Bloomberg has an interesting article on a Russian plan to build a sort of energy superhighway (or super-tunnel) across the Bering Straight - transferring electricity as well as oil and gas. While you could debate the wisdom of getting hooked on Tsar Vladimir’s hydrocarbon crack, the amount of tidal energy being talked about to flow across the interconnector is impressive. Even more interesting (for the small band of smart grid / global energy grid / GENI freaks like me) is the thought of one of the big gaps in the global grid closing - connecting the North American grid to the emerging Asian Energy grid (OK - thats more an oil and gas concept at this point but they’ll eventually work out electricity is the most important energy source). Next up I’ll be looking for something to bridge the Darien gap and connect North America with Hugo’s new Latin American energy grid. At the other end there is the Europe to North Africa connector waiting to appear - but I suspect sub-Saharan Africa and Australia may take a lot longer to get hooked up. Maybe if Johnny’s dream of a nuclear power plant on every corner (or my vision of a small desert covered in solar and geothermal collectors) comes true Asia will want to hook us in a bit sooner…
Russia plans to build the world’s longest tunnel, a transport and pipeline link under the Bering Strait to Alaska, as part of a $65 billion project to supply the U.S. with oil, natural gas and electricity from Siberia. The project, which Russia is coordinating with the U.S. and Canada, would take 10 to 15 years to complete, Viktor Razbegin, deputy head of industrial research at the Russian Economy Ministry, told reporters in Moscow today. State organizations and private companies in partnership would build and control the route, known as TKM-World Link, he said.
A 6,000-kilometer (3,700-mile) transport corridor from Siberia into the U.S. will feed into the tunnel, which at 64 miles will be more than twice as long as the underwater section of the Channel Tunnel between the U.K. and France, according to the plan. The tunnel would run in three sections to link the two islands in the Bering Strait between Russia and the U.S. …
The Bering Strait tunnel will cost $10 billion to $12 billion, and the rest of the investment will be spent on the entire transport corridor, the plan estimates. “The project is a monster,” Yevgeny Nadorshin, chief economist with Trust Investment Bank in Moscow, said in an interview. “The Chinese are crying out for our commodities and willing to finance the transport links, and we’re sending oil to Alaska.”
In Alaska, a supporter of the project is former Governor Walter Joseph Hickel, who plans to co-chair a conference on the subject in Moscow next week. “Governor Hickel has long supported this concept, and he talks about it and writes about it,” said Malcolm Roberts, a senior fellow at the Anchorage-based Institute of the North, a research policy group focused on Arctic issues. Hickel governed Alaska from 1966 to 1969 as a Republican and then from 1990 to 1994 as a member of the Independence Party. Alaska’s current officials, however, are preoccupied with other issues, including a plan to develop a pipeline to transport natural gas from the North Slope to the lower 48 U.S. states, Roberts said. …
Tsar Nicholas II, Russia’s last emperor, was the first Russian leader to approve a plan for a tunnel under the Bering Strait, in 1905, 38 years after his grandfather sold Alaska to America for $7.2 million. World War I ended the project.
The planned undersea tunnel would contain a high-speed railway, highway and pipelines, as well as power and fiber-optic cables, according to TKM-World Link. Investors in the so-called public-private partnership include OAO Russian Railways, national utility OAO Unified Energy System and pipeline operator OAO Transneft, according to a press release which was handed out at the media briefing and bore the companies’ logos. …
The World Link will save North America and Far East Russia $20 billion a year on electricity costs, said Vasily Zubakin, deputy chief executive officer of OAO Hydro OGK, Unified Energy’s hydropower unit and a potential investor. …
“It’s cheaper to transport electricity east, and with our unique tidal resources, the potential is real,” Zubakin said. Hydro OGK plans by 2020 to build the Tugurskaya and Pendzhinskaya tidal plants, each with capacity of as much as 10 gigawatts, in the Okhotsk Sea, close to Sakhalin Island. The project envisions building high-voltage power lines with a capacity of up to 15 gigawatts to supply the new rail links and also export to North America.
Russian Railways is working on the rail route from Pravaya Lena, south of Yakutsk in the Sakha republic, to Uelen on the Bering Strait, a 3,500 kilometer stretch. The link could carry commodities from eastern Siberia and Sakha to North American export markets, said Artur Alexeyev, Sakha’s vice president. The two regions hold most of Russia’s metal and mineral reserves “and yet only 1.5 percent of it is developed due to lack of infrastructure and tough conditions,” Alexeyev said. …
Rail links in Russia and the U.S., where an almost 2,000- kilometer stretch from Angora to Fort Nelson in Canada would continue the route, would cost up to $15 billion, Razbegin said. With cargo traffic of as much as 100 million tons annually expected on the World Link, the investments in the rail section could be repaid in 20 years, he said. “The transit link is that string on which all our industrial cluster projects could hang,” Zubakin said.
Japan, China and Korea have expressed interest in the project, with Japanese companies offering to burrow the tunnel under the Bering Strait for $60 million a kilometer, half the price set down in the project, Razbegin said. “This will certainly help to develop Siberia and the Far East, but better port infrastructure would do that too and not cost $65 billion,” Trust’s Nadorshin said. “For all we know, the U.S. doesn’t want to make Alaska a transport hub.”
The Sydney Morning Herald has an article on a report from IHS Energy (part of CERA if I recall correctly) entitled “Iraq has double the oil”. I could have told you that years ago (as could any old Iraq Petroleum Company geologists and anyone else who paid attention to the Senator Church’s hearings in the 1970’s for example) - and I’d be so bold as to say it has twice as much as IHS are currently estimating. A little Google search just then turned up this paper - apparently our current effort is the seventh oil war in Iraq since the Ottoman empire fell apart.
Iraq’s oil reserves could be almost twice as vast as current estimates, and its production could also double in five years, a report from consultancy IHS has showed, the Financial Times reported on Wednesday. According to the business daily, the report, which it said was the most comprehensive independent survey of Iraq’s resources since the US-led invasion of the country in March 2003, noted that such developments were dependent on an improving security situation in the Middle Eastern country.
“Obviously the security situation is very bad, but when you look at the sub-surface opportunity, there isn’t anywhere like this,” Ron Mobed, the head of IHS’s energy division, was quoted as saying by the FT. “Geologically, it’s right up there, a gold star opportunity.”
Doubling Iraq’s oil reserves would mean an increase of 100 billion barrels of oil, which would make it the second-biggest source of oil reserves in the world, after Saudi Arabia and ahead of Iran, the FT said. Iraq is currently third on that list with 116 billion barrels of reserves.
IHS also said that Iraq could double its current rate of production in five years, to four million barrels of oil a day, if international investment into Iraq increases. The consultancy’s study of Iraq’s oil reserves is based on data collected before and after the 2003 invasion, and its prediction of an additional 100 billion barrels of oil is based on an analysis of geological surveys.
Given that our pursuit of Iraqi oil seems to be bankrupting the US taxpayer and there are a lot of alternatives to oil out there (think electric transport + global energy grid) that will make for a massive economic boom when we make the switch - one the US technology industry is best placed to exploit - you really have to wonder if its worth killing so many people just so that a completely immoral sunset industry can maintain control over what is both a diminishing resource and one that is contributing to a vast swathe of environmental problems.
But I guess when the creatures of the aforesaid sunset industry still have their bony claws firmly on the levers of power in Washington this isn’t going to change any time soon. Meanwhile their “surge” seems to have managed to have achieved an increase in the attrition rate from bombings.
On a related note, I’ve been arguing with the stupidest person I’ve had the misfortune to encounter in several years over at Jeff Vail’s blog for the last week or so - one interesting link that appeared between the paranoid conservative conspiracy theories was this one from ZMag back in February entitled “It’s About the Oil”.
By the standard moral and legal definition, “telling the truth