Pillar to Post: Peter Welander's Blog
News and comment from Control Engineering process industries editor, Peter Welander
Has gasoline consumption peaked?
We know that gasoline consumption has gone down lately due to recessionary pressures, but now some experts believe it will never return to the heady days of 2007. We may look back at that time as the year gasoline consumption peaked in the U.S. An article from McClatchy news service suggests three reasons: • New vehicles are more fuel efficient; • The number of cars on the road has r ...... Read More
Comments (0)Know your alternative gasses
In my discussion of home producer gas appliances, Kevin Chisholm pointed out that I had misused some terminology in the interest of trying to add variety to my prose. (Such is a hazard in this business, and I have been called on it a few times before.) In the headline I used the term bio-gas to refer to the product from the wood gasification process. While this does describe what wood gas is since ...... Read More
Comments (0)Your next home appliance: bio-gas generator
Last Sunday, Joe gave me the results of some searching he’d done on the Internet about wood gas generators. (We discuss this topic frequently, and I keep telling him that I can’t believe he’s never dabbled in it given all his other interests.) Anyhow, apparently there’s a company in China that manufactures a commercially built wood gas generator with the catchy name JXQ ...... Read More
Comments (0)Your next home appliance: bio-gas generator
Last Sunday, Joe gave me the results of some searching he’d done on the Internet about wood gas generators. (We discuss this topic frequently, and I keep telling him that I can’t believe he’s never dabbled in it given all his other interests.) Anyhow, apparently there’s a company in China that manufactures a commercially built wood gas generator with the catchy name JXQ ...... Read More
Comments (0)Hazards of repeating gray science
The United Nations has suffered some embarrassment over a report issued by the Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The benchmark report, issued in 2007 under the leadership of Rajendra Pachauri, made the rather alarming claim that the Earth’s glaciers are melting so quickly that they will disappear completely in the Himalayas as early as 2035. The embarrassing part isn’ ...... Read More
Comments (0)Rising sugar prices: Food vs. fuel?
If you think your mid-afternoon sugar boost is getting more expensive, you’re probably right. Sugar costs have been rising for a while and are getting to levels not seen an almost 30 years. Needless to say, this affects products like candy immediately and directly. Confectionary prices are up almost 10% over this time last year. Raw sugar on world markets is up by 42% over January 2009, and ...... Read More
Comments (0)Want a nuke plant? Call Korea
You’ll be forgiven if you don’t know that KEPCO (Korean Electric Power Company) is the world’s third largest nuclear plant builder, but the name is likely to become far more recognizable in years to come. KEPCO just beat its two main competitors (GE/Hitachi and Areva) to get a $20 billion contract related to four new Generation-3 APR-1400 reactors in the United Arab Emirates. ...... Read More
Comments (1)Coal troubles: As if carbon isn't bad enough
In what is a real-life example of “pick your poison,” coal-burning power plants are dealing with a choice of spewing out sulfur dioxide that results in acid rain, or mercury that contaminates fish and causes birth defects. We won’t even get onto the topic of carbon emissions. This is manifest in rising levels of mercury in a number of mid-western states, including Illinois, th ...... Read More
Comments (2)Correcting nuclear power myths
Last Sunday my friend Joe spotted me during the after-church coffee time and gave me his copy of Mechanical Engineering. He pointed particularly to an article in the December issue called Facts & Fission by Theodore Rockwell. The article makes some interesting points about the nuclear power industry and dispels some common myths about related dangers. Rockwell goes back to the earliest parts o ...... Read More
Comments (0)Engineers: Learn Esperanto!
You will be forgiven if the importance of yesterday slipped your mind. December 15 was the 150th birthday of Ludovic Lazarus Zamenhof (12/15/1859-4/14/1917) who you might recognize as the creator of Esperanto. “What’s Esperanto,” you ask? In the late 19th Century, Zamenhof set out to create a universal language that was intended to bridge all sorts of ethnic, linguistic, and n ...... Read More
Comments (0)Toward appropriate energy resource pricing
Last evening my wife was bored and watching one of those TV shows where people go around looking at houses. We get to hear and see their reactions as they consider a new place to live. Usually I can’t watch these for more than five minutes, but the case in point was a very well-off young couple that was looking for a new place near Indianapolis. It was just the two of them, but one of the m ...... Read More
Comments (0)An inconvenient data
If you’ve been paying attention to the climate change debate during this run-up to the Copenhagen meetings, you have probably heard the term “climategate,” making reference to a scandal that some of the data used to support the argument for anthropogenic global warming has been cooked or at least spun to make the problem look worse than it really is. Moreover, there is apparen ...... Read More
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