By 2025 it is estimated that light trucks and cars (i.e. average Joe vehicles) will account for 45% of the US oil consumption.
You're way behind the times; they already do. The US burns about 9 million barrels/day of motor gasoline out of a hair over 20 million total.
Lightweight SUV class vehicles have been demonstrated using plain gasoline to acheive fuel economy beating today's compact and subcompact cars. By 2025 it is estimated that light trucks and cars (i.e. average Joe vehicles) will account for 45% of the US oil consumption.
Setting aside the question of why you drive a Suburban while touting light SUV-class stuff (hypocrisy?), the SUV form factor is inherently draggier than a car. The same powerplant technologies that can make a 40 MPG SUV can make an 80 MPG car. You know, like the Daimler-Chrysler ESX3, the GM ParadiGM and the Ford whateveritwas.
Hogwash. Do some research to at least validate part of your namesake.
Take it from the horse's mouth: 2005 ethanol production was only ~4 billion gallons. Production this year isn't even projected to reach 6 billion gallons.
Cellulosic ethanol has so much resource available to it only someone ignorant of the reality would make such a statement. Apparently this includes you. Cellulosic ethanol utilizes paper sludge, grasses, agricultural waste (of which we produce about one billion tons/year) that currently is generally burned or dumped into landfills. Waste biomass along can produce approximately 25-30 billion gallons of ethanol per year at current level of conversion technology.
I've read The Billion-Ton Vision. It projects a whole 10% of transportation fuels will come from biomass in 2020 (see the sidebar in the first page of the introduction, page 18).
How many people can actually use E85 when ethanol is only 10% of transportation fuel? That's the proof that the whole flex-fuel vehicle thing is a scam. The auto companies are getting CAFE credits for guzzling monsters that can run on E85, without there being enough ethanol to run more than a small fraction of them.
Production of ethanol loses about 50% of the energy right off the top; it disappears into the process either as metabolic losses of the yeast or process heat in hydrolization or distillation. That's energy that can be used productively if you aren't wedded to the idea of using liquid fuels. There are other ways to use biomass, such as carbonization. Direct-carbon fuel cells (a variant of molten-carbonate fuel cells) can convert charcoal to electricity at up to 80% efficiency, and the off-gas from carbonization is combustible and can run engines. With a scheme like that, you can do a lot more than just offset some fraction of oil consumption; you can:
Provide all transport energy.
Between carbonization and wind, provide most scheduled electric generation requirements now provided by gas and coal.
Manufacture excess charcoal for use as a carbon-sequestering soil amendment (search for "terra preta de los indios", or start reading here).
Ethanol is a very lossy way of making biomass suitable for even lossier internal combustion engines. It's a dead end.
By using industry standard breeding and cropping practices, by 2050 using switc
The crude that comes out of this source is actually easier to refine.
Which source? The product of oil sands is solid at room temperature, and requires both cracking and desulfurization IIRC.
In at least two of the processes natural gas is a suprluss [sic] product.
I think you have not learned the distinction between natural gas, cracker off-gas and synthesis gas. They are not interchangeable.
Water usage isn't the issue for this source, power is. Hence part of the political roadblock. Indeed, if used intelligently, this process can be used to produce surpluss *clean* water, as well as power for the electrical grid.
Production of oil from tar sands requires 2 barrels of water per barrel of oil. The situation with Fischer-Tropsch (the governor of Montana wants to use coal-to-liquids to prop up his economy) is roughly the same.
You don't get a free ride if you use in-situ retorting. Here's what The Rand Corporation has to say about it:
All high-grade western oil shale resources lie in the Colorado River drainage basin. For mining and surface retorting, the major water quality issue is the leaching of salts and toxics from spent shale. A number of approaches are available for preventing surface water contamination from waste piles, but it is not clear whether these methods represent a permanent solution that will be effective after the site is closed and abandoned. For in-situ retorting, inadequate information is available on the fate, once extraction operations cease, of salts and other minerals that are commingled with oil shale.
There's no proof that freeze-walls will work on such a large scale, that the boreholes will remain open as the shale is retorted (it expands, which would tend to occlude the bores), or several of the other things that would have to work to get the oil out. We can be pretty certain that production cannot be ramped up fast enough to compensate for declining production elsewhere. We can be pretty much assured that the groundwater in the area will be a toxic mess for millennia, though.
E85 provides a transition to ethanol driven fuel cells. Ethanol driven fuel cells are showing the best potential as far as infrastructure requirements.
Hogwash. The US burns about 140 billion gallons of gasoline every year, and another 63 billion gallons of distillate (diesel). You're not going to replace that with ethanol (especially not from corn!), and you've still got the remaining 1/3 of US demand that goes to non-transportation uses. US production of ethanol is due to get up to around 5 billion gallons/year. Uh, w00t?
The best replacement for petroleum transportation fuel isn't alternative petroleum, it's electricity. The grid is here, and its spare capacity in off-peak hours is enough to move several times as much energy as our vehicles need (total generation capacity almost 1 TW, average is ~450 GW; do the math). We've got several suitable varieties of Li-ion batteries on the market already, a carbon-backed lead-acid technology (which radically reduces weight and increases lifespan) coming, and several different supercapacitor technologies either on the market or under development (EEStor). To keep electricity from becoming the transport energy source of choice, ALL of them will have to fail. Electricity has further advantages:
Stationary plants can sacrifice lightness and form factor for high efficiency and cleanliness.
Stationary plants can use energy sources which cannot be packaged for a vehicle.
Stationary plants can co-generate with fuel being used for heat.
if you have to live with using only 5% of the energy that you use now, what will you choose to use it on? Take it as a thought experiment - you're not allowed to invent ways to produce your own energy; assume that this has already been done.
Total wind-power potential of the USA is about 1.2 TW, or about 4 kW/capita (we currently use about 450 GW average, or 1.5 kW/capita). That's 40% of Americans' 10 kW/capita consumption from all sources right there (and there's another 3 kW/capita on the continental shelves for a further 30%). Add some efficiency and you've got the American lifestyle without compromises right there.
Then there's solar. The US has about 113,000 km^2 of impervious surface (pavement, roofs, etc.). If you can cover 30% of this with PV, the PV has 15% efficiency and the average insolation is 1300 kWh/m^2/year (somewhat less than mid-Kansas gets), that would be 44.1 trillion kWH of sunlight from which you'd get 6.61 trillion kWh of electricity (755 GW average). That's another 2.5 kW/capita just from 30% of area we've already got covered with stuff, and you're getting it net after conversion losses.
Reducing per-capita energy to 500 watts might be an interesting thought experiment, but as a prediction of the future... ridiculous.
When you consider that 1 ppmv of CO2 is created from 1 ppmv of O2 and we've currently got over 200,000 ppmv of O2, reports of the demise of atmospheric oxygen have been greatly exaggerated.
We do need to do something about climate change. There are even things we can do in the short term; if a single volcanic eruption can lower global temperatures by 0.6 C and bring sea levels down by half a centimeter (Pinatubo), humanity's far greater output of things like sulfur can probably reproduce this if we only use them to best effect. Once we've slowed the Greenland glaciers back to their normal speed and prevented the Siberian peat bogs from thawing and belching gigatonnes of methane, we'll have time to work on the rest of the problem.
Which doesn't matter one bit if you can't produce it fast enough (due to limitations on e.g. water for gasification or natural gas for upgrading and desulfurization) to keep pace with the decline of conventional oil.
And that oil is declining. Cantarell (Mexico's biggest field) has peaked. Kuwait's biggest field has peaked. Even Ghawar has peaked (and if you don't know what that that means, you don't know enough to expound on this subject). A million barrels a day from Alberta tar sands will offset a whole 5% decline in other US sources. Big whoop. Even if it pays off, you still have to replace most of that oil with something else.
When I get 10MPG on E85, I am getting 67MPG of gasoline. Now who requires more oil to drive around, my Suburban or the Prius?
Your Suburban, by far.
Ethanol does not come straight from the field; it requires considerable inputs to grow the crop, and more to turn it into liquid fuel. The average EROEI that I've seen for ethanol from today's sources is 1.34:1; the most optimistic is 1.67:1. Further, about 20% of the energy in a gallon of E85 is from petroleum. Summing that up, you've got:
0.15 gallon of gasoline per gallon E-85
Of the 0.6 gallons-gasoline-equivalent of ethanol in the.85 gallons of ethanol, between.36 and.48 gallons-equivalent is from fossil fuels (petroleum, coal and natural gas).
Your total fossil energy per gallon of E85:.51 to.63 gallons-equivalent of fossil energy. The Prius is doing twice as well as you at its worst, three times at best!
Global warming has finally been explained: the Earth is getting hotter because the Sun is burning more brightly than at any time during the past 1,000 years, according to new research.
Your "explanation" only accounts for about 30% of the observed warming, even if the estimates of historical solar output are correct.
At the same time, estimates of solar output in the past are extremely uncertain, and so there is a great deal of scope in blaming any unexplained phenomena on solar changes without fear of contradiction.
In contrast to the claims of solar output, historical temperature data is quite firm and atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases are accurately known for almost a million years.
In short, the claim you're making is a canard.
It is us monkeys, who have been actively measuring temperatures for two hundred years at best and are reconstructing climate history with very limited devices and methology that are getting overtly excited when we still have no idea whatsoever as what is "normal" on this planet in this part of the galaxy.
On the contrary. We have an excellent idea of what is "normal" in human history, and how poorly we're likely to do if things change seriously. We're already seeing damage to ecosystems.
The other thing to take home is that there are a lot of people on this planet all too happy to abuse doomsday predictions to further their agendas both socially and economically.
Given the number of people with interests in the status quo who will abuse any trivial uncertainty as an excuse to continue doing what they're doing, I find your projection very ironic.
Last verse of "Never set the cat on fire", to be specific:
Don't start an interstellar war, it has no proper uses When they ask what you did it for, you'll only make excuses If thirty billion folks get hurt You'll go to bed with no dessert Don't start an interstellar war And mind your manners as circumstances may require And never set the cat on fire.
It may be news to you, but rock formations have stored CO2 for geologic time; some of these CO2 deposits are already being pumped to do secondary recovery on oil reservoirs. Even lighter molecules, like methane, have been trapped for hundreds of millions of years.
If you really want to make sure "eventually" means aeons, you could feed the CO2 to those oleaginous algae and then dump the veggie oil in the ground. On the other hand, you've got the next 100,000 years to decide what to do, so as long as you get the CO2 out of the atmosphere now there's no big hurry.
you've correctly pounced on a less-than-fully-technically-accurate use of the phrase "closed-loop system".
You mean "deceptive and dishonest". A once-through, two-step system whose entire output consists of fossil carbon is better than a once-through, one-step system, true. But it is nowhere near a closed loop, and it's not honest to describe it as such.
it can be a resource-friendly system because it can be a sorta "closed-ish loop", with respect to irrigation.
Irrigation is not the big problem facing the globe. The world is covered in saltwater; we could grow halophilic algae in brine (salty enough to kill most competitors) and never have to worry about where to get more water from as long as it was within pipeline distance of an ocean. The problem is atmospheric carbon, and this process does not reverse the direction (ground to atmosphere), it only reduces the rate.
I'll let you do the calculation of the energy required to get a ton of CO2 into the system (let's see, energy equals volume times pressure, you've got 385 ppm of CO2 in the atmosphere...) and also extract the humidity from the far end to recycle the evaporated water.
Plus the capital cost of the air pumps, pipes and dehumidification gear.
producing CO, via zinc refining or some other process, isn't really "carbon negative", because you're just going to sell that CO to somebody who will likely use it to produce CO2 at some point...
If they produce CO2 in a stationary plant (e.g. a Fischer-Tropsch synthesis plant or any process which uses steam reforming), it'll produce a nearly-pure stream of CO2. It may even be under considerable pressure, making it even easier and cheaper to liquefy and pipe off for disposal. Many processes require the CO2 to be removed from the feed stream, so this is perfect for sequestering the carbon.
Sure, some of the carbon is likely to wind up back in the atmosphere; if you convert half of your CO to H2 (sequestering the CO2 made in the shift reaction) and then use the rest to make hydrocarbons (CH2(n)) for sale as fuel, you'll wind up with only half the carbon sequestered. That's still a flow in the opposite direction from the way things are done now.
As soon as an energy crisis arises, we're going to start building nuclear reactors like they're going out of fashion.
The construction permit applications are already being filed.
You can run your cars on nuke-electrolysed hydrogen...
That is not going to happen. Electrolysis is perhaps 75% efficient, compression 85% (or less), fuel cells 60%, throughput about 38%. Lithium-ion cells are 95% efficient, and new-tech cells like the ones from A123Systems can drive your car for 300 miles, put out 5 kW/kg and recharge to 80% capacity in 5 minutes. Forget hydrogen; the immediate prospect is hybrids and the future is batteries.
No it is not. The bio-reactors are closed (to avoid evaporative losses) and fed by the boiler exhaust. The CO2 content of the air going into the boiler furnace is ~385 parts per million, coming out is is something like 150,000 ppm (all of the additions from coal); if you think that significant amounts of the oil from the algae comes from atmospheric carbon, you're dreaming.
If you grew the algae in open ponds it would be otherwise, but you will not get the same phenomenal growth rates with atmospheric CO2 concentrations and you'll have issues with evaporative losses of water, contamination by other algae strains, predators and parasites.
Europe has begun licensing TDP tech and we have a full-scale refinery running near Kansas City.
You mean the one in Carthage, MO? That plant was shut down by the governor because of the awful stench it was creating. (The plant got a permit to restart after "changing a leaking gasket". If you think that a problem severe enough to justify closing the plant was caused by something as easily fixed as one gasket, I've got a bridge to sell you.)
If we ever get serious about putting domestic oil production the whole idea of oil from the ground will be beyond quaint.
Don't bet on it. Look at the math on CWT's PR page (down at the bottom). Notice anything funny about it? It assumes no losses in the process.
CWT used to have a press kit on their site with a bunch of PDF's regarding the process (some of the same figures were in the original "Anything Into Oil" article in Discover). That whole press kit seems to have been removed (so much for transparency!), but I saved a copy of the file which has the yield figures. From 100 pounds of municipal liquid waste (which includes a large fraction of grease-trap waste, which you would not normally have) it claims these yields:
26 lbs oil
9 lbs gas
8 lbs carbon and other solids
57 lbs water
So, if you could get 6 billion tons of waste a year, and if half of your waste stream was nice, energy-rich grease, you could get about a quarter of it back as oil. At CWT's figure of 7.7 lb/gallon, that's less than 1 billion barrels/year. For comparison, the whole US only uses about 3 billion gallons of cooking grease per year (about 70 million barrels).
And this... doesn't require massive leaps in corn production and doesn't require an change in transportation systems or distribution.
It is not going to be that easy. (For that matter, corn will get us nowhere. If you took all 11.8 billion bushels of the record 2004 crop and converted it to ethanol at the 2.66 gallons/bu that the USDA says is about the best feasible, you get 31.4 billion gallons. The US burned 139 billion gallons of gasoline alone in 2004, and another 60-odd billion gallons of distillate fuel oil.)
The KC Star reported that from bio-waste alone via agribusiness we could convert all organic waste-fodder into 20 billion barrels of oil. We consume 12 billion barrels at present. We could ergo go from being the largest consumers to the largest producers.
Garbage In, Garbage Out (pun intended). It is not going to be that easy; our current systems simply are not efficient enough to satisfy our needs on the biofuels we can grow. We are going to have to change our transportation systems, which mostly means making them use electricity from the grid as their primary energy source and liquid fuels only for extended range.
If you grow biomass and then use it in an energy process which reacts carbon with oxygen, you can get CO2 at high purity. This is tailor-made for pumping underground.
A system like this could remove net carbon from the atmosphere.
I have not investigated where the rest of our oil goes, but I suspect that any carbon source converted to clean carbon monoxide could produce most or all of our petrochemical requirements by steam reforming to syngas (CO + H2O -> CO2 + H2) followed by Fischer-Tropsch, Sabatier or other chemical synthesis. A lot of things are already made that way and a process which yields CO would cut out the middleman.
There is algae that can be grown in a closed-loop system (i.e. not allowing vast quantities of water to evaporate, needing constant irrigation from ground water) that can be also grown in an industrial process (i.e. using already industrial land) that produces 10,000 gallons of biofuel per acre.
Mass is conserved. You're removing about 75,000 lb of matter (perhaps 80% of it carbon) from each acre of this system (per year). This has to come from somewhere. Where's that?
The UNH scheme supplies the carbon from coal-plant exhaust. This is not a closed loop, and it depends on coal combustion (with all that implies). True, it traps most sulfur and other nasty stuff and gives you a twice-through before all that carbon winds up in the atmosphere, but you're not closing any loops.
If you actually made sustainable biodiesel from algae, you'd have to grow them on carbon from the atmosphere. This means leaving the ponds open, evaporative losses, and considerable water use. There are probably places on earth where you can do this without having to worry about water shortages (any process that uses seawater or even more saline water won't run out any time soon!), but it's not something you can just ignore.
Carbon is the key
Ignore water at your risk
You aren't worth your salt.
The problem isn't the administration per se but the religious fundamentalists which constitute its power base. These ideologues have made the phrase "only a theory" into one of their shibboleths, exploiting and expanding the difference between the commonplace and scientific meanings of "theory" (see next comment).
Essentially they are committing the logical fallacy of ambiguity, but the sort of people who need some absolute authority to look up to aren't the type to examine reasoning closely. If it agrees with what they're told it's good (holy), if it disagrees it's bad (blasphemous).
But to be equally fair, realscience.org's [sic] main contributors seem to be Mann et el. so I wouldn't expect objective criticisms of MBH98.
That's RealClimate.org, and Mann is only 1 out of 11 scientists named there.
You appear to think that science is a political party or cult, which has an orthodoxy and sticks to it. Nothing could be further from the truth. Scientists tear each other's theories apart mercilessly, beginning in the peer-review process. The only restriction is that criticism as well as theories must have a foundation in fact. Research is often funded and conducted with the goal of determining which out of a set of conflicting theories is actually correct.
Theories which have already been proven incorrect by the existing data need not apply. That already includes "our activities aren't doing anything".
I started out believing there was a link between warming and anthro CO2. But after I started digging a little I found it wasn't as easy to establish as I thought it would be.
Pardon me if I have difficulty believing that a person who cites a pseudo-scientific front created by a PR firm is an informed observer with no other interests or biases in the matter. There is a certain lack of credibility which goes along with naming co2science.org, kind of like citing William Dembski when talking about the origin of theropods.
Slashdot Mirror
You're way behind the times; they already do. The US burns about 9 million barrels/day of motor gasoline out of a hair over 20 million total.
Setting aside the question of why you drive a Suburban while touting light SUV-class stuff (hypocrisy?), the SUV form factor is inherently draggier than a car. The same powerplant technologies that can make a 40 MPG SUV can make an 80 MPG car. You know, like the Daimler-Chrysler ESX3, the GM ParadiGM and the Ford whateveritwas.
Done long before you ever thought to ask. (More here).
Take it from the horse's mouth: 2005 ethanol production was only ~4 billion gallons. Production this year isn't even projected to reach 6 billion gallons.
I've read The Billion-Ton Vision. It projects a whole 10% of transportation fuels will come from biomass in 2020 (see the sidebar in the first page of the introduction, page 18).
How many people can actually use E85 when ethanol is only 10% of transportation fuel? That's the proof that the whole flex-fuel vehicle thing is a scam. The auto companies are getting CAFE credits for guzzling monsters that can run on E85, without there being enough ethanol to run more than a small fraction of them.
Production of ethanol loses about 50% of the energy right off the top; it disappears into the process either as metabolic losses of the yeast or process heat in hydrolization or distillation. That's energy that can be used productively if you aren't wedded to the idea of using liquid fuels. There are other ways to use biomass, such as carbonization. Direct-carbon fuel cells (a variant of molten-carbonate fuel cells) can convert charcoal to electricity at up to 80% efficiency, and the off-gas from carbonization is combustible and can run engines. With a scheme like that, you can do a lot more than just offset some fraction of oil consumption; you can:
Ethanol is a very lossy way of making biomass suitable for even lossier internal combustion engines. It's a dead end.
Which source? The product of oil sands is solid at room temperature, and requires both cracking and desulfurization IIRC.
I think you have not learned the distinction between natural gas, cracker off-gas and synthesis gas. They are not interchangeable.
Production of oil from tar sands requires 2 barrels of water per barrel of oil. The situation with Fischer-Tropsch (the governor of Montana wants to use coal-to-liquids to prop up his economy) is roughly the same.
You don't get a free ride if you use in-situ retorting. Here's what The Rand Corporation has to say about it:
There's no proof that freeze-walls will work on such a large scale, that the boreholes will remain open as the shale is retorted (it expands, which would tend to occlude the bores), or several of the other things that would have to work to get the oil out. We can be pretty certain that production cannot be ramped up fast enough to compensate for declining production elsewhere. We can be pretty much assured that the groundwater in the area will be a toxic mess for millennia, though.
Hogwash. The US burns about 140 billion gallons of gasoline every year, and another 63 billion gallons of distillate (diesel). You're not going to replace that with ethanol (especially not from corn!), and you've still got the remaining 1/3 of US demand that goes to non-transportation uses. US production of ethanol is due to get up to around 5 billion gallons/year. Uh, w00t?
The best replacement for petroleum transportation fuel isn't alternative petroleum, it's electricity. The grid is here, and its spare capacity in off-peak hours is enough to move several times as much energy as our vehicles need (total generation capacity almost 1 TW, average is ~450 GW; do the math). We've got several suitable varieties of Li-ion batteries on the market already, a carbon-backed lead-acid technology (which radically reduces weight and increases lifespan) coming, and several different supercapacitor technologies either on the market or under development (EEStor). To keep electricity from becoming the transport energy source of choice, ALL of them will have to fail. Electricity has further advantages:
Then there's solar. The US has about 113,000 km^2 of impervious surface (pavement, roofs, etc.). If you can cover 30% of this with PV, the PV has 15% efficiency and the average insolation is 1300 kWh/m^2/year (somewhat less than mid-Kansas gets), that would be 44.1 trillion kWH of sunlight from which you'd get 6.61 trillion kWh of electricity (755 GW average). That's another 2.5 kW/capita just from 30% of area we've already got covered with stuff, and you're getting it net after conversion losses.
Reducing per-capita energy to 500 watts might be an interesting thought experiment, but as a prediction of the future... ridiculous.
We do need to do something about climate change. There are even things we can do in the short term; if a single volcanic eruption can lower global temperatures by 0.6 C and bring sea levels down by half a centimeter (Pinatubo), humanity's far greater output of things like sulfur can probably reproduce this if we only use them to best effect. Once we've slowed the Greenland glaciers back to their normal speed and prevented the Siberian peat bogs from thawing and belching gigatonnes of methane, we'll have time to work on the rest of the problem.
And that oil is declining. Cantarell (Mexico's biggest field) has peaked. Kuwait's biggest field has peaked. Even Ghawar has peaked (and if you don't know what that that means, you don't know enough to expound on this subject). A million barrels a day from Alberta tar sands will offset a whole 5% decline in other US sources. Big whoop. Even if it pays off, you still have to replace most of that oil with something else.
Ethanol does not come straight from the field; it requires considerable inputs to grow the crop, and more to turn it into liquid fuel. The average EROEI that I've seen for ethanol from today's sources is 1.34:1; the most optimistic is 1.67:1. Further, about 20% of the energy in a gallon of E85 is from petroleum. Summing that up, you've got:
- 0.15 gallon of gasoline per gallon E-85
- Of the 0.6 gallons-gasoline-equivalent of ethanol in the
.85 gallons of ethanol, between .36 and .48 gallons-equivalent is from fossil fuels (petroleum, coal and natural gas).
Your total fossil energy per gallon of E85:Wind pays off much faster, and is about 5x cheaper than PV to boot.
Climatologists have addressed this before:
In contrast to the claims of solar output, historical temperature data is quite firm and atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases are accurately known for almost a million years. In short, the claim you're making is a canard. On the contrary. We have an excellent idea of what is "normal" in human history, and how poorly we're likely to do if things change seriously. We're already seeing damage to ecosystems. Given the number of people with interests in the status quo who will abuse any trivial uncertainty as an excuse to continue doing what they're doing, I find your projection very ironic.Last verse of "Never set the cat on fire", to be specific:
Don't start an interstellar war, it has no proper uses
When they ask what you did it for, you'll only make excuses
If thirty billion folks get hurt
You'll go to bed with no dessert
Don't start an interstellar war
And mind your manners as circumstances may require
And never set the cat on fire.
Unless you're planning to do 1 wall per year, putting another R-12 over all 4 walls is much better than just putting R-50 into one.
If you really want to make sure "eventually" means aeons, you could feed the CO2 to those oleaginous algae and then dump the veggie oil in the ground. On the other hand, you've got the next 100,000 years to decide what to do, so as long as you get the CO2 out of the atmosphere now there's no big hurry.
Plus the capital cost of the air pumps, pipes and dehumidification gear.
And don't forget operations and maintenance.
Sure, some of the carbon is likely to wind up back in the atmosphere; if you convert half of your CO to H2 (sequestering the CO2 made in the shift reaction) and then use the rest to make hydrocarbons (CH2(n)) for sale as fuel, you'll wind up with only half the carbon sequestered. That's still a flow in the opposite direction from the way things are done now.
That fixes the problem too.Also get rid of all ethanol mandates, and tax farm inputs so that fossil pass-throughs don't get preferential treatment.
If you grew the algae in open ponds it would be otherwise, but you will not get the same phenomenal growth rates with atmospheric CO2 concentrations and you'll have issues with evaporative losses of water, contamination by other algae strains, predators and parasites.
CWT used to have a press kit on their site with a bunch of PDF's regarding the process (some of the same figures were in the original "Anything Into Oil" article in Discover). That whole press kit seems to have been removed (so much for transparency!), but I saved a copy of the file which has the yield figures. From 100 pounds of municipal liquid waste (which includes a large fraction of grease-trap waste, which you would not normally have) it claims these yields:
- 26 lbs oil
- 9 lbs gas
- 8 lbs carbon and other solids
- 57 lbs water
So, if you could get 6 billion tons of waste a year, and if half of your waste stream was nice, energy-rich grease, you could get about a quarter of it back as oil. At CWT's figure of 7.7 lb/gallon, that's less than 1 billion barrels/year. For comparison, the whole US only uses about 3 billion gallons of cooking grease per year (about 70 million barrels). It is not going to be that easy. (For that matter, corn will get us nowhere. If you took all 11.8 billion bushels of the record 2004 crop and converted it to ethanol at the 2.66 gallons/bu that the USDA says is about the best feasible, you get 31.4 billion gallons. The US burned 139 billion gallons of gasoline alone in 2004, and another 60-odd billion gallons of distillate fuel oil.) Garbage In, Garbage Out (pun intended). It is not going to be that easy; our current systems simply are not efficient enough to satisfy our needs on the biofuels we can grow. We are going to have to change our transportation systems, which mostly means making them use electricity from the grid as their primary energy source and liquid fuels only for extended range.A system like this could remove net carbon from the atmosphere.
I have not investigated where the rest of our oil goes, but I suspect that any carbon source converted to clean carbon monoxide could produce most or all of our petrochemical requirements by steam reforming to syngas (CO + H2O -> CO2 + H2) followed by Fischer-Tropsch, Sabatier or other chemical synthesis. A lot of things are already made that way and a process which yields CO would cut out the middleman.
The UNH scheme supplies the carbon from coal-plant exhaust. This is not a closed loop, and it depends on coal combustion (with all that implies). True, it traps most sulfur and other nasty stuff and gives you a twice-through before all that carbon winds up in the atmosphere, but you're not closing any loops.
If you actually made sustainable biodiesel from algae, you'd have to grow them on carbon from the atmosphere. This means leaving the ponds open, evaporative losses, and considerable water use. There are probably places on earth where you can do this without having to worry about water shortages (any process that uses seawater or even more saline water won't run out any time soon!), but it's not something you can just ignore.
Carbon is the key
Ignore water at your risk
You aren't worth your salt.
Essentially they are committing the logical fallacy of ambiguity, but the sort of people who need some absolute authority to look up to aren't the type to examine reasoning closely. If it agrees with what they're told it's good (holy), if it disagrees it's bad (blasphemous).
"mesh routing"?
Same bogus accusation made in older sibling comment, and refuted by responder.
You appear to think that science is a political party or cult, which has an orthodoxy and sticks to it. Nothing could be further from the truth. Scientists tear each other's theories apart mercilessly, beginning in the peer-review process. The only restriction is that criticism as well as theories must have a foundation in fact. Research is often funded and conducted with the goal of determining which out of a set of conflicting theories is actually correct.
Theories which have already been proven incorrect by the existing data need not apply. That already includes "our activities aren't doing anything".
Pardon me if I have difficulty believing that a person who cites a pseudo-scientific front created by a PR firm is an informed observer with no other interests or biases in the matter. There is a certain lack of credibility which goes along with naming co2science.org, kind of like citing William Dembski when talking about the origin of theropods.