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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."
And where exactly is all of this methane going to come from?
You can convert coal and oil to methane, but it isn't a clean process by any stretch of the imagination.
I doubt existing natural gas supplies would last long under this proposed plan.
How is this diffrent then toxic waste from nuclear plants being stored under ground.... if we continue storring all this wouldn't eventually run out of place to put it?
That was my thought. Let's leave the problem of dealing with our consumption to future generations. Isn't that the whole problem in the first place?
What industrial uses could we find for this stored CO2 other then my silly suggestion? Is there a scalable way to build greenhouses to take care of the problem naturally (photosynthesis)? My gut tells me probably not.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
It produces less radioactive waste then coal-fired plants, but could we please sink more into solar energy sources? By some estimates, we'll begin the end of primary production in the persian gulf within the next decade. Venezualia and the Ukraine may stretch the world's oil supplies by a few years, but the sooner we can get alternatives up and running, the less it's gonna suck when we run out of the cheap oil.
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It's all about the cash
Methanol
Not meaning to be gloomy, but industry will follow the path of least cost unless standards dictate otherwise. If not for "bleeding heart California liberals and environuts" you wouldn't even have the mileage standards we enjoy today in our vehicles - they were derided as "impossible" by the auto industry in the day.
Where I lived, a return to the long-term global average temperature (about 5C warmer than now) would be great. It might turn North Africa into a greenbelt again, too, just like it used to be. That would really help with the famines there! I know change is rough on everyone, but the poor dirt farmers would be a lot better off with an extra growing season. I really think that global warming is just too good to be true.
How much CO2 did Mt. St. Helens vent last eruption? How does that compare to the CO2 from power generation? This link claims that human CO2 inputs are at least an order of magnitude smaller than the natural output of CO2, and that that tips the balance towards increasing CO2 levels.
I really don't believe that idea, but just in case there is something to it, I say: go burn something. I'm sick of shivering!
See what I've been reading.
We are talking several hundred billion dollars, if not a trillion plus.
He then goes on to say it would take 100 years and 1 trillion dollars.
In other words "aint' gonna happen".
My Suburban burns less gasoline than your Prius.
Um. The obvious point is this: the CO2 will have been released anyway if the fuel were burned as it is now. Even if some of the liquid gets out and turns gaseous during a catastrophic leak, it would be a tiny, tiny percentage of the CO2 that would have been released, correction, will be released from the current plants. And the LCO2 would be in thousands of farms, so there would be no major disaster.
CO2 also doesn't explode, so it's safe to store. And simple methods could be used in the future to turn it back into hydrocarbons, if someone wants to go to the trouble.
And here's a thought: we could eventually learn to regulate the heat buildup in the earth's atmosphere by controlled release of the stored LCO2. If an ice age cometh, we can stopeth it by metering out the LCO2 just enough to increase the greenhouse effect to stop the cooling. Conversely, we can mitigate the atmospheric warming we are definitely experiencing today by not flooding the atmosphere with the CO2 we are currently tossing up.
The amount of carbon and oxygen in the world doesn't change but the amount of CO2 has been increasing rather dramatically since we started combining all that coal and oil with oxygen. Storing tons or gallons of CO2 underground is only a temporary fix until it leaks out, and it would be expensive to store it there. This whole idea sounds about as feasable as hydrogen as and alternative fuel.
You can legislate morally you can't legislate morality
What industrial uses could we find for this stored CO2 other then my silly suggestion?
a tion/novel concepts/
Simply put: carbon is rediculously useful stuff. Any method of sequestering a large portion of it is going to have some kind of benefit down the road.
Off the top of my head, i'd say that once carbon-nanotube based materials are practical, the world will become pretty hungry for *any* source of carbon at a concentration higher than what's present in the atmosphere. The trick is taking something like CO2 and turning it into graphite or something else more readily useful for industry.
On a very different tangent, the DOE also suggests that you can use some chemistry to keep it from ever becoming gaseous (reduce chance of air pollution). They also suggest using bioremediation to convert the CO2 back into something useful like methane.
http://www.fe.doe.gov/programs/sequestr
More realistically, if plants are forced to trap their CO2 output, we're more likely to see them combine it with other materials and convert it into carbonates that we already use in industry: like chalk.
It's fairly swift, but not at all painless. If you have ever stuck your head in a vessel containing pure co2 and made the mistake of breathing in just once you would realize that it burns like hell on your internal tissues like lungs throat and nose. Actually, take a half empty two liter bottle of soda, shake it and take a quick sniff at the top to get a sample of it. It's quite painful, imagine having to live with that feeling inside your lungs for about 2 minutes till you pass out. You also feel like your eyeballs are starting to boil. I would hate to die that way. By comparison, Carbon Monoxide is much more pleasent.
Contrary to popular belief, coding is not all free blow-jobs and beer. Those things cost MONEY!
I think this paints a complete picture of the future of transportation: a plug-in diesel/electric hybrid running on biodiesel. The batteries are charged from zero-polution electric plants which feed the carbon dioxide to algae farms which create the oil for biodiesel. The car runs most of the day on the electricity, but switches to diesel when the battery gets low. IMHO this is a far more realistic scenario than the fuel-cell which is getting a good deal more political attention than it deserves at thsi stage.
===== Murphy's Law is recursive. =====
Killer Lakes
You can google for more
I wonder if you could build a Fusor off of CO2 with a continious feed.. it might not be very efficent (e.g. it will consume a lot of fuel and not produce anything near 100% efficency), but if you have gobs and gobs of CO2 laying around, who cares?
"While you can't keep this going forever (energy is not free as in beer), it could greatly reduce the amount of inputs and outputs that have to be removed/added to the system."
How is it that there are so many people who don't understand that the law of entropy is irrelevant in the case of solar energy?
The sun is not going to die for billions of years. It will continue to blast us with free energy. We aren't even coming close to tapping all of that energy yet. It doesn't matter that we're wasting energy through entropy-- because we get more free tomorrow when the sun comes up.
We should draw a line across the US from Washington DC to the Pacific and make it illegal for anyone to use fossil fuel for heating south of that line. Because passive solar heating is a technology that was proven to be able to give 100% of a building's heat needs as far north as Boston in the 1930s.
In answer to your question, I think organisms can get about 10% out of each link of the food chain. So, an industrial process would probably get less.
Actually, they're chemical burns. Chemical burns are possible when living tissue is exposed to high concentrations of CO2. I forget the exact mechanism, but I know CO2 at high partial pressures exposed to water vapor forms carbonic acid. Which although a very weak (relatively speaking of course) acid, would be more than enough to cause the 'burns' seen in the areas surrounding the volcanic lakes in Cameroon. (Remember, the people showing these 'burns' were exposed overnight, so they could have been sweating as they were dying, which would explain the patchy or blotchy appearance of the burns)
This page has a bit more info on the 'phenomenon' surrounding exposure to the lethal gas clouds from the lakes in cameroon. Unfortunately, I can't find any of the pictures. If you ever watch the Discovery channel, they have a show regarding the lakes in Cameroon that shows extensive examples of what I'm talking about.
If we take the carbon from the ground, combine it with oxygen, then pump it back down into the ground, how do we replace the oxygen?
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
Population is the lynch-pin. All else depends from that. Now take a look at where the population problems are. Here's some help.
http://desip.igc.org/mapanim.html
By the way, comparing water usage of desert and temporate peoples is straw.
If you can harvest that plant material for use as either a chemical fuel source (ethanol or conversion into crude oil via chemical depolymerization) or as a feed source for livestock. If you can use the plant material as feedstock for something like a hog confinement outfit, you'll be able to capture "processed plant material" that can produce methane to put back into the system, as well as fertilizer for fields and meat for food.
A fine is a tax you pay for doing wrong and a tax is a fine you pay for doing all right.
If we try to extend our supplies using conservation, then no, we mignt not last 100 years. Lets say we have enough for 10 years right now, erring on the side of caution. Then to last 100 years we need to make the majority of our power drains 10 times as efficient. Given that most thermodynamic processes for converting one form of energy into another have a maximum efficiency of around 70% at the temperature differences we can safely work at (Carnot efficiency), that would mean that we'd have to be using processes that are now 7% or less efficient. This is very old science, and was a big concern back in the days of steam engines. Right now, we're (mostly) doing better than 7%.
The point isn't that we can't be more efficient. It's that we can't be sufficiently more efficient to make much of a difference compared to what we can gain by taking advantage of nuclear power.
The big problem with nuclear power isn't that it produces waste. Everything produces waste. Nor is it the danger of meltdown or incorrect storage of fuel. Those things are very local risks, and statistically are sufficiently infrequent that the total 'cost' including lives and property damage, is still much much smaller than coal or oil.
The big problem with nuclear power is human psychology. People see something that they know was once used to kill millions, and are acutely aware of the times in which there have been nuclear accidents, and then immediately in their minds assume that every nuclear plant will fail, and that it will fail catastrophically. If you were to ask people (who do not live near a plant of any sort) whether they'd rather live next to a nuclear plant or a coal plant, I have to wonder what they'd say, compared to people who actually do live near either structure. People who live near a nuclear plant are going to have evidence which to them suggests that it is perfectly safe: the fact that they haven't experienced a meltdown or other disaster. Whereas people who have not done so are going to extrapolate based on the few cases they are aware of, which are entirely of the 'bad' variety (since who would make a news report that a nuclear plant operated perfectly this week?).
It's the same way with any negative event. People very quickly become afraid of it, and give it much higher relevance than it, statistically, deserves. We see this in all sorts of things: people's reaction to terrorist attacks, disasters in the space program, plane crashes (goodbye Concorde) and so on.
The lifetime of fission byproducts is a bad number to use to estimate the price of nuclear fission. In practice, the price is almost negligible, considering that we can reprocess fuels to reduce the amount of fuel and its lifespan. The main thing stopping that is the whole fear of nuclear weapons, which is a bit silly since anyone who wants to develop the technology to extract particular isotopes can probably manage it in relatively short time anyways. It's hard, but not so hard that we should believe that it will never be done again.
If we were to dump our waste in a suitable location, sealed, etc, then neither you, nor your kids, nor your grandkids, nor THEIR kids would ever see an effect. So the storage can't last for 10000 years, we're talking about running out of fuel in the next 100! Is it really that hard to build another layer of concrete around the waste dump every millenium or so? I mean, right now, we've got raw waste in barrels, which has a lifetime-of-isolation of essentially zero, and we can upgrade that to 10000 by various means.
As for 'we're going to fast, slow down, etc' the simplest thing I can say is, 'you're living twice as long as you would have 200 years ago'. Despite all of the doomsaying, predictions of environmental disaster, carcinogens, dangers of technology and so on, you're still easily outliving your recent ancestors.
The fear of change stems from evolution: the species would continue to exist even if we had never progressed beyond the stage of Neandrethals. As far as survival of the fittest, we