All food production is the following energy conversion process: sunlight->food->people. If you use crops that turn sunlight into food more efficiently, you use less space per person. GMO crops do this.
sudden outbreak of peace in other parts of the world make GM foods unnecessary
Perhaps unnecessary but not undesirable.
GM foods are designed to serve the economy, not actually do anything about starvation.
So what? If you want to deal with starvation, get a gun and a Hummer, and hunt dictators. Make sure you have a plan in place to deal with the power vacuum, all the warring factions left behind, and the people dying from lack of infrastructure, etc, etc, etc.
industrial agriculture itself adds to that number (by taking from the past)
Actually, it does not necessarily, because all fossil fuels can be synthesised. Look at the history of ammonia to understand the first transition from an unsustainable industrial agriculture process to a sustainable one.
BTW, better not to rely on some hypothetical efficient future technology of converting our source of energy...
You're right, like this one. Sadly, we can't use it thanks to liberals.
Not nearly as awesome as us. What's more efficient - a solar panel or a green plant? The solar panel is much more efficient. Why does my old car, about the size of two or three horses, produce 100 horsepower?
We need to use less energy and switch to less damaging, more sustainable energy sources.
How much using less energy would actually help is debatable. There's some argument that using less energy would actually cause more energy as a whole to be used.
But the thing to remember is that alternative energy is not a spectator sport. We can't trust the government and the scientific community to provide us a result any time soon (although you science guys do good work). We have to experiment, do DIY projects and figure it out on our own. For you ME types, please consider ideas like solar thermal energy (using the sun to run steam engines), and home-made wind turbines. For you chemist types, please look at making new types of batteries and fuel cells, as well as biorefining. The steam engine and the gasoline engine weren't invented in a government lab, folks. Why should the solar engine? We can do it on our own, and we have a huge advantage: when we get something working, it will be cheap, affordable, and ready to commercialize.
I've been meaning to buy and read that book for a long time (probably a felony), but I had an idea. Let's find ways to bring lawsuits against politicians and the RIAA and MPAA and who ever else paid for those laws. We might get some of them thrown in jail!
This page indicates that indium tin oxide is still used in the solar panel. Indium has got to be removed because it is an extremely expensive, worth over $500/kg, and it is rare and unsustainable. It's used to make transparent conductors. If we could make some kind of plastic as a transparent conductor, that would be helpful.
Or we could skip the solar panels and build a steam engine.
The problem is that cheaper electricity won't make a difference in EV price. Almost no batteries made or discussed today are cheaper than the electricity they will ever store before they die. The cheapest cost 1.5-2 times the electricity price they store. We don't need a super 300 mile fast charge nano battery. We need one that we can make out of scrap iron and duct tape in our backyards, that provides similar performance to NiMH batteries. Most battery research is missing the point.
The only batteries today that store more energy than their worth are nickel-iron batteries. They are completely indestructible, but extremely expensive (think $50000 worth of batteries to go 200 miles), and heavy. Some are almost 100 years old and still producing their full capacity today.
There's also something many people don't understand. Oil is a synthesizable resource, and a virtually unlimited quantity exists on the earth. To make oil, all you need is the following:
-air (to get CO2 out of)
-water (1 gallon per gallon of oil approx, could be dirty)
-electricity (to split the water)
-heat (to force the hydrogen and the CO2 to react)
First, you use electricity to make hydrogen from the water. Then you heat up baking soda to release CO2 and mix it with the hydrogen. This makes gasoline, diesel, wax, or plastic precursors depending on the catalysts present. You then leave the baking soda outside and it sucks up more CO2. What you have basically done is reversed the process of combustion. Now, this process is not 100% efficient. If you design it well, it will be 70-80 percent energy efficient, electricity to oil. Oil to electricity/mechanical is not very efficient, 60 percent if you're lucky (you're never getting that in a car). It's not the best thing in the world, but it works. Oil is the best method to store hydrogen, in terms of energy efficiency, cost, volumetric hydrogen density, and maybe even gravimetric hydrogen density.
Interestingly, the whole process has not been demonstrated, but every component has. Electrolysis is used to produce %3 of hydrogen used worldwide. Baking soda CO2 processing is used in the Solavy process to make baking soda and road salt. The CO2 + hydrogen = gasoline process was demonstrated in New Zealand in the 1980's, and actually produced millions of gallons of gasoline used in cars. The problem is that the electricity must be dirt cheap and clean - not a very common combo. But stranded wind could be used.
One of my goals is to find a process to make hydrogen from water that consumes only heat. This would consist of a set of chemical reactions, one that releases hydrogen, and one that sucks up heat and produces oxygen. The process would repeat over and over again using solar heat. Fe2O3 + heat = FeO + O2. FeO + H2O = Fe2O3 + H2. heat + H2O = H2 + O2.
The problem is that everyone focused on hydrogen because they sorted that energy density page by mass, not by volume. It's a very poor fuel. People are too focused on hydrogen IMHO. The best and cheapest methods so far considered to store hydrogen (reacting water with metal) all lead to the conclusion that metals are better. The fact that people have made metal air cells in their house that actually power things also shows that they are better.
Metal-air batteries work, and so does electrolysis to regenerate the batteries. The problem most of the companies I've seen so far hit has been the process of pumping the solid fuels ("pumping iron"). I'm a highschool student, so don't take my word for it. I'm also a roboticist, and so I think that if I can get the chemistry working, I can build robots to deal with fuel handling.
What I believe needs to replace the grid is what I call a metallic economy. You see, hydrogen is the worst fuel in the world (go to wikipedia and sort the fuels section of "energy density" by volume). The best fuels in the world are (ignoring those that are dangerous, rare, or not good conductors): aluminium, iron, and zinc. Aluminium is really a pain to make on a small scale, so we'll skip it. Iron, however, is really cheap ($20 of iron gets you 300 miles in an EV). In addition, people have been experimenting with metal air fuel cells, and zinc and iron air fuel cells are 100 times cheaper than hydrogen fuel cells. They are also much more efficient. You can make iron from iron oxide by three methods:
-Smelting it with fossil fuels
-By electrolysis
-By heating it solar or high temp nuclear to remove the oxygen
You'd have an iron-air fuel cell in your house, and every few months, the "iron (wo)man" would drive up in a huge iron powered truck and reload the fuel cell. This leads to a competitive market place for iron (no grid, no last-mile problem), so prices would come down. This also cuts the transmission line problem out. You just drive up to wind turbine in an iron powered pickup truck and swap the iron out of the electrolyser and replace it with iron oxide.
One item that I'm not sure if you folks have missed here is that 2.0 children per woman = 0 population growth (a bit of noise here and there but about). So ignoring all this stuff about mortality (just bear with me), the population of india gained: 5.25 people per couple in 1970, while now it is gaining 2.8 children per couple. That means that the derivative of the population was 2.625 in 1970, and is now 1.4, and falling. So the result is that yes, it's still growing, but the second order derivative is negative. ASSuming these trends hold, you get zero and then negative population growth (until the singularity?)
Malthus was right that population was limited. He was wrong that capitalism and technical development would not slow down population growth. Maybe people have mis-interpreted Malthus?
Stop population growth.
Support economic growth.
(Soon to be a bumpsticker).
Just a note. People see three issues for hydrogen: making it, storing it, and burning it. Ignore that bit about making it for a minute. What's the best way to store hydrogen? The best way is with gasoline and diesel, with hydrogen density 2x that of liquid hydrogen. The second best is with compressed ammonia.
Ignoring fossil fuels, NREL concluded that the best way to make hydrogen was with biofuels. The second best way to make hydrogen was with nuclear powered electrolysis and hydro. The third best, IIRC, was wind.
Now for that burning hydrogen bit. A fuel cell ($63,000) is 10 times more expensive than a diesel generator ($8,999). With the diesel consuming 1.81 gallons of diesel = 141.20 megajoules/hour. The fuel cell consumes 0.962 kg of hydrogen an hour = 137.59 megajoules. That means that at 0.1 $/kWh of fuel, the payback time is 540000 hours. Or, over 60 years. Play with the energy price all you like, the fuel cell does not cut it.
So the best hydrogen economy is biofuels, for example biodiesel. But, the best way to run a diesel car is as a hybrid, and the best hybrid is a plug-in hybrid. That means we end up with a plug-in biodiesel hybrid as the best form of hydrogen using current technology. Now, we might run out of land for biofuels pretty quickly. In which case, we'll be using synthetic diesel from hydro, wind, and nuclear. If this virus discovery works (and anything with these rare, expensive catalysts hydrogen economists love is not "working"), we'll use it to make the gasoline and diesel.
Now, hydrogen is crappy fuel. The best fuel by volume (what you really care about) is not hydrogen but boron. But it's not a nice thing to work with (poor conductor), doesn't burn very well. Second is beryllium, a rare, toxic material. Third is aluminum. We have technology for aluminum that makes it more efficient than most hydrogen economy proposals (but still more expensive than gasoline). The aluminum fuel cell is 300 times cheaper than the hydrogen fuel cell. After that, in terms of storage capacity are zinc and iron, of all things. Iron is where I'm putting my money. If you smelted all the easily accessible iron in the USA, and stacked it up. It would power the whole country for a few years. To make iron batteries to send your car 300 miles, you'd need just $10-$15 worth of iron. It's just so cheap.
Why methane and natural gas/propane? By the time you trapped the CO2, convert it to gasoline instead, so it's a zillion times easier to handle. We need a gasoline fuel cell.
You can't yet store enough practically to make a useful road vehicle.
You can. If you combine the hydrogen with carbon dioxide, you produce liquid carbon hydrides with very high energy density. You then burn that in an internal combustion engine.
You lose energy manufacturing it electrically. You lose energy converting it back to electricity.
There's no theoretical reason this is not a 100 percent efficient process. Practically, it is because hydrogen is a poor electrochemical reagent. If you produced aluminium, zinc, or iron fuel. All methods of quote "electricity storage" are simply methods of storing energy by making either lithium, cadmium, or zinc fuel. You lose energy when you make the fuel. You lose energy when you convert it back to electricity.
Slashdot Mirror
With the amount of food the US plows under
What do you mean?
Good farming practices
All food production is the following energy conversion process: sunlight->food->people. If you use crops that turn sunlight into food more efficiently, you use less space per person. GMO crops do this.
sudden outbreak of peace in other parts of the world make GM foods unnecessary
Perhaps unnecessary but not undesirable.
GM foods are designed to serve the economy, not actually do anything about starvation.
So what? If you want to deal with starvation, get a gun and a Hummer, and hunt dictators. Make sure you have a plan in place to deal with the power vacuum, all the warring factions left behind, and the people dying from lack of infrastructure, etc, etc, etc.
People will look at why it took us 50+ years actually accept the atomic age.
industrial agriculture itself adds to that number (by taking from the past)
Actually, it does not necessarily, because all fossil fuels can be synthesised. Look at the history of ammonia to understand the first transition from an unsustainable industrial agriculture process to a sustainable one.
BTW, better not to rely on some hypothetical efficient future technology of converting our source of energy...
You're right, like this one. Sadly, we can't use it thanks to liberals.
Not nearly as awesome as us. What's more efficient - a solar panel or a green plant? The solar panel is much more efficient. Why does my old car, about the size of two or three horses, produce 100 horsepower?
I agree.
I'd add more: aluminum and zinc.
We need to use less energy and switch to less damaging, more sustainable energy sources.
How much using less energy would actually help is debatable. There's some argument that using less energy would actually cause more energy as a whole to be used.
But the thing to remember is that alternative energy is not a spectator sport. We can't trust the government and the scientific community to provide us a result any time soon (although you science guys do good work). We have to experiment, do DIY projects and figure it out on our own. For you ME types, please consider ideas like solar thermal energy (using the sun to run steam engines), and home-made wind turbines. For you chemist types, please look at making new types of batteries and fuel cells, as well as biorefining. The steam engine and the gasoline engine weren't invented in a government lab, folks. Why should the solar engine? We can do it on our own, and we have a huge advantage: when we get something working, it will be cheap, affordable, and ready to commercialize.
I've been meaning to buy and read that book for a long time (probably a felony), but I had an idea. Let's find ways to bring lawsuits against politicians and the RIAA and MPAA and who ever else paid for those laws. We might get some of them thrown in jail!
aisu-kyuu? (Means ice nine in japanese).
An time you hear nano, think expensive.
Wiki. The price fluctuates quite a bit, and purity makes a big difference.
This page indicates that indium tin oxide is still used in the solar panel. Indium has got to be removed because it is an extremely expensive, worth over $500/kg, and it is rare and unsustainable. It's used to make transparent conductors. If we could make some kind of plastic as a transparent conductor, that would be helpful.
Or we could skip the solar panels and build a steam engine.
The problem is that cheaper electricity won't make a difference in EV price. Almost no batteries made or discussed today are cheaper than the electricity they will ever store before they die. The cheapest cost 1.5-2 times the electricity price they store. We don't need a super 300 mile fast charge nano battery. We need one that we can make out of scrap iron and duct tape in our backyards, that provides similar performance to NiMH batteries. Most battery research is missing the point.
The only batteries today that store more energy than their worth are nickel-iron batteries. They are completely indestructible, but extremely expensive (think $50000 worth of batteries to go 200 miles), and heavy. Some are almost 100 years old and still producing their full capacity today.
There's also something many people don't understand. Oil is a synthesizable resource, and a virtually unlimited quantity exists on the earth. To make oil, all you need is the following:
-air (to get CO2 out of)
-water (1 gallon per gallon of oil approx, could be dirty)
-electricity (to split the water)
-heat (to force the hydrogen and the CO2 to react)
First, you use electricity to make hydrogen from the water. Then you heat up baking soda to release CO2 and mix it with the hydrogen. This makes gasoline, diesel, wax, or plastic precursors depending on the catalysts present. You then leave the baking soda outside and it sucks up more CO2. What you have basically done is reversed the process of combustion. Now, this process is not 100% efficient. If you design it well, it will be 70-80 percent energy efficient, electricity to oil. Oil to electricity/mechanical is not very efficient, 60 percent if you're lucky (you're never getting that in a car). It's not the best thing in the world, but it works. Oil is the best method to store hydrogen, in terms of energy efficiency, cost, volumetric hydrogen density, and maybe even gravimetric hydrogen density.
Interestingly, the whole process has not been demonstrated, but every component has. Electrolysis is used to produce %3 of hydrogen used worldwide. Baking soda CO2 processing is used in the Solavy process to make baking soda and road salt. The CO2 + hydrogen = gasoline process was demonstrated in New Zealand in the 1980's, and actually produced millions of gallons of gasoline used in cars. The problem is that the electricity must be dirt cheap and clean - not a very common combo. But stranded wind could be used.
One of my goals is to find a process to make hydrogen from water that consumes only heat. This would consist of a set of chemical reactions, one that releases hydrogen, and one that sucks up heat and produces oxygen. The process would repeat over and over again using solar heat. Fe2O3 + heat = FeO + O2. FeO + H2O = Fe2O3 + H2. heat + H2O = H2 + O2.
Say goodbye to all innovation in the automotive industry.
Lots of working models. Even some you can build.
The problem is that everyone focused on hydrogen because they sorted that energy density page by mass, not by volume. It's a very poor fuel. People are too focused on hydrogen IMHO. The best and cheapest methods so far considered to store hydrogen (reacting water with metal) all lead to the conclusion that metals are better. The fact that people have made metal air cells in their house that actually power things also shows that they are better.
Metal-air batteries work, and so does electrolysis to regenerate the batteries. The problem most of the companies I've seen so far hit has been the process of pumping the solid fuels ("pumping iron"). I'm a highschool student, so don't take my word for it. I'm also a roboticist, and so I think that if I can get the chemistry working, I can build robots to deal with fuel handling.
What I believe needs to replace the grid is what I call a metallic economy. You see, hydrogen is the worst fuel in the world (go to wikipedia and sort the fuels section of "energy density" by volume). The best fuels in the world are (ignoring those that are dangerous, rare, or not good conductors): aluminium, iron, and zinc. Aluminium is really a pain to make on a small scale, so we'll skip it. Iron, however, is really cheap ($20 of iron gets you 300 miles in an EV). In addition, people have been experimenting with metal air fuel cells, and zinc and iron air fuel cells are 100 times cheaper than hydrogen fuel cells. They are also much more efficient. You can make iron from iron oxide by three methods:
-Smelting it with fossil fuels
-By electrolysis
-By heating it solar or high temp nuclear to remove the oxygen
You'd have an iron-air fuel cell in your house, and every few months, the "iron (wo)man" would drive up in a huge iron powered truck and reload the fuel cell. This leads to a competitive market place for iron (no grid, no last-mile problem), so prices would come down. This also cuts the transmission line problem out. You just drive up to wind turbine in an iron powered pickup truck and swap the iron out of the electrolyser and replace it with iron oxide.
I think we'd be using aluminum fuel cells and propellers. (No way for ash or glass to clog the fuel cells.)
The question is, what would happen if you tried to turn snake oil into biodiesel?
Hmm. This might be a part of my larger-scale plan to save both the economy and the environment: bankerdiesel.
One item that I'm not sure if you folks have missed here is that 2.0 children per woman = 0 population growth (a bit of noise here and there but about). So ignoring all this stuff about mortality (just bear with me), the population of india gained: 5.25 people per couple in 1970, while now it is gaining 2.8 children per couple. That means that the derivative of the population was 2.625 in 1970, and is now 1.4, and falling. So the result is that yes, it's still growing, but the second order derivative is negative. ASSuming these trends hold, you get zero and then negative population growth (until the singularity?)
Malthus was right that population was limited. He was wrong that capitalism and technical development would not slow down population growth. Maybe people have mis-interpreted Malthus?
Stop population growth.
Support economic growth.
(Soon to be a bumpsticker).
Just a note. People see three issues for hydrogen: making it, storing it, and burning it. Ignore that bit about making it for a minute. What's the best way to store hydrogen? The best way is with gasoline and diesel, with hydrogen density 2x that of liquid hydrogen. The second best is with compressed ammonia.
Ignoring fossil fuels, NREL concluded that the best way to make hydrogen was with biofuels. The second best way to make hydrogen was with nuclear powered electrolysis and hydro. The third best, IIRC, was wind.
Now for that burning hydrogen bit. A fuel cell ($63,000) is 10 times more expensive than a diesel generator ($8,999). With the diesel consuming 1.81 gallons of diesel = 141.20 megajoules/hour. The fuel cell consumes 0.962 kg of hydrogen an hour = 137.59 megajoules. That means that at 0.1 $/kWh of fuel, the payback time is 540000 hours. Or, over 60 years. Play with the energy price all you like, the fuel cell does not cut it.
So the best hydrogen economy is biofuels, for example biodiesel. But, the best way to run a diesel car is as a hybrid, and the best hybrid is a plug-in hybrid. That means we end up with a plug-in biodiesel hybrid as the best form of hydrogen using current technology. Now, we might run out of land for biofuels pretty quickly. In which case, we'll be using synthetic diesel from hydro, wind, and nuclear. If this virus discovery works (and anything with these rare, expensive catalysts hydrogen economists love is not "working"), we'll use it to make the gasoline and diesel.
Now, hydrogen is crappy fuel. The best fuel by volume (what you really care about) is not hydrogen but boron. But it's not a nice thing to work with (poor conductor), doesn't burn very well. Second is beryllium, a rare, toxic material. Third is aluminum. We have technology for aluminum that makes it more efficient than most hydrogen economy proposals (but still more expensive than gasoline). The aluminum fuel cell is 300 times cheaper than the hydrogen fuel cell. After that, in terms of storage capacity are zinc and iron, of all things. Iron is where I'm putting my money. If you smelted all the easily accessible iron in the USA, and stacked it up. It would power the whole country for a few years. To make iron batteries to send your car 300 miles, you'd need just $10-$15 worth of iron. It's just so cheap.
Why methane and natural gas/propane? By the time you trapped the CO2, convert it to gasoline instead, so it's a zillion times easier to handle. We need a gasoline fuel cell.
You can't yet store enough practically to make a useful road vehicle.
You can. If you combine the hydrogen with carbon dioxide, you produce liquid carbon hydrides with very high energy density. You then burn that in an internal combustion engine.
You lose energy manufacturing it electrically. You lose energy converting it back to electricity.
There's no theoretical reason this is not a 100 percent efficient process. Practically, it is because hydrogen is a poor electrochemical reagent. If you produced aluminium, zinc, or iron fuel. All methods of quote "electricity storage" are simply methods of storing energy by making either lithium, cadmium, or zinc fuel. You lose energy when you make the fuel. You lose energy when you convert it back to electricity.
H2 + Cl2 = 2HCl
It "burns" using the chlorine as the oxidizer.
YHBT. YHL. HAND.