What I could find indicates that the last global heat wave is believed to have occurred over about 10,000 years. Humanity has raised the CO2 content of the atmosphere by about 30% in one century, and unless we decelerate our burning of fossil fuels, deforestation, etc. at least as quickly as we accelerated them, we'll do it again in this one. We're already up about 0.6C and that includes the dampening effects of pollutants (aerosols like sulfur) and the thermal inertia and CO2 absorption of the oceans. When the oceans get warm enough, that CO2 will fizz its way back out.... along with lots and lots of methane from the decomposition of clathrates on the continental shelves (which some people speculate may have been behind the odor in NYC last week; there's plenty of methane clathrate in the Hudson river canyon. And once those start feeding back through greater ocean warming, we could wind up with the arctic ocean at bathwater temperatures like the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum.
I'd rather not do this at all, let alone in a century. If we have use Paul Cruzen's idea and pump a million tons or so of sulfur into the stratosphere to push back towards center while we deal with the GHG's, I'm all for it.
If you start with an expensive raw material (sugar) and put it through a lossy process like gasification (the chemical efficiency is not stated, but a modern oxygen-blown coal gasifier runs about 76%) you're only going to get even more expensive energy out.
About the only way this makes sense is if you have some very cheap process for making the biomass, and/or a rather high-value use for the hydrogen. Running a laptop on energy-dense sugar syrup would probably qualify, but running a car would not.
As a consumer and someone who CAN produce his own hydrogen (Living in South Florida, I certainly do have access to significant amount of solar energy), do I really care how ineffecient splitting water is compared to a perfect solution?
I don't know, do you?
Let's look at specifics:
1 kg of hydrogen (1 gallon of gasoline equivalent), 41 kWh (148 MJ) of energy per kg.
On the input side of a 75%-efficient electrolyzer, 54.7 kWh/kg.
Fed by a solar PV array producing energy at $.20/kWh (trying to be generous here, on account of Florida's sun), $10.90/kg of hydrogen.
That doesn't count any depreciation or maintenance expenses of the electrolyzer or the compression energy (roughly 20% of the energy of the hydrogen) required to get it into reasonably small tanks. Compression energy would boost it to 62.9 kWh and $12.58/kg. Are you ready to pay around twice the European price of gasoline so you can run on solar hydrogen? The photolysis technology you'd need to do the job directly (and probably more cheaply) isn't even out of the laboratory yet. The PV electricity required to stuff your photolytic hydrogen in a tank would still cost you about $1.60/kg.
Suppose your car gets 62 miles/kg; that's about $.20/mile. But if you fed the same $.20/kWh solar electricity to a car-full of Li-ion batteries and your car used 250 watt-hours per mile, you'd be on the road for about $.05/mile. Is hydrogen so great that you'd go to such expensive lengths just to use it?
(Dammit, is there any legitimate reason for Slashdot to edit out the ¢ symbol escape?)
Off-peak would mean "at night". I've lived through a Texas summer; it does get cooler at night, the asphalt roads actually solidify!
A big enough electric-vehicle fleet would let you take advantage of surplus energy at any time of the day, not just at night. This would be great for Texas, because Texas wind could supply 1190 billion KWh/year, about 30% of US electric demand by itself. Take 20% of that (238 billion kWh), use it to charge vehicles consuming ~400 Wh/mile (much more than current EV's) for a state average of perhaps 20,000 miles/year, and you can run about 30 million vehicles on nothing but electricity. (You'd need about 90 GW of wind generation at 30% capacity factor, but today's ramp rate will have us there in 15 years or less.)
You can also use surplus juice to make ice for A/C the next day, or next week. You just keep topping up the bank whenever energy is available, and if you run too low you start up the extra fossil-fired plants. Meanwhile, you save $billions on expensive and depleting natural gas and the oil Texas now has to import from hostile countries.
Researchers found, in the Midwest and East, there is sufficient off-peak generation, transmission and distribution capacity to provide for all of today's vehicles if they ran on batteries. However, in the West, and specifically the Pacific Northwest, there is limited extra electricity because of the large amount of hydroelectric generation that is already heavily utilized. Since more rain and snow can't be ordered, it's difficult to increase electricity production from the hydroelectric plants.
It's only a difficulty in one region, and adding baseload plants in the PNW (restarting some of the cancelled nukes?) would address their energy deficiency. Or maybe lots of wind, because the hydropower is available for load managing. Either way, it's a policy decision, not an impossibility.
The inexpensive, long-lived room-temperature hydrogen fuel cell, and
Hydrogen fuel every 150 miles or so.
Without either of those, this is just a short-range electric car. <yawn>
PEM fuel cells have been one of the two stumbling blocks for hydrogen vehicles for years. It wasn't long ago that a stack for a car cost a half a million to a million dollars (due to hand-assembly and platinum content) and had a fairly short lifespan. Li-ion batteries to get the same range would cost a fraction as much, and they are coming down in price/kWh at a steady rate. Lifespan is going way up with the new chemistries and nanoparticle materials.
Hydrogen is the other form of Unobtanium. It would take something like a trillion dollars to build out a new hydrogen-fuelling infrastructure to replace petroleum motor fuels. (Got a spare trillion handy, or did it go for Bush's War?) Further, the production of hydrogen from non-fossil energy sources is very inefficient; a PEM electrolyzer is maybe 75% and a PEM fuel cell is about 60%, for a best-case throughput of 45% (before compression energy is considered). In contrast, a lithium-ion battery is about 95% efficient.
There are no ways around this; production of hydrogen from e.g. aluminum is much lossier than electrolysis. Making a renewable hydrogen economy requires not one but two kinds of Unobtanium.
So why's the US government pushing hydrogen? It's my suspicion that the oil interests want all the alt-energy money spent on things which cannot work, thus guaranteeing that taxpayer-funded research will never threaten their gravy train. A few million dollars in campaign funding thus buys them many $billions in increased revenue; probably the best investment they could ever make.
The groundedness of the opinions of the complainer DO MATTER if the subject is science.
Further, the claim that any popular political opinion should be presented in a science class is equivalent to a belief that public schools should be government-run political indoctrination mills.
This is why global warming raises such an alarm bell with me, because it never seems to be presented in this way.
Then maybe you want to fast-forward twenty years, until the science is accepted without manufactured controversy and the classroom treatment has had time to develop.
It isn't that soon yet, but we can't wait that long to act.
I have a suggestion for doing so. It is subject to revision, but so is every element of science and every engineering proposal. No, I have no financial stakes in any of this - yet.
Because if humans aren't the primary (I wouldn't say "sole") cause of the current warming trend, you have to explain things like the atmospheric CO2 level heading towards 30% greater than any time in the last million years, plus the levels of all the other sometimes-natural (N2O, CH4) and unnatural (CF4, SF6) greenhouse gases we're seeing.
You also have to explain the concurrent warming of the troposphere and poles while the stratosphere is cooling.
I really do want to read your take on this. It ought to be good.
The article's constant harping on the other beliefs of the person who filed the initial complaint is an attempt to use an ad-hominem to discredit all opposition to Gore's controversial position.
And you ignore the beliefs in things like radiative energy transfer and atmospheric and oceanic modelling which form the foundation of Gore's position. Not that Gore himself calculates the numbers, he's just the spokesman for a position based on the work of thousands of scientists.
Is that an ad-hominem? Could there be, perhaps, very firm reasons to dismiss and even ridicule Hardison while taking Gore seriously?
Reasons like dozens of climate models and as close to unanimity as you ever get from scientists (especially when some are paid to say otherwise)?
it is clear that the film itself is a propaganda piece promoting one side of a partisan political argument...
It is a "political argument" in the same way that "condoms prevent unwanted pregnancy and STD's", "abortion does not cause breast cancer", "HIV causes AIDS" and "Intelligent Design is not a scientific theory" are political arguments.
That last one is particularly appropriate, because it's been forced on science and scientists in opposition to the same anti-science, go-back-to-before-the-enlightenment crowd behind the "GW is a political controversy" position.
"Global warming and oil depletion mean we should abandon technological civilization and go back to dirt farming with animals" is a political argument. Politics is about policy. When people take the position that a statement of fact is a political position when it can be proven right or wrong, they are stretching the definition of "political" beyond its breaking point. They are doing exactly what the Roman Church did when it demanded that Galileo recant his position that the Earth was not the center of the universe.
Hardison's complaint was that showing such a partisan piece in a public school (where attendance is mandatory), with no voice from any of the opposing views, constitutes propaganda and indoctrination.
Someone as intelligent as you - and believe me, unless you've taken a blow to the head recently (or taken up heavy drinking, you teetotaler you) I know what that is - also knows that science education at the K-12 level is drastically simplified. It has to be; HS biology doesn't have time to deal with matters like introns and RNA interference and all the non-trivial elements of genetics, to list just one thing in one class. Given the enormous complexity of the body of knowledge and the slow pace of education in public schools, it can hardly be otherwise.
"An Inconvenient Truth" is a scientifically relevant presentation on matters of current interest. I would hardly say that a science class wouldn't be complete without it, but it is not out of place in K-12. In an AP-level class, it would ideally be used as an introduction to one-dimensional atmospheric modelling, perhaps with a tie-in to integral calculus.
Bringing up his other beliefs - and by implication attributing them to ALL who disagree with any of the films claims or its presentation in this manner - is itself another piece of partisan propaganda.
His other beliefs are quite relevant, as they have been tied politically to denial of anthropogenic global warming. Anti-science views in general are strongly associated with religious fundamentalism, and it cannot be wrong to say so unless Hardison has dissociated himself from same.
Geez. Of all the people I'd expect to adopt a relativist position on matters of science, you are the last I'd think of. Has moving to the Bay Area finally affected your mind, or is it just reaction to all the fruitcakes around you?
The only Li-ion chemistry which catches fire is the one with cobalt oxide cathodes; cobalt oxide + carbon -> cobalt metal + CO2 + heat. The lithium iron phosphate and lithium titanium oxide (spinel) cathodes can't do that; Valence Technology even does a demo where they fire a bullet through one of their cells and it just sits there.
Seattle's results were poor because they took buses optimised for stop-and-go operation and used them on express runs. It makes one wonder if there was a deliberate attempt to make the technology look bad... perhaps to throw support to a failing rail project?
What you need is hydrogen for Haber-process ammonia (nitrate) and carbon for conversion of rock phosphate to phosphorus (and thence to soluble phosphate); hydrogen usually comes from natural gas and carbon from coal, but there are substitutes. The amounts required are not large, and could be obtained from renewable sources. I took a shot at calculating the nitrogen numbers about a year ago. They work.
When I say fuel cost, I am talking about cost to the environment as that is what this whole thread is about.
But the Toyota page (very imprecise, I might add - popular, not scholarly) was not written that way, and it was wrong of you to read it that way. Oil costs much more per unit of carbon than coal; highly refined oil (gasoline), even more so. If the embodied energy in the car is mostly from coal, it will be much cheaper in currency than the same energy from oil (even as its environmental cost may be greater).
When they become equal, I mean that the extra fuel cost (CO2 emissions) on building the vehicle has been overcome by the extra efficiency of the vehicle.
You're using "cost" in an ambiguous, error-prone manner. I suggest you get out of the habit when writing "... for nerds, stuff that matters."
That's not what it says. It says the CO2 emissions are equal. Big difference.
Of course, that page also doesn't consider that the lifespan of a Prius (battery included) can easily exceed 300,000 km. Some in taxi service in Vancouver have gone close to 400,000 (over 230,000 miles) without anything more than scheduled maintenance. That was a while ago, they're probably a long way over that now.
The point is that the majority of the emissions (CO2 and other) from a car come from the fuel, both tailpipe and production. From this you can conclude that the net emissions (in ALL categories) will take a jump downward if the car is run partly on electricity, and some people are doing exactly that.
if you use cabs/bicycles/public transit combined with a car share service membership you will have much less of an impact that you would if you owned your own anything.
However true, that was totally unrelated to the thread of discussion where you inserted it.
In order to get off the "foreign oil tit", as you put it, we'd have to do alternatives for lubricants, plastics, asphalt, jet fuel, diesel oil, heating oil, etc.
Diesel and heating oil (combined under distillates) are somewhat more, but diesel consumption can be slashed by moving freight to rail, electrifying trucks (don't laugh, the tech is here) and just making them more efficient (WalMart is looking to double the economy of its fleet).
It would be quite difficult to run the US without imported oil, but it would be even harder to get all ground transport and electric generation off fossil fuels — but even that looks possible with current technology.
Perhaps you haven't stopped to think where that electricity that it is using in all-electric mode comes from -- it comes from converting hydrocarbons into mechanical energy and then mechanical energy into electricity.
And due to:
The more optimal loading of the engine,
The Atkinson cycle used by the engine, which recovers more energy of expansion, and
The smaller engine made possible by the electric motor,
More of that energy gets to the wheels by whatever route.
You could get 150 MPG using an ultralight car with a tiny engine (like a Loremo) but most people don't want to sacrifice performance, comfort or safety.
This is actually a less efficient process than direct conversion of hydrocarbons into mechanical energy, of course.
That would only be true if everything else was equal. However, claiming that they are equal is false, and anyone telling you so explicitly is a bald-faced liar.
Slashdot Mirror
Except your price for gasoline is with tax, and your price for hydrogen is sans tax.
What I could find indicates that the last global heat wave is believed to have occurred over about 10,000 years. Humanity has raised the CO2 content of the atmosphere by about 30% in one century, and unless we decelerate our burning of fossil fuels, deforestation, etc. at least as quickly as we accelerated them, we'll do it again in this one. We're already up about 0.6C and that includes the dampening effects of pollutants (aerosols like sulfur) and the thermal inertia and CO2 absorption of the oceans. When the oceans get warm enough, that CO2 will fizz its way back out.... along with lots and lots of methane from the decomposition of clathrates on the continental shelves (which some people speculate may have been behind the odor in NYC last week; there's plenty of methane clathrate in the Hudson river canyon. And once those start feeding back through greater ocean warming, we could wind up with the arctic ocean at bathwater temperatures like the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum.
I'd rather not do this at all, let alone in a century. If we have use Paul Cruzen's idea and pump a million tons or so of sulfur into the stratosphere to push back towards center while we deal with the GHG's, I'm all for it.
If you start with an expensive raw material (sugar) and put it through a lossy process like gasification (the chemical efficiency is not stated, but a modern oxygen-blown coal gasifier runs about 76%) you're only going to get even more expensive energy out.
About the only way this makes sense is if you have some very cheap process for making the biomass, and/or a rather high-value use for the hydrogen. Running a laptop on energy-dense sugar syrup would probably qualify, but running a car would not.
I don't know, do you?
Let's look at specifics:
That doesn't count any depreciation or maintenance expenses of the electrolyzer or the compression energy (roughly 20% of the energy of the hydrogen) required to get it into reasonably small tanks. Compression energy would boost it to 62.9 kWh and $12.58/kg. Are you ready to pay around twice the European price of gasoline so you can run on solar hydrogen? The photolysis technology you'd need to do the job directly (and probably more cheaply) isn't even out of the laboratory yet. The PV electricity required to stuff your photolytic hydrogen in a tank would still cost you about $1.60/kg.
Suppose your car gets 62 miles/kg; that's about $.20/mile. But if you fed the same $.20/kWh solar electricity to a car-full of Li-ion batteries and your car used 250 watt-hours per mile, you'd be on the road for about $.05/mile. Is hydrogen so great that you'd go to such expensive lengths just to use it?
(Dammit, is there any legitimate reason for Slashdot to edit out the ¢ symbol escape?)
Off-peak would mean "at night". I've lived through a Texas summer; it does get cooler at night, the asphalt roads actually solidify!
A big enough electric-vehicle fleet would let you take advantage of surplus energy at any time of the day, not just at night. This would be great for Texas, because Texas wind could supply 1190 billion KWh/year, about 30% of US electric demand by itself. Take 20% of that (238 billion kWh), use it to charge vehicles consuming ~400 Wh/mile (much more than current EV's) for a state average of perhaps 20,000 miles/year, and you can run about 30 million vehicles on nothing but electricity. (You'd need about 90 GW of wind generation at 30% capacity factor, but today's ramp rate will have us there in 15 years or less.)
You can also use surplus juice to make ice for A/C the next day, or next week. You just keep topping up the bank whenever energy is available, and if you run too low you start up the extra fossil-fired plants. Meanwhile, you save $billions on expensive and depleting natural gas and the oil Texas now has to import from hostile countries.
Without either of those, this is just a short-range electric car. <yawn>
PEM fuel cells have been one of the two stumbling blocks for hydrogen vehicles for years. It wasn't long ago that a stack for a car cost a half a million to a million dollars (due to hand-assembly and platinum content) and had a fairly short lifespan. Li-ion batteries to get the same range would cost a fraction as much, and they are coming down in price/kWh at a steady rate. Lifespan is going way up with the new chemistries and nanoparticle materials.
Hydrogen is the other form of Unobtanium. It would take something like a trillion dollars to build out a new hydrogen-fuelling infrastructure to replace petroleum motor fuels. (Got a spare trillion handy, or did it go for Bush's War?) Further, the production of hydrogen from non-fossil energy sources is very inefficient; a PEM electrolyzer is maybe 75% and a PEM fuel cell is about 60%, for a best-case throughput of 45% (before compression energy is considered). In contrast, a lithium-ion battery is about 95% efficient.
There are no ways around this; production of hydrogen from e.g. aluminum is much lossier than electrolysis. Making a renewable hydrogen economy requires not one but two kinds of Unobtanium.
So why's the US government pushing hydrogen? It's my suspicion that the oil interests want all the alt-energy money spent on things which cannot work, thus guaranteeing that taxpayer-funded research will never threaten their gravy train. A few million dollars in campaign funding thus buys them many $billions in increased revenue; probably the best investment they could ever make.
So if the natural warming would have occurred over 10,000 years, humans accellerating it to 100 is somehow okay? Clarify that, if you would.
The groundedness of the opinions of the complainer DO MATTER if the subject is science.
Further, the claim that any popular political opinion should be presented in a science class is equivalent to a belief that public schools should be government-run political indoctrination mills.
I will bet that you would find that... inconvenient for your personal religious position.
If you have an explanation for that, I really want to know what it is.
Then maybe you want to fast-forward twenty years, until the science is accepted without manufactured controversy and the classroom treatment has had time to develop.
It isn't that soon yet, but we can't wait that long to act.
I have a suggestion for doing so. It is subject to revision, but so is every element of science and every engineering proposal. No, I have no financial stakes in any of this - yet.
Because if humans aren't the primary (I wouldn't say "sole") cause of the current warming trend, you have to explain things like the atmospheric CO2 level heading towards 30% greater than any time in the last million years, plus the levels of all the other sometimes-natural (N2O, CH4) and unnatural (CF4, SF6) greenhouse gases we're seeing.
You also have to explain the concurrent warming of the troposphere and poles while the stratosphere is cooling.
I really do want to read your take on this. It ought to be good.
Is that an ad-hominem? Could there be, perhaps, very firm reasons to dismiss and even ridicule Hardison while taking Gore seriously?
Reasons like dozens of climate models and as close to unanimity as you ever get from scientists (especially when some are paid to say otherwise)?
It is a "political argument" in the same way that "condoms prevent unwanted pregnancy and STD's", "abortion does not cause breast cancer", "HIV causes AIDS" and "Intelligent Design is not a scientific theory" are political arguments.
That last one is particularly appropriate, because it's been forced on science and scientists in opposition to the same anti-science, go-back-to-before-the-enlightenment crowd behind the "GW is a political controversy" position.
"Global warming and oil depletion mean we should abandon technological civilization and go back to dirt farming with animals" is a political argument. Politics is about policy. When people take the position that a statement of fact is a political position when it can be proven right or wrong, they are stretching the definition of "political" beyond its breaking point. They are doing exactly what the Roman Church did when it demanded that Galileo recant his position that the Earth was not the center of the universe.
Someone as intelligent as you - and believe me, unless you've taken a blow to the head recently (or taken up heavy drinking, you teetotaler you) I know what that is - also knows that science education at the K-12 level is drastically simplified. It has to be; HS biology doesn't have time to deal with matters like introns and RNA interference and all the non-trivial elements of genetics, to list just one thing in one class. Given the enormous complexity of the body of knowledge and the slow pace of education in public schools, it can hardly be otherwise.
"An Inconvenient Truth" is a scientifically relevant presentation on matters of current interest. I would hardly say that a science class wouldn't be complete without it, but it is not out of place in K-12. In an AP-level class, it would ideally be used as an introduction to one-dimensional atmospheric modelling, perhaps with a tie-in to integral calculus.
His other beliefs are quite relevant, as they have been tied politically to denial of anthropogenic global warming. Anti-science views in general are strongly associated with religious fundamentalism, and it cannot be wrong to say so unless Hardison has dissociated himself from same.
Geez. Of all the people I'd expect to adopt a relativist position on matters of science, you are the last I'd think of. Has moving to the Bay Area finally affected your mind, or is it just reaction to all the fruitcakes around you?
You bought Exxon-Mobil's propaganda!
No, they're not giving prizes, sorry.
The only Li-ion chemistry which catches fire is the one with cobalt oxide cathodes; cobalt oxide + carbon -> cobalt metal + CO2 + heat. The lithium iron phosphate and lithium titanium oxide (spinel) cathodes can't do that; Valence Technology even does a demo where they fire a bullet through one of their cells and it just sits there.
Seattle's results were poor because they took buses optimised for stop-and-go operation and used them on express runs. It makes one wonder if there was a deliberate attempt to make the technology look bad... perhaps to throw support to a failing rail project?
Here's the real link (blast FireFox for omitting the prefix in history lists!)
What you need is hydrogen for Haber-process ammonia (nitrate) and carbon for conversion of rock phosphate to phosphorus (and thence to soluble phosphate); hydrogen usually comes from natural gas and carbon from coal, but there are substitutes. The amounts required are not large, and could be obtained from renewable sources. I took a shot at calculating the nitrogen numbers about a year ago. They work.
NYC Hybrid Buses Improve Fuel Economy 45% Over Diesel, 100% over CNG
My Google search terms
But the Toyota page (very imprecise, I might add - popular, not scholarly) was not written that way, and it was wrong of you to read it that way. Oil costs much more per unit of carbon than coal; highly refined oil (gasoline), even more so. If the embodied energy in the car is mostly from coal, it will be much cheaper in currency than the same energy from oil (even as its environmental cost may be greater).
You're using "cost" in an ambiguous, error-prone manner. I suggest you get out of the habit when writing "... for nerds, stuff that matters."
That's not what it says. It says the CO2 emissions are equal. Big difference.
Of course, that page also doesn't consider that the lifespan of a Prius (battery included) can easily exceed 300,000 km. Some in taxi service in Vancouver have gone close to 400,000 (over 230,000 miles) without anything more than scheduled maintenance. That was a while ago, they're probably a long way over that now.
The point is that the majority of the emissions (CO2 and other) from a car come from the fuel, both tailpipe and production. From this you can conclude that the net emissions (in ALL categories) will take a jump downward if the car is run partly on electricity, and some people are doing exactly that.
However true, that was totally unrelated to the thread of discussion where you inserted it.
Okay, post data for something else. DATA.
The EV1 was essentially built by hand (only 1100 were made) and NONE were ever sold, only leased on closed-end leases.
Your claim is refuted by the facts.
It would be quite difficult to run the US without imported oil, but it would be even harder to get all ground transport and electric generation off fossil fuels — but even that looks possible with current technology.
And due to:
- The more optimal loading of the engine,
- The Atkinson cycle used by the engine, which recovers more energy of expansion, and
- The smaller engine made possible by the electric motor,
More of that energy gets to the wheels by whatever route.You could get 150 MPG using an ultralight car with a tiny engine (like a Loremo) but most people don't want to sacrifice performance, comfort or safety.
That would only be true if everything else was equal. However, claiming that they are equal is false, and anyone telling you so explicitly is a bald-faced liar.