Monday, March 28, 2011

Normal posting resumes

I've been out of the country and away from the internet, but normal posting resumes today!

Thursday, March 17, 2011

Where the nuclear reserves are

The full list of major uranium reserve holders is:
Australia - 31%
Kazakhstan - 12%
Canada - 9%
Russia - 9%
South Africa, Namibia, Brazil, Niger, the US, and China all have between 3 and 5% of reserves.

Uranium isn't the only thing you can use in reactors, although my knowledge gets very shaky.

Plutonium: largely (entirely?) derived from uranium, I believe.

Thorium: If I understand correctly, thorium has been used in experimental reactors for breeding uranium. Not sure if this is meaningfully still a going concern; need to understand reactor tech better than I do... Anyway, the big holders seem to be the US, Australia, Canada, and India.

Wednesday, March 16, 2011

Dependency

One of the themes underlying all national thinking on energy policy is of course energy security. In this context, people in the US immediately think about dependency on the Middle East for oil. Europeans would probably think just as quickly about the risks of depending on Russia for natural gas.

But there are lots of different potential dependencies threaded through various energy technologies. For instance, investing in nuclear power reduces your dependency on fossil fuel producers, but makes you dependent on uranium producers. That might still be a win (major uranium producers include Australian and Canada, which could be preferable to Saudi Arabia and Russia) but it doesn't make you independent. Similarly, storage - that is, batteries - is likely a big feature in next generation power grids and cars. But batteries require things like lithium. Will Afghanistan - with it's recently discovery of huge lithium resources - become the Saudi Arabia of batteries? I believe solar cells also require certain somewhat localized ingredients, though I know less about that area.

So in reality, it may be less about being dependent, and more about picking which people you'd like to be dependent on.

In that context, the cynic in me can't help assuming that Russia's swift moves to divert LNG to Japan in the midst of its crisis - even at the cost of delaying shipments to other customers - is Russia's way of saying, "When you're considering your next generation of energy investments - and replacing damaged nuclear plants - remember that no matter what troubles we may have in other areas, we were a good energy partner when you needed us."

Where the nuclear is

Financial Times has a nifty interactive map of where nuclear reactors are in the world.

For fun, take a look at China.

Tuesday, March 15, 2011

The China problem

Imagine you're on a train. You're shoveling coal into the boiler. Someone comes up to you and says, "Gee, that coal you're shoveling in is dirty and inefficient. But look, I have some super-coal. It's a bit more expensive, but it's a lot cleaner, so you won't be showering soot on everyone around you. And it's a little more efficient, so you might find that you use less, and you'll make back much or all of the money you pay out for this super-coal."

You might decide it was worth giving it a try; you might not. Either way, you're riding a developed-country train, so you've got the luxury of making that choice.

If, on the other hand, you're riding in China's train, there's only one response you can make, which is: "Great! Give me the super-coal. If I have your super-coal, my regular coal, and we throw in the furniture from the dining car - we can make it to the next town!"

China is making huge investments in renewable energy. But renewables don't displace fossil fuels in China; it's not shutting down coal plants. In fact, it's building more coal plants TOO. It has to. To meet economic growth and development targets - including fairly reasonable things like electrifying the large chunks of its population that don't even have power yet - China needs to throw everything it can at the wall.

That's the China problem, and that's why the logic of emissions reduction in China is different from either the developed world or the rest of the developing world.

As a side note, India has some of the same problem (it has a lot of people to electrify) but possibly not as badly (because it's economic development path is more services-oriented and less heavy industry-oriented than China's is).

You can never be too careful...

Germany taking rapid steps to minimize danger to domestic nuclear generation from earthquakes, tsunamis:

http://blogs.ft.com/energy-source/2011/03/15/germany-shuts-down-all-pre-1980-nuclear-plants/

Tuesday, March 8, 2011

Oil update

So, analysts are suggesting that Saudi Arabia may have already boosted oil production by more than it's telling people. (If I understand correctly, they do this by looking at the availability of heavy and light grades of crude; Saudi excess capacity is in the low-quality heavy grades, and there's evidence the market may have a larger proportion of heavy grades than it would if Saudi Arabia were keeping to its official quotas.) If this is true, the bottom line(s) would be:

1) Current oil prices already account for significantly boosted Saudi production - they've stayed high anyway. The article suggests that normally when the Saudis overproduce, it shows up in the global economy as excess inventory, essentially building up a buffer. In this case, however, it looks like consumption is high enough that that excess oil is simply being consumed straight away.

2) The Saudis have less additional reserve capacity available than was thought - meaning that if there's further unrest in the Middle East, their ability to keep oil prices in line is more limited than was thought.

Monday, March 7, 2011

How (some) social sciences really work

Sometimes I think there's a cycle to political science and economics research:

Year 0: conventional wisdom exists; little formal research done.
Year 1: Researcher becomes first to formally research area; proposes and defends theoretical framework that runs counter to conventional wisdom and is therefore totally exciting.
Year 2-20: Researcher's theoretical framework takes field by storm; becomes consensus approach.
Year 25: Younger researcher proposes thinly veiled version of Year 0 conventional wisdom as "novel theoretical framework".
Year 26-40: Younger researcher's "novel theoretical framework" becomes integrated into field as "challenging counter-intuitive approach".
Year 40-forever: Outside observers are mystified.

Thursday, March 3, 2011

Blocking coalitions vs. driving coalitions

I'm experimenting with a different cut at the climate problem. Consider the following two-by-two matrix:



This graphs the level of coordination achieved by interests that favor or drive toward a particular action or agreement vs. the configuration of interests that block or oppose it. A non-trivial part of the problem with climate change mitigation is that, although there's a lot of collective utility to be derived from averting climate change - that is, most people will derive some amount of benefit from doing so - the interest structure that translates into is very diffuse. "Many people deriving some moderate amount of benefit" tends to create a structure that doesn't lobby very effectively. Similarly, while there may be a lot of potential economic gain to be had in green industry, there's not a lot of effective coordination to mobilize those potential interests into an effective current lobby. The interests remain diffused amongst a lot of not-individually-powerful small and medium-sized businesses. By contrast, the interests that favor blocking climate change mitigation, although also distributed throughout the economy and society, have done a much better job of coordinating. Hence, their collective power is more easily wielded.

Actions or agreements that sit in the northwest quadrant - concentrated blocking interests vs. diffuse driving interests - are always going to be difficult. Things that sit in the southeast quadrant - diffuse blocking interests vs. concentrated driving interests - tend to be easy to get (or hard to oppose). Things that sit in the southwest and northeast quadrants are more in the "it depends" world. But I suspect, although this is just intuition, that they depend on different things. I suspect that things in the northeast quadrant (concentrated interests on both sides) largely come down to relative levels of power and motivation for each side (and maybe bargaining skill), while things in the southwest quadrant (diffuse interests on both sides) largely come down to the structure of the playing field based on prior history, political and legal landscape, and so on.

It's actually the southwest quadrant that brought this to mind today. The question came up at my institute of why nuclear power isn't more of a "thing" in the US. I think the answer is partly in the graph above: at this point, I think both the interests resisting and the interests favoring nuclear power are fairly diffuse. I think a strong, focused lobby for nuclear, if it materialized, could push some through; but it doesn't exist. Well-coordinated interest coalitions seem to me to be much more likely to occur when there's a core of specific actors that really want (or really don't want) something, and there's no core of really-want-it nuclear supporters at the national level.

And given that both sides are currently pretty diffuse, history plays a role. Here's a graph that shows what I think happened in these issues historically (leaving off tax cuts for the rich, which I know little about and was just using as an example):



My impression is that nuclear power started with a moderately well-coordinated set of driving interests vs a diffuse (and perhaps merely potential) set of blocking interests. It shifted over time (as people got more afraid of nuclear) to a moderately well-coordinated set of blocking interests vs. a more diffuse set of driving interests. During that period, a regulatory landscape was put in place that solidified and supported the blocking interests. As of now, both sides are pretty diffuse (I think). But in the world of diffuse interests vs. diffuse interests, the regulatory playing field favors the diffuse blocking interest.

Wednesday, March 2, 2011

Libya's oil

This is a quick-hit article everyone ought to read to understand part of what's going on with oil prices right now.

The short version: when there's instability in a place like Libya, the market can usually mostly compensate by switching suppliers; there's a fairly flexible market in oil (I presume this wouldn't be true of a real major like Saudi Arabia or Russia, but Libya is smaller). However, in this case, the places that make the most obvious replacements for Libyan crude - Nigerian and Algeria - both have potential problems of their own now or in the near future. Result: unhappy market.

Tuesday, March 1, 2011

Thoughts on social science research

Social science research findings seem to me to break down into several different levels of question:

1) What is going on? (Essentially, descriptive research.)
2) Why is it going on? (This level seeks to identify the causal chains that lead to particular outcomes, or sometimes, interpreted a little more loosely, what the critical variables are that differentiate different classes of states or outcomes.)
3) How is it effected? (This level seeks to identify the levers by which action can affect outcomes and what the affects of different actions are; it's the only one of the three levels that is directly useful from a policy or "social engineering" standpoint.)

The line between 2 and 3 can be subtle but can also be really important, because misinterpreting which your author is trying to do can lead to a lot of confusion and unnecessary mental critique. It's also really easy to misinterpret - partly, I think, because authors often either aren't clear about or aren't themselves aware of which level they're working on.

I don't think these are theoretical distinctions so much as they are practical ones. It's not that level 2 and 3 aren't, in fact, closely related - they are - but it matters for understanding your author which level he thinks he's working at.