May 2014 – Mike the McScienceMan

Keystone XL Pipeline

The Keystone XL Pipeline is a plan introduced by Canada to construct an oil pipeline system that would extend between Alberta, Canada, the through the midwest of the United States down to the Gulf of Mexico in Texas. To begin, the U.S. government and the Obama administration must first approve the plan. There are many opposed to the pipeline because of environmental reason and in favor of the pipeline for foreign policy reasons. The pipeline would run through several U.S. states shown in the diagram below. These would include Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma and Texas.

Here are the pros and cons of such a project:

PROS

1. According to Harvard Magazine: “[The Pipeline] could transport 830,000 barrels of oil daily—but not all from the Alberta tar sands: the pipeline would also carry at least some oil from the Bakken shale formation in North Dakota.”

“Oil production from the Alberta tar sands totaled 1.9 million barrels per day in 2012 and is projected to double by 2022.”

2. The pipeline will increase the access to Canadian oil and will also create job opportunities within the United States while not drilling in our own country. According to keystone-xl.com the project will bring in $5 billion to the private sector and can create possibly 9,000 jobs for the construction industry.

3. Supporters argue that the pipeline will help make the United States more energy independent and they will no longer have to rely on less stable nations for an oil supply.

CONS

1. The Keystone XL pipeline will accessing Alberta Tar sands which is among the most environmentally dangerous oils in the world. Burning the recoverable tar sands oil will increase the earth’s temperature by a minimum of 2 degree Celsius, according to labor4sustainability.org.

2. According to the same Harvard Magazine referenced earlier, “From 1990 to 2011, Canada’s annual emissions of greenhouse gases increased from 591 million to 702 million tons; exploitation of the Alberta tar sands accounted for 7.8 percent of total national emissions in 2011”. Also, pipelines runs the risk of leaking or combusting, which could devastate the area.

3. Many Americans, especially in the states that the pipeline will pas do not approve of the pipeline passing through their land, especially privately owned land. The idea of the pipeline passing through their backyard isn’t a good one to them. Plus only 56% of Americans approve the decision, a large part of those supporters are Republicans.

Sources:

http://harvardmagazine.com/2013/11/the-keystone-xl-pipeline

5 Reasons Why the Keystone Pipeline is Bad for the Economy

http://keystone-xl.com/five-reasons-why-keystone-xl-benefits-the-u-s/

Brainstorming For Group Project

Having a larger group than most of the other groups in the class, there were a lot of ideas swirling around during the decision process of picking an experiment to do in class. We all had one project that intrigued us. We came back the next class and look more into the process of each experiment and decided that looking into Acid Rain might be the most interesting. Giving what we talked about in class about sustainability and climate, we thought that acid rain was a relevant topic to the class that the class would enjoy very much.

Demand Response

Demand response “allows energy users of all kinds to act as “virtual power plants,” adding stability to the grid by voluntarily lowering their demand for electricity,” according to enernoc.com. “Demand response energy reduction measures are customized for each facility and can include turning off lighting, air conditioning, pumps, and other non-essential equipment.”

When electricity was finally harnessed it opened many new doors for human advancement, but without access to this new resource development would be impossible. Enter the US electric grid, a series of generation plants and transmission lines first built in the 1890′s to spread this powerful technology.

Since it’s beginnings in the 1890′s the grid has been updated, enhanced, tweaked, and modified, but the infrastructure itself remains mostly the same. As the framework is over one-hundred years old the system is barely coping with the huge demands we place on it on a daily basis.

To counteract this increase in demand on an old system the US is working on what is known as the “Smart Grid”. This modern system is being designed from the ground up to take a 21′st century approach the power distribution. In addition to accommodating for the increased, (and continually increasing) demands the Smart Grid is being built to reduce costs in all aspects of the three phase power distribution.

Incorporating computers and self monitoring systems into the new grid is where the Smart Grid really brings a old resource into the modern world. By having the system monitor itself the Smart Grid will be able to reroute power when there are outages, inform consumers of their peak usage, prepare the system for peak hours, alert workers to location of outages and overloads and help prevent surges.

While the power industry majorly benefits from this new system it is the consumers who get the best deal. Being able to monitor your power usage on a hourly basis helps keep people informed as where they use the most. The self monitoring system helps reduce cost by preventing peak overloads, and dispersing power around outages as well as reducing maintenance costs to the power companies which reduces the cost of power further.

The other area where the Smart Grid flourishes is in renewable energy. In addition to the money saving and self monitoring nature of they system, this new power distribution grid is being designed to accommodate renewable sources of energy. Smart has a whole new meaning when it comes to the addition of renewable energy. The grid will better accommodate houses with solar panels, existing wind-farms and allow for an increase in power generating technologies that will help us fight global warming.

The Smart Grid gives us new hope for the security and success of our country, after it is fully implemented the backbone of our technology industry will be stronger and every day life will have a guaranteed availability of power.

Sources:

http://www.enernoc.com/our-resources/term-pages/what-is-demand-response

http://science.howstuffworks.com/environmental/green-science/demand-response.htm

http://energy.gov/oe/technology-development/smart-grid

Generator Lab

This lab was aimed at proving Faraday’s law. Faraday’s law states that a change in magnetic flux through coiled wires will generate an electrical current and voltage. It also states that the greater then change in magnetic flux, the greater the generated current and voltage will be. This was demonstrated through a combination of an NXT attachment as well as a generator apparatus taken from a flashlight.

By shaking the light the magnet passes through the coil and thus generates an electric charge. The NXT read the voltage generated over a 30 second period and saved it to an excel table. We then took the sum of the square values it recorded to determine the level of electrical charge. We can see that as the number of shakes increases, the current and voltage increase.

Generator Table Generator Graph

After some initial confusion the lab ended up successfully proving Faraday’s Law despite a two minor problems:

Data not recording properly

Narrow set of data (most of the data falling between 90 and 120 shakes)

Tom Vales Visits Class

Professor of electrical engineering Tom Vales came to class to show us different alternative energy machines that he had collected and built. Each one displayed a different method of creating electricity. His visit gave us great insight into how science and technology is striving to find the best ways to create energy without harmful effects on the environment.

The first machine he showed us was called a Stirling Motor/Engine. This machine was particularly interesting because it was operating solely on steam created by a pot of boiling water. The steam from the water creating a shifting airflow within a tube, which in turn drove a piston, which could then be used to generate a form of essentially free energy. He said that this technology was utilized in emergency generators in Maine.

Next, Mr. Vales showed us a machine that was invented by physicist Jean Peltier. The machine incorporated two types of electricity conducting metal, copper and bismuth, fused together. An electric charge is sent through one side of the machine, heating up the other end which can then be used for different purposes.

The next machine was referred to as a Mendocino Motor. This device was very impressive, as it used nothing but solar energy to operate and resulted in a long metal rod actually floating and spinning freely in a magnetic field. This was accomplished by attaching four solar panels to the rod and concentrating a light source over the cells. The cells generated a charge that each turned the rod 90 degrees, and since there are four cells the rod spun in a full circular motion for as long as the light source was turned on. This demonstration impressed me because it showed solar energy could create a type of perpetual motion machine in a small scale machine.

Lastly, Mr. Vales demonstrated a Tesla Coil that he built himself. The Tesla Coil works by creating an alternating current of electricity through tightly spun copper wire. This demonstration showed us how AC power flows through different devices, which is how electricity flows from electrical outlets in our walls to any type of device we plug into the outlet. The Tesla Coil was very impressive and interesting, and Mr. Vales demonstrating how the electricity flowed through various devices he brought helped me better understand the concept of alternating current.