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Water Now More Awesome Than Previously Thought
Dan writes "Wired has a great article about a guy who thinks we can provide unlimited energy , accelerate crop growth, desalinize and purify drinking water, obtain health benefits and provide air conditioning, all by pumping up water from the depths of the ocean."
This is a fantastic idea, except for one flaw. This would only work for cities near the coast. Where I'm from (Minnesota) I don't see how this could possibly work (Lake Superior is very cold though, that is a possibility).
I like how he irrigates the farms. The sweating of the pipes below ground is a great idea. It seems much more efficient than spraying water everywhere, and having a lot of it evaporate.
He may be a nut (or not, I'm not a good judge of character), but he does have a great way of looking at his environment.
"You see, I apply cold temperatures to different parts of my body in three bastings. The third is the most complicated - I ice the terminuses of my lymphatic system. My body heals itself. Look at these hands," he says, opening and closing his fists. "I have no joint pain of any kind!"
You're just numbing the pain. Idiot.
That /. would post a story on the awesomeness of water shortly after ThinkGeek begins selling a Water Powered Clock and a Mini Water Dispenser
Stupid planted articles...I'll buy what I want!...oooh...clock...
How Jaded Are You?
Best. Headline. Ever.
Be careful! Dihydrogen Monoxide can be a dangerous thing! Spread the word.
Doesn't pumping up water from the ocean consume lots of energy?
Wouldnt excessive use of this method perhaps alter ocean temperatures?
Maybe it will turn out like windmills- they take negligible energy out of the wind.
OTEC, as a concept, has been around for quite some time. Prototypes have been built and tested around the world. Old news!
Do you have any idea how much water there is in the ocean? And what the specific heat of water is? By the time we're pulling enough energy to make a difference, we'll have colonies in multiple solar systems.
it's way more awesome than you even know... now where did i put my bong... what? no way! that uses water too! sweeeet!
OTEC? Holy Christ don't tell me that the Arabs are already planning on price-fixing this market before it even gets started!
If this technology is going to be so successful why isn't being tried all over the place?
Because there are only a few islands throughout the world where it's practical. If you have a continental shelf, it ain't gonna work.
Be careful who you disclose water's potential to... before you know it you'll have Keanu Reeves trying to outrun blue shock waves on motorcycles...
Yup...
The "limitless energy" claim is pure hype, but just ignore that bit.
As you point out, it is also important to evaluate the long term affects of removing significant amounts of cold water from the oceans (disrupting ocean currents, overall water temp. rises, etc). The drinking water generator would also lower the air humidity, which would cause problems if the project was done on a wide scale.
I am sure this technology has applications in some circumstances (perhaps on oil rigs, remote islands, etc), but it is certainly not the solution to all our energy problems. Done on a large scale it would be unsustainable.
I'm still waiting for practical fusion power...
http://www.ocees.com/
The efficiency of these system is extremely low because the temperature difference is so miniscule. For thermodynamic efficiency purposes temperatures are measured in Kelvin and temperature differences are only a few percent. The maximum efficiency of these plants in an ideal world is only 6%. When you account for the very large amounts of energy needed to pump huge volumes of water, the real efficiency is only 2-3%. This FAQ covers this and other issues.
Yes, you can get energy, but not much.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
Looks like the vision of Captain Nemo from 20K Leagues Under the Sea. Wave turbines, gold extraction, and environmentally sound food gathering, Jules Verne recognizes that we are barely tapping the vast resources of the deep.
It was the same guy! He's almost 80...
I've been applying icy cold beverages (usually beer) to the INSIDE of my body for years, and let me tell ya what, after a six'er, let me assure you I'm feeling no joint pain at all. I do tend to have a headache the next day though...
Seriously, cooling parts of yourself with ice causes the body to react and change bloodflow to the cooled area, usually increasing it markedly. The extra circulation does help healing.
Funny thing is, heat kinda does the same thing, albeit not as effectively. Most folks don't like the ice and go for the heat for injuries, though, because heat "feels better". Icing an injury can actually be painful - drop a sprained ankle into a large bucket of ice and water for ten or twenty minutes and the first minute or so will have you twisting and turning and writhing as your foot hurts like hell from the cold water. The pain does go away though after a minute or two.
Heat won't cause that pain. But heat will increase the internal bleeding from an injury if it's not fully healed yet, making the injury worse. Icing an injury will help stop any internal bleeding.
At least that's what my college football trainer told me one time as I was sitting waist-deep in a whirlpool of ice and water to treat a pulled groin muscle. Talk about having your balls shrivel up...
provide unlimited energy [...] by pumping up water from the depths of the ocean
;-)
I guess the energy you need to pump up the water would be provided by the same water - not.
I have no [...] pain of any kind!
Pain-free! Guess that explains it...
He's 80, so he can't be lasting very long from here on out. I hope he wrote something down then.
This sig no verb.
Lessee, water converts to steam and might break down, but odds are will recondense into... water. So where are we depleting this source? And if it's temperature, remember that heat rises, so by default (and by convection) this water is its own heat sink.
This sig no verb.
>>pseudo-scientific, completely unfeasible, sketchy "unlimited energy" solutions
I'm sure they said the same thing about the internal combustion engine. Thanks for your complete lack of vision.
Just think for a moment what a clean source of power this could be. Stirling engines (external combustion engines) are quire remarkable little machines which extract power from a thermal delta. Hook a deepsea cold water supply to a Sterling engine and you'd have an extremely reliable, zero-pollution source for reciprocal motion or electricity generation. And the hotter the climate, the more effective it would be due to the greater thermal delta. Wouldn't you call a zero-emission engine be a desirable product?
Luckily it's pure grade-A horse poop.
Er, no, not really. Granted, this particular guy sounds a few gallons short of a hogshead, but deriving useable energy from cooling things off works exactly the same way as by heating them up - Namely, we can use the transfer of energy from the warmer side to the colder side to perform useful work (such as generating electricity). The absolute temperatures involves don't particularly matter.
So why do virtually all human-created energy extraction technologies use warmer than ambient going to ambient as the two sides? Simple... We humans have enjoyed, at least for the past few millenia, a really easy way to get things hot (ie, fire and a supply of fuel that literally grows on (as?) trees). We have not had a convenient way of making something colder-than-ambient, except very recently (within the past century), and even then only by using the hot-to-ambient conversion to get electricity to do the ambient-to-cold conversion - Sort of trading one for the other, with a net loss in both conversions.
Deep ocean water, however, provides exactly that - A nearly limitless supply of something colder than ambient, with a high enough specific heat that the energy we can extract from the temperature gradient FAR exceeds the energy needed to pump it in the first place.
Imagine the climactic effects, and effects on the oceans ecosystems
Now, here you make a good point. In the short term, or on a small scale, I would tend to say that we couldn't even come close to the natural processes that mix the oceans. But then, people thought the same about burning wood and later oil, until just the past few decades.
Check out 'Blind Man's Bluff', which is about the post-WWII craziness that was Cold War submarine espionage. This guy is smart, smart, smart.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
"screwing with the oceans themodynamics"?
First, that doesn't make sense (even if you had spelled thermodynamics properly).
Second, get an introductory physics textbook and see how much energy we would have to remove from the oceans to lower its temperature by say 0.01 degrees. It's a lot.
In theory cold-water energy works; anytime you have a temperature differential it can be harnessed to create energy according to the laws of thermodynamics. In practice, I'd question whether the constant pumping and maintenance (saltwater is highly corrosive) wouldn't require more energy than you get out of this system.
One more thing: it's all fun and games until you suck a whale into the input pipe! But seriously, if you pump up nutrient-rich soup from the deep, in a few years your pipe is going to be so clogged up with marine critters that your flow rate is going to tend towards zero...
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
For all you Engineering Types, here is a page with an animation which shows the basis for the technology:
http://www.ocees.com/mainpages/Powersystems.html/
It's not untouched by man. From shipwrecks to dumping of garbage to all the usual pollutants, the deep-ocean is most certainly affected by our presence already. Of course, there's nothing new about this, it's just harder to tell when you can't actually visit most of this stuff in person, and have to send ROVs.
As far as benthic thermal pollution, it already exists in the form of deep ocean thermal vents. Of course these are natural, even though they spew vast amounts of sulphur etc. I would suspect the ecosystem down there would handle this pretty well, since by the time the warm water got back down it would be nearly the same temperature as the surrounding water.
Of course, it would be wise to run a full-scale test for a few years to determine the localized impact on the biosphere,(before widely deploying it) but I wouldn't jump to any conclusions until we see the findings.
m-
You catch enchiladas by picking them up behind the head and holding them underwater until they don't kick anymore -VeGas
tm
Support TBI Research: http://www.raisinhope.org
I can't visualise the physics of the electricity generation from the information in the article. Can anyone provide a clearer picture?
Thanks
You appear to know very little about this. "horse poop"? Cornell doesn't think so. Climate change? Got a high school physics education? Go do some math.
"A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming, is not worth knowing" - Alan Perlis
Water is way more awesome than most people realize - because of hydrogen bonding -
It is a key component in life; it's solvency and structure are what makes biochemistry work.
It has about the widest range of temperature as a liquid of any simple material - making life possible over the face of the earth.
It is the closest thing to a universal sovent we will ever see.
Since it expands on freezing ice floats - just think what a mess the oceans would be if they were made of something that shrank when it froze, and the ice sank. The planet would have much wider extremes in temperature just because of that small fact.
Wate has an immense heat capacity compared to other liquids... moderating our weather
The beat goes on; it's unique chemistry and physics are whe we live off of every day.
Pick up an introductory thermodynamics textbook. Find the chapter with the Carnot cycle. Calculate the Carnot efficiency of this setup. Calculate how many thousands of gallons you are going to have to pump to produce a single kilowatt (yes, it's that bad). This was actually a homework problem in my thermo class. You end up with some ridiculous numbers, and wonder how the hell these people are getting money handed to them to build something that's about as useful as a perpetual motion machine.
a)underground sweating of pipes is not very effective BECAUSE the sweating is atmospheric condensation, in the ground you will just pull condensation out of the adjacent soil. though it would have some effect, it would not be a complete irrigation solution as soil does not flow like air :)
b)colder water from the depths would produce a LOT of condensation on a hot summer day, but the cost of pumping will reduce the efficiency of the method. consider that pumping will not be extramely expensive, similarly as expensive as pumping the volume of water horizontally because you dont actually lift a volume of water, just displace the water on the bottom to the top and the ocean does the work.
c)very cold water on ocean floor, mildy cool water to warm water on surface = nice temp difference. enough to run a sterling engine on to produce electricity. coupled with solar heat collectors this would infact be practical in some areas.
This is caused by the body's natural heat regeneration features. You will find that applying the same icy cold beverage will make the headache go away. ;-)
This continuation-technique is also known as "repairing", which is a slight misnormer since it doesn't actually repair, but instead reinstates the body in the wanted state of painlessness
No wonder my girlfriend always tell me to take a cold shower.
Faster growing fruit + unlimited energy + free air-conditioning = multiple orgasms (profit!!!)
Well, he was a spook. Check out the bolded portion in the excerpt below:
----excerpt-----
September 1, 1985, dawned gray and ornery over the North Atlantic. For nine days Ballard's Titanic mission had the turgid sea to itself. But that morning, as first light broke, the crew was astonished to wake up smack in the middle of a NATO antisubmarine exercise. Hours earlier Ballard had radioed that he'd found the long-lost Titanic. Was it coincidence that NATO had chosen this morning, this exact spot, to flex its muscle?
"Just chance," Ballard assures me.
"Probably not," says John Piña Craven, former chief scientist of the navy's special projects office and project manager of its deep submergence projects program. "I'd suspect something else was down there. Something we didn't want the other side knowing about. Because that's how the CIA and the navy work."
Talk long enough to Craven and he will have you checking your back every few minutes to make sure you aren't being followed. He says things like, "I'm under continuous surveillance, so if I inadvertently leak classified information they're going to move in." Craven, who traces his forebears back to Moorish pirates and to the British navy at the time of Cromwell, is 80 now and lives in Hawaii. But in the 1960s, at the height of the Cold War, he was the navy's chief underwater spook.
Back then the submarine world -- in both the U.S. and U.S.S.R. -- was a labyrinth of secrecy and tension. With good reason: Subs, particularly the newer, nuclear-powered ones, could lurk for days just offshore, virtually undetectable, capable of lobbing nuclear payloads hundreds of miles inland at unprotected cities.
In that supercharged atmosphere the slightest strategic advantage was critical. Spies were our first line of defense, and Craven was the best. In 1966 he was on the team that located and retrieved a hydrogen bomb lost after a midair refueling collision off the coast of Spain. He outfitted a sub with a deep compression chamber, so divers could tap Soviet undersea cables. He located a sunken Soviet nuclear sub that the Russians had lost track of, and fished nuclear hardware from the sea. Over the phone he says, "Ballard is me, 20 years later."
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
but does it run linux?
No, but somehow the image of LARGE amounts of COLD water remind me of penguins.
There are several office buildings in downtown Toronto that are cooled via cold water pumped from lake Ontario. http://www.enwave.com/enwave/view.asp?/dlwc/energy
Previous examples of the attitude you express: whaling, fishing, logging, hunting, burning fossil fuels, and of course, the classic, oil. In case your history is rusty, in all these cases people just assumed the capacity of nature was limitless. Then one day they woke up and realised the world had changed for the worse.
The system would have definite points of extraction, therefore you have to consider local effects. You can't just calculate the energy of the whole ocean and then say, "we are only taking 1%, so it must be OK". If you are taking 1% of all the ocean's energy from 0.1% of its volume you are going to cause serious problems.
There are several factors that make up for the inefficiency in power generation:
Places like Saudi Arabia and Chile, which have lots of sun and salt water, but almost no fresh water, should jump on this. Saudi Arabia in particular, which has all the power it needs, could really benefit.
Raise your children as if you were teaching them to raise your grandchildren, because you are.
http://www.ocees.com/mainpages/Powersystems.html
See http://www.enwave.com/enwave/dlwc/
Anyone who has been to Dubai (I spent a few years there) knows that desalinization in such large capacities is both financially and technically sustainable... Irigation is a no brainer... Creating surplus energy, though ??? That does not sound plausible...
Of course it's still not free from a thermodynamic standpoint, since they're dissipating the temperature gradient between shallow and deep water.
As reported by the CBC last August, Lake Ontario water cools Toronto offices
Sure, this guy is doing all sorts of neat things at once with the water. For getting it to market and economically proven though, I'd rather see a demo that shows that one of the features is useful than trying to make a whole range of things work.
Even more troubling is that he proposes to pay off investors in seven years- not a great ROI given the risks.
Information: "I want to be anthropomorphized"
well aside from the aforementioned points of questionability raised about OTEC, i'd like to point out that even if you do grow crops more than three times quicker than normal, your limiting factor will be soil nutrition, which will mean either quick depletion of nutrients or massive importing of fertilizer. (unless you use all that rich dead stuff from the bottom of the ocean to fertilize, but you'll have to give it a while for bacteria to fix its nitrogen.)
in all seriousness, a cool way to get fresh water and possibly some electricity out of it, if the efficiency problems can be solved. fresh water is scarce enough of a resource as it is.
Yes and by screwing with the oceans themodynamics we will have finally ruined earth as a livable habitat
Ok, take a deep breath, and try to develop a sense of proportion. Oceans are big. Very, very big. We're talking miles deep, and thousands of miles across.
Ocean thermal plants will work with pipes that are very, very small in proportion. Even 100-meter diameter pipes raising cold water from the deep, will have an effect that's just about immeasurable.
Ocean thermal energy poses no more hazard of disrupting ocean currents, than windmills do of stopping the wind.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
No, because in Russia, the power waters you! Or...?
The CB App. What's your 20?
Well, there are some other places... for example the Monterey Bay submarine canyon (bigger than the Grand Canyon, all underwater.). Fantastic place for deep-sea ROVs to explore.
The biggest problem that I see is one of location. For a lot of this stuff to work, you need a few different things:
1. Cold, deep water.
2. Warm surface water.
3. Warm, humid air.
So you're limited to equatorial regions with available deep water. The UK won't be using this.
m-
You catch enchiladas by picking them up behind the head and holding them underwater until they don't kick anymore -VeGas
I have never heard of an "ocean engineer," as opposed to chemical engineer or electrical engineer.
Ocean Engineering is a field of civil engineering, which is concerned with construction on coasts or under water. Offshore oil rigs are designed by Ocean Engineers, for example.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
The turbine produces electricity to lower the pressure in the chamber. The warm water loses energy when spins the turbine. If the water loses enough energy, there may be some electricity to power other things.
Club soda is carbonated, right? (So any softdrink would do).
Because of the carbon in the mix, the freezing temperature of club soda is lower then zero. So when you pour it, the less-then-zero temperature liquid hits water, dropping the water to less then zero, and freezing it. Additionally, as you pour, the carbon gas escapes, until the freezing point rises to match the current temperature, and bam, frozen liquid.
I'll have to try that when I get home, sounds really neat.
Interesting - this looks like it has the influence of Viktor Schauberger, commonly known as the water wizard, behind it. Blueprints for an ocean water pump is in Living Water.
Look, I've taken few thermodynamics classes and I know what you are talking about. The theory is fine and dandy. You have lots of energy in that water. The problem is, it's next door to useless because that 15 degree difference is not enough to make a practical power plant (one that can produce enough energy to make its construction worthwhile).
The equation for Carnot cycle efficiency is nu = 1 - Tlow / Thigh [in kelvin]. This is about 5% for a 15 degree temperature difference. After you take inefficiencies into account, this will become maybe 1%. What this boils down to is that you need a enormous, extremely expensive plant to produce laughable amounts of power. On top of that, you get into many technical problems related to pumping seawater. It's corrosive and has lots of nasty wildlife in it (shells, etc.) which quickly clog up your pipes, heat exchanges, and other equipment. In short, this is one technology that is extremely unlikely to ever become practical.
I've seen it happen with one of the Smirnoff "chick" vodka beers. This girl opened one, took a sip, and then held it for a few minutes while watching the tv, the carbonation escaped and the base of the bottle started getting foggy, as it froze from the bottom of the bottle all the way up to the top.
Gravity Sucks
So in other words, it is IMPOSSIBLE to come up with an alternative energy production solution that meets the unrealistic requirements of environmentalists.
Yes, we should investigate what footprint we might leave in any endevour like this, but it seems these days that environmentalists dismiss anything, out of hand, that has ANY impact, no matter how minimal.
The largest impediment to developing alternative energy sources, these days, seems to be environmentalists.
"Ask not what your country can do for you." --John F. Kennedy
Small scale extraction may be ok, but using cold water as global energy source is a very bad idea. e.g.:
- It can change the pattern of ocean current, causing major climatic shift.
- It can cause oxygen depletion in deep ocean, causing mass extinction.
- Deep ocean water contains large amount of methane hydrate. Heating them up will release the potent green house gas into atmosphere.
The worst thing is above effects are self reinforcing, potentially generating run away positive feedback loop. For more information, see this.
Craven is sort of crazy, but he is the real deal, at least when it comes to the Navy stuff. He wrote an excellent book , which was a good companion and response to another book that first unveiled his crazy greatness. He was the architect, or one of them anyway, of the Polaris missile system; which arguably helped keep the peace during the Cold War. ANyway, either book is a good read. He comes across as a stupendous smart guy maverick badass type in both.
Dude, I think I can see my house from here.
If I remember correctly, he was also the guy who sold the Navy on using guassian distribution techniques to find the S.S. Thresher when it went missing, and the lost nuclear bomb off Palomares Spain.
He was written about extensively in the book Silent Service (author eludes me right now).
if we take cold water out quicker than the oceans can cool we will have a huge problem.
Clearly, you have no understanding of proportion at all. Go do the math.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Long story short, it didn't work very well. My physics prof pointed out that the theoretical limit on their technology was
or about 10% where 303 is the boiling temperature in Kelvin and 273 the cold water temperature in Kelvin. After subtracting the various inefficiencies, there wasn't enough power left over to do anything with.All was not lost however, the Hawaiians ended up using the cold, nutrient rich water to feed aqua culture enterprises that would use it to grow lobster, abalone, kelp and nori (the seaweed you wrap sushi in.) Aqua culture was so successful that the farmers started sinking their own pipes because the state couldn't meet the demand for cold water.
They use an ammonia/water mixture for their working fluid, which presumably has a significantly lower boiling point. They might also apply a vacuum, which would also lower the boiling point.
-ccm
Too much Law; not enough Order.
Hello? This is slashdot.
Which brings up the question: why are you here?
"Nobody writes jokes in base 13." - Douglas Adams
Submitter deserves a golf clap for getting a Slashdot story accepted with a Fark headline.
I thought baby drool was the universal solvent.
Okay, lets say for a moment that there are 6 billion people on the planet, and each one is going to consume 4 liters of ocean water every MINUTE for purpose of cooling, which would be like trying to cool yourself off by running a shower 24/7 at full blast. Then, considering that there are about 1.34x10^21 liters of ocean water in the oceans, this is about 0.001% of the ocean's water being cycled through in an entire year. And that's about as extreme as it could possibly get.
In reality, this would only be practical for a portion of the population, and so its usage would never reach this.
Correct. The grandparent poster should read the article and notice that nowhere did it say that the sweat irrigation was to be derived from buried pipes. It even went so far as to describe one of his PVC cold water pipe sweat condensers in detail, noting that it was out in the open.
t ml?pg=3&topic=craven&topic_set=
"Irrigation:
Pipes carrying cold water run beneath fields of crops, sweating freshwater to irrigate plants and chilling their roots, promoting faster crop cycles."
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/13.06/craven.h
I browse at +5 Flamebait- moderation for all or moderation for none.
In Finland and Denmark they use what is called District Heating and District Cooling , which improve the efficiency of power stations to 80%->90%. Instead of just dumping this "waste" heat they've created they pump it round homes and businesses or use it to power district cooling systems where cold water is pumped round houses and businesses in summer. It does still end up in the environment but it's at least useful first.
Deleted
With that small a difference it's doubtful you can generate enough power to break-even. After all, you have to run the pumps to pump up the cold water. That's not a trivial amount of energy-- water is heavy and it's waaay down there.
I'm too lazy to do the spreadsheet math right now, but a rough estimate says you can't even break even on the energy, even with an ideal turbine using some ideal working fluid that vaporizes at just the right temperature.
And any economically viable scheme has to not only be above break-even, it has to generate enough benefits to pay for the equipment and labor. Have you priced the cost of a 5,000 foot long sewer pipe recently? How's about a turbine that can extract useful power from a 40 degree F difference? Yowsa.
Everyone seems to be missing the point.
1) You pump the water up, using a lot of energy.
2) You circulate that water around in various heat exchangers, but it *never leaves the pipes* and is never exposed to anything.
3) The water goes back down - recovering almost all of the enrgy required to get it up, only losing the friction costs.
So, all you've done is warm the water up a bit, and use a little energy to overcome friction.
I think we can all agree that Carnot says the thermodynamic efficiency of this method is never going to be more than 10% even in optimal circumstances, and the mean theoretical efficicency is probably 5% or thereabouts (assuming 4 C water from the depths and mean hot-side temperature of 20 C). But that doesn't mean the technology is unworkable or impractical.
The heat capacity of water is 4186 J/kg*K, so 5% of the total energy available in a 16 K temperature difference is 3.3 kJ/kg. With a pipe diameter of 10 m and a flow velocity of 1 m/s (big pipes and low velocity is best, because head loss goes as v**2) you get 78 m^3 per second, or 78,000 kg/s, or an available power of about 250 MW.
If the practical efficiency is 1%, that would be 50 MW. So far, it doesn't sound very practical. But up the pipe diameter to 30 m, and we're looking at 0.5 GW. That's not bad.
30 m (~100 ft for the Yemeni's and Americans in the audience) may sound like an insanely large pipe, but humans have a long history of developing technology to insane extremes. It is not possible at this point to say whether this technology will be worth it in the long run, but the raw numbers don't look sufficiently bad to write it off just yet.
--Tom
Blasphemy is a human right. Blasphemophobia kills.
1:13 - Try Jose Cuervo.
9:42 - Alcohol absorbs thc, you're filtering all the good out o yer weed.
hmm, 8 hours gap. I bet there's at least one poor sod trying to work out if he should drink his bong Tequila...
This sig all sigs devours