Drilling for Oil & excavating coal.

Hello rurudr

You are right to be worried about major extractive procedures.

1. Density of Planet is not materially altered.
2. Rotation of Planet is not materially altered.
3. Balance of Planet is not materially altered.
4. Axial Loading of Planet is not materially altered.

However, on a localised scale, extraction of oil and minerals, or filling of a hydro dam with water has caused local problems such as:

1. Ground surface slumping.
2. Sinkhole development - houses etc. falling in to the hole
   
3. Local earth tremors = mini-earthquakes
4. Ground Water variations
5. Intrusion of saltwater into fresh-water aquifers
6. Contamination of aquifers
7. Loss of habitat for animals
8. And more....

There has never to my knowledge, ever been a proper cost/benefit exercise done on most extractive projects, because if the true costs were added into the finished product, it would be so expensive nobody could afford to purchase it.

Petrol, or gasoline in the US, would be currently around US$45:00 per US gallon, if all true costs were added to the product.

Hard coal in the US would currently be around US$500 per ton, if all true costs were added into the product.

And so on, for cement, concrete, steel, copper, metals, chemicals, glass and so much more.

Thus most of these projects are heavily subsidised, and our descendants are going to gnash their teeth, and think very poorly of us, who squandered a precious heritage of resources, when time arrives to remedy the long-term damages done.

Much of what we "think we need", because we are told we need them, are just fancy baubles, toys to amuse so-called adults, and when we go from this Planet, as we all must when we die, we surely can take none of those "things" with us to our eternal home, whichever one we chose while we were here.

Kind Regards....

Sparky - please define "true costs". If there are "true costs" who is paying them?

Hello Taganan

True costs are able to be quantified easily, but the costs are sometimes costs which most people would not think about.

There is a very long costs list, which I did in another Post, but think a bit about the side effects of mining extraction, and you could make yourself a list, like I did.

Us and our descendants, per "courtesy" of the Central Banks, who lend our bankrupt Government Corporations "pretend Money", at a rate of interest, on something created out of nothing.

That the Money Game, to enrich the few, at the expense of the many.

Have a look at: http://www.themoneymasters.com/ for a good exposé of how the continuing swindle is done, and why it is being done.

Kind Regards....

I'm wondering about the "true cost" of the Egyptian pyramids. They miust have used open pit quarries which have not been properly covered over and re-landscaped. Clearly, the pyramids have out-lived their original function, seeing the Pharoah off to the other world, so the cost of removing them, disposing of the waste stone, and re-landscaping the sites is surely part of the real cost. Consider how much better off Egypt would be now if the monetary cost of the pyramids had been invested at compound interest for millenia.

Hello esbuck

From recent analysis of the pyramid "carefully shaped rocks" and other information, it seems that the pyramid "rocks" were in fact made from "poured-in-situ concrete".

That would have made the construction far cheaper and faster, with a "perfect fit" automatically assured.

Cement was first made in China and the secret of hydraulic cement either "passed on to/stolen by" the Egyptian ruling class, via contact with the Maya in Yucutan.

The composition of that early cement is different from the cement we make today, because we have "better technology and machinery" unavailable all those centuries ago.

Kind Regards....

Well, here in Pennsylvania we buy subsidence insurance. In parts of Germany, I believe, they deliberately drop the land level after mining. The whole process plays havoc with water supplies.

As far as the effect of the extraction of oil and minerals from the ground on planetary density, balance and rotation. There is little to nil the amount we are removing and moving around compared to the mass of the earth is insignificant to cause any change.

As far as sink holes from removal of these there is all ways a possibility. Then sink holes do form naturally.

Gentlemen,

Thank You for your insight...Now something new to keep me up at night, and something we all should ponder. Will future generations "evolve" in such a manner that the way we have raped, pillaged and squandered our natural resources has little or no effect on them or will they truly hold us accountable for leaving behind a legacy of greed and waste. I hope for my children's sake (and all future generations) that we all become a little wiser and begin a recovery effort which will not necessitate the need for future generations to "adapt" nor force our future generations to view us as the ones that so poorly decided their fate.

Again, thank You

"Just for example, solar energy at geosyncronus orbit is about 1.4 kilowatts per square meter and available 24/7, whereas here at the surface it is at best about a fourth of that, and constantly interupted by weather and the planet's rotation."

Please explain how a geosynchronous stellite does not rotate once every 24 hours and how it avoids passing into the Earth's shadow. Then calculate how many years of solar energy it takes to make the satellite and to get it into geosynchronous orbit.

I once consulted for a company which wanted to beam microwave power from the moon to the earth. To save on launch costs, they would start with a small solar plant and use the energy produced to make more PV cells on the moon, and to make the microwave transmitters. When one runs the numbers, it only take a few thousand years to become profitable.

"Please explain how a geosynchronous stellite does not rotate once every 24 hours and how it avoids passing into the Earth's shadow. Then calculate how many years of solar energy it takes to make the satellite and to get it into geosynchronous orbit."

This was done about 40 years ago [P.E. Glaser, "Power from the Sun: Its Future", Science, Vol. 162, pp957-961 (1968)]. The "eclipses" lose a few percent of the 24 hours, at most. Solar power is being used for things like the international space station, even though it is lower orbit where it DOES lose more time to shadow. Except at the north & south poles, the moon's surface would be in shadow half the time, a FAR less useful portion; needing to leave one gravity well and enter another increases the cost of getting materials there (vs. geosynchronous orbit), and you no longer have a single "target" for sending the energy toward due to earth's rotation. The safety factor is much lower because there is a longer time lag between send and receive, and any signal from the ground to indicate loss of connection takes that time lag - TWICE! - to turn off the sending antenna, during which the energy is sent to an unintended "target". See the article in Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power_satellite.

Sir, depending upon the type of orbit, a geosync satellite might not pass through the Earth's shadow but every few orbits. Total loss, a few percent at worst. Keep in mind that a geosync orbit is quite a long ways out from the surface.

Now, regarding your claim of the cost and return on solar power satellites, your statement causes me to question what technologies you had in mind and when. Just for example, photovoltaic cells have become dramaticly more efficient in the last several years, and with the advent of thin-film printed cells, are about to get a whole bunch cheaper too. Nor is this the only way to convert sunlight into electricity.

Furthermore, I have no doubt that your premis was based upon building everything here at Earth's surface and then using rockets to drag it up to geosync. This is just about the most expensive way to go about the thing. A far more economical approach, certainly in the long run, would be to build them in orbit from raw materiels acquired in space and processed and manufactured using solar energy. This might be a bit more expensive initially, but in this case we are buying capability more than power satellites, and the next ones just get cheaper.

The point here is that space is a boot-strap proposition, just like every other frontier has ever been. Yes it's expensive, but it will pay for itself eventually. Consider the new world just a few centuries ago, which was very expensive to begin with, but which became the United States and Canada, and which now dominate the world's economy.

Furthermore, consider this. When NASA started the US space program in ernest half a century ago, the money it spent paid primarily for research. Look around you, because everywhere are things today that were invented because of NASA-funded research. The simple fact is that if NASA had the patents on everything it's research dollars ever paid for, it would now be the single most powerfull industrial concern on the planet, dwarfing the rest of the Fortune 500 combined.

There will always be those who don't want to go and don't want anyone else to go. Who say no when others say "why not?" Let them stay home, but please get out of the way of those of us who would like to make a bigger pie, rather than trying to cut the present one into ever smaller pieces.

I didn't claim the cost and return on solar power satellites, but asked what they were, these days. I claimed that, at one point, a moon-based system did not seem profitable.

I spent three years with NASA, and I think I was present at the meeting which drove a few coffin nails into the GEO concept. It was a simple thing, the sort of thing any good engineer might have thought of in the first few minutes. How do you get rid of the waste heat in space? If you are using silicon solar cells (the moon and asteroids seem deficient in gallium arsenide) and a factory in space, the area needed to radiate the waste heat is several times the area of the solar panels, and the mass of the radiators, including heat pipes or whatever, will be greater than the mass of the power panels. A solution to the problem was presented: use efficent vacuum-tube microwave amplifiers, like the magnetrons in counter-top ovens, which can operate hot and therefor radiate their waste heat (a small fraction of that from transistors) with red-hot pyrolytic carbon plates not much larger or more massive than a DVD. Of course, building a tube and radiator factory in space is a bit of a problem. However, the vacuum tube option was not considered, since it was politically forbidden to regress to old technology; it would be solid state or nothing. Nothing won.

NASA had a tube-type communications transmitter in the shuttle, 22 W , if I recall, which they resolved to replace with a modern solid state transmitter, "smaller, lighter!". Millions of dollars later, they got their transmitter, but it weighed about 80 pounds (huge heat sinks!), and it put out so much waste heat that the shuttle environmental control system would have been overwhelmed. (Microwave power transistors are not as efficient as tubes) The "smaller, lighter" transmitter never flew. The experience, however, did not affect the optimistic solar power satellite thinking. I suppose the bureaucrats never noticed.

Just to suggest another alternative to coal and oil, how about putting large mirrors in space and beaming the energy to Earth as photons of visible light? It seems overly complicated to convert sunlight to low voltage DC, convert that to high voltage AC, so as to transmit it to acres of transistors without huge, heavy conductors, downconvert to low voltage DC to power the transistors, making microwaves and a lot of waste heat, then beaming the microwaves to Earth, converting them to low voltage DC in a rectenna, then high voltage AC to distribut to cities, where the electricity is used to power street lights to shower the pavement with visible light photons. Wouldn't it be cheaper and more efficient just to use a very light (perhaps only micorns thick) mirror to deliver the photons directly?

One thing I learned, working at NASA, is that even a government agency which is supposed to promote science exists primarily to promote itself. Image ("modern solid state") prevails over product. I'm not singling out NASA, as most government efforts (public schools, the war on drugs, and anti-ballistic-missile defense come to mind) are hellishly unproductive and inefficent.

My Dear Sir,

Your comments about waste heat are very well taken. As are your remarks concerning government inefficiency. I believe it was Heinlein who defined an elephant as a mouse built to government specification. As for me, I spent an entire career in the U.S. Navy, and saw it everywhere I ever went. Though I dare say that a great deal of it is endemic to the thing.

In any event, one supposes that the thing will never become reality until private enterprise gets involved similar to the way that such British enterprises as the Virginia and Hudson Bay Companies contributed so much to openning up the new world. Not very admirable organizations in themselves, but they did bring massive amounts of manpower and investment to the thing. And of course private enterprises are a lot less likely to be offended at the idea of using older technologies, such as vacuum tubes, to solve problems.

The whole pity of the thing of course is that there is so incredibly much potential up there. And yet here we are at the mercy of petty bureaucrats and the like.

I appologize for assuming you to be a naysayer.

It might be interesting to open a thread on this line of discussion, space-based resources and industries. Any thoughts anyone?

"Just to suggest another alternative to coal and oil, how about putting large mirrors in space and beaming the energy to Earth as photons of visible light? It seems overly complicated to convert sunlight to low voltage DC, convert that to high voltage AC, so as to transmit it to acres of transistors without huge, heavy conductors, downconvert to low voltage DC to power the transistors, making microwaves and a lot of waste heat, then beaming the microwaves to Earth, converting them to low voltage DC in a rectenna, then high voltage AC to distribut to cities, where the electricity is used to power street lights to shower the pavement with visible light photons. Wouldn't it be cheaper and more efficient just to use a very light (perhaps only micorns thick) mirror to deliver the photons directly?"

Legitimate question. Without trying to handle the math, or to update work done decades ago, I believe that the answer lies in the issue of safety. In the microwave scheme, the transmitting antenna would be a phased array, with a control system that required receipt of a constant "All OK" signal from the receiver. Loss of that signal would randomize the phase pattern to unfocus the beam, making it a far lower intensity (you can't abruptly turn off the microwave without serious consequences, from my understanding). Use of large mirrors would mean a significantly longer delay before getting to a safe mode with visible light; meanwhile, you might accidentally blind a small city. Microwave radiation would be kept low enough that exposure wouldn't harm humans [nor should it harm other living creatures!], but the mirrors would be equivalent to looking at the sun. Clearly, mirrors need not be monolithic, and individual sections may be separately aimed, so an analogous unfocussing can take place absent an "All OK" signal, but unless you get to MEMs (Micro Electro-Mechanical devices), the reaction time will be far longer - and many mirror actuators have severely limited ranges of motion, limiting the amount of defocus.

As has been mentioned elsewhwere, using mirrors to drive steam turbines (for example) in space is an alternate sunlight-to-electricity path. The turbine will have little force on its bearings, and should last a very long time. The working fluid need not be water, of course. The output can be at high enough voltages that some conversion steps would be eliminated (though I suspect that frequency will still be an issue). Radiators in the mirrors' shadow should suffice to handle waste heat. Stirling engines have been proposed instead of turbines, and I'm sure that this does not BEGIN to cover the range of possibilities.

Flying into the area over a rectenna farm would be safe (not that you'd deliberately do so, I think), but entering the path of a visible light beam might be injurious in ways ranging from mild sunburn to serious and immediate damage. And unless the beam is reasonably concentrated, how could the cost be justified? Plants would be seriously affected by visible light, as well as animals, so there would be additional environmental issues.

My recollection, by the way, is that microwave transmission and reception of power was demonstrated at over 80% - the efficiency was surprisingly high - over a one-mile horizontal path. That's a pretty fair percentage of the atmosphere, due to conentrations of dust & aerosols low down, and to the density at ground level vs. higher altitude.

"Use of large mirrors would mean a significantly longer delay before getting to a safe mode with visible light; meanwhile, you might accidentally blind a small city. Microwave radiation would be kept low enough that exposure wouldn't harm humans [nor should it harm other living creatures!], but the mirrors would be equivalent to looking at the sun."

Clearly, the easiest mirrors to build would be plane or diffuse mirrors, perhaps a sheet of mylar spinning to keep it flat. Any sunlight reflecting off a plane mirror will diverge at about 1/2 degree, so, no matter what the size, the light intensity will always be less than that which arrives at the earth directly from the sun. Whether you use a mirror form a lady's compact or one the size of Maine, it will always be safer than going to the beach. Only a deliberately focused mirror could produce a death ray, as in War of the Worlds.

A further thought, regarding getting power from an orbiting solar power satellite to the ground.

The nicest way to get from Earth surface to orbit would be via a space elevator, or skyhook, comprised of a very long tether anchored to the surface on the one end and to a suitable counterweight at the other, with it's center of mass at geo-sync orbit, slightly less than 36,000km, and with electromagnet, linear motors attached to it to run capsules up and down it's length. The likely material for such a thing is carbon nanotubes, since nothing else we know of is anything like strong enough to handle the tension it would have to endure. Now one variety or nanotube, the single-walled, is an excellent conductor. So, it would be a simple matter to engineer the tether to carry solar power down to the surface, thus avoiding all of the issues of beam transmission.

I do admit that I wonder about loss over such a long power-line, as I have no data on dissipation in nanotube conductors, though what I have read suggests that they are likely better even than pure silver.

I live in Alberta - Here, the production is extensive - killing everything in sight - including farm land and the water tables - they are using pure clean water to extract much of the oil - now creating toxic water tables and underwater lakes of toxic wastelands - I also heard of a void they came across in the Canmore area that was over 3000' - a couple of thousand feet below the surface ... wouldn't you just want to be standing there, huh? Sooner or later this is going to catch up to us.... as it is the northern people of Alberta have a substantial higher rate of cancers and rare diseases, and in this province, respiratory ailments are on the rise in many of the population sectors. Muskeg is being removed at a tremendous rate - nothing lives in areas as large as 20 sq Km - and there are many of those - I know, I've worked on them.Until Oil becomes less inportant than human life, it will just keep on going....

It will keep going until they are made to clean up after themselves and clean the used water. Which do your politicians bow to, not environmental extremists in this case, this is big money and jobs. A little environmental realism might be to push for a cleaner way of doing it without causing so much pollution. Some kind of middle way that both sides can live with, a little clean-up, a little pollution, a compromise for the sake of energy to keep society going.

Hey Guest:

The oil refiners are working tirelessly trying to develop cleaner ways to refine the tar sands in Alberta.

THe closed loop solvent method of refining is being tested in the US.

The sand is soaked in solvent, which releases the oil, then the solvent is distilled off and re-used. Clean sand is seperated out. Go Canada, keep mining and refining.

Of everything in the world to worry about, this should be about at the bottom of the list.

I believe that when oil is found it is often in pockets of rock. Sometimes in a large void in the rock and sometimes in a pocket of porous rock. If it's in a rock cavity then when the oil is gone the rock dome structure should continue to hold together. If it's in porous rock, same thing holds. It's like ringing the water out of a sponge - the structure remains even after the liquid is gone.

Coal mining is a bit different. When they extract coal they leave large columns of coal and rock in tact to hold up the mine. The columns are on a regular grid - likely on the order of 20ft diameter columns on 40ft centers. The same practice is done in a lime stone quarry. They find lime stone and leave columns. Often the excavation is done at the top of a shale layer. The columns then have a shale foundation. When shale is exposed to air it rapidly weakens. To counter this the base of the columns are collared in concrete to keep air from getting to the shale and also to add strength to the column foundations.

Sometimes a mine does cave in but I would think that the surface is effected only rarely.

Now - when a coal mine catches on fire - that's a whole other thing to loose sleep over.

Travis

Just for the record, I never said I "Worried" about this. And the caveat was "Forgive me if this is an eye roller." Things that perplex me keep me up at night, for I do not like not knowing the answers. The intent was not to sound worrisome but rather inquisitive. For that I apologize. I did not know the answers and was looking for further insight from the forum to better educate myself. Mission accomplished. Worry...No. Continue to expand my horizons through open discussions with friends, colleagues and forums such as this...Yes.

Thank You