Two seemingly unrelated stories hit the front steps this morning in the SF Chronicle’s drastically-downsized business section.  The reporting and writing in each is sound; they are by well-respected writers at the paper. They got The Tracker to thinking. To start, before making the point, they are:

• David R. Baker: Altamont landfill’s gas fuels garbage trucks ; The world’s biggest operating facility for converting methane from decomposing garbage and trash can generate as much as 13,000 gallons of liquefied gas every day. Tracker finds that hard to believe, but it’s what the Press Release says  too. Whatever the number,  it is enough to run hundreds of the landfill operation’s trucks. Bravo.
• Tom Abate: New factory in Pittsburg is no pipe dream ; For one, fine yarn – Abate seems to like big noisy industry. He walks the reader through an actual huge and shiny new manufacturing plant, United Spiral Pipe,  where  heavy sheets of steel become spiral-built pipes several feet in diameter. It’s a joint US-Korean operation, largely to help feed the burgeoning domestic fossil fuel trade’s appetite for pipelines.

So, one has here adjacent pieces. One is on recycling-rich energy that turns greenhouse-potent methane into renewable (ie not fossil) CO2, and another tells us of a giant factory running mainly on old-style energy and making pipes for more of the old-energy sector. The interesting point, from here, of this juxtaposition is that Abate tells us that this one factory, alone and when at full capacity, will demand 10 megawatts of power – enough for 7,500 homes. It’s not easy keeping its presses and arc welders and gantries going. It gives one a sharp glimpse of how hard it will be for wind, sun, biofuel, or other renewable sources to satisfy the baseload demands of heavy industry any time soon. Please, won’t somebody show that large scale sequestration works, or that new nukes or space-based solar power or super-efficient batteries to buffer hundreds of square miles of wind turbines, or something huge, can be built for a reasonable price and without kicking the Keeling curve up another notch? Efficiency gets us started but sooner or later we’ll need to finish with serious hardware. Whew.

- Charlie Petit

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 3rd, 2009 at 3:15 pm and is filed under Environment & Energy Stories. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.