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  • Home > The Case for Compression > Finite Resources
Currently viewing the category: "Finite Resources"

The Age of Connectivity

On May 2, 2012 By Robert W. "Doc" Hall
monkeybrains-wireless-isp

Besides our complex environmental challenges, businesses are entering a new Age of Connectivity. The technology of connection, while baffling at times, is easier to foresee than the human changes they might entail. The engineers of network growth are ebullient indeed. A recent forecast suggests that in only four [...]

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Spectrum Crunch

On February 22, 2012 By Robert W. "Doc" Hall
smart-phone-use

CNN is running a series on the impending shortage of spectrum to carry the increasing demands of smart phones. Without action, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) anticipates the shortfall to be serious by 2014. Fast growth in phone traffic presages the issues of Compression in many other domains, but happening in [...]

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Water Treatment

On February 6, 2012 By Robert W. "Doc" Hall
Waster Water

Will Rogers once advised audiences to “drink upstream from the herd.” That usually worked in a thinly populated world. Running water and soil percolation remediated low bioloads. Heavy metal contaminants weren’t as widely distributed.

Today we have to help nature deal with high bioloads and pervasive industrial chemicals, but Read Full Article →

District Energy

On January 20, 2012 By Robert W. "Doc" Hall
District energy systems produce steam, hot water or chilled water at a central plant. The steam, hot water or chilled water is then piped underground to individual buildings for space heating, domestic hot water heating and air conditioning. As a result, individual buildings served by a district energy system don't need their own boilers or furnaces, chillers or air conditioners.

One of the oldest ways to save energy is district energy, formerly district heating. Many old cities, campuses, and other big building complexes used district heating, often as steam piped from an on-site boiler house or as turbine steam from a community electrical generating plant. In an energy-cheap economy, this came to be [...]

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Our Dropping Energy Yields

On December 15, 2011 By Robert W. "Doc" Hall
Screen Shot 2011-12-17 at 1.20.12 PM

Energy return on energy invested (EROEI) is well known, but not widely practiced. Applied to an oil well, EROEI is the ratio of energy represented in crude oil at a wellhead divided by the energy used to drill the well and pump up the oil.

Estimating this ratio for a strictly bounded system is not [...]

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Water, Water…

On October 13, 2011 By Robert W. "Doc" Hall
Galaxy-08279-5255-surrounded-by-140-trillion-times-water-in-oceans-6402-300x225

October 13, 2011

In the last 40 years we discovered water in space. We expect to find much more water deep on the moon, Mars, and elsewhere. Water on Asteroid 24 Themis closely matches our ocean water. Scientists speculate that much of earth’s water wafted in from comets [...]

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Low Load Energy

On September 27, 2011 By Robert W. "Doc" Hall
Compression-thinking-small-scale-energy-solar-refriderator-640w1-300x173

September 27, 2011

The Fukushima disaster cut Japan’s generating capacity. This immediately prompted ideas to cut the load on their grid. Many ideas are modern updates of a 200-year old one, a self-winding watch that powers itself at the point of use. For instance, inventors like Kohei Hayamizu are concocting systems to generate [...]

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Of Jellyfish and Cooling Water

On June 30, 2011 By Robert W. "Doc" Hall
nuclear-power-plant-250

June 30, 2011

In Scotland the Torness nuclear generating units have been shut down until at least July 5 to clean out jellyfish clogging the intake filters for cooling water. In France, as in the summer of 2009, unofficial channels report that nuke generators are going through rolling shutdowns because a [...]

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“Seeing” World Food Scarcity

On June 10, 2011 By Robert W. "Doc" Hall
food-shortages-and-compression-250

June 10, 2011

How we view global food supplies parallels how we see many issues of Compression. How do you see global food problems? Using what evidence? How does that skew the further information you seek? This loop is sometimes called a ladder of inference.

For decades, environmental forecasters like Read Full Article →

Compressing the Food Crisis

On March 11, 2011 By Robert W. "Doc" Hall
Compression-Thinking-Compressing-the-Food-Crisis-250

March 11, 2011

In February, the UN’s Global FAO Food Price Index pushed further above its former peak in July 2008, the same month that oil prices peaked above $140 a barrel. The 2008 peak subsided quickly because it was partly speculative trading, but not before food riots broke out in various places; [...]

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Phosphorus in our Future?

On February 23, 2011 By Robert W. "Doc" Hall
phosphorus-fertilizer-and-urine-for-fertilizer-640

February 24, 2011

Phosphorus is an element essential to biology. Although a miniscule amount does the trick, nothing grows without it, so it has no substitute. The global market price of phosphate rock spiked at $430 per metric ton three years ago, and is now about $200 on its way back up.  About 90% of [...]

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Living Off the Land

On December 29, 2010 By Robert W. "Doc" Hall
Cape-winelands-South-Africa-250

December 29, 2010

Picking through obscure news, prospects for significant “pushback” by dispossessed people seem on the rise. Pushback refers to NIMBY movements, involuntary relocations, and so on, triggering social unrest, and even violence. The UN reports that urban poor are the fastest growing segment of the global population, fed by [...]

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Critical Materials

On December 16, 2010 By Robert W. "Doc" Hall
critical-materials-250w

December 16, 2010

On December 15, the Department of Energy released its Critical Materials Strategy Report which is downloadable. Many horses escaped before this barn door started to close, but within the last few months, imagination began to perk up. For example, the last appendix of this report is the draft of a [...]

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Ricocheting Shortages and Ceteris Paribus

On December 2, 2010 By Robert W. "Doc" Hall
Circuit-Board-300

December 2, 2010

A new book, Global Resource Depletion by Andre Diederen, reads much like the opening chapter of Compression, only better. Although published in the Netherlands, it’s written in English, and available from on-line booksellers. You can glean the gist of Diederen’s thinking from one of his recent presentations.

Diederen does a [...]

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Resource Wars

On November 3, 2010 By Robert W. "Doc" Hall
resource-wars-mining-tunnel-cart-250x280

November 3, 2010

Historically, most hot wars were partly motivated by grabs for land and resources, as with colonial wars and World War II. For example, early in the 20th century Japan aspired to industrial power status, but lacked the natural resources for it and was shut out of Asian markets. [...]

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World Grain Supply — 2010 and Beyond

On August 16, 2010 By Robert W. "Doc" Hall
OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

August 15, 2010

World grain prices are up sharply since June. U.S. prices rose for several days ahead of the USDA’s much awaited projection of this year’s global grain harvest, issued on August 12. Excess heat cut this year’s harvest in Central Asia. Russia and the Ukraine, which are normally grain [...]

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Rare Earths and Wicked Problems

On April 8, 2010 By Robert W. "Doc" Hall

April 8, 2010:

To actually accomplish anything complex, and which has multiple goals, the “wicked” aspects of a situation must be considered (a wicked problem is defined somewhere in the Compression Map). But work organization leaders realize that focusing groups on simple goals is easier than challenging them with complexity. “Go for it” stirs emotional [...]

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Resource Shortages

On January 4, 2010 By Robert W. "Doc" Hall

A few substances may actually be near a limit. An example is rare earths important for electronic gear, like terbium and dysprosium, mined only in China so prices have sharply increased since 2007. In this case, conventional market signals prompt seeking other sources or substitutes. A New York Times summary can be found Read Full Article →

Energy and Energy Yield

On January 4, 2010 By Robert W. "Doc" Hall

Most industrial society denizens would like the benefits of cheap energy without any of its downsides. For example,uranium mining and processing has strong opposition almost anywhere it is proposed. For a rundown on this explore: www.wise-uranium.org/ Nuclear fusion has been held to be a magic solution, but that technology has been projected to be at [...]

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