Category Archives: Energy/Technology

Coal Creek sunset

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This gorgeous sunset is the result of me standing on top of my wife’s truck to capture a shot of one of the crown jewels of North Dakota’s energy industry. This is Coal Creek Station, which is the facility responsible for DryFining™ technology.

The people working here got an idea for making lignite coal burn better by removing moisture. By the time they got their process worked out a little bit, they were also able to remove a significant amount of impurities and pollutants from the coal as well. They’re now in the process of licensing this sort of technology all over the world!

The whole thing started with some of that North Dakota ingenuity we all hear about, where guys just grab whatever is handy and start building something. What started out as blowing air through a barrel is now a process which can improve coal-fired power plant performance by leaps and bounds.

It also makes for a nice sunset photo!

(UPDATED) Sunset for North Dakota’s energy industry? Byron Dorgan’s committed to it

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If you paid attention during the 2008 presidential campaign, you likely heard candidate Barack Obama foretell that he would bankrupt the coal industry, and that under his energy policies “electricity rates would necessarily skyrocket.”

For decades now, North Dakotans have been duped into thinking that we need to continue to send Byron “Skybox” Dorgan, Kent “Countrywide” Conrad, and Earl “The Pearl” Pomeroy to Washington on our behalf, because they’ve accumulated so much seniority and clout. They’ve grown very bold and comfortable in this role, scaring North Dakotans into repeatedly sending them back to office and doling out federal dollars when they return. They warn that any replacement would have to start from square one, wielding no effective influence on behalf of North Dakota and the interests of our state. So…what have we gotten for that? Zero. Well, unless you count the government health care takeover…

Now on his way out the door, and employing a “scorched earth” policy toward his country and the North Dakotans who enabled him, Senator Dorgan has these foreboding words for our nation’s energy industry:

“Regulations are coming in the future. If coal does nothing, coal will lose.”

North Dakota’s economy has remained robust during the national recession for a few different reasons, one of which is the solid energy industry. The policies of these liberal Democrats will decimate that. We don’t have the next election to use as an incentive to bring Byron Dorgan back to earth…what about his cohorts? I don’t think they’re any more interested in North Dakota’s economic future than he is. Once their re-election chances are sealed one way or the other, can we expect such candor from Conrad and Pomeroy?

UPDATE: This story from KFYR TV news shows that Byron Dorgan and his hairpiece are completely detached from reality. He’s pushing legislation to push people toward electric cars, while simultaneously trying to strangle the industry which generates much of the electricity that would be used to charge them. He also ignores the load that charging a bunch of these magic vehicles would put on an already strained electric grid.

That’s why I’ve always considered liberal/progressive/Democrat policies as suicidal. He’s attacking us from both sides: making energy production more expensive and difficult, while forcing us into a corner with his pie-in-the-sky electric vehicles (which ought to be FANTASTIC in a North Dakota winter). Senator Dorgan is long overdue for replacement, as are his like-minded comrades in Washington.

One of my new favorite signs around Bismarck-Mandan

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I spotted this sign on the way back from Sibley Park last night. Obvious punctuation issues aside, it raises an important point about ethanol blended fuels that nobody wants to address: they are inferior and smart consumers don’t want them. Naturally, the entrepreneurial spirit kicks in and some businesses start catering to the desires of the consumer. Amazing how the system works.

I have friends who own FlexFuel vehicles. They’ll tell you that by the time they fill their tanks with E85 fuel, deal with the loss of acceleration and passing power, and figure out the horrible mileage the fuel delivers, they break about even. That is NOT counting the tax subsidy that you and I pay on each gallon of E85, whether we use it or not, in order to keep its price competitive at the pump. That also does not include the higher food costs we pay because so much corn is going into the production of said “renewable fuel.”

A long time ago I made this graphic to illustrate one more point, and a real deal-breaker: Even if you have an engine that could extract every bit of energy available in a gallon of E85 fuel, it still is WAY down on gasoline. E85 simply does not have the BTUs (measured units of energy) locked within its chemistry to compete with traditional motor fuel when it’s burned and the energy stored in those hydrocarbons’ chemical bonds is released. (Yes, I majored in chemistry in college at one point.) Simply put: E85 is a thermodynamic loser. Even worse, we’re forced to subsidize it.

Personally I have to burn high octane fuel in my motorcycles and our trucks recommend it. I burn regular in the lawn mower and stuff like that. Even so, I will not buy ANY fuel that has an ethanol component to it. Thankfully I can now jet down to Unistop along University Drive if I want some ethanol-free regular gasoline.

One of the world’s biggest lies is posted near 3rd & Rosser

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I suppose it’s appropriate to have a whopper like this near the offices of professionals like Earl Pomeroy, Byron Dorgan, and Kent Conrad. This billboard is part of an orchestrated campaign to fool people into supporting “The American Power Act” – by not letting you know that it’s a repackaging of the Kerry-Lieberman “Cap & Trade” act, designed to decimate our nation’s energy industry. Energy…say, isn’t energy a very significant part of North Dakota’s economy?

Not only is this bill a total disaster for North Dakota and the nation at large, but it has another few interesting flaws:

The “Renewable Energy World” website, which is vested in the sorts of “green energy technology” bandied about by liberals bent on killing the energy industry, has an article titled “American Power Act Contains Little Direct Support for Renewables.”

The “World Climate Report” website, which purports to be “the Web’s longest-running climate change blog”, has an article posted which calls the American Power Act “climatologically meaningless.” For instance, even if this bill worked like clockwork (which never happens), they might lower temperatures by a couple hundredths of a degree over the next hundred years!

The folks at American Thinker have an article posted which points out that the Act is merely “a sugar coated version of Cap and Trade.”

Hey, guess what? It gets better! If you actually visit “PassTheAmericanPowerAct.com” you’ll get the site above. Looks pretty conservative and jingoistic, doesn’t it? The only thing it seems to be missing is a flattering photo of George W. Bush. There’s only one problem: It’s a sham.

That web address actually bounces you to the servers of DemocracyInAction.org, a liberal activist group that apparently hosts all kinds of different websites for “progressive” causes. Here’s how they describe themselves:

“DemocracyInAction, a 501(c)3 nonprofit organization itself, believes technology can be a decisive force for social change. We exist to empower those who share our values of ecological and social justice to advance the progressive agenda.”

Operated by a company called Salsa Labs, and oriented around the same sort of “community organizing” as our hapless President. Here’s a list of their clients, which includes a bunch of liberal nonprofits like Code Pink and a bunch of liberal Democrat political campaigns.

If I had the money, I’d simply rent the billboard next to it and put up something like this. It wouldn’t take much, and it would help put some truth right next to the Big Lie that is trying to kill jobs and take control of more Americans’ lives in the name of the Global Cooling Warming Climate Change hoax.

Wielding all that “clout and seniority,” Conrad and Dorgan vote the Democrat party line against North Dakota interests (AGAIN)

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Those wacky North Dakota Democrats…they’ve gone and done it again. They postured themselves in the media as being for the Murkowski Amendment (PDF here), which would restrict the EPA from heavy-handedly going after any industry they felt generated too much carbon dioxide. In other words, North Dakota’s burgeoning energy industry.

This is “health care reform” all over again. They make sure they’re on TV, radio, and newspaper pages indicating that they’ll vote against something North Dakotans don’t want. Then they whisk themselves back to Washington, remove the plaid shirts, and vote whichever way the national Democrat Party wants them to.

Once again, you can view the Murkowski Amendment here (PDF). For the vote tally, click here.

How much do you want to bet you won’t see accurate mention of this on KFYR, KXMB, WDAY…or in any of the Forum newspapers or the Bismarck Tribune?

Rob Port over at Say Anything tipped me to this article which describes Dorgan as “liberated by his pending retirement…” which was my biggest fear after hearing of his decision not to run again. He basically has a license to do what he’s always done (vote as a liberal Democrat) with no repercussions. It looks like he’s going to end his too-long political career by going out with a liberal bang.

How’s that Hope™ and Change™ working out for everybody? When North Dakota’s energy industry gets flattened by government regulation and we join the long list of states in economic woe, thank everyone who voted Democrat.

Weekend warriors

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These guys are heroes to the people out of town who are relying on them to restore the power. They’re working their tails off to accomplish the task, too! Can you imagine standing on top of these towers and cranking power lines into place? Yikes!

There were still some wooden poles down, but I passed a lot of brand new ones and the crew which was replacing them. They’d obviously accomplished a lot in the area northwest of Mandan.

By the way, when one of those huge metal towers folds, there isn’t much you can do with it. The metal has been fatigued, so it’s time to replace the entire structure (aside from the pilings anchoring it to the ground). Once it’s dismantled and placed in a pile, it becomes obvious that there really isn’t a lot of metal in these things!

Imagine the force it took to twist and bend metal like this. Some of the damage was obviously due to the storm, the rest from cutting it into sections. Wow.

The landscape looks a bit different out there right now, as there are some places where the big metal towers are missing (for now). I poked around a bit west of Mandan to get my truck muddy and see what I could see, and there were crews working diligently to make sure that the lights come back on…one tower at a time.

Yeah, the power might be out for a while

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This is the spot where the power line fell on Highway 83 on Friday. As you can see, the tower has been repaired somewhat and reinforced with guy wires. There are at least a half dozen more of these that need to be fixed on the way to Baldwin. Things are a lot worse west of Mandan, however.

Normally those really big power line towers, the ones that resemble stick figures to a degree, are an adversary to a North Dakota photographer like myself. I’ve always been fascinated with them, just not when they’re in the way of a landscape photo or sunset or something like that. In this case, I ran around a little bit to see them twisted into contorted shapes that convey the force wielded by that ice and snow.

These towers are down from Crown Butte westward for at least a mile or two. I can’t imagine how much fun it’s going to be to replace them on soggy ground. The metal is so fatigued and twisted that they’ll simply have to be replaced. Only the concrete footings look salvageable to an untrained observer like me. Even the insulators are damaged on many of them.

Of course, in the process of satisfying my curiosity regarding these giant steel behemoths and their untimely demise, I have to get all artsy about it with my camera. Would you expect any less?

I saw a lot of crews working and a lot of utility trucks driving today as I poked around the outskirts of town. These crews are going to be the heroes of the day as they gradually restore power to more and more customers. Then we’ll be ready for tornado season! Shhh.

More photos from the Baldwin area can be found here.

Somebody’s going to have a busy Easter weekend

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As you may have heard, Highway 83 is closed due to a downed power line crossing the highway. Crews there have a very big job ahead of them, as the towers holding these power lines are in very bad shape…and not terribly accessible, either. We went from sunny 70s earlier this week to blustery blizzard conditions, dumping more precipitation than we usually get in the entire month of April over the course of a single day! Of course, heavy slush and snow like that put an incredible strain on suspended power and phone lines.

I imagine a tower like this is going to be very difficult to repair, since the metal structure is torn and mangled. I counted about a half dozen of these damaged towers between Highway 83 and Baldwin.

There were some smaller lines running along the road into Baldwin that were down as well, with five or more poles laying in the ditch. Others, like this one, were merely broken.

This looks like an easy fix compared to the rest of the damage I saw! At least the pole is intact.

Here’s the beginning of the fallen poles, which were laying in the frozen ditch. The slush had frozen so hard that I was able to walk on top of it. For some shots I took throughout the morning, I walked an eighth mile or so down a section line road, and didn’t even get my tennis shoes wet. Local residents had parked along the road and hiked down their driveways.

One of five poles laying in the ditch. Some poles were either broken or ripped out of the ground but the wires looked intact.

I wondered how the Regan wind farm fared through all this and, from this vantage point, everything looked intact. Naturally none of the turbines were turning. Wind power is the most expensive power you can attempt to generate except perhaps solar, and it’s very unpredictable. Plus it puts rabid environmentalists in a quandary, since the blades kill birds.

Of course I had to get a windmill in there somewhere! This is pretty much in someone’s back yard. All of the metal towers I saw that were down were in the middle of a field or other location far from the roads. When I arrived a crew was using tracked skidsteers to clear a path to the towers. I stayed for a little while, which accounts for the change in sky color between some of these shots.

Here the crews are preparing to work on the first tower east of Highway 83. I think they had already made repairs to a tower on the west side, but I’m not positive on that. Once this one is fixed, I think they can open the highway (which may have already happened as I type this).

I didn’t stay to see any of the repair work, since I’m busy and it was likely to be a slow process. I left about the same time as the KX News van, except I got in the southbound lane to go back to Bismarck. They drove down the northbound lane, straight into oncoming traffic, before catching their mistake and doing a quick u-turn. Oops!

I’m told there are similar situations like this all around our area. I have friends south of Lincoln who are borrowing one of my generators right now. I’m told that lines are down from Mandan to Flasher as well, and friends of mine north of Mandan got their power restored yesterday evening. Thankfully it isn’t sub-zero now, too! Hopefully the warm temperatures will resume quickly and we can proceed to Spring.

Eight Senate “Coal State Democrats” Write Challenge To EPA, North Dakota’s Senators Conspicuously Absent

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According to this article from CNSNews.com, a letter from Jay Rockefeller is challenging the EPA’s attempts to regulate CO2 and bludgeon traditional providers of energy. It was signed by seven other Senators:

“The letter to EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson was signed by Democrats Mark Begich of Alaska, Robert Byrd of West Virginia, Sherrod Brown of Ohio, Bob Casey of Pennsylvania, Claire McCaskill of Missouri, Carl Levin of Michigan and Max Baucus of Montana.”

So much for that clout and tireless fighting for North Dakota that we hear about from Senators Conrad and Dorgan, eh? They can’t even stamp their name on a letter standing up for our state’s energy producers.

How’s that Hope™ and Change™ working for you, my fellow North Dakotans? Right now our state is the only one bucking the recession trend. The federal government wants to put a stop to that, and our Senators can only sit like good little Democrat pets and vote the party line. Where’s all that seniority, clout, and experience they brag about every election season?