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The (Possible) Future of Alternative Energy
Sponge! writes: "The stuff that turns oil into margarine. The stuff that made the Hindenburg float. The stuff that combines with oxygen to make water and with carbon to make methane. The stuff that sends the space shuttle skyward and could someday power your car, office building, house, cell phone, even your hearing aid. That "Stuff" is hydrogen, and according to Amory Lovins, it is the future of energy. Here is an interesting article on Lovins and his view of hydrogen as the number one fuel."
is that you can get it anywhere there is water and sunlight. Never run out of gas and be stranded again! Cool, especially if you're on a budget.
I love reading about alternatives to horribly invasive forms of energy we use today. This is a meta stop gap solution, a way of reducing peaking by bleeding compressed air to help the generators during peak usage. The crux of the issue remains, our power generation techniques are dirty and deprecated.
Most of quelling of useful technology is done by: the old boys club not wanting to give up on the profits, a lot of it is mis-information, and the remainder of the reason why we use horribly inefficient power sources is lack of attention (by our sheep like media).
I used to live near a nuclear power plant in Minnesota. I don't know why people are so afraid of good clean nuclear power. There used to be a lot of cancer there, and everyone jumped on the power plant, but it was shown that most of the cancers were not related to the power plant at all, there was solvents being dumped into the local water supplies that were causing intestinal cancer. People don't understand radiation cancers always occur in statistical rings, that certain percentage of the people a certain distance get some very specific cancers. Nevertheless, even after the nuclear power plant was vindicated - the media failed to report that the solvents killed the people, not the power plant.
Anyways, here we are burning coal and fossil fuels all day long. Fuel cells, gyroscope technology, ceramic engine and electric cars are getting the kibosh due to the retrofitting costs. And we burn, burn burn.
Today on the front page of the Wall Street Journal, May 1, 2001, Coal and Utility companies are lobbying the ever-environment-hating White House to reduce the clean air rules on power plants. Cheney said the administration energy policy will focus on more output for oil and natural gas.
They can continue to sell us electricity at higher prices, cut the cost, pollute the air, and keep real technology from proliferating.
Some say time is the fire in which we burn. My time is running out
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A long time ago I read something about how every generation of fuel uses a higher hydrogen to carbon ratio. For instance, coal to oil and then oil to natural gas.
Every generation was less poluting and more efficient because of this larger ratio, and so it seems almost natural that eventually we'd get to pure hydrogen as a fuel source.
Please correct me if someone else has more info.
In other words, I don't think that we're going to have peace until we get away from a Petrol hungry economy.
Since I'm a freaky peacenik, this means a lot to me. So my thought is - introduce the technology in those "developing countries" that we didn't ratify the Kyoto Treaty over. (I know, I know, we never intended to actually sign the damn thing, that's not the point. ;)
Point is, if somebody started manufacturing a hydrogen engine cheaply and building and selling it in someplace third world or maybe even a poor first-world country (Mexico, India) then we'd have a chance.
My thoughts are initially: trains and trucks. If I make my millions in the near future, I'll be learning everything I can about MechE, hiring some people, and moving to Mexico for a while. Build a prototype hybrid hydrogen/hydraulic engine (so that a little hydrogen produces a lot of torque) and then sell it to trucking as a way to meet and beat the US emissions requirements.
My scheme actually also involves closing the system (cooling and re-cracking the exhaust) and introducing electricity into the system partially by means of solar. Other possibilities (for the nighttime trucker) include flywheels that can be charged at stations and during the journey, and for trains, just bearing the burden on the same thing that drives electric engines now.
The hydrogen/hydraulic engine is supposedly a very efficient way of producing a lot of torque for a little energy, which makes it ideal for hauling heavy loads. However, I'm going to have to check my facts. Still, if so, this would be a great way to start the little industry that could.
Oh, and btw, Iceland is making the move to Hydrogen. Don't remember where I read it but the story checked out. Take a look on google.
The benefits are considerable:
Is such a system ever going to be feasible?
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
Three Mile Island particularly showed that the people who were in charge of the plant should probably not be trusted with anything as dangerous as a motor vehicle - the contractors x-rayed the same weld joint dozens of times (and changed the id numbers) instead of inspecting the whole plant because they knew that no-one would check up on them.
Fission is clean power to public relations people and a government that wants a good source of radioactive material for weapons, but to engineers it is very dirty power that needs to be very carefully contained in case it gets out and kills everything near the powerplant.
The financial cost of construction and decomissioning nuclear power plants is enormous - that price may come down after a few more have been decommisioned, but for now it is an expensive form of power over the life cycle of the plant. All of those rare earths and hi-tech materials are not cheap - and everything used in the steam cycle is going to be radioactive enough to cause storage problems for more than a lifetime. The environmental costs have been enormous in the Ukrane, and may be high in other places in the future.
For all it's good points, people often gloss over the one big dealbreaker - hydrogen is a gas. And a very, very small gas as well, which has a tendency to work it's way even through metal containers, making them brittle in the process. In a nutshell, it's difficult to store. Even if you overcome that with tanks on cars or buildings, what are you going to do for smaller devices like lawnmowers or whatnot? If you run out of gas on the road, you won't be able to just walk to the nearest station to fill up a tank.
The fact is, for practical purposes, gases are difficult fuels, even relatively easy ones like LPNG. We need a liquid alternative that we can make in a renewable fashion, even if it doesn't trigger as many buzzwords. Methanol would be ideal for most purposes. Alternatively, rather than using hydrogen and oxygen we could use the easier-to-store sytem of ammonium and nitrous oxide. That produces water and nitrogen as a byproduct.
---If you can't trust a nerd, who can you trust?
Upon reading the article, you would see that this is countered by the improved efficiency of fuel cells (3 to 4 times as efficient as combustion engines). If something was that efficient and ran in a car of half the weight, it would certainly be able to be powered by a clean alternative energy source because you'd get approximately the same bang for the buck as you would with gas. This is because (using the numbers above) the fuel could be 6 to 8 times more expensive than gasoline to obtain the same result at the same price.
Internal combustion engines are terribly inefficient (10% efficiency or so). Even using a fuel cell to strip hydrogen from gasoline would result in better performance, and I'm suprised that something like that wasn't mentioned. The technology exists to strip hydrogen from regular gasoline, which would significantly bridge the gap to "the future."
The primary problem with Hydrogen as a fuel source is not generation (which can be accomplished in large facilities dedicated to the task), but rather in safe, efficient delivery.
One of the most interesting systems I have seen recently is the Powerballs system. It does appear to be a well considered, functional, and (most importantly) *available* system. I don't think this is anything (scientifically) extraordinary, but it is available now.
Hopefully the site will take a slashdotting, they deserve a little publicity, and I'd like to see what others think of the basic idea...I'm not enough of a chemist to understand the efficiency or practicality of their method.
When I was doing my undergrad work, this was my dream. I brought it up with some microbiology professors who pointed out many problems in the real world which prevented this from becoming a reality.
Arguments I've heard against this.
If electricity is produced by electrons is morality produced by morons?
A quote from the article:
...
Imagine a world where
"OPEC is out of business because the price of oil has fallen to five dollars a barrel,"
Currently the vast majority of commodity chemicals are made from crude oil. That means most everything you own, the synthetic fibers in that cotton blend shirt, the plastic in your keyboard, the tires on your car, down to the aspirin that you take after staring at the computer screen all night; all of it is made from oil.
If oil prices dropped to $5 a barrel, the chemical companies would still crack the oil to get at the compounds that they are interested in, and we would be left with a lot of gasoline. What would we do with that? Burn it? Give it away?
This is why oil is such an integral part of our world. Finding a cheap alternative fuel source is only part of the solution.
If electricity is produced by electrons is morality produced by morons?
Couldn't agree more. It's been done. Read Natural Capitalism by (among others) Amory Lovins.
Or, to paraphrase The Natural Step, every business, regardless of industry, produces only two things: Product, and non-product. Selling product makes money. Non-product is, at best, worthless and is frequently a liability.
The ratio varies by industry of course, but when you trace through the entire supply chain, usually only 5-10% of the materials stream winds up in product. Improving this figure is a huge opportunity to add money to the bottom line, and generally speaking, there is alot of room for improvement!
As far as the political process goes, the main thing the government needs to do is to:
1) Stop subsidizing waste.
2) Correct the legal structures that currently allow industries to externalze costs. Just to give a timely example, a gallon of gas would cost alot more than $1.50 if the oil companies had to foot, say, 25% of the nation's defense budget every year to preserve access to the oil (the ethical considerations notwithstanding, of course.) As it is, the taxpayers pick up the tab instead. A whole lot of "fringe" and "green" technologies would be much more in demand if the users of current technology had to pay the true costs of that technology.
"Research is what I am doing when I don't know what I am doing." -- Wernher von Braun
The central thesis of the book is that while getting incremental improvements in resource/energy efficiency may be expensive, radical improvement that comes from leveraging synergies within a system can often be more cost-effective than the status quo. Companies and individuals who realize this will profit significantly in the 21st century.
Read the book. Even if you disagree with it, you'll learn a lot about systems thinking and optimization. And maybe even wind up saving a few bucks (and a few barrels) down the line.
-- Chris
When a company comes out with a new plan to solve the world's energy problems the rational person always asks "So why hasn't it been done?". Barring OPEC conspriracy theorists I refuse to believe that if this was valid it wouldn't have been done already. In fact, if it were possible the first people to jump on the bandwagon would be the people who already have the oil rigs in place.. i.e. the oil companies themselves.
OTEC. Ocean Thermal Energy Conversion.
Already in 1881 Jacques d'Arsonval proposed this: exploit the temperature difference between tropical surface ocean water (27 C) and deep water (5 C) in a Carnot heat engine. Low efficiency (5%) but unlimited supply. This is the energy that also tropical cyclones feed on. "Taming hurricanes"!
Hydrogen generation would eliminate the transport problem, and the plants could be out on the open ocean.
Hydrogen doesn't have that limitation, but it's also not now a mainstream power source. If proton exchange membrane fuel cells come into common use, that will undoubtedly change. But as things are, it's just not profitable enough to make it worth the capital investment.
And the brethren went away edified.
Not really. Fusion "containers" are massive electromagnetic coils which are themselves suspended in a vacuum chamber.
There are other types, as described in the very recent book _Megawatts and Megatons: A Turning Point in the Nuclear Age?_ (pp. 254-255):
-nukebuddy