time, as policy makers we have to come up with policies that are based on present day realities. And the reality is that most Europeans are living and working in big cities and using modern means of transport. It would be unrealistic to impose sanctions on car producers and users if no alternatives are provided.

Before continuing I can’t but express once more my joy in seeing EU’s leaders having such a close interaction with their citizens. More bio-fuel talk under the fold.

[break]

Crossposted at the European Tribune.

In Europe, we use less than 2 percent of our cereals production for biofuels, so they do not contribute significantly to higher food prices in the European context. Even if we reach our 10% biofuels target by 2020, the price impact will be small. Our modeling suggests that it will cause a 8 to 10% increase in rape seed prices and 3 to 6% increase in cereal prices. Increase in the price of the latest has very small influence on the cost of bread. It makes up around 4 per cent of the consumer price of a loaf.

[...]

We need to use first-generation biofuels as a bridge to the second generation biofuels using lignocellulosic materials as a feedstock. With this in mind, the Commission within the forthcoming review of the Common Agricultural Policy will urge the farmers to invest more in short rotation forestry crops and perennial grasses which are the most typical feedstocks for advanced biofuels.Over the past 30 years, Europe’s farmers have stood accused, through their association with the Common Agricultural Policy, of over-producing and dumping their surpluses with the aid of massive export subsidies on over supplied world markets, therefore depressing market prices and contributing massively to poverty and starvation in poor countries. That criticism has now been reversed. The charge now is that EU biofuel policy will contribute to third world poverty by driving food prices up. My impression from this debate sometimes is that we the Europeans know best what is good for people in developing world. Let them speak for themselves.

[...]

And let’s not forget that oil is a finite commodity, and high oil prices are one of the main factors making food more expensive, particularly in poor countries.

The most important questions raised in the previous log entries were left unattended. Here’s a simple accounting exercise to get a real sense of proportion:

The EU consumes today roughly 20 Mb/d of Oil. Of that about two thirds are used in Transport, make it 13 Mb/d. Assuming that EU’s Transport use remains unchanged up to 2020 that turns the target to something like 1.3 Mb/d.

Ethanol has an energy density of about 60% of gasoline, biodiesel is somewhat better, so make it 75%. Thus to replace those 1.3 Mb/d of Oil, about 1.75 Mb/d of bio-fuels are needed ( 1.3/0.75 ).

Ethanol production in temperate climates has an EROEI below 2:1, biodiesel about 4:1. Oil’s EROEI differs markedly from place to place (offshore versus onshore, etc) but 10:1 is a general enough mark. Accounting for EROEI, the useful energy the EU gets from Oil is about 1.2 Mb/d. To match that useful energy, total bio-fuels production has to rise to 2.1 Mb/d ( 1.2/0.75/0.75 ).

Corn crops yield about 3500 litres of ethanol per hectare per year (that’s 9.5 litres per hectare per day). With sugar cane in the tropics that number goes up to 6000 (16,5 litres per hectare per day). But for bio-diesels the numbers are considerably lower, around 1250 litres per hectare per year (3,5 per hectare litres per day).

Using 159 litres for a barrel, 2.1 Mb correspond roughly to 333 Ml (mega-litre). Using again the most optimistic figure for the temperate regions, the EU needs to allocate thirty five million (35 000 000) hectares to bio-fuels production.

I live in a state that has an area of less than 9 million hectares. Germany has an area just over 35 million hectares.

All that dark green area producing ethanol in 2020?

Good or evil? Friend or foe? This kind of wording doesn’t fit in my Engeneering/Architecture dictionaries. Bio-fuels are not an option, it’s all a matter of numbers.

Data sources:

Ethanol fuel

Biodiesel

The EROEI of ehtanol

Previous coverage of Andris Piebalgs blog:

Andris Piebalgs on Bio Fuels

Piebalgs on European Energy Security

Andris Piebalgs’ Blog

Luís de Sousa
TheOilDrum:Europe

Jamais Cascio talks about the P. Kharecha and J. Hansen “resources v. climate change” paper this evening, which was talked about here at TOD a few months ago (link). I thought I would bring the discussion over there to your attention.

http://www.openthefuture.com/2008/03/peak_oil_vs_global_warming.html

It will be interesting to me to see how both peak oil watchers and anti-global warming activists take this report. I suspect that some oilers will dismiss it as not big news, since they already knew that society is going to collapse before we reach the worst of global warming; others might take it as an indicator that trying to deal with peak oil by producing liquid coal fuels (or similar fossil substitutes) is a bad idea, as it would eliminate the one slight benefit of peak oil conditions. I hope that climate watchers might have a generally more positive response, relief that the worst-case scenarios are even less likely than before. Unfortunately, I have a feeling that more than a few global warming-focused activists will see this report — despite coming from Hansen — as an attempt to reduce the urgency of the need to deal with anthrogenic carbon emissions.

What this report tells us, however, is that we can’t simply focus on one crisis — no matter how large and looming — without taking into consideration the other key drivers of change. The onset of peak oil will alter how we deal with climate disruption, rendering climate strategies that don’t take peak oil into account of limited value. Similarly, the fact of global warming must shape how our economies deal with a permanent oil crunch.

For both issues, the kinds of strategies most likely to succeed are those based on the precepts of an open future: innovation and experimentation; transparency and shared knowledge; and collaboration and shared responsibility. It’s a future worth fighting monsters for.

Go on over and say hello.

This is a guest post by Eugenio Saraceno, member of ASPO-Italy and consultant for energy sources management.

<A href=”//www.theoildrum.com/files/626px-Nuclear_plants_map_France.jpg
“>

France’s nuclear power plants produce almost 80% of the nation’s electricity. In contrast, nearby Italy has no nuclear plant in operation.

[break]

One of the main arguments of the present debate on energy is whether a nuclear energy program should be restarted or not. We can use the cases of Italy and France as a way for evaluating whether it is a good idea for a non nuclear country to get nuclear plants.

Italy is probably the only country in the world that has dismantled by law the existing nuclear plants. It was the result of a referendum against nuclear power that was held twenty years ago and that led to the stopping of all nuclear energy activities in the country. The only nuclear plant that was under construction at the time, Montalto di Castro on the Tyrrenian coast, was converted to natural gas. In the following years, the Italian government shut down the remaining nuclear plants even though it this was not required by the results of the referendum, probably due to economic and security considerations.

So, nuclear power was completely abandoned in Italy in the 1980s and the country focused on hydrocarbons for the generation of electricity. Years of low oil prices helped this trend but, after 2000, with rising oil prices the debate on nuclear power restarted. Nuclear supporters say now that stopping the Italian nuclear program was a mistake and that new nuclear plants will have to be built because of the very low price per kWh produced. The debate is ongoing in the Italian TV and in the press and, recently, the leading candidate for the right wing party for the coming April elections, Mr. Berlusconi, has stated that, if elected, his government will restart the Italian nuclear program.

In contrast to the case of Italy, France is engaged in the most ambitious nuclear program in the whole world, achieving the maximum ratio of nuclear energy to total electric power production, near 80%. France has 63 GWe of installed nuclear power, 58 reactors over 19 sites.

For a comparison, first of all let’s see some data about the energy consumption in both countries.

All data in the table are for the year 2005. Look at the yellow boxes for a quick assessment of the relevant differences and similarities between the two systems. Coal consumption is nearly the same for France and Italy, while oil consumption is larger for France, especially for the transport and household sectors. However, natural gas consumption is lower in France by nearly 30 Mtep. Italians have to burn about 26 Mtep of natural gas in order to generate electric power. This is the relevant advantage of nuclear power: without nuclear, the French would have needed 75 Mtep extra of natural gas.

However, it is also clear that nuclear energy cannot satisfy all energy needs of a country. So, even though France has nuclear power, the country still has to import coal and hydrocarbons (natural gas and oil derived fuels) whose prices are not influenced by the presence of atomic power. So in 2005 the energy imports bill for France and Italy was nearly the same, 37,5 G€ for France and 38,5 for Italy.

We can also compare energy prices in France and Italy. Here are the relevant data.

Note how oil products have nearly the same price in both countries. Natural gas prices for both France and Italy are very similar and lower than the EU-15 mean. The real advantage for France is the low cost of electricity, lower than the EU-15 average and much lower than in Italy. Again, we see that nuclear energy has an effect on the prices of electricity, but not on other energy sectors.

France is a large net exporter of electric power while Italy is the largest net importer in Europe, mostly from France, directly or via Switzerland. France produces electrical power mainly by nuclear energy and hydropower. Italy mainly burns gas in combined cycles or oil and coal in steam turbine plants. Italy has also a good quota of hydropower and the best geothermal production in Europe. The electricity use table shows consumption in various sectors. This time the yellow boxes are all for France. First, look at the distribution losses and plant services consumption (electricity generation sector). These data describe the efficiency of electricity generation and distribution services processes; this ratio is 11,2% for France and 9,5% for Italy. The scarce attention for efficiency in France is probably due to the abundant and cheap electricity available. Considering final uses, the interesting point is the huge French household and service consumption sectors, nearly twice as large as in Italy.

Surely electricity is cheap in France, but what is the real cost of the nuclear kWh? As a first approximation let’s consider the whole French production as if it was all nuclear. Then consider that electricity consumption of France is partitioned into two nearly equal parts, industrial (at an average price of 54,1 €/MWh) and domestic (at an average price of 92,1 €/MWh), so the average income for producers is 73 €/MWh. This cost is the maximum possible cost for nuclear energy; otherwise operators couldn’t make a profit. The value fits well with IEA World Energy Outlook 2005 that estimates costs between 60-70 €/MWh for nuclear electricity. This value is very far from values of 20-30 €/MWh reported from some optimistic sources. These values could be justified only by means of unrealistic assumptions, such as plant lifespan over 35 years, medium plant availability over 7500 hours per year, interest rate under 5%, building time time less than 5 years, building cost less than 2000 €/kW and others.

It appears that electricity prices in France remain low thanks to the huge past investments in nuclear power. French Families and small firms pay for electricity very low rates, nearly half than what Italians have to pay. On the other hand, they enjoy so much these good rates that household and services consumption of electric power is double than in Italy. So, in the end, French and Italian people spend the same in terms of their electricity bill. Evidently, Jevons’s paradox is valid also for nuclear power: if you have something cheap, you tend to waste it.

As a last relevant point, let us consider the problem of nuclear fuel availability in the coming years. See below some data in the figure

Produceable uranium at various extraction costs (reasonably assured resources and inferred resource)

EDF (Electricité de France), the Franch nuclear utility, estimates that there exist economically exploitable uranium reserves for 60 years of present consumption (67 kT/year). This fits well with the on uranium by energy watch group (EWG). And then? And what if many countries step up their nuclear energy production? A research effort is ongoing on new nuclear technologies such as fast neutron reactors and more efficent uranium mining methods, even from seawater. But concrete results on these issues seem to be very far, Commercial fast neutron reactors are expected to be on the market in 2040; perhaps too late to have an effect on the scarcity of mineral uranium. Uranium from seawater was experimentally obtained in small quantities, of the order of kilograms. We do not see a program for commercial exploitation of the industrial quantities that would be needed, of the order of ktons. Moving to mineral uranium very low concentrations (<0,1%) is possible, but there is a minimum value of the concentration that can be exploited because the energy required for mining it would exceed electric energy that could be obtained from it. The EWG reports that this limit is 0,01%, others report lower values but it is clear that today we have a strong uncertainty on the availability of mineral uranium and, as a consequence, on the role of nuclear energy in the future. This could be the real reasons for the modest growth of the nuclear sector in the last few years.

In the end, we see that complete independence in energy production with nuclear power was not reached by France, nor Italy could hope to reach it by revamping its old nuclear program at this point. To reach the French level of nuclear energy production, Italy would have to build almost 20 GWe of nuclear power, spend over 40 G€ and this would take some 10-20 years. Doing so, Italy couldn’t hope to become independent from hydrocarbon imports since we see that France couldn’t do that, either, despite all her nuclear reactors.

Energy independence for countries that have (or plan to build) nuclear energy could be obtained increasing the cost of electricity costs in order to avoid wasting power and using the extra incomes for financing energy efficiency and substituting hydrocarbons using plug-in hybrid or all electric veichles in urban areas and heat pumps for household and services. Obviously, this has not been done in France: in no country of the world politicians become popular by raising prices of utilities. So, France has not attained energy independence, despite the huge effort made on nuclear power. Whether the return to nuclear energy planned by Italy and other countries can do that, is all to be seen.

References

Several resources have been utilized for the preparation of this paper. Statistics on the energy use in France and Italy have been derived from the Eurostat site

http://epp.eurostat.ec.europa.eu/portal/page?_pageid=0,1136239,0_4557144…

Specific data about italy have been obtained from
www.terna.it
www.mercatoelettrico.org/GmeWebInglese/Default.aspx
www.snamretegas.it (Italian gas utility)
www.autorita.energia.it

Specific data about France came from
www.rte-france.com
www.edf.com
www.gazdefrance.com
www.areva.com (French nuclear utility)
www.prix-carburants.gouv.fr/index.php?module=dbgestion&action=search

Data about uranium production and costs have been obtained from

www.world-nuclear.org/info/uprod.html World uranium production
www.uxc.com/review/uxc_Prices.aspx Uranium prices

The study by the energy watch group cited in the text can be found at
www.energywatchgroup.org/fileadmin/global/pdf/EWG_Uraniumreport_12-2006….

A general discussion on the cost of nuclear energy (in italian) can be found at http://www.aspoitalia.net/images/stories/coiante/coiantecostonucleare.pd… http://www.aspoitalia.net/images/stories/coiante/coiantenucleare2.pdf

Powering transport using liquid petroleum gas, compressed natural gas or fuel produced by gas-to-liquids processes are options that have received varying amounts of attention in recent years as the oil price climbs ever higher. While shifting dependence from one fossil fuel to another doesn’t make a great deal of sense when you take peak oil and gas into account, there is a renewable option for producing gas - biogas.

One recent example of biogas use in Australia is a pilot project by horticulture company Growcom to convert banana waste into biomethane, which will then be used as fuel by cars converted to use compressed natural gas and by a generator for electricity production.

The processing plant uses an anaerobic digester - in trials, the banana waste produced maximum yields of 398 litres of methane per kg of dry banana. With this yield, 1 ton of bananas per day can generate around 7.5 kW of electricity - enough to supply six to eight modern households.

[break]
According to research done at the University of Queensland by Associate Professor Bill Clarke, over 310,000 tonnes of bananas are grown in Australia each year (250,000 tonnes in FNQ). Approximately 30% of the bananas are rejected at the packing stage for quality reasons. Gloablly, around 70 million tonnes of bananas are produced each year, 20% of which are traded.

Growcom board member Keith Noble says, “An over-riding principle of the project has been to use locally available materials and expertise wherever possible. The system must also integrate with existing farm practices. If on-farm digesters are to have a commercial future they must add to farm efficiency and be simple to operate.”

Given the volume of bananas required to produce the gas, banana power will only ever be a niche solution (something the people involved readily admit), but it is an example of how waste streams can be used to produce biogas - which has the important benefit of not diverting food (or arable land) to fuel production - one of the major criticisms of present day biofuels.

An important additional benefit is that methane is a potent greenhouse gas, and thus capturing it and burning it helps from a global warming point of view.

Of course, Banana waste is just one type of agricultural byproduct that can be diverted to produce biogas - there are a wide variety of other byproducts from farming and the food industry that can be captured and digested in a similar way (wood chips being another example).

Pig Poo Power

Another niche source of biogas that has considered in Australia is from animal manure - specifically pig poo. This seems to be part of a worldwide trend, with countries as far afield as Thailand and South Korea also harnessing the foul odours and putting them to good use.

Famed Kleiner Perkins Caufield and Byers venture capitalist John Doerr is also getting in on the act, looking at pig farms in California’s Central Valley for opportunities.

Pig’s aren’t the only animals producing large amounts of ordure that could be used for biogas production - other animals producing copious quantities of potential feedstock include cows (which could help solve another problem - burning mountains of cattle manure), dogs, chickens, turkeys (whose output is being burnt directly in biomass power generation facilities in the US, which has received criticism for both pollution and for burning material that would be of use for fertiliser) and zoo animals.

It isn’t just the animal world that is capable of providing fuel of course, people can too. A Rwandan prison uses waste from the inmates to help power the prison.

An Indian company called Sintex is even marketing an at-home biogas digester, with hopes of solving India’s energy and sanitation problems in one hit. These plans have the enthusiastic backing of the WTO (World Toilet Organisation). A one-cubic-meter digester (initially filled with cow dung to provide the bacteria required) can convert the waste from a four-person family into enough gas to cook all its meals and provide sludge for fertilizer for around $425 - paying for itself in energy savings in less than two years.

Similar schemes are in use in many other developing nations (an Energy Blog commenter once referred to the developing world as “one large zone of ’stranded biogas’“).

Landfill Gas

Another widespread use of biogas is capturing the gas produced in landfills for power generation - Australia already has a number of plants in use, and a large number of developments are underway in the US capable of generating hundreds of megawatts of power, with an estimated 700 sites capable of being used for this purpose.

One heavy user of landfill gas is General Motors, which has reduced its consumption of natural gas by around 25% since 2000 by replacing it with gas from landfills. The University of New Hampshire is getting over 8% of its energy from landfill gas. The city of Sao Paulo in Brazil has a 23 MW landfill gas plant in operation.

Biogas In Europe

Europe seems to be the leader in the production and use of biogas.

UK studies have shown that biogas is much cleaner and more efficient than biofuels for use in transport - and also allows farmers to become energy generators rather than just commodity producers.

According to an EU well-to-wheel study of more than 70 different (fossil and renewable) fuels and energy paths, biogas is the cleanest and most climate-neutral transport fuel of all.

Some examples of biogas use in Europe include:

* Austrian drivers can fill up their CNG cars using biogas made from grass.
* Denmark has more than 50 biogas plants in operation.
* The Netherlands is generating biogas from sewage treatment plants and feeding it into the gas grid and to fuel cars.
* Sweden is producing biogas from wastewater treatment plants and and using it to generate power and to fuel buses and trains.
* Germany is producing biogas from maize and using it in combined-heat-and-power plants (the French have developed a giant maize variety specifically for biogas production).

The German government is considering feeding biogas into the country’s natural gas network (ironically, the main obstacle to this has been that biogas is too good for the network - exceeding Germany’s upper limit on gas heating value, something the German Greens and farming lobby are trying to have fixed).

According to the government, locally produced biogas could supply up to 10 percent of Germany’s total gas consumption by 2030. Germany is the largest producer of biogas in Europe, and biogas is Germany’s fastest growing renewable energy sector.

One controversial study last year claimed that the EU could produce enough biogas to replace all natural gas imports from Russia by 2020, which would change Europe’s energy security outlook considerably if it proves to be correct. The main findings of the study were:

* Europe’s potential for the sustainable production of biomethane is 500 billion cubic meters of natural gas equivalent (17.7 trillion cubic feet) per year. This is roughly the total amount of natural gas currently consumed by the entire European Union.
* The entire EU’s natural gas needs for the the medium-term future (2020) can be met by biogas; all imports from Russia can be replaced, while the excess can substitute petroleum and coal.
* The production of 500 billion cubic meters of biogas, fed into the grid, will result in a reduction of 15% of Europe’s CO2 emissions. The Kyoto protocol demands a reduction of 10%.
* An efficient biogas-feed-in strategy will be build around the concept of ‘biogas corridors’: such corridors consist of biomass plantations established alongside the pipelines, so that the green gas can be fed into Europe’s main natural gas grid without the need for new pipelines and infrastructures.
* A Europe-wide biogas-feed-in strategy will result in the creation of 2.7 million new jobs within the EU. Employment will be generated mainly in agriculture, in the manufacture, construction and management of biogas plants and biogas purification plants.

These sorts of plans will raise the usual questions about the wisdom of “fermenting the food supply” and the like, so at this point it is worth taking the claims in this report with a grain of salt.

One company leading the way in Germany is Schmack Biogas, who are piloting feeding biogas into the grid and claim their super maize crop “reduces the land needed to grow feedstock by up to a third” and “restore degraded land and increase its fertility” - all of which sounds very nice, if true.

A related venture is the Combined power Plant idea being promoted by the University of Kassel, Enercon, SolarWorld and Schmack. This proposed plant “links and controls 36 wind, solar, biomass and hydropower installations spread throughout German”, making it the distributed equivalent of a large conventional power plant. The plant uses biogas and hydro power to even out supply when the wind and solar components are generating at reduced capacity.

Cross posted from Peak Energy

This is a guest post by Jason Bradford who has written here previously on “Relocalization: A Strategic Response to Peak Oil and Climate Change” and “Does Less Energy Mean More Farmers?”. Jason has a Phd in Biology, is the founder of Willits Economic Localization (WELL) and runs a CSA in Willits, CA.

"Can
we rely on it that a ‘turning around' will be accomplished by enough people
quickly enough to save the modern world? This question is often asked, but
whatever answer is given to it will mislead. The answer "yes" would lead to
complacency; the answer "no" to despair. It is desirable to leave these
perplexities behind us and get down to work." E.F. Schumacher, Small is
Beautiful

I would rather have titled this essay "Where the Hoe Meets
the Soil" but that phrase is not part of our cultural lexicon, which is itself
a symptom of the problem I am working to address. Setting aside any prolonged discussion of
whether or what about the modern world should be saved, this essay is primarily
about what it means to "get down to work" as Schumacher puts it. But very quickly, to me saving the modern
world means setting a goal for the human economy to be properly scaled relative
to the global ecology, and maintaining a sufficiency of social stability
necessary to manage a transition.

[break]

Before getting to work, I want to make sure the work I do is
useful. This is where a clear
understanding of the big picture helps.

Ecological Economics

The question of proper economic scale is examined by the field of ecological
economics. In the ecological economics
model, the human economy is a subset of the Earth system, and therefore the scale
of the human economy is ultimately limited.
The human economy depends upon the throughput or flow of materials
from and back into the Earth system.
Limits to the size of the human economy are imposed by the interactions
among three related natural processes:

(1) The capacity of the Earth system to supply inputs to the human economy
(Sources),

(2) The capacity of the Earth system to tolerate and process wastes from the
human economy (Sinks), and

(3) The negative impacts on the human economy and the resources it relies on
from various feedbacks caused by too much pollution.

”

Fig. 1. The ecological economics model
of the relationship between the human economy and the Earth system highlighting
the importance of sources, sinks, feedbacks and scale.[i]

For an expanded look at the relationship between our economy and the planet
see the engaging on-line film "The Story of Stuff."[ii]

One measure of whether the human economy is too large is the
ecological footprint (EF), which calculates on a nation-by-nation basis the
consumption of resources and the build-up of wastes relative to resource regeneration
rates and the waste-absorbing capacity of the environment. According to two independent EF analyses (which
I will call EF 1 and EF 2) the human economy (population plus consumption and
waste generation) is in a state of overshoot, meaning it is too large relative
to the long-term capacity of the planet to cope.[iii] The Earth can provide for us beyond its means
for a long time before the consequences become severe, just like a millionaire
can, for a time, live high on the principal in a savings account instead of the
interest. The degree to which we are
drawing down principal as opposed to living on interest is called our
"ecological debt."

Figure 2. Change in
ecological footprint over time according to EF 1 with our cumulative ecological
debt in blue.[iv]

Getting More Specific:
Fossil-fuel Depletion and Climate Change

Indicators like the ecological footprint are important for
understanding we have a problem and giving us a sense of the scale, but they
aren't very specific. In order to do
something about reducing our footprint, it would help to know what is causing
the ecological footprint to be so large.
A significant portion of the ecological footprint represents consumption
of fossil fuels and the resulting waste, mainly greenhouse gases. The "carbon" footprint component is about 52%
for EF 1 and the similar "energy land" is 88% for EF 2.[v] According to EF 2, "energy land" is 93% of
the North American footprint. A priority
on reducing fossil fuel consumption appears justified. The human ecological footprint can be lowered
below "1 Earth" only by eliminating the pollution from fossil fuel
combustion.

EF analysis uses the capacity of the environment to absorb
greenhouse gas emissions, which, as seen in the model shown in Fig. 1, means EF
measures "sink" capacity. The real
picture is more complex and more disturbing for a couple of reasons. Firstly, fossil fuel extraction is reaching
limits sooner than expected. Since we
have not been weaning our economy off fossil fuels steadily for the past few
decades, rapid energy price inflation will likely make it difficult to maintain
the kind of economic vitality and stability needed for a smooth transition to
renewable energy alternatives. Secondly,
recent evidence suggests that climate change is happening faster than
expected. Ice sheet destabilization is
one major indicator that the Earth system is more sensitive to greenhouse
emissions than most scientists and policy-makers have presumed. Recent articles by Kurt Cobb[vi]
and Richard Heinberg[vii]
review all these points, and the "Climate Code Red" report[viii]

goes into truly excruciating detail so I won't elaborate further here.

The bottom line is that every measure must be taken to
rapidly eliminate fossil fuel consumption and dependency in every component of
our lives. The key word is
"rapidly." Don't passively assume
inexpensive alternative energy substitutes will arrive to replace fossil fuels-we
may have waited too long to respond to have a smooth transition. Therefore, focus most attention on reducing
energy demand rather than substituting a new energy supply. And finally, in the context of ecological
economics, fossil fuel depletion and climate change, ask whether what you do in
your life, vocation, hobbies, and habits, contributes to the long-term function
(or dysfunction) of society.

The U.S.
Food System and Fossil Fuels

It would be hard to argue against a claim that a secure and
healthy food supply is indispensable to society. A widely known and troubling fact is that the
current food system in the U.S.
(and most highly industrialized nations) is very dependent upon fossil
fuels.

As far as I am aware, the most comprehensive study on the
topic of energy use in the U.S.
food system is by Heller and Keoleian of the University of Michigan's
Center for Sustainable Systems.[ix] The report is from 2000 and makes use of data
from the mid-1990s. Although the data
are about 10 years old, I don't believe the basic structure and function of the
U.S.
food system has changed dramatically over the past 10 years. In fact, current trends of increased
industrial meat consumption[x]

and biofuels[xi], which
both rely on grains, make the following case even stronger.

We learn from the study that over 10% of the energy
consumption in the U.S.
can be attributed to the food system, and that about 20% of this occurs in the
agricultural production sector. Home
energy consumption (e.g., refrigeration and cooking) consume the largest share
at about 30%. Between the farm and the
home are everything else (transportation, processing, packaging and
retail). Much of this middle portion is
a function of the geographic disconnection between production and
consumption. Eating food out of season
either requires long-distance transportation or energy demanding
processing. Both transportation and
processing require investments in storage.

Sorting out the proper scale of operations for farms,
processing and transportation systems is very difficult, however, because optimization
for one factor (e.g., transportation), may be sub-optimal for another (e.g.,
heat intensive food processing). Within
a category, such as transportation, the technologies analyzed may be limited
too. A study comparing rail cars, large
semi-trucks and small produce trucks may conclude that bigger is better, but
what about hyper-local transportation systems using bikes, small electric
vehicles and bipedal locomotion? Another
complicating issue is that studies may assume the U.S. food system should be more or
less similar in its mix of products while lowering energy consumption. For example, tomatoes can be processed using
canning or drying. Canning lends itself
to centralized operations and so does drying if fossil fuels are used as heat
sources. But a naturally decentralized
and fossil-fuel free technique such as passive solar dehydration may not even
be considered. Large energy savings can
be found everywhere in the food system, but especially so if assumptions about scale
and consumer-level demand are allowed to change.

Fig. 3. The energy
inputs to the U.S.
food system are several times larger than the energy content of the food. A life-cycle analysis identifies how energy
consumption is partitioned among economic sectors.[xii]

Another graphic from the Heller and Keoleian report clearly
identifies a huge savings potential.
Over 50% of U.S.
grains are fed to domestic animals, and most export grains go to animal feed as
well. Overall, only 26% of U.S. grain
production in 1995 went to domestic human consumption.

Although poultry need grains, red meat and milk products
dominate the feed market and grains are not a natural part of their diets. If red meat and dairy production were reduced
to only what harvested hay and pasture could provide, perhaps half of annual U.S. grain
production could be eliminated. The
acreage out of food production could be used for green manure crops to build
soil and fix nitrogen. A 2004
Congressional Research Service report showed that fertilizers are the largest
part of farm energy use, and that natural gas to produce nitrogen comprised
75-90% of the fertilizer input (Fig. 5).[xiii] Fixing nitrogen naturally, therefore, saves
significant energy. Some of the vast
cropland area no longer producing grains could then be used for appropriately
scaled biofuels to power farm equipment instead of fossil fuels.

Fig.
4. A reprint of Fig. 3 from the Heller
and Keoleian report.

Fig.
5. A reprint of Fig. 2 from a 2004
Congressional Research Service report.

An older and less comprehensive on-line
review paper[xiv] titled "Energy Use in the U.S. Food System: a summary of existing research and
analysis" by John Hendrickson of the Center for
Integrated Agricultural Systems, UW-Madison concluded that:

"It appears that some of the greatest
saving can be realized by:

• reduced use of petroleum-based fertilizers and
  fuel on farms,
• a decline in the consumption of highly processed
  foods, meat, and sugar,
• a reduction in excessive and energy intensive
  packaging,
• more efficient practices by consumers in shopping
  and cooking at home,
• and a shift toward the production of some foods
  (such as fruits and vegetables) closer to their point of consumption."

Hendrickson's paper is helpful in republishing and comparing
tables from many previous studies, including "Table 5" reprinted here on the
energy consumption of home grown versus market-purchased fruit and
vegetables.

Taking Responsibility: Brookside Farm Examples

With this extensive background I introduce the project I
have been working on for about two years now, Brookside Farm. This is a 1-acre mini-farm in Willits, CA. It operates as a program of the non-profit
corporation North Coast Opportunities, functions as a working farm with a
community supported agricultural program serving 15 "shares" per year, exists
at an elementary school and is therefore open to classes and tours, and
conducts research and demonstrates aspects of a local food system with the collaboration
and support of Post Carbon Institute.[xv]

Brookside Farm thinks about food from a "farm to fork" and
back again perspective. Farmers create
artificial ecosystems, and we therefore look to ecology to guide our
practices. Highly productive and stable
ecological systems are noted for a diversity of species both in kinds and
functional forms. When these diverse
species interact effectively, they maximize the rates of productivity and
nutrient retention in the system using ambient energy sources. We view ourselves as human members of the farm
ecosystem with our labor and wastes as parts of the whole.

To get by on ambient energy as much as possible, we have
sought alternatives to fossil fuels in every aspect of the food system we
participate in. Table 1 considers each
type of work done on the farm, to the fork, and back again and contrasts how
fossil fuels are commonly used with the technologies we have applied.

Table 1. Feeding
people requires many kinds of work and all work entails energy. In most farm operations the main energy
sources are fossil fuels. By contrast,
Brookside Farm uses and develops renewable energy based alternatives.

Our use of food scraps to replace exported fertility also
reduces energy by diverting mass from the municipal waste stream. Solid Waste of Willits has a transfer station
in town but no local disposal site. Our
garbage is trucked to Sonoma
County about 100 miles to the south.
From there it may be sent to a rail yard and taken several hundred miles
away to an out of state land fill.

We are also planning to irrigate using an on-site well and a
photovoltaic system instead of treated municipal water or diesel-driven
pumps.

How much energy does Brookside Farm
save?

The complexity of the food system makes it difficult to
calculate how much energy Brookside Farm is saving. A research program at UC Davis now devoted to
just this sort of question is recently underway, but with few results to share
thus far.[xvi]

From previous studies we can find clues about the high
energy inputs to fruit and vegetable cultivation. From Fig. 4. above, we can see that fruits
and vegetables account for (102,370/921,590) 11% of crop production by weight. Table 3 (given below) of the Congressional
Research Service report shows that energy invested in fruit and vegetable
production is proportionally higher, accounting for (3759/18364) 20% of the
energy for crops at the farm level.

<center

Much of the savings at Brookside Farm occurs off the farm by
replacing what would normally be imported, through passive solar preservation
and storage techniques, and by shifting consumer habits towards seasonally
fresh cuisine proportionally high in vegetables.

Does Brookside Farm Scale? Lawns to Food

Before it was Brookside Farm, it was a field of mostly grass
at an elementary school. The school
district watered and mowed it (Fig. 6).

Fig. 6. Brookside
Farm in early spring, 2007. The image
shows the farm site adjacent to the forest and bordered by grassy fields,
school buildings and a residential neighborhood. Arrows from a home contrast distance and
direction of food coming from the local Safeway supermarket and Brookside
Farm. The 1 acre Brookside Farm occupies
about a quarter of the available play field at Brookside Elementary School.

Using satellite imagery, the area of lawn in the United States
has recently been estimated:

"Even conservatively," Milesi says,
"I estimate there are three times more acres of lawns in the U.S. than irrigated corn." This means
lawns-including residential and commercial lawns, golf courses, etc-could be
considered the single largest irrigated crop in America in terms of surface area,
covering about 128,000 square kilometers in all.[xvii]

The same study identifies where and how much water these
lawns require:

That means about 200 gallons of
fresh, usually drinking-quality water per person per day would be required to
keep up our nation's lawn surface area.

Let me put the area of lawn from this study into a food
perspective. The 128,000 square
kilometers of lawns is the same as 32 million acres. A generous portion of fruits and vegetables
for a person per year is 700 lbs, or about half the total weight of food
consumed in a year.[xviii] Modest yields in small farms and gardens would
be in the range of about 20,000 lbs per acre.[xix] Even with half the area set aside to grow
compost crops each year, simple math reveals that the entire U.S. population could be fed plenty
of vegetables and fruits using two thirds of the area currently in lawns.

Labor Compared to Hours of T.V.

For its members Brookside Farm's role is to provide a
substantial proportion of their yearly vegetable and fruit needs. Using our farming techniques, we estimate
that one person working full time could grow enough produce for ten to twenty
people. By contrast, an individual could
grow their personal vegetable and fruit needs on a very part-time basis,
probably half an hour per day, on average, working an area the size of a small home (700 sq ft in veggies and fruits plus 700 sq ft in cover crops).

American's complain that they feel cramped for time and
overworked. But is this really true or
just a function of addiction to a fast-paced media culture? According to Nielsen Media Research:[xx]

The total average time a household
watched television during the 2005-2006 television year was 8 hours and 14
minutes per day, a 3-minute increase from the 2004-2005 season and a record
high. The average amount of television watched by an individual viewer
increased 3 minutes per day to 4 hours and 35 minutes, also a record. (See
Table 1.)

So if we imagine families having the discipline to cut out a
single sitcom viewing per day, or one baseball or football game per weekend
during the growing season, that would free-up sufficient time to become
self-reliant in fruits and vegetables and likely improve overall health.[xxi]

(A note of caution though, an article from The Onion warns
"that viewing fewer than four hours of television a day severely inhibits a
person's ability to ridicule popular culture.")[xxii]

Conclusions

For those wanting to contribute to a lower-energy food
system, starting with fresh produce makes sense for several reasons:

(1) Significant production is possible in a small area,
often what people already have,

(2) Tools and equipment are simple, inexpensive and readily
available,

(3) Fruits and vegetables are heavy due to high water
content, and therefore energy-intensive to transport and process either by
canning or dehydrating,

(4) Growing vegetables and fruits is generally more energy
intensive than other crops because of high fertilizer and irrigation inputs,

(5) Quality declines rapidly after harvest, so home or
locally available food has higher nutritional value and usually tastes better,

(6) Labor, packaging and storage demands of fruits and
vegetables are high in mechanized production systems, making the investment in
home-grown produce financially competitive, and

(7) Gardening and small-scale fruit and vegetable farming
lend themselves to physical and social activities across generation and income
gaps that improve health and enhance a shared sense of purpose and fun.

[i] This
graphic was developed based on the principles discussed in Chapter 2 of Daly
and Farley "Ecological Economics:
Principles and Applications" (2004, Island Press)

[ii] http://www.storyofstuff.com/

[iii] http://www.footprintnetwork.org and

http://www.rprogress.org/ecological_footprint/about_ecological_footprint.htm;
the original ecological footprint analysis (EF1) is at the first reference, and
the second type (EF2) at the second. The
major difference between the two is that the second attempts to incorporate
aquatic systems (e.g., oceans), total terrestrial productivity, and
biodiversity reserves.

[iv] Graphic
from: http://www.footprintstandards.org/

[v] For the
50% figure see: http://www.footprintnetwork.org/gfn_sub.php?content=global_footprint; for the greater than 90% and discussion of
differences between methods see: http://www.rprogress.org/publications/2006/Footprint%20of%20Nations%202005.pdf

[vi] http://scitizen.com/screens/blogPage/viewBlog/sw_viewBlog.php?idTheme=14&idContribution=1397

[vii] http://globalpublicmedia.com/richard_heinbergs_museletter_big_melt_meets_big_empty

[viii] http://www.climatecodered.net/

[ix] http://css.snre.umich.edu/main.php?control=detail_proj&pr_project_id=29

[x] See
especially Table 2. in: http://www.fao.org/docrep/005/AC911E/ac911e05.htm

[xi] http://www.theoildrum.com/node/2431

[xii]
Graphic from: http://css.snre.umich.edu/css_doc/CSS01-06.pdf

[xiii] http://www.ncseonline.org/NLE/CRSreports/04nov/RL32677.pdf

[xiv]

Although no date appears on this paper, it is clearly related to a 1994
conference and workshop: http://www.cias.wisc.edu/pdf/energyuse.pdf;
http://www.cias.wisc.edu/archives/1994/01/01/energy_use_in_the_us_food_system_a_summary_of_existing_research_and_analysis/index.php

[xv] http://www.energyfarms.net/

[xvi] http://asi.ucdavis.edu/conferences/farmtofork/;

http://californiaagriculture.ucop.edu/0704OND/editover.html;
http://asi.ucdavis.edu/Research/ASI_Program_Proposal_Brief_-_Energy_Life_Cycle_Assessment_in_Food_Systems_9-13.pdf

[xvii] http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Study/Lawn/

[xviii] http://www.ers.usda.gov/Data/FoodConsumption/FoodGuideIndex.htm

[xix] An
acre is ca. 43,000 sq ft. Our experience
at Brookside Farm suggests about 1 lb of produce per square foot of cultivated
space is to be expected, with infrastructure and paths requiring significant
area. Fruit orchards in Mendocino County yield about 20,000 lbs per
acre: http://www.co.mendocino.ca.us/agriculture/pdf/2006%20Crop%20Report.pdf

[xx]http://www.nielsenmedia.com/nc/portal/site/Public/menuitem.55dc65b4a7d5adff3f65936147a062a0/?vgnextoid=4156527aacccd010VgnVCM100000ac0a260aRCRD

[xxi] http://www.csun.edu/science/health/docs/tv&health.html

[xxii] http://www.theonion.com/content/node/30863

Matt Simmons was on Fast Money (on CNBC) Friday afternoon. Here’s the clip.

Matt Simmons was on Fast Money (on CNBC) Friday afternoon. Here’s the clip.