10. Transporting energy: the grid, hydrogen, batteries, and more

Figure 10.1 On June 10, 1999, a pipeline transporting gasoline exploded near Bellingham, Washington, a rare accident, killing three boys and causing considerable local environmental damage. Some 230,000 gallons of gasoline were spilled and one and a half miles of Whatcom Creek were damaged, killing an estimated 100,000 fish. Smoke from the explosion rose six miles. (© AP images)¹

Key facts

• The U.S. energy transport network is huge. Some 90,000 miles of oil pipelines, 2 million miles of natural-gas pipelines, and 700,000 miles of electrical transmission lines transport much of the energy from where it is obtained to where it is used.

• America’s natural-gas pipelines have had a good safety record, but all energy transportation systems are vulnerable to terrorism and accidents, which could have far-reaching effects.

• Ironically, the most technologically advanced form of our energy—electricity—has the most outdated, inadequate, and vulnerable transport network, the electric grid.

• If present trends continue, peak electricity demand will be unmet in five years for most of the United States unless we rapidly expand our transmission system. A hydrogen economy, where a society produces and uses energy primarily or largely in the form of hydrogen, is a popular proposal today. But the United States lags other nations—including Japan, Germany, and Denmark—in research and development to create such an economy.

Pipelines: one way to get energy where you need it

When we think about transporting energy—if we think about it at all—we picture high-tension power lines marching across the landscape. Aware of it or not, however, electricity is not the only form of energy that must be transported long distances before we use it. Gasoline, for example, travels a long way from refineries via pipelines, rail cars, and trucks before it gets into your car’s tank.

One of the many problems associated with Americans’ dependence on fossil fuels is that the places where the fuels originate are usually far removed from where they are most heavily used. For example, East Coast states, with their high human populations, receive 60% of the refined oil products shipped within the nation and almost all the refined oil products imported into the nation.²

Mostly it takes a disaster or a hugely inconvenient disruption to make us suddenly aware of energy transportation. Sometimes the attention-getter is a major oil spill, like that of the Exxon Valdez, or news of a spectacular explosion when a pipeline bursts or a railway car or truck carrying gasoline overturns, as happened on June 10, 1999, in Bellingham, Washington. It was hard to miss this explosion if you were in Bellingham or nearby—the smoke rose six miles into the air, and more than a mile of gasoline several inches thick slid down Whatcom Creek in the town. The next year, in August, 2000, a gasoline pipeline exploded near Carlsbad, New Mexico, and killed 12 members of a family camped nearby. As a result, in March 2002, Senators John McCain and Patty Murray authored the Pipeline Safety Improvement Act as an amendment to the Senate energy bill (S 517).³

When I talk with people about alternative energy sources such as solar and wind, inevitably someone asks what we’re going to do about running cars when all we are producing is electricity. Once in a while, someone may ask about the electrical grid, especially right after a major blackout, but I can’t remember anyone ever asking questions about transporting natural gas, gasoline, diesel, jet fuel, or coal within the United States. If there’s an oil spill somewhere in the ocean, or if offshore drilling comes up in the news, then people talk about local effects of a spill, but rarely about the national or international transport of oil.

There are two key points here. First, all forms of energy have to arrive at the place where we want to use them or can use them. (We can sometimes go to the source of the energy, as do farmers taking their grain to a medieval watermill.)

Second, energy can be converted into forms that are more easily transported, although the conversion always entails some loss. With the invention of the fuel cell, the conversion of electrical energy and chemical fuels became practical for many modern technological applications. An electric current passed through water separates H₂O into hydrogen and oxygen. Although hydrogen is highly explosive and therefore hard to package, it is one of the best fuels. It can be combined with carbon to make methane, the simplest hydrocarbon (one carbon atom combined with four hydrogen atoms). Add an oxygen atom to methane in the right way and you have ethanol, alcohol that can power your car. In this way, the energy from sunlight, first converted to electricity, is transferred as energy stored in a gas or liquid fuel.

The processes can also go the other, more familiar way—as many power plants do all the time, and as those convenient little home generators do: Use gasoline, diesel, oil, natural gas, or coal to run an electric generator, converting the energy stored in those gas and liquid fuels to AC or DC.

Each form of energy that we use to power our civilization has a transportation network. The networks are huge, and as the accompanying illustrations show, each network is surprisingly complex (Figure 10.2).

Figure 10.2 Oil pipelines in the United States: (Top) The big trunk lines.⁴ (Bottom) The smaller refined-oil lines.⁵ (Allegro Energy Group)

The U.S. petroleum pipeline

For petroleum alone, there are 55,000 miles of main “trunk” pipelines and 30,000–40,000 miles of smaller “gathering” pipelines in the United States, including both underground and aboveground pipes.⁶ Petroleum accounts for about 17% of all freight moved in the United States, and the pipelines carry about two-thirds of all that petroleum.⁷ It’s hard to imagine how much petroleum is transported—it’s another of those giant numbers that populate discussions of energy—but let’s try to picture it. According to one analysis, it simply couldn’t be done by truck or train. “Transport for high volume/long distance shipments are so daunting as to be impractical. Assuming each truck holds 200 barrels (8,400 gallons) and can travel 500 miles per day, it would take a fleet of 3,000 trucks, with one truck arriving and unloading every 2 minutes, to replace a 150,000-barrel per day, 1,000-mile pipeline.”⁸ And if all this were to go by rail, “Replacing the same 150,000-barrel per day pipeline with a unit train of 2,000-barrel tank cars would require a 75-car train to arrive and be unloaded every day, again returning to the source empty, along separate tracks, to be refilled.”⁹

Transporting natural gas

Right now, 19% of electric power in the United States is produced by burning natural gas, and this is expected to increase to 23% by 2016. The natural gas used in the United States flows through 300,000 miles of major trunk lines and 1.9 million miles of smaller lines, including those that deliver gas to your house and to 69 million other users of this fuel (Figure 10.3). Some areas of the nation depend quite heavily on natural gas for electricity. Texas gets more than half of its electricity from natural-gas-powered plants. Florida, California, Arizona, and parts of the Northeast—areas with high populations—are also very dependent on natural gas for electricity. A disruption in the natural-gas transportation network therefore could affect both heating and electricity in a large part of the U.S.¹⁰ The North American Electric Reliability Corporation agrees, saying that “disruptions in the supply or delivery of natural gas could have a significant impact on the availability of electricity” and that some measures to provide protection against such events are in development. These include more storage units as well as “alternate pipelines, expanded dual fuel capability, fuel-conservation dispatching, and increased coordination with gas pipeline operators.”¹¹

Figure 10.3 Natural gas pipelines.¹² (DOE/Energy Information Administration/Office of Oil & gas, Natural Gas Division, Gas Transportation Information System)

Remarkably, the natural-gas delivery network has been one of the safest forms of transportation of any kind, with only 12 fatalities in one year, 2002, during which there were 42,000 deaths on highways and a total of 2,000 deaths from aviation, boats and ships, and railroads.^{13, 14} According to the American Gas Association, gas companies spend $7 billion a year to maintain these pipelines. Natural gas also travels in a liquefied state, which requires that the gas be highly compressed. This is the way it is also transported across oceans among nations, and it is much more controversial because of the risk of explosions and vulnerability to terrorism.

Advantages and disadvantages of the pipeline system

Like air travel, petroleum transportation has hubs and spokes. New York City is one of the major hubs for importing and transporting oil, as is otherwise little-known Cushing, Oklahoma, along with Chicago, Los Angeles, and several areas along the Louisiana-Texas coast. Oil spills are of particular concern for hubs with high resident populations.

It is important to note that not all the U.S. states are connected to each other by pipelines for either oil nor gas. California has no pipeline from other states, and New England has no pipeline connection to the rest of the nation—fuel arrives there by barge. This means that a large portion of the U.S. population lives where the least expensive and most efficient oil-delivery system isn’t available.

The good news: Although the amount of material moved is huge, the cost per barrel or gallon is low. For example, in 2001 it cost only about 2.5¢ per gallon to send gasoline from Texas to New Jersey through pipelines. The cost is much higher by train, truck, and even by barge, as is the amount of energy expended to move the fuel by those means.¹⁵ In case you were wondering, oil moves about 3 to 8 miles per hour in the pipelines, so it takes two to three weeks for oil to get from Houston to New York City. This lag might create supply problems in an emergency, an argument in favor of going the electricity route.

Transporting electricity: the grid, the smart grid, or no grid?

Going the electricity route—trying to obtain, transport, and use as much energy as possible in the form of electricity rather than using that energy to make gas, liquid, or solid fuels—has its own problems, as we saw in the book’s opening story about the great 2003 blackout. Let’s start with this simple fact: The world’s largest machine is the U.S. grid system. Actually, it’s three systems: an eastern grid that covers the eastern two-thirds of the United States and Canada; the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, which covers Texas; and a western grid that takes care of the rest of the United States and Canada that has grid connections.

In the U.S., the grid was originally developed only as an emergency fallback. It was built mostly in the 1930s through the 1950s to provide emergency power as needed and extend electricity to the smallest farms in the most rural areas. Today, the grid includes more than 700,000 miles of transmission lines¹⁶ and 250,000 substations and has become the primary way of transporting electrical energy. With about 60% of its equipment more than 25 years old, one of the few things on which most energy experts agree is that the electrical grid is badly outdated, likely to fail, and in need of both major repairs and technological updating. (This is true even taking into account that electrical machines tend to be longer-lived than many others, such as internal combustion engines.) Bill Richardson, Secretary of Energy in the Clinton administration, said the U.S. grid was “third-world.”¹⁷

How does something go wrong with the grid? When the electrical energy transmitted exceeds the amount that the wires can carry, they overheat and may sag or break, and if this doesn’t happen, the transformers and other devices blow out. As the 2003 blackout illustrated, when one part of the system goes down, another becomes overloaded and fails, until the entire system crashes like a bunch of dominos. Also, the grid transmits alternating current, not direct current, and this must be generated precisely at the standard 60 cycles a second. If not, the entire system can get out of phase, overheating can occur, and the grid will fail even if the total amount of electricity flowing over the wires has not surpassed the maximum. The grid’s electrical load has grown even greater since the blackout of 2003.¹⁸

The evidence provided so far in this book favors solar and wind energy, but this requires us to improve our ability to transmit electricity long distances over electric power grids and to put more emphasis on off-the-grid applications and what are known as microgrids, which transmit the electricity locally to a number of users over transmission lines. An analysis of the problems with the present electrical grid by Roger Anderson and Albert Boulanger of the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, N.Y., published in Mechanical Engineering Power & Energy, concludes that “the present U.S. electric grid will not work on any scale—local, state, national, or international—at the higher loads and more diverse generation sources required in the future, let alone if the terrorist threat becomes more severe. Failing to upgrade the system will leave us unprepared and, ultimately, in the dark.”

But little is happening. According to the nonprofit North American Electric Reliability Corporation, which assesses such things, only 2,000 miles of electrical transmission lines were added in 2006, less than 1% of the total and much less than what is needed, not even considering the need for repairing, replacing, and upgrading existing lines.¹⁹

One of the most important uses of fossil fuels in the next years will be to provide power that can be brought online at times when demand exceeds the supply of electricity generated by wind and solar. Microturbines—basically, the same engines that power jet aircraft—are right now used for this because the engines can be brought up to speed quickly to provide electricity when there is a sudden increase in demand.

A smart grid

Experts also favor a smart grid. Several advocacy groups have emerged calling for this, including the Galvin Electricity Initiative and the GridWise Alliance. The former is the brainchild of Bob Galvin, retired CEO of Motorola Corporation, who has made this a major activity since leaving that company. He argues that power outages cost the United States $150 billion a year and that the smart grid would prevent them with the use of automatic switching systems that involve computer and Internet-like communication and control. The smart grid will involve advanced management of electrical devices such as home water heaters, whose energy use could be automatically reduced when overall grid electrical demand surged. It would also have the capability to turn the charging of electrical vehicles on and off so that charging takes place primarily during off-peak times.²⁰

Think of the transition from dumb grid to smart grid as similar to the transition from telephone lines in the first half of the 20th century, with operators handling all the calls, to the present cell phone world of phoning, text-messaging, game-playing, GPS, and the ability to contact your computer from anywhere.

The smart grid moved out of the idea stage in 2008 when Xcel Energy Corporation began installing a test system in Boulder, Colorado, that included smart meters that tell a customer how much electricity he uses and makes possible real-time adjustments. The idea is that this information can motivate people to reduce their use of electricity.

Surprisingly, redundancy has not been the common approach for the grid. As a result, using today’s grid is a little like flying big commercial airplanes on one engine all the time, with your fingers crossed, just hoping that nothing goes wrong. Actually, substations are quite vulnerable, not only to lightning in a thunderstorm, but even to a squirrel that has found its way into a dangerous place and steps across two high-voltage wires.

A little-discussed danger is the possibility of a terrorist attack on any of the energy-distribution systems, which are quite vulnerable. Ironically, the smart grid, with its Internet-like computer controls, might be even more vulnerable to cyberterrorism. Safeguarding their large-scale energy-distribution systems presents a major challenge to the United States and other developed nations. This is all the more important because, as emphasized throughout this book, an adequate energy supply is fundamental to modern technological societies, any of which could be crippled at least temporarily by major disruptions in energy distribution. Although advocates for improving the grid discuss this, it remains one of the least publicized of the major issues about energy supply.

One of the solutions to disruptions of an electrical grid, including terrorism, is to train the grid operators much as airline pilots are trained, using sophisticated computer simulations so that they can experience and learn how to deal with rapid surges in demand. You may recall that one of the major causes of the widespread system failure in 2003 was that grid operators found themselves unable to respond quickly enough and get power companies to cooperate.

Advocates of the smart grid call for a large-scale integrated system of energy production, transmission, and storage, including novel kinds of energy storage, such as huge flywheels and underground compressed air in caverns and superbatteries and elevated water reservoirs.²¹ They also call for novel, experimental methods of energy transmission, such as low-temperature superconductors. The first experiment with this kind of transmission took place in 2008 at Brookhaven, Long Island, New York, where the $60 million Holbrook Superconduction Project started 138,000 volts of electricity flowing along a half-mile of wires that were cooled to minus 371° centigrade by liquid nitrogen and were no bigger in diameter than spaghetti.²²

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security reached an agreement with Consolidated Edison Corporation in 2007 to install superconducting cables beneath New York City to connect two Manhattan substations (big transformers that change the voltage of electrical currents) so that if one burns out, the other can take over. The superconducting cable for Manhattan is in the planning stage and is supposed to be installed and running in December 2010, but this is not certain. One reason that superconducting cables are planned is that so many underground wires, cables, and pipes exist in Manhattan, let alone subways and train tracks, that little room remains for massive new cable systems. A second reason is that heat generated by standard transmission lines would create problems in the crowded underground.

How much will it cost to repair, restore, and develop the electrical grid? According to the Edison Electric Institute, it will cost at least $450 billion (Figure 10.4). But this does not include all the costs of the smart grid or more exotic developments like superconducting cables.

Figure 10.4 Costs to improve the electrical grid (Edison Electric Institute estimates).

No grid?

Our use of energy in the future will involve a greater degree of independence from the grid and from major national energy networks. This will be made possible by solar and wind energy and by the development of local microgrids, referred to earlier. Our future energy supply will also involve the integration of different forms of energy and energy transportation—including, in particular, the conversion of electrical energy to hydrogen. Some call for a hydrogen economy, meaning that hydrogen would become the fuel of choice and, along with electricity, the primary means of transporting energy. The National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) claims that the United States could convert to a hydrogen economy in ten years.²³

This would seem an extreme challenge, with the nation not ready for it. But Iceland and Japan illustrate the potential for moves in this direction. Iceland has several filling stations that provide hydrogen as a fuel for cars. In Great Britain a plan is in development to make the Shetland Islands independent of fossil fuels by producing electricity and hydrogen from wind.²⁴ Denmark built Europe’s first wind-to-hydrogen facility on the island of Lolland.

In sum, however, the idea of a hydrogen economy is controversial and largely untested. Although there is much talk and informal journalism about a hydrogen economy, and the idea has been the topic of several popular books, including Jeremy Rifkin’s The Hydrogen Economy,²⁵ the present reality is that such energy systems are only experimental and small-scale, and little is happening in the United States.

The bottom line

• The transport of energy is one of the keys to energy independence, security, and our standard of living and way of life. But compared to questions about whether to go nuclear, switch to biofuels, or keep searching for more fossil fuels, it gets little attention.

• The future of energy in a technologically sophisticated nation will involve better integration of energy networks, a smart electrical grid, and greater use of microgrids—producing and using energy locally, within a relatively small area.

• Too little research, development, and imagination are focused on transporting energy. It should be one of the major areas of innovative energy research, but it is not.

• The move away from fossil fuels, no matter what kind of energy becomes primary, will lead to increased production of electricity. Conversion of electrical energy to gas and liquid fuels will be necessary, but methods and installations are presently woefully inadequate.