Railways? Pipelines? What's better than 7 B-train Trucks a Day?

In response to my previous post, I've had a number of questions about "what's better than trucking? We need a railway? Pipelines?"

Well, we've had a railway for over 100 years, and a pipeline for over 50 years. But, we don't use our railway which connects us to a fine deep water port, and we've been busy ripping up our pipeline infrastructure. Ah, that's progress.

So, the question is, what is better than trucking all that gasoline, diesel and heating fuel to the Yukon?

1. First rule, USE LESS! If we cut our fossil fuel consumption in half, the amount of trucks half. That's a fundamental of energy efficiency and energy independence - USE LESS!
2. Second, use a ship from Vancouver and the railway from Skagway:

• Energy use / tonne-km for rail is 1/10th that for trucks. Ships are 1/6th that of trucks¹
• A round trip from Vancouver to Skagway via the Inside Passage is about 3000 km. A round trip from Skagway to Whitehorse by rail is about 360 km.
  
• Assuming we are moving some 126 million litres of fuel annually, or 107,500 tonnes of fuel annually, then the total fuel consumption (diesel) by ship and rail from Vancouver to Whitehorse is 3.2 million litres of fuel

So, the answer is 1) use less; and 2) if we used ship and rail, we'd cut the fuel usage (and GHG emissions) associated with transportation of fossil fuels to the Yukon by 63%.

Hydro-electrify the railway, and it's even more...

• Note that oil pipelines use about 1/5.5th the energy of trucks, so are less efficient than railways from an energy perspective (no comment on relative manpower requirements). However, if the pumps running the pipeline are hydroelectric powered, and the rail is not run on hydro, then probably the pipeline is a better idea. Overall, the railway should be hydro-electricfied (if that is a word!)

Here's a radical Yukon sustainability suggestion: Should us Yukoners acquire (dare I say it - nationalize?) the railway to Skagway to ensure a long-term sustainable transportation solution for ourselves?

How Many Tanker Trucks Arrive in the Yukon Each Day?

I've always been curious as to how many trucks are required to haul all of the gasoline, diesel and heating fuel to the Yukon? Well here are the numbers:

• 2007 annual fossil fuel usage in Yukon¹: 128,062,000L - yes, 128 million litres of fuel used in the Yukon.
• Assuming the average B-train has a payload of 50,000 L, then that is: 2561 B-trains loads a year, or
• almost 7 tanker trucks of fuel A DAY are consumed by the Yukon!!!!!

From a green house gas emissions perspective, if we assume the average B-train comes from Edmonton to Whitehorse and returns, this is a round-trip of almost exactly 4,ooo km. The average B-train has a fuel efficiency of 1.7 L/km², so each round trip consumes some 3,400 L of diesel. Sum all those trips, and we burned 8.7 million litres of diesel just to get our fossil fuels to us!

Convert that to green house gas emissions, and that's 23,000 tonnes of CO₂e annually. Another way to put this is trucking fuel to the Yukon accounts for 6% of the Yukon's total GHG emissions! This means when we are doing GHG inventories, we should be tacking on a GHG transporation surcharge of 6% on GHG emissions.

Drain Water Heat Recovery

The other week I finished installing a drain water heat recovery (DWHR) unit (shown in photo to right)

If you don't know what these are, they are a VERY simple device that recovers heat from the sewer stack (primarily from shower water) to pre-heat cold water coming into the house. They are sometimes called gravity film xchange (GFX). The optimum configuration is to pre-heat both the cold water going to the shower and supplying water to the hot water tank as illustrated below:







I ordered mine from ECOInnovation Technologies Inc. in Quebec. I've had a couple of dealings with these folks, and they are very helpful, responsive and good to deal with. The first time I ordered the wrong size - a 4" diameter unit, when in fact my sewer stack is the more standard 3" diameter. Doh. They were very good about doing the return.

In the end, I ended up getting a S3-60 which is a 60" long unit and has a heat recovery efficiency of 68%. The unit has a 3/4" water supply, which splits into two 1/2" lines around the sewer stack. The purpose of this is to minimize pressure drop and increase heat recovery efficiency. My unit cost about $980 once shipping and tax was included, so not that cheap. Given the amount of copper in the thing, I'm not surprised. Then there is another $50+ dollars with of misc. plumbing parts (couplings, pipe, fittings, etc.). You can get smaller units (40" long) which are only slightly less efficient for $500 to $600. Those are probably a better return on investment because your get more bang for your buck.

Note that Energy Solutions Centre is now including DWHR devices in the Good Energy program, and you can get a $100 rebate from them.

Energy Savings
These units have been validated by NRCAN through a number of studies you can find online. In fact, they've commissioned an on-line DWHR calculator at http://www.ceati.com/calculator/. I ran my setup through this calculator to see what my savings would be. I logged our family showering patterns for a couple of weeks (ya, what a nerd) - we take on average 1.35 showers a day, with an average shower time of 9 minutes (I shower WAY longer than Georgi). So, based on the calculator and our unit, we should be saving about 550 kWh / year, or at a marginal electrical cost of $0.14 / kWh, that is about $77/year. When Finn starts showering, obviously these savings will increase. Furthermore, if marginal electrical rates rise to $0.22/kWh as proposed by Yukon Energy, the savings during winter time (when we use a lot of electricity for space heating), would be $121 / yr (although less in summer when we use the cheaper first block electricity).

So, at current prices, the simple payback is about 12-years, again a bit mediocre as far as energy efficiency upgrades. From a return on investment perspective, the unit has a IRR of 8% over a 25 year period. Quite a bit better than any of my RRSP's are returning these days!


Installation
Theoretically, the installation of these should be pretty easy. In new construction, I think this is a no-brainer. However, things never go smoothly as planned....

1) because my sewer line is HIGHER than my basement, I don't have space on the sewer stack in the basement to install the DWHR, so I had to cut the wall open on the main floor and install the unit in the wall cavity. That was okay, because I wanted to rip the drywall off anyway to install wood paneling in my front entry, however....

2) the stack was in the wrong place (not where I designed it to sit in a nice big wall cavity), rather it is in a skinny section of wall, too narrow to accommodate the diameter of the DWHR. So, I had to fur out the wall to accommodate the unit, and....

3) my lovely plumber also put a "jog" in the sewer stack there, so not only did I have to cut out the stack to for the DWHR, but also had to move the jog in the stack- making the overall length of the installation too long for the hole I cut in the wall. So, I had to cut the hole bigger, meaning I have to patch the drywall (yuck). Then....

4) I decided to install the unit on a Monday night, after 8pm when we put Finn to bed. So, that means the store is closed if anything goes wrong. There was no shut off valve between the supply to the house and the hot water tank, so I had to shut off all the water to the house.

I hooked up the unit with relatively no problems, but once I tested it, it didn't seem to be working right (the cold water supply to the shower wasn't warming up). Then I realized I had installed the water supply lines BACKWARDS!!!. I had to completely disassemble the nice plumbing job I did, and in the process, got totally soaked, spraying water all over the place and creating a minor flood in the basement. A very Chevy Chase like scenario. AND, I was running out of PEX fittings, so was totally stressed about not being able to complete the job. If it wasn't hooked up, then I couldn't turn the water on, and we'd be without water over night. I was not getting impressed looks from Georgi.

Finally, I did get it installed, and it works great now. When showering, you set the shower a bit cooler than previously (because the cold is being pre-heated, reducing the amount of hot water used). Also, you really can feel the heat on the outlet to the DWHR, so it does work.

Overall, it is a very simple device, and does work. As with most things, install it as part of new construction for far less "reno-pain”.

Our Energy Use Implications for the Yukon's Future, Community Sustainability and Energy Security

In my previous post, I illustrated the Yukon's Energy Budget. So, what does this mean for our future? What does this mean looking forward to maintain some semblance of life-as-we-know-it in the Yukon as we enter the post oil age? We know that fossil fuel costs are going to rise exponentially (and become increasingly volatile as we've recently experienced) over the next 10-20 years. Fuel prices have doubled in the last 8-10 years, and we should expect this cost doubling to occur again in an even shorter period of time.

Space Heating - Use of fossil fuels for space heating is not going to be affordable in the next 10 to 20 years. What do we do?

• Reduce space heating requirements - insulate, build more energy efficient buildings, etc. Although this can help, I doubt we can count on more than a 20% Yukon wide, net reduction in building heating requirements.
• Burn more biomass (wood, pellets) - this is going back to the old way we did things, however our population is WAY bigger now, so this will mean cutting a lot of trees. And even though our new wood stoves are "clean burning", there would be a lot of local air pollution if we all burned wood.
• Burn coal for heat - yuck, who wants to go there.

So what does this leave us? ELECTRICITY. Knowing that we won't be able to afford to heat our homes with fossil fuels in 10-20 years, then we need to start planning for the electrical production needed to replace that energy. In other words, we will have to DOUBLE our electrical production in the next 20 years to make up for the shortfall left by fossil fuels.

Some have argued that new hydroelectrical production is very expensive. Say $0.25 to $0.35/kWh. Well, right now oil space heating is in the range of $0.15/kWh equivalent. So, when our fossil fuel prices double and then quadruple to $0.30 and $0.60/kWh equivalent, then that "new" hydro is going to look pretty cheap. Let's start the planning now, especially while energy (and its proxy, "money") are still cheap.


Transportation - Energy for transportation is a hard nut to crack - fossil fuels really are not easily replaceable for transportation. Possible solutions:

• travel less: fewer trips, transit, walk & bike, live closer to your work, friends and family.
• produce more goods & foods locally so we are less dependent (vulnerable) to trucking goods here
• use electric vehicles for local travel
• use electric transit systems: either trolley buses, or electrify and extend our existing streetcar system (say to Whistle Bend?!). Grid connected vehicles are highly efficient - on the order of 98% - what other vehicle can claim that kind of efficiency?
• switch some vehicles to biogas- again, probably relegated to relatively local travel because there isn't likely to be much biogas production outside of Whitehorse.
• limited local natural gas production from Whitehorse Trough (perhaps coal bed methane) - a long shot, and would only be affordable if "nationalized".
  

Are these things going to be enough? Probably not, so let's prepare for transportation to become VERY expensive. Fossil fuels are probably going to be reserved for long-range transportation.

The Yukon's Energy Budget

Today's post has been inspired by a couple of things: 1) a casual conversation with a friend about the merits of (or as was argued, lack there of) using of hydroelectricity for space heating, 2) starting work with some folks on a sustainable building design and associated discussions about long-term operating and maintenance costs; and 3) I just finished reading James Kunstler recent fiction book "World Made by Hand" which is a "what-if" novel about life in the post-oil age.

Below is an energy budget for the Yukon - or a summary of energy usage in the Yukon - I prepared over a year ago as part of our business plan for Earth Energy Yukon, Inc. It's a useful snapshot of how we use energy, but more importantly, some insight into what we are going to need in the future:

Figure 1. Yukon's Energy Use - 2005

Energy Category	Energy Use (Terajoules/year)	%	Category %	Source Notes
Electricity - Hydro	1237	19%	20%	1
Electricity - Diesel	81	1%		1
Heating - Oil	995	15%	22%	2
Heating - Propane	184	2.9%		4
Heating - Wood	208	3.2%		3
Transport - Land	3343	52%	58%	1
Transport - Aviation	396	6%		1
Total Energy Use	6444

Source Notes:

1. Yukon Statistical Review, 2005 Annual Report. Yukon Bureau of Statistics. http://www.eco.gov.yk.ca/stats/annual/review05.pdf
2. ibid, sum of "heating oil" and "light fuel oil"
3. ibid, based on firewood timber permits issued. Due to typical lower efficiency of woodstoves, total energy reduced to 65% for comparative purposes.
4. Report on energy supply-demand in Canada, 2005. Statistic Canada. http://www.statcan.ca/english/freepub/57-003-XIE/2005000/part1.htm

How the Yukon Energy Budget was Created

This energy use summary is very similar to that prepared by Vector Research for the Yukon Energy Strategy - it is based on Yukon Bureau of Stats and StatsCanada data. However, there are two difference from what Paul did and my Energy Budget:

1. Vector research included energy use and production associated with the gas development in southeast Yukon. Although technically, this is Yukon energy in the political sense, however it does not flow to any Yukon communities, and as such I excluded it when trying to understand energy usage from the perspective of Yukon community sustainability; and
2. I included fuel wood. StatsCanada doesn't identify firewood usage. So, I took the total amount of firewood permits (cords) reported by Yukon Bureau of Stats. There is likely more firewood harvesting than there is permits, so this is likely an under-reported amount. Either way, it is not an insubstantial amount of our energy use/production. I did "down-report" the energy production by firewood by 35% to account for the lower efficiency of firewood burning. Although this energy was still used, it wasn't usable to the building, and to allow easier comparison with other space heating energy use which is typically 80% to 100% efficient. In other words, if we were to replace wood with electricity, the chart show how much energy would be required.

Key Observations about Our Energy Usage

1. Transportation fuel is a huge part of our energy demand - over 50%. This is much higher than the provinces (transportation tends to be about 30% of their energy use. Interestingly, aviation fuel isn't that much (relatively speaking) and transportation energy usage is much higher than space heating usage (which was a surprise to me, I would have thought our space heating energy needs would be proportionally bigger).
2. Space heating provided through fuels (e.g. fossil fuels or biomass (a.k.a. "firewood")) accounts for only 22% of our energy use, with firewood providing 3-4%. Although the percentage provided by firewood is small, that is still a staggering17,000 cords of firewood a year!
3. General electrical use includes some space heating. I don't know what percentage of the electrical use is for space heating, so I can't figure exactly how much of the Yukon's total energy is used for space heating. Nonetheless, it is worth noting that fuel usage for space heating exceeds total electrical energy production!