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Zero-emission Power Plants Proposed
ckbreckenridge writes "Supercompact, superfast, superpowerful turbines called ZEPPS (zero-emission power plants), designed to combat global warming, could help produce the electrical power needed to keep up with 21st century demand. They would consume methane and oxygen and produce liquid carbon dioxide, which could be sequestered underground. The current electricity grid would need to be replaced by a 'supergrid' across the USA, says Jesse H. Ausubel in The Industrial Physicist. Work on such a system should start as soon as possible, since CO2 levels leaped up 2 ppm in the past two years as global warming becomes more of a reality."
"Work on such a system should start as soon as possible, since CO2 levels leaped up 2 ppm in the past two years as global warming becomes more of a reality."
Please study statistics. Please realize that a sample over 2 years when Earth existed for billions of years don't mean a thing. Global warming may be a reality, as it may be caused by humans, or part of a natural cycle, or part of a natural cycle human activity accelerated.
In my book, 2 ppm over 2 years, considering error and all, isn't a good reason to start producing these plants 'as soon as possible'.
Eureka Science News - automatically updated
It depends on the pressure, I believe. If you place CO2 under pressure and not freeze it, it will liquify.
Per Square Mile, a blog about density
"yet no politician wants to force the issue on ethanol-burning transportation"
That's because ethanol takes a significant amount of energy to produce, often more than you get out when you burn it. Now, it may be possible, in areas where there's consistent sunshine, to use solar heating in ethanol production, but it will require a lot of non-ethanol energy from some souce to produce that ethanol.
It also introduces new safety problems of its own. AFAIR ethanol burns invisibly, so it's not exactly an ideal fuel to have in a crash.
The problem with all of these is you have to worry about the re-emergence of the CO2. Limestone seems like a good option because you just have to keep it dry. The downside is that limestone is heavy and even though the production is exothermic, producing lime has not been worked out. Pressurizing CO2 and storing it underground works, unless it leaks out. Then you have the same problem. Liquid bubbles are good if you have a very high pressure place to store them (the ocean), but the long term effect is acidification of the ocean and exhaustion of the carrying capacity (estimated to be around 1000-1500Gtons, we produce around 3Gtons/year).
There aren't any easy answers. However long term, since coal is about 57% of current electricity in the U.S., it's not going away. What carbon sequestration will do is allow us to bridge the gap economically and technologically between high and low carbon fuel sources.
I'm a big fan of wind, but there are still lots of hurdles.
-- Bird in the Bush: The Renewable Energy Blog http://www.birdinthebush.org
http://www.netl.doe.gov/publications/proceedings /01/vision21/v211-5.PDF
Chris Williams clw7500nc@gmail.com
It sublimates directly at atmospheric pressure. It will form a liquid at high pressures however.
Only in a Slashdot fantasy can a Slackware install turn into several hours of sex . . . . .
I know this isn't a popular option, but there is only one way left to combat CO2 emissions without winding the planet back to the stone age.
It's nuclear power. There is no other technology available that has sufficient output, whilst not outputting CO2 that will put the Florida Quays any further underwater.
The common argument in return is saving CO2 isn't much use if you make the planet uninhabitable due to reactors melting down. Well, the Chinese, with some help from the Germans, have very kindly solved this problem for us. Go check the link out - it's to wired.com - they have developed a nuclear reactor that doesn't go critical when the coolant system is switched off.
We can save the planet, if we're willing to get over the Cold War era stereotypes.
Iran has endorsed
since CO2 levels leaped up 2 ppm in the past two years as global warming becomes more of a reality.
Well this would be a problem if humans produced any real quantity of co2....the thing is 300 gigtons of co2 is produced a year from natural causes and humans only produce 6 gigtons...the more likely couse of increased co2 is that carbon sinks are going though a natural cycle and are currently absorbing less at this time....or it is possible that natrual production of co2 has increased.
stendec@gmail.com
The CO2 is a liquid because of the pressure, not because it is really cold.
"Warming it up" won't make it boil.
A friend who worked in the Hazardous Waste disposal industry lamented the ignorance of many protesters who came out to his site and harrassed the workers. They didn't know the difference between Hazardous and Toxic waste. CO2 is not toxic. In high concentrations it can be harmful (depending on the lifeform), but that is the definition of Hazardous. Toxic means it does harm even in small concentrations.
Example:
1,000 gallons of horse urine if dumped on a field would probably kill the grass, but if dilluted and spread over time it would not.
1 milligram of plutonium spread on a field would kill the grass, no matter how you dilluted it and grass wouldn't grow again for a long time.
I'm sure I didn't explain this as well as he could have, but I hope you get the gist of it.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
>I thought carbon dioxide sublimates, as in goes from solid to gas with no liquid step. Or, if it has a liquid stage, its only under very specific conditions of temperature and pressure.
It's pressure that makes the difference. At atmospheric pressure CO2 doesn't have a liquid phase. At higher pressures it does. In fact, the way you make dry ice (at least used to be) taking the pressure off some liquid CO2, letting some evaporate to chill the rest into a solid.
The proposed power plants operate at high pressure including the exhaust stream. So all you need to do is cool the exhaust and you have liquid CO2.
For sake of reference, the suffocation incident was at Lake Nyos in Cameroon and is documented at http://www.snopes.com/horrors/freakish/smother.asp . 1,746 people killed in a matter of minutes... evidence of how scary Mother Nature can be. Although, to be fair, death was apparently very swift and likely painless.
This sig has absolutely no significance and serves only to take up screen space and waste the time of the reader.
What a rosy view of the future!
...is mehead on mecrooked? If for some ridiculous reason they planned to go ahead with this, a more realistic solution for the CO2 waste product would be to run the gas produced by the evaporating liquid CO2 through another turbine, effectively extracting more electrical energy from the process. Chris
"You can drive out Nature with a pitchfork, but It always comes roaring back again." - Tom Waits
(this has already happened in Africa, I believe)
Yes they did, lakes with CO2 saturated water at the bottom that release it suddenly asphyxiating thousands in the area. link here. Pretty bizarre event.
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
*SMACK!*
Read the article and you see it isn't about methane so much, It's about nuclear and hydrogen, and airborne pies.
My Suburban burns less gasoline than your Prius.
CO2 also doesn't explode, so it's safe to store.
... neither does nuclear waste. What CO2 does do, that nuclear waste does not, is roll down mountains as a cloud, smothering entire villages.
Um
"Because Science" is one step from "Because old book". Try "Because of my experiment testing my falsifiable assertion".
How is this diffrent then toxic waste from nuclear plants being stored under ground....
Much more hazardous, especially on an immediate basis.
Liquid CO2, pushed down injection wells under pressure, occasionally springs a leak. When this happens you suddenly get a giant bubble of CO2 on (and in) the ground, displacing the oxygen and killing everybody and everything (even plants if it persists in the soil long enough) for miles around.
This has happened when CO2 injection was used to pressurize oil wells to squeeze more oil out of the gound.
A similar phenomenon happens naturally (though fortunately VERY rarely) when largely CO2 volcanic gasses vent into a deep still lake (such as in a volcanic crater). The gasses disolve, carbonating the lower waters. Then suddenly something disturbs the water and some of the carbonated water comes up and starts to bubble - rapidly "turning over" and boiling out the CO2 in the rest of the lake in a matter of minutes and releasing a similar ground-hugging toxic bubble.
Think of a shaken soda can the size of Lake Tahoe.
if we continue storring all this wouldn't eventually run out of place to put it?
Nuclear, at least, takes up very little space and decays over years/centuries/millenia (depending on the isotope - generally the hotter the faster). Some of its components are also useful and can be separated out and put to work. Others can be "burned" in nuclear reactions into less hazardous and/or more useful material.
That's not to say it's safe or good stuff. Some of it is horrid. But "running out of room" isn't the problem. (Keeping it in its room until it promises to be a good little kid and MEANS it is the problem.)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
No, we won't suddenly be growing wheat in fucking north dakota, the soil isn't right for it.
Wheat growers in North Dakota beg to differ.
You can never go home again... but I guess you can shop there.
You can calm down. They're studying cheap ways to extract oil from the tar sands reserves in Alberta. It's going to happen. And there's more salvagable oil there than there is in all liquid oil in the entire planet. So it isn't going to be a problem for a long time, definitely not in the next decade.
No politician? Granted, $7.2 million isn't a huge amount of money, but it was enough for Bush to bring it up during the debates. I think the fact that it would increase agriculture jobs is just as important as helping the environment.
You have enemies? Good. That means you've stood up for something, sometime in your life. --Winston Churchill
Problem is, every so often, the carbon dioxide gets out. And lots of people die. Now, there are degassing projects which release the gas from the lakes into the atmosphere in a gradual controlled process.
Degassing
"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, it doesn't go away." - Philip K. Dick
There's a net gain of O2 from a given tree, assuming it is getting enough light.
do() || ! do() && try = NULL;
mefus
In Open Society, GPL Software frees YOU!
the REAL problem now and always has been the near infinate storage of the spent fuel and any and all material that even gets near the fuel which over time become just as radioactive and needs to be "taken care of" somehow.
A promising technology is discussed in this story.
Please donate your spare CPU cycles to help fight cancer and other diseases
EVERY OBJECT ON EARTH IS SLIGHTLY RADIOACTIVE. C-14 is present in in all carbon compounds. There's nothing more radioactive about a lot of liquid CO2 than the CO2 floating about the atmosphere. The gasoline in your car is slightly radioactive. C-14 is used to date organic objects because it has a half-life. YOU are slightly radioactive.
This guy talks about 3000 RPM as a novel, high, shaft speed. Standard power generation turbines normally run at 3600 RPM, or sometimes 1800 RPM, to synch with the power grid. Modern microturbines run up to 96,000 RPM. (Yes, at last, Capstone Turbine isn't vaporware any more. You can actually buy a 60KW generator from them. This is an option worth considering if you need backup power for your data center.) Only 24% efficient, though. General Electric's most efficient gas turbines have reached 60%. (Big turbines are more efficient than little ones.)
Turbine technology is up against materials limits. Vast amounts of effort (many billions of dollars) have been put into finding better materials for turbine blades, because this limits aircraft performance. Current blades are single crystals of metal, often with a ceramic coating. Pure ceramic blades have been made, but have tensile strength and brittleness problems. The turbine this guy is talking about requires materials way beyond anything that exists today.
If it's thermodynamically possible to build a big machine of the type this guy is talking about, it should possible to build a little one right now.
CO2 is not considered an air contaminant by many regulatory bodies. In New Jersey, where I do air permitting work, CO2 is considered a "Distillate of Air" and emissions of CO2 do not need to be considered. However, New Jersey recently announced to the regulated community that they will be removing CO2 from the definition of 'distillates of air'. This is for tracking purposes only. Permitees will be required to estimate and report CO2 emissions, but there will be no emission limits or other requirements for CO2 emissions. CO2 emissions will also be exempt from "polluter taxes".
The other 'distillates of air' under New Jersey regulations are: He, N2, O2, Ne, Ar, Kr, and Xe.
You're not breaking any laws of thermodynamics because the algae (or whatever) would be drawing energy from the sun and metabolizing the CO2.
A fine is a tax you pay for doing wrong and a tax is a fine you pay for doing all right.
Neo-conservatives (in the derogatory sense) are not conservative fiscally. Their plan is to increase government spending in the form of corporate welfare while cutting taxes. The theory is that this will cause the economy to grow so much that the resulting deficit doesn't matter. They also believe in restricting civil rights; for instance granting the executive branch powers to lock people up without trial. They believe in solving international problems by going to war with the countries that are causing those problems.
To some degree these are valid attacks on the current Republican administration. Many people are wondering where the small-government Republicans of the '90s went.
I have seen the future, and it is inconvenient.
No, a good bit of the CO2 we're discussing here results from combustion. The original chemicals undergoing combustion have carbon, which combines with oxygen to produce CO2.
The amount of fossil fuels is decreasing. The amount of carbon dioxide is increasing.
We are removing fossil fuels from the ground, in a state there they had been largely stable for millenia, and adding carbon dioxide in a form that we can't say with any degree of certainty is going to stay put.
From the slashdot excerpt: "The current electricity grid would need to be replaced by a 'supergrid' across the USA, says Jesse H. Ausubel in The Industrial Physicist."
False.
A careful read of the article reveals that the author did not claim that replacing the entire grid was needed [to implement his cleaner "ZEPP" plan]. The ZEPP plant's output is electricity, whereas the misnamed "replacement grid" conveys liquid hydrogen.
Furthermore, the article said "...power companies could insert ZEPPs into densely settled regions such as eastern China without much change to the footprint of the energy system."
So we would not have to replace the whole power grid to adopt the cleaner ZEPP process. ZEPPs make electriciy, which can be used to generate hydrogen (via electrolisys). In turn, the "new relay grid" would convey liquid hydrogen, yet I doubt that we'll live to see the day that electricity is obsolete. The so-called "new grid" would be the addition of liquid hydrogen as an option, alongside electricity and natural gas.
"Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us." -Jesus Christ The Lord's Prayer
"his page is protected from editing until disputes have been resolved on the discussion page." heh.
Actually, I'm not to sure about GWB himself, but the policy wonks behind him do have a specific, coherent credo.
My own interpertation of their views is : spend like crazy until something breaks, use that as an excuse to cut programs they don't like, play lip-service to the moral conservatives, while not actually doing anything of substance in return for their support.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Let's be creative here... All this carbon-based energy production is a terribly innefficient way to generate electricity. In the future, probably eolian energy will be the best source of energy.
At that point, given enough energy, we can re-disolve the CO2 into magma - remember that there is a lot more CO2 (and other gases) dissolved in the liquid magma than all the power plants will ever produce.
Don't try to use the force. Do or do not, there is no try.
Seriously, there are industrial processors you can buy which convert hydrogen and CO2 into methanol (CO2 + 3 H2 -> CH3OH + H2O). If you have any process which can generate enough hydrogen cheaply enough, you can use it to "fix" carbon into methanol. From there you can convert it into other things, if desired; polymerizing it into heavy waxes and pumping it underground to freeze would effectively put it back where the original oil and coal came from, and in a form that's not terribly difficult to retrieve either.
Where and how do you get the hydrogen? Aye, there's the rub...
Sustainability and energy independence essay
They went to the Libertarian Party....
http://www.lp.org
--those are the two main types now. Paleocons (I am one basically) are the old traditional conservatives, fiscally conservative, non interventionist, smaller government and so on. They believe in a fair deal, not a new deal or a raw deal. They were represented by say the old goldwater wing, and then there was the rockefeller wing, or the "eastern establishment" or "limousine liberal" conservatives, who are now known as neocons. Neocons are globalists, interventionists, proponents of larger government,israel-firsters, corporate apologists, and so on. They really aren't conservative, just stayed in the R party, and took it over during some pretty intense inter party warfare in the 60-68 time frame. They sabotaged their own candidate in 64 on purpose. They are global totalitarian socialists actually, if you look really close at their agendas and think tanks, just they like to be the "bosses" about things and give a lot more credence and power to corporations than they do to private people. Socialism for corporations I gue4ss comes close. Money and power and profit over traditional nationalism or conservatism, just keep the name. It gets confusing. They are anti democratic in that sense, really closer to a feudalistic bent, they think they are appointed or something to "lead" because of their birthrights and level of income, etc. they "know better". I call them technofeudalists, because it fits the best. Paleos just want to be left alone, and are much closer to the capital L party by nature in any reasonable comparison. They differ from the L party in mostly being prolife, anti illegal unlimited immigration, and are in favor of a bit more protectionism in trade policies, they usually aren't for what is called "free" trade.
There are a very few paleocons left in upper government circles, most of them can be found in what is called the "liberty lobby".
This is a *rough* outline and description but it's close enough for posting purposes.
Clean Energy Systems paper
Carbon Capture and Storage from Fossil Fuel Use
Capturing and sequestering carbon dioxide"
the research in the field seems to be quite activeConstant volume, increased temperature = increased pressure.
Thermodynamics isn't that hard, folks.
Although... in perusing MIT's own links, it looks like the solar books somewhat exaggerated the success.
I'm still defending my position though. I live in a 1957 ranch house in NC that has, at present, *no* insulation in the walls. We have survived winters without turning on the heat. Though we did look specifically for a house that was properly oriented.
Most houses are not properly oriented. The long dimesion of the building should run East-West and the short North-South. The sun is lower in the winter so most sun comes through the south side of the building. In summer, the sun is high, so you want your East and West walls short. Most houses are not like this.
We do not use air conditioning. Ever. Plant a tree on the south side and don't be such a wuss.
"why haven't most houses and buildings built since then (south of Boston anyway) use passive solar designs?"
Simple-- in 99+% of the cases of a house going up, the person that is going to use it is not the person designing or building it. Unless you have a custom-built home, you get whatever you can, and the price is based more on location than quality.
The economics are simple. A builder wants to invest as little as possible, so he builds crap-- as little insulation, as little thought to efficiency, as little *thought* as possible. A buyer buys for location. Then they realize they have huge heating/cooling costs. Most individuals can't or won't finance the construction of a smart home and most builders have no incentive to.
In a corporate situation, there's no reason to build a good building that will last hundreds of years and perform well because you can build a cheap tin box and write it off as it depreciates then build a new one. (or so says my architect brother-- I really have no idea how that works).
There are a few energy concious builders and apartment complexes, but most people don't know about them because they don't care and they're particularly advertised. I recommend you look for a "solar home tour" in your area. You'd be surprised what is possible. Unfortunately, except for some free-heat-and-hot-water solar college apartments I saw, most seem to be on the high end luxury homes.
p.s. Slashdot sucks, you can't draw a diagram because of the lame filter.