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New Heating Technology Uses Seawater and Carbon Dioxide (csmonitor.com)
Kenneth Stephen writes: While some enterprises have used sea-water for cooling, others are starting to use this for heating. and thereby cut back greatly on the carbon footprint of large facilities. What makes this technique even more fascinating is that a key component of this technology is carbon dioxide — the greenhouse gas that has climate watchers so worried.
An Alaska aquarium recently announced "the first installation of CO2 refrigerant heat pumps to replace oil or electrical boilers in a conventional heating system in the United States" after 7 years of development, and predicts they'll now save up to $15,000 each month on their heating bill.
CO2 is just the refrigerant. It is not consumed by the heating cycle. CO2 has been used for cooling in many places, this is the first I've heart of using it in a heat pump for heating though.
Especially this bit about compressing the CO2 to over 2,000 psi to heat it. I assume this process is powered by fairy dust, unicorn farts, politicians speaking honestly, or some other such magical limitless power source? This is Slashdot - give me the physics, not the fluff piece.
Feel free to point out if I'm wrong.. But, isn't this just like a huge mini split? Using CO2 instead of um.. Freon, or whatever they put in them these days?
Stick a huge finned thing out in the ocean, cycle some refrigerant around it, transfer heat from one side to the other? Requires electricity and it's not like.. you're *consuming* CO2 and removing it magically?
The article seemed to describe exactly what the mini-split in my living room does, only on a much higher scale, and with C02 as the transport medium instead of some other rare gas?
It's not an example of switching "from fossil fuels toward innovative clean energy". It's an example of switching from an inefficient heating technology (electrical resistance heating) to a more efficient heating technology (refrigeration). Presumably the energy source is still fossil fuels because they likely want to heat the place on days and nights when the wind isn't blowing (not much solar at 60N in December).
It's also an example of wildly inaccurate reporting. But you can find wildly inaccurate reporting in virtually every article about anything nowadays.
You can't see ANYTHING from a car, You've got to get out of the goddamned contraption and walk...Edward Abbey
I assumed when they said 'used' it was consumed or converted in some manner as well. Not the case.
Used means "utilized" more often than "consumed" (though it can be both, or either). You picked a very odd way to take the original statement, almost as if you wanted it to be wrong.
They didn't really go into much more detail but assuming no maintenance anybody building this without that grant is looking at about 4 years to recover their costs.
The cost to the ASLC was $118,360. Saving $15k per month, it has an ROI under 1 year. Why are you trying to make a good thing look as bad as possible?
Learn to love Alaska
Four years to recoup a capital investment is beyond fantastic. Even double that, as will be more likely when everything is figured in, is really good.
Interestingly this last link refers to CO2's 'low toxicity'.
Well, CO2 isn't really that toxic. You'll die if you breath in pure CO2 anyway though. But that's because you'll suffocate since it is heavier than air and therefore remain in your lungs and prevents any new oxygen-rich air from entering.
It will also fill up closed spaces like basements and you'll basically drown in it.
Presumably the energy source is still fossil fuels because they likely want to heat the place on days and nights when the wind isn't blowing (not much solar at 60N in December).
The energy source is the difference between the temperature of the seawater (the heat source) and that of some other heat sink (probably the Alaskan air). Heat is collected from the ocean via a titanium heat exchanger, transferred to a glycol-water mix (i.e. antifreeze-laden water), and moved to a refrigerator operating as a heat engine - which then drives a heat pump to heat air warmer than either the ocean or the heat-sink air (or whatever).
The "news" is that they modified the heat engine to use liquid/gas carbon dioxide as a replacement for its original working fluid - R-134a (the pricey modern refrigerant that replaced the R-12 "freon" of ozone-hole fame).
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
You still need energy to drive the compressor. Maybe that's what he means?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
> thousands of times more than the negligible amount mankind has ever produced
nice try.
the yearly production of CO2 by humans is MUCH higher than the yearly CO2 production by volcanoes.
from first link I found :
-->volcanoes release a total of about 200M ton of CO2 annually.
-->global fossil fuel CO2 emissions (2003) = 26B ton CO2
Yes, I'm left. You have a problem with that?
There are at the moment over 30 volcanoes erupting world-wide spewing millions of tons of CO2 into the atmosphere, thousands of times more than the negligible amount mankind has ever produced starting with the very first fires of cave-men
Even without knowing exactly how much CO2 the volcanoes produce you can already see that this is not right. Volcanoes have been producing CO2 since the beginning of the Earth, yet the CO2 concentration in the atmosphere only started to go up since the industrial age. Also, when you look at the graph of CO2 concentration, you see a nice smooth rise, and no sudden peaks during years of massive eruptions.
You seem to make numbers up... but luckily real numbers exist. The American geophysical union (which includes many of the world's foremost experts on volcanoes) actually calculated how much CO2 volcanoes produce in an average year, the answer is about 0.25% of what coal power plants put out in an average year (and that's only a fraction of industrial CO2 emissions - remember cars for example).
Volcanic CO2 emissions average a quarter of a percent of coal powerplant CO2 emissions. We outdo volcanoes all the damn time.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
Traditional refrigerants like R-12 (dichlorodifluoromethane) have massive ozone destruction capability, 1st generation replacements like R-134a (1,1,1,2-tetrafluorethane) has minimal ozone destruction capability but very high global warming potential (thousands of times more potent than CO2, gram for gram), 2nd generation replacements like R-1234yf (2,3,3,3-tetrafluorpropene) while having no ozone destruction capability and minimal global warming potential suffer from being highly flammable, increasing the risk of leaks.
The advantage of CO2 is that it is neither flammable, ozone damaging, high GWP, nor significantly toxicity. The disadvantage is that substantial re-designs of refrigeration systems are required to use it, as well as some changes to operation/maintenance.
The transition from R-12 to R-134a, is near drop-in, with only minimal redesign required for optimal performance. To switch to R-1234yf, the re-design required is relatively modest (pressures are higher, so a different pump is needed), but otherwise the principles and basic system architecture are the same. With CO2, you are dealing with transcritical fluids, and this requires a significant architectural change to the refrigerant circuit (as there is no condensation of the refrigerant, so no liquid refrigerant in the circuit).
CO2 levels need to be above/around 50k ppm, or 5%, before it starts becoming a real danger. You'll know something is up long before that, around 1-2%.
Ammonia, on the other hand, is considered lethal at 500 ppm, or 0.05%
I'm going to go with 'CO2 is at least 1/100th as toxic as Ammonia'. The CO2 displacing the O2 is a bigger concern, but still 'solvable' by getting out of the room.
I don't read AC A human right
The Key takeaway here is saving $15k a month on heating bills.
If the savings are representative or what can be achieved elsewhere, the economics and payback period work out, then it's a Win-Win.
The surest way to bring someone over to your Environmentalists side is to show people they can save lots of money. Haranguing them about the CO2 and driving up energy costs...not so much.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
It's pretty depressing if every time we mention CO2, there has to be an obligatory, if completely non sequitur mentioning of AGW. It's akin to being required to say something about werewolves everytime someone mentions silverware.
However, these new-fangled transcritical CO2 heat pumps tend to have a higher coefficient of performance than older ones based on ammonia or other HCFC-based working fluids. So, while you still need to supply (fossil fuel-based electrical) energy to get the thing to run, you need less of it with this machine. So, I call that progress and won't harangue them for an attention-grabbing, modestly misleading headline. The information in the article is correct.
So if the boiler breaks now you flood your house with CO2 and kill everyone in it? Doesn't sound like a good idea to me.
Flooding your house with any inert gas - like the fluorocarbons typically used in AC units and refrigerators - will only kill by displacing oxygen. It takes a lot to do that in a whole building, though if it were releases into an enclosed basement a hazard is far more likely. How often have you heard about deaths from this cause?
Still, lots better than flooding your house with compressed ammonia, sulfur dioxide, or methyl chloride which were used in refrigerators in the early 20th century, and did kill people with some regularity.
Second class citizen of the New Gilded Age
Which graph [wikipedia.org], has no peaks?
This one: http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/w... I do want to clarify my earlier statement. Obviously, CO2 has varied in a lot in the past, but looking at your Vostok graph, it has been relatively slow moving for the last half million years, never crossing 300 ppm. Since the industrial age, we've crossed 300 ppm, quickly followed by breaking the 400 ppm level, even though volcanic activity isn't remarkable.
People who have internalized so much right-wing propaganda that they've become totally delusional are very confident in their beliefs, because Conservatism has become a cult. They consider science and news "Liberal" and embrace superstition and propaganda. They're probably hopeless, but you're doing good work in correcting the propaganda when they regurgitate it outside their bubble.
The heat pump is better than resistive heating by the amount of outside heat it can pump in. It's just a matter of turning the air conditioner around. It exhausts the heat from the energy it uses into the room, which is the equivalent of resistive heating, and moves heat from the colder outside to the warmer inside. It isn't going to work very well if it gets really cold outside (say 0F/-20C/253K), because it's difficult to make the outside spot colder than the outside, and at that point it's basically a very expensive and complicated resistive heater. (I haven't followed the progress of residential heat pumps, and they may be useful at lower temperatures than that, but in climates where it gets that cold people tend to heat by burning natural gas anyway.)
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes