Adam Rogers is right: “IEEE Spectrum this month has an awesome, awesome article on why we cant get the electricity on in Iraq.“
He pulls out some of the story’s juicier tidibits. Stuff like:
* Shortage of power nationwide: 4000 megawatts.
* Amount of power you could generate from the natural gas that gets flamed off — vented and burned from working oil wells instead of captured: 4000 megawatts.
* Kind of fuel the Iraqis have easy access to: crude oil.
* Kind of fuel the persnickety GE dual-fuel combustion turbines we bought use: diesel or natural gas.
* Cost of bringing high quality diesel, by truck, from the nearest source (Turkey): $85 a barrel.
* Amount of diesel all the fancy new combustion turbines in the country would use if they were up and running, which they arent: one tanker-truckful every 45 minutes.
But to me, that most amazing statistic in this numbers-rich article is that “the final [reconstruction] tally might be as high as $100 billion.”
As of fall 2005, the United States had spent or committed more than US $20 billion to the effort, other countries had pledged $13.6 billion, and Iraq itself had contributed about $24 billion, including seized assets of Saddam Hussein.… For comparison, in the first two years of their reconstruction after being devastated in wars, Germany, Japan, Haiti, Bosnia, Kosovo, and Afghanistan together received a total of $25.6 billion, in 2003 dollars, according to the United States Institute of Peace, a congressionally created organization devoted to conflict resolution. The first European Recovery Program, known as the Marshall Plan, which rebuilt much of Western Europe after World War II, spent the equivalent of about $90 billion in today’s dollars between 1948 and 1951.
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* Shortage of power nationwide: 4000 megawatts.
The last update I had about Iraq electricity output was around 5000 Megawatts in December (Capacity of approximately 8845MW by one source, 7000MW by another). Another source claimed 2800 megawatts of the country’s potential 7,100 megawatts was disrupted at that time. By the way, is Adam the guy of Global Guerillas? That would explain the match, but that would also mean likely conflicting data with mine and Adams.
It’s even worse than this summarized line:
Amount of diesel all the fancy new combustion turbines in the country would use if they were up and running, which they arent: one tanker-truckful every 45 minutes.
The quote from the article is it takes a tanker truck of diesel every 45 minutes to fire _just 4 LM6000 turbines_ providing 30MW each.
Ouch.