(Goddammit, why can't I see the italicized text inside blockquotes? Is Slashdot fucking me over AGAIN?)
We are not rapidly running out of natural gas. We're running out of domestic natural gas, but world natural gas supplies are still quite plentiful.
And, GW emissions aside, how exactly does this helps our energy security and balance of trade situations? There is considerable resistance to LNG terminals also.
Note that the US used to use a significant amount of oil for electricity generation.
A point I've made frequently. (Note that "petroleum" in that table includes refining byproducts such as petroleum coke, so the total of liquids is even less.)
The primary replacements for oil-fired electric plants were nuclear and coal. Recently we've added a lot of gas-fired capacity. We can't add more gas due to supply limits, coal is a pollution and GHG nightmare and nuclear has a 10-year or so planning horizon. The immediate problems require other solutions, and I think the primary ones are going to be wind, efficiency and cogeneration.
When it became expensive, we switched, and now oil is almost unused in this country for power generation (except for backup power). Barring some instant, "ooops, we're out of natural gas -- when the heck did that happen?" moment (which is essentially impossible), there's not going to be an electricity shortage.
The Maui gas field has been responsible for 25% of New Zealand's electricity generation. When it runs out in a year or two, not only will a multibillion dollar infrastructure become essentially obsolete overnight but New Zealand will have lost 25% of it's electricity generation capacity. If you thought New Zealand's electricity crisis was a concern it is about to get a whole lot worse.
It ain't what you don't know that'll get ya. It those things you know that ain't so.
As for a charcoal fuel cell: it's not about whether or not you can get energy from charcoal in a variety of manners. Feeding it and removing the byproducts, even in a slurry, is the problematic element -- especially when you factor in the cost of making your charcoal consistent enough.
Consistent? It only has to be fine enough (and ball mills are very good at guaranteeing that). The actual feeding is an engineering problem; if engineers can build gravimetric feeders for powdered coal in furnaces which require steady flames, the management of a carbonate bath which needs feeding every half-hour or so can't be all that difficult. And here's what the originators say about ash:
The ash in coal may be chemically extracted and thereby reduced to levels below 0.5% at minimal cost and energy penalty. At this level, its impact on electrolyte life no longer limits cell economy.
In other words, you're going to need to deal with other things before the electrolyte composition changes enough to bother you. More about ash on pages 11-12 of this PDF.
As for charcoal itself, its production is a lossy process. Much of the original energy is contained in the released gasses -- namely CO, H2, and volatile oils/tars -- but they're mixed in with lots of CO2 and H2O, making for less efficient combustion (not to mention the energy loss involved with the process heat).
Quite right! Charcoal produced by flash carbonization yields about half the input energy as gas and heat (a pyrolysis process driven by external heat would convert more to carbon and le
People retool and replace automobiles on a regular basis anyway. The typical model goes about 3 years before a refresh. Engines, exteriors, creature comforts all get updated to sell better. The average age of cars is about 8½ years, and most of the mileage accrues to the younger vehicles.
What we've got here is an evolutonary change on the level of energy supply:
The cars evolve to take a non-chemical energy supply (electricity), which happens to already be more widely available than petroleum or alcohol.
The cars simultaneously shift toward extreme flex-fuel, able to run on 100% alcohol or even wet alcohol (95% EtOH, 5% H2O).
The biomass industry shifts away from making only liquids and toward making electricity and feedstocks for electricity.
Every bit of this can be accomplished by increments, unlike the "hydrogen highway" which has to be complete before any vehicle can drive it end to end. Vehicles are replaced one at a time. Producers of fuels from farm and forestry byproducts go into business one at a time. The whole thing can be done by baby steps, and it works just fine at every intermediate stage.
I also didn't postulate any liquid-fuel production from the charcoal pathway. Feeding the charcoal to direct-carbon fuel cells yields CO2, which can be fed to algae same as at the biomass-processing stage. The algae produce fats (biodiesel feedstock) and carbohydrates (ethanol feedstock). The only issue is that the products will almost always wind up in the atmosphere rather than sequestered, but that's an issue of priorities. Roughly 2/3 of the carbon winds up as charcoal, so you could potentially triple the liquid fuel output beyond my basic analysis.
Are you saying that ethanol SHOULD be a source of electricity (at what net efficiency from the source material?) or that it shouldn't be?
I propose ethanol as one of several storable products of an energy-production process which begins with non-edible biomass. The other storable products are charcoal and biodiesel (formed by transesterification of algal fatty acids) or light hydrocarbons (formed by thermochemical processing of the same fatty acids). The non-storable (but easily transported) product is electricity, which is the product of equally non-storable (and non-transportable) pyrolysis gas. Please see the section from "Bi-cycles and re-cycles" down to the bubble diagram before the next section header.
I don't think we should use ethanol to make electricity. Too many losses in the pathway, and far more complicated than starting with charcoal.
The US uses on the order of 2-3 billion gallons/year of cooking grease. We burn 60 billion gallons/year of distillate, and 140 billion gallons/year of gasoline. Niche solutions are okay, but we need to take on the rest too.
The US uses about 17.4 quads/year of gasoline, and another 8.7 quads/year of distillate (diesel and heating oil). This is about 7640 billion kWh, or about 1.9 times total US electric energy consumption. Losses would increase this figure considerably. You're not going to supply this by electrolysis from nuclear powerplants, because nobody is stupid enough to try.
I flip a switch and the light comes on. I bump up the thermostat and the furnace comes on. I need to drive to Toledo so I fill the tank.
And when the USA is dependent on Mideast LNG for your heat and lights as well as their oil for your car, and the politics blow up in Iran or the House of Saud....
Rolling blackouts and empty gas stations may be the least of your problems. I'd like to aim for a future which precludes those possibilities, thanks.
You'd think that you'd welcome anything that prompts a big move from annuals seeded in bare soil to perennials which are cut or coppiced from long-term rootstock.
Not that corn stover and other byproducts of annuals wouldn't be valuable feedstocks, but when you could turn an orchard's pruned dead wood into profit you might just have something worth looking at more closely.
The problem is that you are feeding the same old inefficient combustion engines (14.9% tank-to-wheels net for a non-hybrid) only now you are adding losses as great as 50% in the conversion from cellulose to ethanol.
If you need 3 quads of work but your system has a 15% efficient engine and a 50% efficient fuel preparation system, you need to feed 40 quads of something in at the beginning. Try as you might, you won't get far.
A nuclear plant has a 10-year planning horizon. The current spurt of license applications just started in 2006, so we're looking at 2016 before the first ones come on-line... assuming they stay on schedule.
Nine years to go before we get perhaps 2-5 GW. We don't have nine years! We are looking at serious problems much sooner.
Wind farms have a planning horizon of around two years; the installed base is growing at about 25%/year, doubling every 3 years. Small-scale fuel-cell generators (250 kW-1 MW) literally fit on flatbed pallets and can be put into operation in days. The problem is going to be coming up with enough fuel to feed them. If we can start making direct-carbon fuel cells running on charcoal, we can make one hell of a lot of fuel from agricultural and forestry wastes, or even tree-trimming wastes in forested cities.
I have literally nothing against nukes, but we can't sit on our hands until they light up.
... accusations that the Left focuses too much on good intentions, feel-good measures, and such while ignoring consequences have characterized most decent critiques of the Left for quite some time now, and gives rise to some of the claims that the left experiences a "disconnect from reality".
That was exactly my criticism a little over a year ago. (My politics are a long way from theirs, being mostly capitalist and small-l libertarian.)
So you know what they did? They asked me to be part of their policy-formation group. And I acted as critic and reality check.
I didn't sign onto their product because I thought it was way too timid (and if you've read Sustainability and EA2020, you'll know why), but I hadn't had time to finish my own analysis by their deadline so I cannot fault them.
Also, I don't appreciate this article's attempt to conflagrate electricity generation with fuel production.
Perhaps if you don't take greenhouse warming into consideration, but a ton of CO2 is the same regardless of what it comes from. Besides, cars like the Chevy Volt make electricity fungible with motor fuel for short trips. Once vehicles derive much energy from the electrical grid, the two must be considered together.
Few are worried about us running out of sources of electricity, due to coal, nuclear, and decreasing costs of renewables. It's vehicle fuels that are the issue of concern.
You are quite wrong. We are rapidly running out of natural gas, which provides 18.6% of US electric generation. The problem is growing rapidly, to the point that the chemical and fertilizer industries are moving overseas and the US is moving to import LNG to satisfy our demands.
Wouldn't you rather get that electricity from something we produce domestically? Something we even throw away? No terrorist is ever going to bomb a corn-stover terminal, you can bet on that.
And some of the proposals are just plain stupid, like running vehicles on charcoal that it's embarassing that they even mentioned them in passing.
Why NOT run on a fuel which yields 80% efficiency? Or are you just jealous that you didn't propose it first? (I doubt we'd actually use it on anything as small as trucks, but the idea might have merit.)
There's nothing wrong with Ethanol, save for studies 30 year out of date that are perpetuating the idea that it's energy negative.
The best corn ethanol can probably do is 1.5:1, maybe 1.8:1. This would still require 55%-67% of the product energy to be recycled to run the system. In short, at its best it's so far short of what we need that we should shut down the effort immediately and divert the money to things which can actually work.
Cellulosic ethanol would be better, but we use so much motor fuel in this country that we run into limits of carbon capture. We just can't grow enough biomass to even replace gasoline with it. (Syntec claims 100 gallons per ton with their gasification process. Replacing the energy of 140 billion gallons of gasoline would require about 210 billion gallons of ethanol. Got 2.1 billion tons of biomass handy? Even The Billion-Ton Vision only came up with 1.3 billion tons! For Iogen's enzymatic process yielding 70 gallons/ton, you'd have to start with 3 billion tons of inputs.)
The problem with most of the algae-based systems is that they rely on powerplant exhaust as a carbon source, and don't even manage to capture all the carbon. They cannot be part of a carbon-neutral or carbon-negative energy system. A better possibility is a scheme for using wild-type algae growing on sewage-treatment effluent, pulling carbon out of the air. If this also captures and concentrates nutrients like phosphorus, it will be a triple-play: clean sewage, generate energy, recover elements otherwise lost.
"Sustainability" links to Greenfuel (a company which recently produced fuel-grade ethanol and biodiesel from carbon scavenged from the stack gas of a powerplant in Arizona), but there's now the example of Solix which might be a better fit. Solix's test system is growing algae on CO2 from a brewery, which is about what you'd get from the combination of fuel-cell exhaust and fermentation products of algal carbohydrates.
The US has a huge farm lobby and agribusiness giants like ADM which make huge amounts of money on corn. Actually, the farmers have mostly made their money from subsidies, as production has glutted the market since the end of the acreage set-asides under Agr. Sec'y Earl Butz. ADM made massive amounts of money turning subsidized corn into fructose and selling it into a sweetener market driven by protectionist sugar tariffs, so it was natural for it to go to fermenting subsidized corn and selling it for the 51 cent/gallon fuel subsidy.
Unfortunately, just because it's money-positive doesn't do spit for energy. The energy balance of corn ethanol may be as low as breakeven, according to a recent MIT analysis; even the USDA's numbers only come out to 1.09:1 after you correct their math. Should you manage bring that up to 2:1, you can still generate barely 16 billion gallons-net of ethanol (energy equivalent to 10-11 billion gallons of gasoline) out of the entire US corn crop.
As for why we don't look at cellulose.... it's because cellulose is a tough polymer evolved to be hard for bugs to eat, and we are better off using pyrolysis (charring or burning it) instead of hydrolysis (breakdown into sugars) to get energy out of it.
Sustainability actually does propose converting cellulose to ethanol, but via a rather indirect path:
Pyrolyze cellulose to charcoal and fuel gas.
Burn fuel gas in a molten-carbonate or solid-oxide fuel cell, producing carbon dioxide, electricity and waste heat.
Feed carbon dioxide to a closed bioreactor with algae.
Extract algal fats, sugars and starches.
Ferment sugars and starches (easily handled with common yeasts) to ethanol.
Distill ethanol using fuel-cell waste heat.
It goes by a roundabout route, but it doesn't require any funny business and it tries to get useful energy at every step.
A long-term solution, in this rapidly-moving technological environment, is 50 years.
You can bet that, absent massive climate change (which my proposal is crafted to help prevent), we won't have plants stop growing and cease generating organic wastes from diverse sources in the next 50 years. Before 50 years are up, I expect that solar PV will be cheaper than wind power and will be the principle source of electric power in most of the world. Wind and wave power look good to cope with night, clouds and other difficulties for PV, and storable energy of some kind (e.g. charcoal for direct-carbon fuel cells) will fill any gaps left over from hydro, nuclear and the rest.
World annual human energy consumption (about 400 quads from all sources, including nuclear heat input to electric production) is equivalent to about 40 minutes of global solar input. The direct effect is utterly trivial save on a very local basis; the warming we're seeing is from greenhouse gases which trap more of the 5.2 million quads of sun striking the atmosphere every year.
Though "paid liar" may be the most charitable thing I could call you.
If we'd listened to that butterfly collector back in the early 70s, we'd have put lamp black across the north and exacerbated whatever situation we seem to now be finding ourselves.
Except that we never saw any hint of an imminent ice age. Advancing glaciers, later spring thaws... none of these things showed themselves.
We see all the signs of global warming, from temperature anomalies to the northward shift of plant hardiness zones. It's the difference between a theory having no basis, and a theory being irrefutably correct in the basics. This debate is exactly analogous to the scientific issues vs. political controversy over evolution: the scientists are talking about selection mechanisms and evidence of gene co-option, and the pols are listening to the cranks demanding that the science classroom discussions include "GODDIDIT".
Your role in this is to be an extra in the mob of cranks.
The current manmade global warming stuff is also a media driven thing - this time with some 'scientists' jumping on board the gravy train.
The cooling and contraction of the stratosphere is not a media-driven thing. It is a greenhouse-gas driven thing, as more and more IR radiation is filtered out of the windows where the gases of the stratosphere can absorb them. You might note that this is itself absolute proof that the surface warming is not driven by the sun; greater solar input would warm the stratosphere, not cool it.
And this rhetoric is typical of you propagandists. It's always "gravy trains" and "alarmist industries", without the slightest attention to the evidence. Evidence is the difference between alarmism and warning of a real threat, and it's the evidence that you cannot debate or even allow yourself to look at.
I guess that makes you an amateur and a true believer who knows even less than the professional you attacked at the beginning of your post. Knowing that which is incorrect is paramount to knowing less than nothing.
While you have been relentlessly attacking me for several posts (without linking to, or even mentioning, a single verifiable fact - for reasons which are no mystery anymore) you have never named the professional I allegedly attacked. Well, you won't find anyone named, or even referred to, in it. To borrow a phrase, it appears that every word you've written is a lie, including "and" and "the".
Let's talk about consequences here. If the scientific models are wrong but we act on them anyway, we might lose GDP equivalent to a small recession. Or we might show overall gains; most anti-GW measures are "no regrets" actions which have benefits beyond climate, such as reduced pollution and consequent improved public health. The march of technology makes this outcome highly likely - and it's the GW denialists (such as TXU) who want to build dozens of poorly-scrubbed coal plants which will dump particulates in the air and mercury in the food chain.
If the scientific models are right and we fail to act on them, we will lose GDP equivalent to a major global recession. We will also lose coastal cities around the world, and entire ecosystems along with millions of species. We'll lose all the fertile land in the world's river deltas which winds up under salt water. And the billions of people who lived on that l
Note that we are not on the verge of running out of oil.
The "peak oil" claim is not that we are about to have no oil. It is that the world's production rate of oil is about to peak and decline (just as the USA's production peaked in 1971 and declined, and any individual oilfield of significance you care to name). What this means is that prices will be much higher and more volatile, and the key to managing energy costs is cutting demand.
I doubt we are on any verge of the ability of the earth to absorb co2 either.
Tell it to the climate scientists who are measuring uncomfortable trends like rapidly rising methane emissions from former permafrost in Siberia, and the rumored rise in methane alerts from tanker detection systems along undersea gorges such as the one at the Hudson River. Former sinks are becoming sources.
Whats more, all that fossil fuel carbon came out of the atmosphere to begin with anyway. Burning it just returns it back to the atmosphere to be absorbed again by life for the cycle.
Coal strata mostly date from the carboniferous, about 300 million years ago. Oil and oil shale dates as far back as the Cambrian, over 500 million years ago. This carbon has been out of circulation for as much as half a billion years, and no extant ecosystem or living species is adapted to the conditions which prevailed at that time.
As I mentioned before, the last time we had a surge in atmospheric CO2 (end of the Paleocene) we had a mass extinction. What sort of delusion lets you think that it wouldn't do the same thing all over again?
If you want to get technical, O2 is the real culprit.
I highlighted that in case anyone reading this had doubts that you are delusional or dishonest.
As for man and his technology - we're a tertiary effect at best
Humans with mere axes and muscle-powered saws denuded the forests of Michigan in just a few years. (One consequence was the extinction of the Michigan Grayling, which required cold water in streams protected from direct sun. These ceased to exist, and the fish along with them.)
That was over a century ago (the fish finally died out in the 1930's). Since the late 19th century, our ability to change the environment has increased many-fold. The atmospheric concentration of CO2 tracks human emissions. In short, anyone who says what you're saying is either lying or delusional.
If it suited the alarmist industry, we'd be back to expecting the next ice age and probably trying to put lamp black on the glaciers to melt them - like they wanted to do back in the 1970s.
You are confusing a media-driven phenomenon of the time with scientific discussion which never claimed that glaciation was about to recur; this shows the shallowness of your knowledge. The scientists were looking at the historic climate cycles and noting that the current orbital fo
There are some efforts to make portable small cracking units - which could potentially eliminate the need for high pressure tanks scenario - keeping the fuel in its hydrocarbon liquid state - like in the form of gasoline - until usage needs dictate it should be converted for immediate use.
In other words, it's just another energy chain from hydrocarbons to wheels. After the fuel cell, the exhaust (though free of smog-forming or toxic chemicals) would probably be dumped, rather than stored and recycled.
I don't think you appreciate the sheer size of the problem. It would be one thing if we are running out of oil (we are), but we have already run out of Earth's capacity to absorb our carbon emissions. We have to convert to energy systems which do not take any carbon out of the ground and dump it into the air. This means that every pound of carbon we emit has to be pulled from the atmosphere, not the ground.
This is an enormous undertaking. Capturing carbon is a very difficult thing; 5 tons/acre/year is quite good. Our current use of carbon-based fuels is way beyond our ability to feed with what we can capture. We cannot depend primarily on liquid fuels any more. What we can do is shift most of our demand to electricity (which is surprisingly easy - there's a lot of energy in petroleum and coal but not very much of that is converted to useful work, and the grid has plenty of spare off-peak capacity). If you shift the primary transport energy supply to electricity, you can supply the remaining liquid-fuel needs relatively easily. If fossil fuels are required, they can be used in stationary plants which can sequester the carbon.
Unless we develop cheap photolytic hydrogen generators, hydrogen will be a trillion-dollar side trip. The future is not the Ford Airstream, it is the Chevy Volt.
my point in the previous post was an offer at an explaination of why h2 is being pushed - ie - association of the approach with existing hydrocarbons companies and an existing infrastructure reduce the amount of distribution infrastructure creation.
Yes, and it's being pushed for two reasons:
To convince the public that Something Is Being Done, and
To fritter away the R&D budgets on measures which do not threaten their core business.
Fortunately, first Toyota and now GM have realized that they can either break free of petroleum or be sacrificed to it. Ford, as great as my sympathies are for them, doesn't get it yet.
H2 can be acquired one of two ways. First, invest lots of energy into dissassociating h2o where the h2 is merely an energy storage means.
Which gives you not only the losses of the multiple conversions, but the ruinous expense of the equipment.
The other is to 'crack' hydrocarbons to get it from.
Which not only leaves you in a hydrocarbon economy, it transforms a compact fuel into an extremely bulky one (which still needs ruinously expensive equipment to make the best use of it).
If you're starting with any renewable energy source other than photolytic hydrogen (whether wind, solar, hydro, or biomass) or even nuclear power, your cheapest path from source to wheels doesn't go anywhere near hydrogen. You can turn biomass into charcoal at over 50% efficiency and then use the charcoal in a direct carbon fuel cell, you can get 40% field-to-terminals efficiency plus considerable energy yield from the conversion process. You can handle the fuel as either a powder or a water slurry, so no high-pressure gases; the tanks are small and cheap.
For anything except rockets or chemistry like ammonia synthesis, there is no sense in turning energy to hydrogen.
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And, GW emissions aside, how exactly does this helps our energy security and balance of trade situations? There is considerable resistance to LNG terminals also.
A point I've made frequently. (Note that "petroleum" in that table includes refining byproducts such as petroleum coke, so the total of liquids is even less.)
The primary replacements for oil-fired electric plants were nuclear and coal. Recently we've added a lot of gas-fired capacity. We can't add more gas due to supply limits, coal is a pollution and GHG nightmare and nuclear has a 10-year or so planning horizon. The immediate problems require other solutions, and I think the primary ones are going to be wind, efficiency and cogeneration.
Impossible? It happened to New Zealand:
It ain't what you don't know that'll get ya. It those things you know that ain't so.
Consistent? It only has to be fine enough (and ball mills are very good at guaranteeing that). The actual feeding is an engineering problem; if engineers can build gravimetric feeders for powdered coal in furnaces which require steady flames, the management of a carbonate bath which needs feeding every half-hour or so can't be all that difficult. And here's what the originators say about ash:
In other words, you're going to need to deal with other things before the electrolyte composition changes enough to bother you. More about ash on pages 11-12 of this PDF.
Quite right! Charcoal produced by flash carbonization yields about half the input energy as gas and heat (a pyrolysis process driven by external heat would convert more to carbon and le
But then again, you're just a troll.
What we've got here is an evolutonary change on the level of energy supply:
Every bit of this can be accomplished by increments, unlike the "hydrogen highway" which has to be complete before any vehicle can drive it end to end. Vehicles are replaced one at a time. Producers of fuels from farm and forestry byproducts go into business one at a time. The whole thing can be done by baby steps, and it works just fine at every intermediate stage.
That was one of the points of the exercise.
And I do thank you for your contribution to it.
You will receive your return as an in-kind payment.
To wit, a WP grenade in your pants.
I do hope you are as eager for this as I am.
For instance, I postulated 50% efficiency for the fuel cell end of the biomass processing system, but some people are already talking 80%.
I also didn't postulate any liquid-fuel production from the charcoal pathway. Feeding the charcoal to direct-carbon fuel cells yields CO2, which can be fed to algae same as at the biomass-processing stage. The algae produce fats (biodiesel feedstock) and carbohydrates (ethanol feedstock). The only issue is that the products will almost always wind up in the atmosphere rather than sequestered, but that's an issue of priorities. Roughly 2/3 of the carbon winds up as charcoal, so you could potentially triple the liquid fuel output beyond my basic analysis.
Are you saying that ethanol SHOULD be a source of electricity (at what net efficiency from the source material?) or that it shouldn't be?
I propose ethanol as one of several storable products of an energy-production process which begins with non-edible biomass. The other storable products are charcoal and biodiesel (formed by transesterification of algal fatty acids) or light hydrocarbons (formed by thermochemical processing of the same fatty acids). The non-storable (but easily transported) product is electricity, which is the product of equally non-storable (and non-transportable) pyrolysis gas. Please see the section from "Bi-cycles and re-cycles" down to the bubble diagram before the next section header.
I don't think we should use ethanol to make electricity. Too many losses in the pathway, and far more complicated than starting with charcoal.
For one thing, I don't think you do your homework.
The US uses on the order of 2-3 billion gallons/year of cooking grease. We burn 60 billion gallons/year of distillate, and 140 billion gallons/year of gasoline. Niche solutions are okay, but we need to take on the rest too.
The US uses about 17.4 quads/year of gasoline, and another 8.7 quads/year of distillate (diesel and heating oil). This is about 7640 billion kWh, or about 1.9 times total US electric energy consumption. Losses would increase this figure considerably. You're not going to supply this by electrolysis from nuclear powerplants, because nobody is stupid enough to try.
Rolling blackouts and empty gas stations may be the least of your problems. I'd like to aim for a future which precludes those possibilities, thanks.
You'd think that you'd welcome anything that prompts a big move from annuals seeded in bare soil to perennials which are cut or coppiced from long-term rootstock.
Not that corn stover and other byproducts of annuals wouldn't be valuable feedstocks, but when you could turn an orchard's pruned dead wood into profit you might just have something worth looking at more closely.
Maybe you're the person to do it?
The problem is that you are feeding the same old inefficient combustion engines (14.9% tank-to-wheels net for a non-hybrid) only now you are adding losses as great as 50% in the conversion from cellulose to ethanol.
If you need 3 quads of work but your system has a 15% efficient engine and a 50% efficient fuel preparation system, you need to feed 40 quads of something in at the beginning. Try as you might, you won't get far.
A nuclear plant has a 10-year planning horizon. The current spurt of license applications just started in 2006, so we're looking at 2016 before the first ones come on-line... assuming they stay on schedule.
Nine years to go before we get perhaps 2-5 GW. We don't have nine years! We are looking at serious problems much sooner.
Wind farms have a planning horizon of around two years; the installed base is growing at about 25%/year, doubling every 3 years. Small-scale fuel-cell generators (250 kW-1 MW) literally fit on flatbed pallets and can be put into operation in days. The problem is going to be coming up with enough fuel to feed them. If we can start making direct-carbon fuel cells running on charcoal, we can make one hell of a lot of fuel from agricultural and forestry wastes, or even tree-trimming wastes in forested cities.
I have literally nothing against nukes, but we can't sit on our hands until they light up.
So you know what they did? They asked me to be part of their policy-formation group. And I acted as critic and reality check.
I didn't sign onto their product because I thought it was way too timid (and if you've read Sustainability and EA2020, you'll know why), but I hadn't had time to finish my own analysis by their deadline so I cannot fault them.
Wouldn't you rather get that electricity from something we produce domestically? Something we even throw away? No terrorist is ever going to bomb a corn-stover terminal, you can bet on that. Why NOT run on a fuel which yields 80% efficiency? Or are you just jealous that you didn't propose it first? (I doubt we'd actually use it on anything as small as trucks, but the idea might have merit.)
Cellulosic ethanol would be better, but we use so much motor fuel in this country that we run into limits of carbon capture. We just can't grow enough biomass to even replace gasoline with it. (Syntec claims 100 gallons per ton with their gasification process. Replacing the energy of 140 billion gallons of gasoline would require about 210 billion gallons of ethanol. Got 2.1 billion tons of biomass handy? Even The Billion-Ton Vision only came up with 1.3 billion tons! For Iogen's enzymatic process yielding 70 gallons/ton, you'd have to start with 3 billion tons of inputs.)
The problem is, it doesn't matter if it can never work: the ethanol lobby uses some really dirty tricks to make sure they get your money.
Fixing this problem means eliminating the efficiency losses of both ethanol production and the internal combustion engine. Both have to go.
The problem with most of the algae-based systems is that they rely on powerplant exhaust as a carbon source, and don't even manage to capture all the carbon. They cannot be part of a carbon-neutral or carbon-negative energy system. A better possibility is a scheme for using wild-type algae growing on sewage-treatment effluent, pulling carbon out of the air. If this also captures and concentrates nutrients like phosphorus, it will be a triple-play: clean sewage, generate energy, recover elements otherwise lost.
"Sustainability" links to Greenfuel (a company which recently produced fuel-grade ethanol and biodiesel from carbon scavenged from the stack gas of a powerplant in Arizona), but there's now the example of Solix which might be a better fit. Solix's test system is growing algae on CO2 from a brewery, which is about what you'd get from the combination of fuel-cell exhaust and fermentation products of algal carbohydrates.
I'm a member in good standing of the animal kingdom (genus Homo), thankyouverymuch....
Unfortunately, just because it's money-positive doesn't do spit for energy. The energy balance of corn ethanol may be as low as breakeven, according to a recent MIT analysis; even the USDA's numbers only come out to 1.09:1 after you correct their math. Should you manage bring that up to 2:1, you can still generate barely 16 billion gallons-net of ethanol (energy equivalent to 10-11 billion gallons of gasoline) out of the entire US corn crop.
As for why we don't look at cellulose.... it's because cellulose is a tough polymer evolved to be hard for bugs to eat, and we are better off using pyrolysis (charring or burning it) instead of hydrolysis (breakdown into sugars) to get energy out of it.
Sustainability actually does propose converting cellulose to ethanol, but via a rather indirect path:
It goes by a roundabout route, but it doesn't require any funny business and it tries to get useful energy at every step.
A long-term solution, in this rapidly-moving technological environment, is 50 years.
You can bet that, absent massive climate change (which my proposal is crafted to help prevent), we won't have plants stop growing and cease generating organic wastes from diverse sources in the next 50 years. Before 50 years are up, I expect that solar PV will be cheaper than wind power and will be the principle source of electric power in most of the world. Wind and wave power look good to cope with night, clouds and other difficulties for PV, and storable energy of some kind (e.g. charcoal for direct-carbon fuel cells) will fill any gaps left over from hydro, nuclear and the rest.
World annual human energy consumption (about 400 quads from all sources, including nuclear heat input to electric production) is equivalent to about 40 minutes of global solar input. The direct effect is utterly trivial save on a very local basis; the warming we're seeing is from greenhouse gases which trap more of the 5.2 million quads of sun striking the atmosphere every year.
Though "paid liar" may be the most charitable thing I could call you.
Except that we never saw any hint of an imminent ice age. Advancing glaciers, later spring thaws... none of these things showed themselves.
We see all the signs of global warming, from temperature anomalies to the northward shift of plant hardiness zones. It's the difference between a theory having no basis, and a theory being irrefutably correct in the basics. This debate is exactly analogous to the scientific issues vs. political controversy over evolution: the scientists are talking about selection mechanisms and evidence of gene co-option, and the pols are listening to the cranks demanding that the science classroom discussions include "GODDIDIT".
Your role in this is to be an extra in the mob of cranks.
The cooling and contraction of the stratosphere is not a media-driven thing. It is a greenhouse-gas driven thing, as more and more IR radiation is filtered out of the windows where the gases of the stratosphere can absorb them. You might note that this is itself absolute proof that the surface warming is not driven by the sun; greater solar input would warm the stratosphere, not cool it.
And this rhetoric is typical of you propagandists. It's always "gravy trains" and "alarmist industries", without the slightest attention to the evidence. Evidence is the difference between alarmism and warning of a real threat, and it's the evidence that you cannot debate or even allow yourself to look at.
While you have been relentlessly attacking me for several posts (without linking to, or even mentioning, a single verifiable fact - for reasons which are no mystery anymore) you have never named the professional I allegedly attacked. Well, you won't find anyone named, or even referred to, in it. To borrow a phrase, it appears that every word you've written is a lie, including "and" and "the".
(aside before I end this: even Robert Zubrin is with me on the merits of hydrogen. He has a strong record in aerospace research; all you have is bald assertion.)
Let's talk about consequences here. If the scientific models are wrong but we act on them anyway, we might lose GDP equivalent to a small recession. Or we might show overall gains; most anti-GW measures are "no regrets" actions which have benefits beyond climate, such as reduced pollution and consequent improved public health. The march of technology makes this outcome highly likely - and it's the GW denialists (such as TXU) who want to build dozens of poorly-scrubbed coal plants which will dump particulates in the air and mercury in the food chain.
If the scientific models are right and we fail to act on them, we will lose GDP equivalent to a major global recession. We will also lose coastal cities around the world, and entire ecosystems along with millions of species. We'll lose all the fertile land in the world's river deltas which winds up under salt water. And the billions of people who lived on that l
You can't expect someone to understand something if their paycheck depends on them not understanding it.
Indeed, in no small part because the acidification of the oceans from increased CO2 (quite independent of the warming effects) is dissolving the calcareous exoskeletons of many varieties of sea life, the base structure of coral, and much more. The reduction in CO3-- ions compared to HCO3- reduces their access to building material in the first place.
The "peak oil" claim is not that we are about to have no oil. It is that the world's production rate of oil is about to peak and decline (just as the USA's production peaked in 1971 and declined, and any individual oilfield of significance you care to name). What this means is that prices will be much higher and more volatile, and the key to managing energy costs is cutting demand.
Tell it to the climate scientists who are measuring uncomfortable trends like rapidly rising methane emissions from former permafrost in Siberia, and the rumored rise in methane alerts from tanker detection systems along undersea gorges such as the one at the Hudson River. Former sinks are becoming sources.
Coal strata mostly date from the carboniferous, about 300 million years ago. Oil and oil shale dates as far back as the Cambrian, over 500 million years ago. This carbon has been out of circulation for as much as half a billion years, and no extant ecosystem or living species is adapted to the conditions which prevailed at that time.
As I mentioned before, the last time we had a surge in atmospheric CO2 (end of the Paleocene) we had a mass extinction. What sort of delusion lets you think that it wouldn't do the same thing all over again?
I highlighted that in case anyone reading this had doubts that you are delusional or dishonest.
Humans with mere axes and muscle-powered saws denuded the forests of Michigan in just a few years. (One consequence was the extinction of the Michigan Grayling, which required cold water in streams protected from direct sun. These ceased to exist, and the fish along with them.)
That was over a century ago (the fish finally died out in the 1930's). Since the late 19th century, our ability to change the environment has increased many-fold. The atmospheric concentration of CO2 tracks human emissions. In short, anyone who says what you're saying is either lying or delusional.
You are confusing a media-driven phenomenon of the time with scientific discussion which never claimed that glaciation was about to recur; this shows the shallowness of your knowledge. The scientists were looking at the historic climate cycles and noting that the current orbital fo
In other words, it's just another energy chain from hydrocarbons to wheels. After the fuel cell, the exhaust (though free of smog-forming or toxic chemicals) would probably be dumped, rather than stored and recycled.
I don't think you appreciate the sheer size of the problem. It would be one thing if we are running out of oil (we are), but we have already run out of Earth's capacity to absorb our carbon emissions. We have to convert to energy systems which do not take any carbon out of the ground and dump it into the air. This means that every pound of carbon we emit has to be pulled from the atmosphere, not the ground.
This is an enormous undertaking. Capturing carbon is a very difficult thing; 5 tons/acre/year is quite good. Our current use of carbon-based fuels is way beyond our ability to feed with what we can capture. We cannot depend primarily on liquid fuels any more. What we can do is shift most of our demand to electricity (which is surprisingly easy - there's a lot of energy in petroleum and coal but not very much of that is converted to useful work, and the grid has plenty of spare off-peak capacity). If you shift the primary transport energy supply to electricity, you can supply the remaining liquid-fuel needs relatively easily. If fossil fuels are required, they can be used in stationary plants which can sequester the carbon.
Unless we develop cheap photolytic hydrogen generators, hydrogen will be a trillion-dollar side trip. The future is not the Ford Airstream, it is the Chevy Volt.
Yes, and it's being pushed for two reasons:
Fortunately, first Toyota and now GM have realized that they can either break free of petroleum or be sacrificed to it. Ford, as great as my sympathies are for them, doesn't get it yet.
Which gives you not only the losses of the multiple conversions, but the ruinous expense of the equipment.
Which not only leaves you in a hydrocarbon economy, it transforms a compact fuel into an extremely bulky one (which still needs ruinously expensive equipment to make the best use of it).
If you're starting with any renewable energy source other than photolytic hydrogen (whether wind, solar, hydro, or biomass) or even nuclear power, your cheapest path from source to wheels doesn't go anywhere near hydrogen. You can turn biomass into charcoal at over 50% efficiency and then use the charcoal in a direct carbon fuel cell, you can get 40% field-to-terminals efficiency plus considerable energy yield from the conversion process. You can handle the fuel as either a powder or a water slurry, so no high-pressure gases; the tanks are small and cheap.
For anything except rockets or chemistry like ammonia synthesis, there is no sense in turning energy to hydrogen.