All current hybrids use NiMH batteries, which have no cadmium toxicity issues (unlike NiCd). They're soon going to switch to Li-ion because the specific power (kW/kg) and energy (Wh/kg) are better with some of the new chemistries.
Li-ion batteries have few toxicity issues either, and the new chemistries like iron phosphate and titanium spinel have even less.
Of course, it still makes sense to recycle batteries instead of landfilling them. Lead-acid car batteries are already the most-recycled items in the USA, and the more valuable the materials in the battery (nickel, lithium, cobalt in the old Li-ions) the more attractive it will be to recycle them.
I'm no longer a member of Technocrat, and I barely know what Hugg is. But I know Michael Milliken reads my blog, so I expect things to be noted at both Worldchanging and Windsofchange in the next week or two.
Throwing that much SO2 in the air is indeed asking for trouble. For starters, it won't save the Greenland and West Antarctica ice caps from melting (a planet with SO2 + CO2 will be much warmer at the poles and slightly cooler at the equator).
So you'd prefer considerably warmer at the equator and much, MUCH warmer at the poles? Until we can pull atmospheric CO2 (and other GHG's) back down, those are the alternatives. Not even space diffractors would alter the trend toward equalizing north-south temperatures.
Of course, we do have some choice of where we put the sulfur. If we reflected a lot more light away from the poles, we might even be able to re-establish some of that lost difference.
Pinatubo threw a lot more SO2 into the air than this scheme would require, and current industrial emissions are many times greater - the problem with our current emissions is that they're too much, too low in the atmosphere.
Photochemical smog is the product of reactions between hydrocarbons, oxides of nitrogen and ultraviolet light. Smog contains ozone. This has almost nothing to do with smog.
FWIW, I came out for something like this last April.
Shading the Earth won't get rid of the direct effects of excess CO2, such as ocean acidification and preferential growth promotion of undesirable plants like woody vines vs. trees. But the beauty of injecting a few million or tens of millions of tons of sulfur in the upper atmosphere is that it spreads out much more widely, the effects will reduce drought and heat stress which are killing plants and turning land into desert, and you might even cut the original pollution by taking the sulfur from some existing source.
Cutting heating and stress on plants looks like it reduces the CO2 problem directly, by enabling better CO2 uptake. If you don't believe me, take a look at the Keeling curve and tell me what else could explain the flattening in the two years after Pinatubo. Take your time, I'll wait.
That's triply true in the case of fuel cells. Hydrogen fuel cells are outrageous because they (until now) require hand-fabrication, have short membrane lifespans and need precious metals to catalyze their reactions. Zinc-air doesn't need precious metals, and direct-carbon fuel cells run hot enough to get by with thermal activation. These technologies require some R&D to get them to mass-production status, but they are potentially very cheap.
Old thinking isn't going to solve this problem. The mountains of horse poop on city streets weren't solved by making poopless horses, and the problem of piston-engine inefficiency and pollution isn't going to be solved by better piston engines. We're going to have to go with batteries of some kind, because electricity is the sine qua non for clean and efficient.
Since we have to scrap the internal combustion engine anyway, we might as well go for a scheme which is tailored to get renewable energy down to wheels as efficiently as we can. Zinc-air fuel cells are a really good one (you can use bio-carbon to reduce ZnO to metal, or regenerate using electricity from any source) and direct-carbon fuel cells are also pretty good if not so flexible (they require a source of carbon, not just electricity).
And that's a fact. Even if you got all 1.3 billion tons/year which ORNL believes might ultimately be available (after years of reforming to make it possible), you'd only get enough alcohol to replace about 65% of US gasoline consumption. That leaves nothing for diesel, heating oil, jet fuel, LPG, chemicals, or other fuels like coal and natural gas.
This can only lead to disaster when the salvation that people have been waiting for, fails to arrive (like the Ghost Dance). What's scary is that Khosla has to know this... but he's still pushing it as hard as he can. I can only think that he intends to clean up from the misery of the American public.
If you think Khosla isn't blowing smoke, tell me where we'd get the biomass and what kind of yield is required. Otherwise, shut up.
Capturing carbon from the air is the hard part. If you can keep hold of that carbon and recycle it without diluting it by three thousand to one and re-concentrating it, you've saved yourself a huge amount of effort (and not having to discard the entropy saves a huge amount of energy).
Switchgrass is far less efficient than PV panels, and some schemes yield photolytic hydrogen. If you can turn e.g. methanol and oxygen into CO2 and H2O at one end, and CO2 and hydrogen into methanol and H2O at the other, you've got a cycle which can produce far more energy per square meter than a field of grass. The only thing you'd use grass for is to feed carbon into the system and replace losses.
That page does not list dates, but the reference to "Inquisition" and "woodcuts" indicates that such activities are a couple hundred years in the past.
inquisition, the members of the christian religion have been motivated by their religious beliefs to commit innumerable atrocities, from the crusades to the guy who shot up a gay bar last week.
Only the last is any kind of point, and I'll note that the perpetrator's religion was all but certainly pure rather than tempered by secularism and its emphasis on reason. "Whoever can make you believe impossibilities, can make you commit atrocities."
this is not the arguments of two individuals, rather it is judging the credibility of information sources.
What you miss is the distinction between societies based on truth and fairness, and societies based on "honor". Truth is no defense in the latter, and is actively and even violently discourged if it doesn't look good.
I think the Christians include plenty of nutters (people who murder doctors for serving a willing clientele, and those who support them, are way off the scale) but I've never heard of a protest which resulted in the protestors killing each other.
Convince a French magazine to draw Christ as a bomb toting terrorist and we'll see.
You can find Muslims drawing Christians as pigs and Ariel Sharon eating babies all the time (though Sharon has become a less popular subject after his stroke). This not only does not cause violent protests, it passes almost without notice.
I find it very ironic that every point you raised as a hypothetical already has evidence which supports the case that Islamic societies (and probably Islam itself) are inherently barbaric even compared to the worst the USA has to offer.
2) Criticism from within a culture is different to criticism from without - can you imagine if it'd been an arab who made piss christ?
They do a lot worse all the time. I'd like you to list one reaction even remotely similar to the staged protests over the Mohammed photos in the Jyllandsposten. Just one.
What you imply is that if a culture suppresses criticism from itself, it should be immune from all criticism. That is a double standard. Further, you imply that the validity of a critique depends not on what it says but on who says it. That's ad-hominem. It's standard leftist ideology, and it's amazing that any person can espouse it and claim to be educated; the cognitive dissonance required to hold it should break any functioning mind.
To give just one counter-example, wind farms have roughly a 3-month payback period and EROEI of 80:1 over an estimated 20-year lifespan.
I'm pro-nuke AND pro-wind, but I see people like Teddy Kennedy and Greenpeace shutting down both of them because they refuse to make decisions. The NIMBY monster has grown to BANANA (Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anything), and the consequence is that the owners of the current energy systems are laughing all the way to the bank because NIMBYism has blocked all the alternatives.
The governor of Missouri moved to shut the plant down because of its extreme odor problems. The plant owners claimed the difficulty was a leaking seal (how long would it have taken them to fix a leaking seal?), but the list of modifications they made to deal with the problem says that it was a far bigger issue. Last I read, they were open again. Unfortunately, I had no time to stop in Carthage last month so I couldn't check it out for myself.
From 1 BTU of fossil inputs, even the USDA calculates that you only get about 1.34 BTU of ethanol out. Think about that for a minute; to make 1 billion gallons net, you'd have to make almost 4 billion gallons gross and recycle ~3 billion gallons just to run the process! Anything that cut your efficiency a bit would reduce the output to or below zero.
I did those numbers last year, and in four separate pieces I was forced to conclude that
ethanolisaboondoggle.
The UNH studies are assuming that the algae is a monoculture, kept isolated from other stuff by taking CO2 from powerplant exhaust instead of the atmosphere. They are investigating "photobioreactors", which implies this. Taking the carbon from a fossil stream means the process is non-renewable.
I don't think it will work. If you try to capture carbon from the atmosphere to close the loop, natural limits bring the productivity way down. Then you have the inefficiency (60% loss) and pollution of the engines.
If you're going to change the world, don't go halfway. There are at least five battery or capacitor technologies either on the market or near market (Firefly Energy carbon-foam lead-acid battery, A123Systems Li-ion cell, EEStor ultracapacitor, several companies making zinc-air batteries, aluminum batteries) which can supply enough energy density and recharge fast enough to eliminate the need for combustion engines. If your vehicle doesn't need a carbon fuel, you don't need to capture carbon to power it; you can use anything that makes electricity. The list of things that make electricity is a lot longer and some of them (e.g. wind) are mighty cheap per kWh.
No problem, man! The folks who can make oil out of turkey guts should be able to process lobbyists and fat, drunken wind-farm opponents just fine. (I don't know how many of the latter you could get, but the former appear to be a highly renewable resource.)
First, most of the newer plants and ethanol "farmers" are using ethanol powered equipment.
Most of the equipment used in agriculture is diesel-powered. Who makes the ethanol equipment? Are they converted diesels or refitted spark-ignition engines? Who builds the fuel systems? (I found a reference to an 800-hour test with EtOH blended with #2 diesel, and another where the fuel was 15% EtOH and 80% diesel. Big whoopee.)
Further, more and more of the ethanol is not coming from specifically grown crops, but agricultural waste and "garbage". (Yes this is personal knowledge here).
It was my impression that the fuel distilleries bought grain on the open market, or spoiled grain not fit for consumption. How do the "ethanol" farmers know they're growing for the fuel market? Especially the ones whose grain gets mold and isn't fit for other uses? Since you have personal knowledge I'm sure you won't mind explaining the details and linking to a few references.
Cellulosic ethanol is reaching the 4-6:1 energy range. Indeed, it does much of this by producing the necessary gasses used in the process (think of in-process recycling).
That statement begs two questions:
What's the fraction of fuel ethanol produced from cellulose vs. grain?
What's the excuse for giving subsidies to grain alcohol when it does not significantly improve energy supplies or security?
Cellulosic ethanol is indeed far, far better than corn likker. But it's still awfully inefficient; you take a dry ton of biomass at 16.1 GJ and you get 87 gallons of ethanol at ~84000 BTU/gallon (total 7.3 million BTU, or 7.7 GJ) out. That's less than 50% conversion efficiency, and even if you can get your drivetrain efficiency up to 20% (the average is 14.9%) you're down to less than 10% field-to-wheels. Maybe some of the fermentation byproducts have value as animal feed or something, but that still stinks.
If you took that ton of biomass and burned it in a combined-cycle plant achieving 40% efficiency, then used it to charge batteries you could probably get 25-30% efficiency field-to-wheels. You might be able to use the waste heat for other purposes, too; you can't do that with a distillery.
I also love this "logic":
How does the Prius do on this account? Poorly at best. A Prius or other hybrid does nothing to increase a shift away from "gas guzzling". And it does so at a serious risk to future problems.
A vehicle which gets more than double the MPG of your average light truck "does nothing"; never mind that it could be converted to E85 if the incentive structure gave credit for it. Yeah, that's some reasoning.
For example, currently most of the transportation infrastructure such as roads and bridges are paid for by gasoline taxes at the pump. Governments have already started increasing these taxes and considering raising them in accordance with better fuel economy. Why? Simple: as fuel economy improves dramatically, revenues will decrease. We all know that no government likes decreasing revenues.
Since corn ethanol contributes almost nothing to our energy security, why not eliminate its 52 cents/gallon Federal tax subsidy? That would raise more revenue than all the hybrids on the road don't pay, never mind that they tend to be light and cause a much lower share of road damage than heavy trucks. Besides, it would be simple to raise the gas tax by a penny here and a penny there to make up for the changing composition of the fleet. Nobody would notice, and the bulk of the cost would be paid by the people who create the bulk of the damage: those with big, heavy, gas-guzzling vehicles.
Slashdot Mirror
All current hybrids use NiMH batteries, which have no cadmium toxicity issues (unlike NiCd). They're soon going to switch to Li-ion because the specific power (kW/kg) and energy (Wh/kg) are better with some of the new chemistries.
Li-ion batteries have few toxicity issues either, and the new chemistries like iron phosphate and titanium spinel have even less.
Of course, it still makes sense to recycle batteries instead of landfilling them. Lead-acid car batteries are already the most-recycled items in the USA, and the more valuable the materials in the battery (nickel, lithium, cobalt in the old Li-ions) the more attractive it will be to recycle them.
I'm no longer a member of Technocrat, and I barely know what Hugg is. But I know Michael Milliken reads my blog, so I expect things to be noted at both Worldchanging and Windsofchange in the next week or two.
So you'd prefer considerably warmer at the equator and much, MUCH warmer at the poles? Until we can pull atmospheric CO2 (and other GHG's) back down, those are the alternatives. Not even space diffractors would alter the trend toward equalizing north-south temperatures.
Of course, we do have some choice of where we put the sulfur. If we reflected a lot more light away from the poles, we might even be able to re-establish some of that lost difference.
Pinatubo threw a lot more SO2 into the air than this scheme would require, and current industrial emissions are many times greater - the problem with our current emissions is that they're too much, too low in the atmosphere.
Photochemical smog is the product of reactions between hydrocarbons, oxides of nitrogen and ultraviolet light. Smog contains ozone. This has almost nothing to do with smog.
FWIW, I came out for something like this last April.
Shading the Earth won't get rid of the direct effects of excess CO2, such as ocean acidification and preferential growth promotion of undesirable plants like woody vines vs. trees. But the beauty of injecting a few million or tens of millions of tons of sulfur in the upper atmosphere is that it spreads out much more widely, the effects will reduce drought and heat stress which are killing plants and turning land into desert, and you might even cut the original pollution by taking the sulfur from some existing source.
Cutting heating and stress on plants looks like it reduces the CO2 problem directly, by enabling better CO2 uptake. If you don't believe me, take a look at the Keeling curve and tell me what else could explain the flattening in the two years after Pinatubo. Take your time, I'll wait.
That's triply true in the case of fuel cells. Hydrogen fuel cells are outrageous because they (until now) require hand-fabrication, have short membrane lifespans and need precious metals to catalyze their reactions. Zinc-air doesn't need precious metals, and direct-carbon fuel cells run hot enough to get by with thermal activation. These technologies require some R&D to get them to mass-production status, but they are potentially very cheap.
Brazil's vehicle fuel mix has about twice as much diesel as gasoline; ethanol is up to about 60% of the gasoline number, but Brazil's "miracle" is 90% oil drilling vs. 10% ethanol.
And yes, my blog IS the first on Rapier's blogroll. That ought to tell you something.
Butanol is a dead end mostly because it's only fit for the same 15%-efficient internal-combustion drivetrains which are wasting so much petroleum today.
Old thinking isn't going to solve this problem. The mountains of horse poop on city streets weren't solved by making poopless horses, and the problem of piston-engine inefficiency and pollution isn't going to be solved by better piston engines. We're going to have to go with batteries of some kind, because electricity is the sine qua non for clean and efficient.
Since we have to scrap the internal combustion engine anyway, we might as well go for a scheme which is tailored to get renewable energy down to wheels as efficiently as we can. Zinc-air fuel cells are a really good one (you can use bio-carbon to reduce ZnO to metal, or regenerate using electricity from any source) and direct-carbon fuel cells are also pretty good if not so flexible (they require a source of carbon, not just electricity).
And that's a fact. Even if you got all 1.3 billion tons/year which ORNL believes might ultimately be available (after years of reforming to make it possible), you'd only get enough alcohol to replace about 65% of US gasoline consumption. That leaves nothing for diesel, heating oil, jet fuel, LPG, chemicals, or other fuels like coal and natural gas.
I've detailed all of that in my own open letter to Vinod Khosla. Supporting information is all over my blog.
This can only lead to disaster when the salvation that people have been waiting for, fails to arrive (like the Ghost Dance). What's scary is that Khosla has to know this... but he's still pushing it as hard as he can. I can only think that he intends to clean up from the misery of the American public.
If you think Khosla isn't blowing smoke, tell me where we'd get the biomass and what kind of yield is required. Otherwise, shut up.
Capturing carbon from the air is the hard part. If you can keep hold of that carbon and recycle it without diluting it by three thousand to one and re-concentrating it, you've saved yourself a huge amount of effort (and not having to discard the entropy saves a huge amount of energy).
Switchgrass is far less efficient than PV panels, and some schemes yield photolytic hydrogen. If you can turn e.g. methanol and oxygen into CO2 and H2O at one end, and CO2 and hydrogen into methanol and H2O at the other, you've got a cycle which can produce far more energy per square meter than a field of grass. The only thing you'd use grass for is to feed carbon into the system and replace losses.
- "Piss Christ"
- The elephant-dung Madonna.
- Hateful characterizations of all people who do not practice Wahhabi Islam
I think the Christians include plenty of nutters (people who murder doctors for serving a willing clientele, and those who support them, are way off the scale) but I've never heard of a protest which resulted in the protestors killing each other. You can find Muslims drawing Christians as pigs and Ariel Sharon eating babies all the time (though Sharon has become a less popular subject after his stroke). This not only does not cause violent protests, it passes almost without notice.I find it very ironic that every point you raised as a hypothetical already has evidence which supports the case that Islamic societies (and probably Islam itself) are inherently barbaric even compared to the worst the USA has to offer.
You don't have to look far to find comments by Ward "little Eichmanns" Churchill.
What you imply is that if a culture suppresses criticism from itself, it should be immune from all criticism. That is a double standard. Further, you imply that the validity of a critique depends not on what it says but on who says it. That's ad-hominem. It's standard leftist ideology, and it's amazing that any person can espouse it and claim to be educated; the cognitive dissonance required to hold it should break any functioning mind.
Islamic violence and hate is a fact. News organizations censor facts at the risk of their credibility.
To give just one counter-example, wind farms have roughly a 3-month payback period and EROEI of 80:1 over an estimated 20-year lifespan.
I'm pro-nuke AND pro-wind, but I see people like Teddy Kennedy and Greenpeace shutting down both of them because they refuse to make decisions. The NIMBY monster has grown to BANANA (Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anything), and the consequence is that the owners of the current energy systems are laughing all the way to the bank because NIMBYism has blocked all the alternatives.
The governor of Missouri moved to shut the plant down because of its extreme odor problems. The plant owners claimed the difficulty was a leaking seal (how long would it have taken them to fix a leaking seal?), but the list of modifications they made to deal with the problem says that it was a far bigger issue. Last I read, they were open again. Unfortunately, I had no time to stop in Carthage last month so I couldn't check it out for myself.
To be specific, biodiesel is methyl or ethyl esters of fatty acids.
I did those numbers last year, and in four separate pieces I was forced to conclude that ethanol is a boondoggle.
I don't think it will work. If you try to capture carbon from the atmosphere to close the loop, natural limits bring the productivity way down. Then you have the inefficiency (60% loss) and pollution of the engines.
If you're going to change the world, don't go halfway. There are at least five battery or capacitor technologies either on the market or near market (Firefly Energy carbon-foam lead-acid battery, A123Systems Li-ion cell, EEStor ultracapacitor, several companies making zinc-air batteries, aluminum batteries) which can supply enough energy density and recharge fast enough to eliminate the need for combustion engines. If your vehicle doesn't need a carbon fuel, you don't need to capture carbon to power it; you can use anything that makes electricity. The list of things that make electricity is a lot longer and some of them (e.g. wind) are mighty cheap per kWh.
No problem, man! The folks who can make oil out of turkey guts should be able to process lobbyists and fat, drunken wind-farm opponents just fine. (I don't know how many of the latter you could get, but the former appear to be a highly renewable resource.)
I'm going on vacation and this thread will be closed by the time I get back. Feel free to have the last word.
Most of the equipment used in agriculture is diesel-powered. Who makes the ethanol equipment? Are they converted diesels or refitted spark-ignition engines? Who builds the fuel systems? (I found a reference to an 800-hour test with EtOH blended with #2 diesel, and another where the fuel was 15% EtOH and 80% diesel. Big whoopee.)
It was my impression that the fuel distilleries bought grain on the open market, or spoiled grain not fit for consumption. How do the "ethanol" farmers know they're growing for the fuel market? Especially the ones whose grain gets mold and isn't fit for other uses? Since you have personal knowledge I'm sure you won't mind explaining the details and linking to a few references.
That statement begs two questions:
Cellulosic ethanol is indeed far, far better than corn likker. But it's still awfully inefficient; you take a dry ton of biomass at 16.1 GJ and you get 87 gallons of ethanol at ~84000 BTU/gallon (total 7.3 million BTU, or 7.7 GJ) out. That's less than 50% conversion efficiency, and even if you can get your drivetrain efficiency up to 20% (the average is 14.9%) you're down to less than 10% field-to-wheels. Maybe some of the fermentation byproducts have value as animal feed or something, but that still stinks.
If you took that ton of biomass and burned it in a combined-cycle plant achieving 40% efficiency, then used it to charge batteries you could probably get 25-30% efficiency field-to-wheels. You might be able to use the waste heat for other purposes, too; you can't do that with a distillery.
I also love this "logic":
A vehicle which gets more than double the MPG of your average light truck "does nothing"; never mind that it could be converted to E85 if the incentive structure gave credit for it. Yeah, that's some reasoning.
Since corn ethanol contributes almost nothing to our energy security, why not eliminate its 52 cents/gallon Federal tax subsidy? That would raise more revenue than all the hybrids on the road don't pay, never mind that they tend to be light and cause a much lower share of road damage than heavy trucks. Besides, it would be simple to raise the gas tax by a penny here and a penny there to make up for the changing composition of the fleet. Nobody would notice, and the bulk of the cost would be paid by the people who create the bulk of the damage: those with big, heavy, gas-guzzling vehicles.