ISRAEL’S ENERGY FUTURE

[UPDATE:  I just added the necessary links]

– By Bertram Cohen bert99@peoplepc.com

Israel’s energy future is currently following two paths. One path is to develop the large oil and gas fields located off shore. The second is to develop oil-free energy technologies. But the path with the most potential, by far, is a third path. It is not yet on the Israeli agenda because that path remains overlooked, underestimated and may also appear too futuristic. Trying to alert Israeli energy officials to this message, only with emails from America, has proven too difficult for me. The purpose of this paper is to find an Israeli volunteer(s) willing to be my informed messenger(s) to reach Israeli energy officials, more directly.

After identifying the first two energy paths, this paper will focus on the third path.

1. New oil and gas fields

The recent discovery of huge oil and gas fields off shore enables Israel to become energy independent and earn income from energy exports. Developing these fields is expensive and can also raise political tensions with Turkey and Lebanon which also have made territorial claims. Israel’s adversaries, who profit from their oil and gas, will still be earning huge incomes to continue funding their hostility.

2. Oil-free energy – certainly helpful but still short of the ideal solution.

EV & Energy Storage, Oil-Free Business to Business Initiatives

Conference at Daniel Hotel, Herzelia, Israel – Wednesday, 30/05/2012

The event is also a part of the “2nd Israeli Power Sources Conference” (Batteries, Fuel cells and EV) Solar is another oil-free energy source.

PM Netanyahu’s important energy announcement. Israel to Invest NIS 2B in Alternative Fuels   20 September 2010

At this week’s Cabinet meeting, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced a new NIS 2 Billion initiative to develop alternative fuels, calling it a “national goal of the highest importance.”

3. The third path – Advanced energy technologies for an energy revolution

This category is, by far, the most advanced but it remains largely unknown. This third category represents entire families of advanced energy technologies which: consume no fuel; produce no emissions; are nearly cost free; are totally safe and produce unlimited energy on demand. They are scalable from huge industrial and community size down to a home and car size. This is NOT perpetual motion but free energy similar to wind and solar which also produces free energy. The electric grid would no longer be needed along with its added costs and its vulnerabilities to disruption by nature or by man. This category can totally eliminate oil for energy along with eliminating natural gas, coal and nuclear energy.

An attempted breakthrough – In early 2009 a group of top scientists with the Orion Project sent an urgent memorandum to Obama, and the entire congress, proposing to develop one of these advanced energy technologies in 18 months. There has been no official response to this day.   

However, there was an unofficial response. The scientists received anonymous phone calls threatening them. Fearing for their safety, they resigned.

We have the prospect of advanced energy technologies that can transform the world but every attempt to do so is blocked by the powerful special interests.

Without the suppression we would have been free of oil, coal, natural gas and nuclear power many years ago. Iran would have no oil income and no pretext claiming to seek nuclear power. The center of energy suppression appears to be the U.S. government which also appears to exercise a global reach. To placate the American public the government spends billions researching conventional energy while allowing only limited progress. This creates the illusion that there is freedom to invent. Meanwhile big energy still dominates 80% of the U.S. energy market with little prospect of significant change in the foreseeable future. Allowing a single breakthrough would bankrupt the entire global energy establishment. This is why no one is allowed to succeed.

The potential of advanced energy is revolutionary. Global energy costs would decline dramatically and free up massive capital for economic improvement. Everyone would have access to cheap energy. Cheap energy would reduce the cost to desalinate the oceans. Cheap water plus cheap energy means growing more local food at lower cost thereby reducing dependence on imports. More national self-sufficiency for energy, water and food reduces three major causes for conflict. Eliminating fossil fuels would dramatically reduce CO2 greenhouse emissions. Everyone wins except the energy barons and the special interests.

The internet contains voluminous information about various breakthrough energy technologies, patent numbers, individual inventors, and how governments collude with special interests. The suppression is aided by a media blackout. Successful suppression depends on their never failing. We need to win only once and they are destroyed.

Can Israel succeed where others have failed? Against big energy the lone inventor or small company has no chance. But they too, like Goliath, have their vulnerabilities. There is more than one way to reverse the odds and win. It would be quite something if tiny Israel could neutralize the Arab Oil Weapon and free all humanity from enslavement to big energy. Israel has more than enough technical capability to accomplish this once the leadership can understand the potential.

What is needed now – It is difficult to write directly to Israeli energy officials, offering an unfamiliar, futuristic-sounding story, and be taken seriously. I already tried. What is needed now is an informed messenger in Israel. He or she would be fully briefed by me and then be prepared to approach Israeli energy officials directly. Technical expertise is not required.

It is urgent to move now. Even the announcement of an early breakthrough will start collapsing the oil market, diminishing Iran’s oil revenues and ending the pretext of their needing nuclear power.

The writer is a retired engineer with long term interests in the environment, alternative energy systems, advanced energy technologies and the ever present politics of energy.

 

July 24, 2012 | 20 Comments »

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20 Comments / 20 Comments

  1. With the gas fields opening up offshore and indeed from new methods of drilling in shale under Israel. the best technology is the stationary fuel cell. South Korea ordered 70 MW then 100 MW or so more from a Danbury CT firm and the City of Seoul has now under consideration ordering 250 more to replace a nuclear plant in Seoul and an additional site for 95 MW. . The technology eliminates 99% of the toxic pollution of a coal plant, and is also significantly lower than gas fired combustion turbines. Their key advantage is to be fuel effficient in small sizes. A 300 kW fuel cell uses less fuel per kWH than a 600,000 gas combustion turbine. The large turbine will need transmission, subtransmission, distribution and substations to distribute the load and to integrate the load and to connect to other sources of generation to engage in reserve sharing. This will use up quite a lot of energy in I square R losses, especially during utility peak hours. The major problem with cost has been the cost of the hardware. But it can save the cost of transmission, distribution and substations.
    Up to now, load diversity savings of integrating load has paid those extra costs, but now that one new form of stationary fuel cells has been subject to a DOE program to lower the cost of manufacture, their cost is down to $700 per kW if manufactured in large volumes. South Korea is currently using a molten carbonate fuel cell that is optimal in sizes of 300 to 3000 kW. It has by a learning curve and by increasing the volume of production, reduced the cost from about $20,000 per kW to $2,000 per kW. The DOE program is on the solid oxide fuel cell that is economic in 10 kW units but can be stacked into MW scale plants. It is predicted to have an fuel efficiency of 50% and with co goeneration, i.e. using byproduct heat for domestic hot water, space heating, and with a chiller, air conditioning, the fuel cell can have a fuel efficiency of up to 90%+.

    South Korea is currently reducing the cost even further by manufacturing the gas processing and the electrical parts of the fuel cells from Danbury, CT and combining them with stacks of fuel cells made in the US and assembled into stacks here. However they soon may just buy the cells and assemble them into stacks in Korea lowering the costs still more.
    Fuel cells have the added advantage of being less vulnerable to sabotage as the power supply is divided up into much smaller units. I won’t say how one can disable a power system but it is the transmission lines covering long distances that are unable to be guarded.

    Until now, taking advantage of load diversities available from integrating loads meant that for residential low load factor loads, one needed only 1 – 1 1/2 kW of generating capacity to serve a 10 kW residential load. However for each 10 kW of additional residential load you must add 10 kW of transmission, distribution, and substation capacity. These costs have skyrocketed so the their cost is now in the order of $1500 per kW. So when distributed generating capacity costs less per kW than transmission, distribution and substation capacity, load diversity loses its ability to cover the extra costs for large capacity units.

    Bloom Energy is now receiving quite a lot of publicity about their fuel cell but their cost is about $7,000 per kW, an order of magnitude above those companies that had participated in the DOE SECA program.


  2. All eyes on Israeli trial of methanol fuel

    Israelis are first to test whether a greener, cheaper fuel from natural gas can be used in existing cars without ill effects on the engine.

    Emissions from natural gas-based fuel are much less toxic than those of regular gasoline, and methanol is biodegradable.

    It’s also cheaper. Using M15 would reduce gas prices in Israel by 50 agorot per liter (roughly equivalent to 50 cents per gallon).

    “The question is how to best use natural gas to replace oil,” says Luft.

    “It’s a question being asked in Israel and also in the United States, which has abundant natural gas and a dependency on oil. Natural gas is one-sixth the price of oil on an energy-equivalent basis, so it makes total sense to replace oil with natural gas in transportation. Our view is that turning gas into methanol is the easiest and most economical way to do it.”

    Rich stores of natural gas have been discovered in Israel and in the United States over the past couple of years, and the race is on to plan how to use it in the most efficient way for fuel.

  3. Bert Said:

    Most people seem to be illiterate and fail to even fully read my article.

    Well, it is your responsibility to make people interested in your article.
    You have only yourself to blame If people get bored after reading the beginning.
    Of course you can call them “illiterate”, “closeminded” and “lazy”.
    We live in a world where there are is a lot of worthwhile things to read so when something strikes uninteresting we move on.

  4. Michael Chenkin Said:

    There may be worthy new energy ideas out there that are not in the realm of science fantasy and while not earth shattering would have commercial and societal merit.

    Yes, this is what I was hoping the article was going to be about before I read it.

  5. @ Bert:
    Bert Said:

    You made no mention that the Orion Project also explained the political problems encountered by inventors or the extensive list of technical references. You made no mention of the link that lists many inventors and what happened to them.

    No, I did not, perhaps I stopped reading before I got to that part.
    However if I did read this, that would not make much difference in my understanding. I’d interpret it as paranoid delusions. I know many people who suffered from such delusions. My neighbor here claims that he is being attacked with microwaves from the satellite. His real problem is that he is quite unattractive looking and can’t find any woman that’d want to be with him. This is hard to face, so it is much easier to imagine a world conspiracy. He also believes in the government suppressing all sorts of useful knowledge from free energy from the Earth’s “energy field” to the “anti-gravity” devices and of course the flying saucers and contacts with aliens.
    Now let’s assume that your invention is real. How is any investor going to distinguish between you and the millions of crazy of people who claim the same thing?
    I say there is only one way. Make a working model that can output more energy that what you put into it. So that we can all see that it is tapping a new source of energy.
    Let in produce a single Joule of energy then I will invest ALL MY MONEY, into it, I will also easily convince everyone in my family and most people I know to invest into this invention. Because such invention will be worth more than the greatest goldmine ever found.

    Meanwhile I am willing to invest my money into something else. I will bet all my money that such model will never be constructed. Never is a long time, so let’s make it simple. Not in the next year, not in the next 10 years. Hopefully we will live long enough to verify my prediction.

  6. A Status Update on Cold Fusion

    a fundamental problem – that government censorship.

    So far the patent ability for LENR isn’t coming. The US Patent Office has a backlog of dozens of applications on which it is not acting, demanding cumbersome and expensive on-site demonstrations in addition to the usual paper filings. It’s not much better overseas. This puts the inventors in a very unusual spot. With no intellectual property rights, whatever is offered can simply be taken with poor grounds for compensation.out in the real world, LENR science is in better shape. Italy, Japan, Israel and Greece are the current world leaders. China is suspected to have a major LENR program. Entrepreneurs and venture capitalists are quietly pursuing the pot of gold, isolated and in secret, avoiding the heavy hand of the US government, which might be a very good thing when commercial prospects get to market.


    COLD FUSION TIMES

    “The journal of the scientific aspects of loading isotopic fuels into materials and the science and engineering of lattice-assisted nuclear reactions”

    The process of Low Energy Nuclear Reactions (LENR) or Cold Fusion or your choice on an array of ideas on what to call it, have required the element palladium as a catalyst, that isn’t consumed, but represents an expensive initial outlay. Current commercial efforts use nickel instead, because it is plentiful and cheap and works almost as well.

    The fuel of choice has been “heavy water”, which is non-radioactive and can be recovered from ocean saltwater. Four ounces of heavy water today costs about $50 and contains enough energy when converted to electricity to supply the average American with electricity for a lifetime. The commercial efforts are focused on plain fresh water, some with a hydrogen gas flow, now.

  7. Ted,

    Various commentators have pointed out the very dubious nature of Bert’s claims and have asked the critical questions, where is a simple prototype and why wouldn’t energy hungry nations (China, and I would add, Japan) who have vast resources, make a small investment in at least producing a prototype of these ideas.

    There may be worthy new energy ideas out there that are not in the realm of science fantasy and while not earth shattering would have commercial and societal merit. Perhaps you could give exposure to ideas of that nature, and leave science fiction for a Purim edition of IsraPundit.

  8. @ Viiit:
    I HAVE approached Israeli energy authorities and found they are mostly stuck with conventional technologies and improvements to efficiency. Most people seem to be illiterate and fail to even fully read my article. This is a big subject that requires some willingness to delve deeply while suspending judgement. Frankly most people are too lazy to do the work and would rather make off the cuff pronouncements. Useless opinions do not add up to a serious investigation where the real answers are to be found.

  9. @ Viiit:
    You made no mention that the Orion Project also explained the political problems encountered by inventors or the extensive list of technical references. You made no mention of the link that lists many inventors and what happened to them. I too was involved with a small company with a game changing energy invention. It was easy for the U.S. government to squash the company and erase their fingerprints. As the saying goes ‘you will never believe it until it happens to you.’

  10. @ Notsocommon:
    Yea, just what I thought… 🙂
    What I find surprising is that Ted chose to publish this stuff here.

    I knew a guy like this here where I live. I felt sorry for him. He too has invented free energy, and was feeling very hurt that nobody wanted to sponsor him. That people could not recognize how important his invention was. Perhaps there is a psychological condition like “the unrecognized genius complex”.

  11. Your links lead to a paper by a Dr. Steven M. Greer who organizes courses in how to initiate contact with alien visitors, and is accused by some of running a cult. The paper, full of fancy pseudo-scientific verbiage that doesn’t mean anything in particular and is neither verifiable by lab experimentation nor is discussed in terms of concrete measurements or even units of measure, does little to help its own case.

  12. Bernard Ross Said:

    If there is something in it I would think the Chinese, with their mega appetite for energy and resources, would have interest. The question becomes why arent there more interested parties who are not invested in oil,etc.?

    Because Chinese, Americans, Israelis, and everyone else reasonably assume that there is no such thing as free lunch, or a “perpetual motion machine”, and that a person who is suggesting such thing is irrational.
    Unless you provide a working model that can produce even a single Joule of energy out of “Earth energy field” nobody will listen to you.
    If you were able to produce such a model, you would be the most celebrated inventor/scientist in human history, by far outshining Edison, Tesla, Archimedes, and Einstein.

  13. If there is something in it I would think the Chinese, with their mega appetite for energy and resources, would have interest. The question becomes why arent there more interested parties who are not invested in oil,etc.?

  14. I read the first article. The Orion Project.
    Nothing specific there either.
    Just some general talk about extracting energy from the Earth’s energy field.
    Now that does not say anything. What’s that “Earth’s energy field”, how do you extract energy from it.
    Most importantly, where is even the smallest prototype.

    When Rudolf Diesel invented his engine, he had a prototype. At leas people could see that it can be done. Likewise a simple bamboo stuffed with the black gun powder can demonstrate the principle of a rocket. Based on such model someone may be willing to invest into a bigger rocket.

    But to the best of my knowledge there is no prototype, that extracts energy from “the Earth’s energy field”.

    So make a working prototype, that actually produces any amount of energy from “the Earth’s energy field” and I will take it to whoever you want me to.

  15. @ Laura:
    The missing links in this article have now been restored. These references include general background information on advanced energy technologies and the long term effort by the U.S. government to suppress them.

    I was previously involved with a small technology company that was poised to introduce an engine modification technology that would dramatically increase gas mileage and dramatically reduce global oil consumption. The U.S. government struck, without warning, and destroyed the company outright, illegally, and with no trial. And all in collusion with the court and behind a media blackout so this crime ‘never took place’.

    The full energy story extends far beyond the limited references cited here. This is why it will take considerable briefing to fully comprehend what has been suppressed and the government power involved in keeping us unaware of what is really going on. I’ve been following this matter for years and it is always difficult to sum it all up and made credible in one limited article.

  16. Not a shred of information is given as to what this alternative energy source is. We are kept in the dark. This sounds to me like a hoax.

  17. @ Notsocommon:
    My original article contained four links which got dropped in this posting. That omission changes everything. I am asking Ted Belman if he can somehow restore them. – Bertram Cohen

  18. Nice, but where’s the beef? Bertram, could you not include at least some brief specific information about this mysterious, ideal 3rd category of advanced energy technologies? Your article mostly states the obvious benefits such alternative would offer, something we can all figure out without help, but is not revealing any new factual info. Googling the Orion project one comes upon a site written in similar style peppered with pseudo-scientific sentences such as ‘extracts electromagnetic energy from the quantum vacuum field’. Digging further there are the works of one Tom Bearden who talks about ‘precursor engineering’ and other such wording that only he uses and nobody else, and eventually one reaches discussions on getting ‘DNA activation’ through a sceance with mediums to ascend to a higher spiritual level and so on. So even without a more thorough review one gets the impression that this quacks and walks like snake oil (plus they’d like to raise $5.7 million). So it seems one can easily explain why it’s being hard to get the attention of grown ups. Not the sinister forces of the status quo I’m afraid, just commonsense indifference.