The Oil Drum Australia has a great post this week about tidal power construction all across the world, including the attractive ‘Energy Island’ concept pictured. The article talks about tidal, ocean current and wave projects from the UK, US, New Zealand, Taiwan and Canada, amongst many others. The UK could potentially derive 25% of its power just from wave energy, not to mention its huge resources of tidal power in the Severn Estuary and on the coasts of Scotland. Also discussed is OTEC (Ocean Thermal Energy Conversion), which creates power from the heat differential between warm surface water and cold deep water.
In other news, Oil has never been higher priced in history than it is today, at $102.08 a barrel. Looks like we’re going to need a lot of this alternative energy supply. One of the projects mentioned at the bottom of the Oil Drum article is for floating islands of power generation producing hydrogen to fuel passing ships. Neat.
The highest price oil has ever had was in December of 1979 when the nominal price was about $38. In inflation adjusted 2008 dollars, that would be about $104. It wold be more accurate to say: The cost of gas is almost as high as it was three decades ago..
Hi jtc, you may be right. The number when adjusted for inflation for the 1979 value varies a little according to the source. Perhaps the news article I quoted is using a lower value. – this reuters article uses an inflation-adjusted high of $102.58, for instance: http://uk.reuters.com/article/oilRpt/idUKL2736008020080227
this financial times article is way higher at $109. http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/cf2af3b2-6107-11dc-bf25-0000779fd2ac.html
this article says the value is BETWEEN $96 and $103, depending on how the inflation is calculated. http://www.tulsaworld.com/business/article.aspx?articleID=20080221_5_E1_spanc17814
This one says 101.70 (via a different site but quoting reuters, indicating that even one source doesn’t have a fixed number), but also that in 1864 prices could have been as high as $104.35
http://www.busrep.co.za/index.php?fSectionId=642&fArticleId=4196934
It’s more art than science and the exact figure will complete depend which expert you pick and which numbers and factors THEY picked. Adjusting a price for inflation over 28/29 years is dependent on a lot of factors so some people will be reporting the all time high at different times. Whenever the moment happens, we’re pretty close to an all-time high without any incredibly obvious reasons for it (unlike 1979, which was dependent on the Iranian Revolution).
The concept of floating islands to provide OTEC energy was detailed in the 1992 Marshall Savage book.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Millennial_Project:_Colonizing_the_Galaxy_in_Eight_Easy_Steps
Besides energy, there are a lot of good reasons for building such floating islands right now.