RSS
guest-blogger

New Pickens Ad: Drill Drill Drill

By The Seminal

When John McCain turns out to have an advantage over Barack Obama on the energy issue this fall, we’ll know who to blame.

Comments

(10)

I was wondering if anyone was going to expose this guy

for the bloodsucker he truly is.

By thaelmann37August 25, 2008 - 12:49pm

I like what I hear BUT.

I don't trust him.

No doubt he owns large natural gas holdings (he pushes nat. gas.) and will leverage those holdings (with the help of a bought-and-paid-for legislature) to dominate a monopolistic strangle hold on the renewable energy markets.

SAME SHIT, DIFFERENT PRODUCT.

By A GAugust 25, 2008 - 2:28pm

Wind power

is of course preferable to ethanol (energy in vs. energy out and still produces CO2) and biodielsel (energy in vs. energy out and still produces CO2) and even Hyrogen (still comes from a fossil fuel source). But I have always been wary of a guy who makes bigass $$$ off of oil and then turns around to tell us we need a new paradigm.

By justintymeAugust 25, 2008 - 1:21pm

sigh

No disrespect, but your information is a tad off...

1.) You don't need fossil fuels to generate Hydrogen. You can VERY easily electrolyze water via:

1.1.) straight electrolysis, using solar, tide, or wind power.
1.2.) Thermally excited Iron/Iron-oxide cycling.
1.3.) using a pretty simple hack on Spirulina.

2.) Using solar thermal or photovoltaic derived energy makes Bio-diesel a net energy gain. Once we've got the system in place, it'll just keep giving us energy, with the added benefit of surplus power for the local, state, regional, and national grids, when harvesting and processing are done for the year.

3.) the CO2 can easily be trapped in a muffler attachment, and then used for crop use.

give me lever, and a place to stand...

By wrenchboyAugust 25, 2008 - 5:54pm

The straight skinny from "Mr. Science"

Good for you, wrenchboy. It's about time somebody brought up the technical aspects of our energy problem instead of the oil-bound emotional aspects.

I'd ,like to clarify.

Splitting water into Hydrogen and Oxygen, then running it through a "fuel cell" to generate electricity is old technology. It is how we electrically powered our trips to the Moon.

However, it does require at least as much energy input as we get out (there is no free lunch, thermodynamically). Hydrogen fuel cell technology is just an "energy currency" like any form of electricity.

The critical point in your argumernt in item (1.0) is that we must use renewable, "NON-CARBON BASED" energy sources to split the water. This is the ideal, ultimate solution for a sustainable society. The same would be true for "thermally excited Iron/Iron-oxide cycling" (1.2).

These are simple old technology chemical reactions (though nanotechnology applied to the Iron substrates may lead to realistic efficiencies). The issue is, where does the energy to drive them come from?

Natural Gas, Coal, Ethanol, Methonol, or any plant source (Switch Grass, Sugar Cane, Wood Chips) helps us with our dependance on imported oil and the associated geopolitical issues, but does nothing to reduce our increasingly destructive effect on our planet's climate.

=====================

Gotta go but will discuss further later. I did biochemical engineering work on Hydrogen producing cyanobacteria (genus Anabaena - like your "Spirulina") and studied genetic engineering techniques ("genetic hacks") back in the day.

also wanna talk about (2.0)

and feasability of Li-OH and CO2 wet-scrubbers and CO2 sequestration [as we transition to non-Carbon based energy sources, what do we do the the Carbon Dioxide (CO2) in the meantime?].

Later.

By A GAugust 26, 2008 - 11:58am

A G

Thank you for the assist! I should have clarified point 1.2 (thermally excited iron). The basic idea for that one is forcing a piece of iron to get rusty very very quickly. The iron will grab the oxygen, leaving the hydrogen free for the taking. While the overall efficiency isn't the world's best, the process is pretty much idiot-proof to the point that froggles could probably handle a home unit. Assuming the numbers are right in the books I've read, then about 14 KWH will produce one lb of hydrogen. Using only bargain basement solar cells, I can get 10 watts per square foot. that works out to some 1400 square feet, using I want 1 lb/hr of hydrogen. with a standard tank using about 12 gallons per week, after working out the conversion factors, and assuming that New England only gets 4 hours a day of sunlight, I need something like 4300 square feet of cheap PV panels per car. Harsh, but doable That means that 1 acre can support 10 car/weeks of drivers, assuming such hideously low efficiency PV panels. This scales up to some 3,000 cars per square mile, assuming only half of the square mile is covered with panels. Assuming we decided to build one big PV industrial plant dedicated to making hydrogen to power the cars, and we gave every American a car...

We'd need something like an area 100 miles by 100 miles.
Boston's GMA of 3 million people (using they went apostate from the T and Bus system) would need something like 33 miles by 33 miles. Not that big an area, when you think of it.
( I think that collector could be placed in the Bay, and few would notice.)

The biggest problem with talking about this stuff to the public is that they forget that oil is also just an energy currency.

Seeing as I can be a cheap bastard at times, I would prefer to use a few PV panels, and a whole lot of concentrator mirrors. Place a large water filled heat exchanger between the incoming concentrated light and the PV panel, and you can capture the concentrated IR, and let most of the visible light through to the panel. You can use trapped heat for a steam engine, allowing a little bit more generated power (and it gives the whole facility that added stylish Steampunk motif.)

I could see using scrubbers to store the CO2 until collected at some station, maybe an add-on to regular gas stations? The collected CO2 could then be used to help grow more plants/crops. With a touch of creative tinkering, we could use this process to create larger farms in New England.

give me lever, and a place to stand...

By wrenchboyAugust 26, 2008 - 12:44pm

Impressive. Thanks for fleshing out some of the numbers.

These solar-to-Hydrogen technologies sound within the realm of possibility, based on those numbers.

Obviously this is what we need to do the 10-20 year time frame.

One point about CO2 as a "fertilizer", though. This is a misconception. If plant life could absorb CO2 as fast as we can flood it into the atmosphere, IT WOULD ALREADY BE DOING IT. Nonethelss, that does highlight the fact that deforesting the planet IS EXACERBATING THE CO2 PROBLEM.

By A GAugust 26, 2008 - 2:41pm

hmmm...

Off the top of my head, I can think of XXX things to do with the CO2.
1.) crack the CO2 for the carbon, and use that as graphite for construction materials
2.) bubble the CO2 into a pond, collect the algae, and feed that into a Vista style digester. The algae will turn into methane and remarkably rich fertilizer. (For that matter, we could bubble the CO2 into septic tanks, which will clean up the >ahem< "effluvia" give us methane, and a bit more fertilizer.
2.1.) the methane can either be burned for power and heat, turned into methanol for fuel/power, or used for chemical/plastic feedstocks.

3.) While methane is a greenhouse gas, and does produce CO2, creating it in situ reduces the foot print via no oil extraction, transportation, refining, and secondary transport foot prints.

4.) I believe that there are a few fuel cells that will use methane as an input.

give me lever, and a place to stand...

By wrenchboyAugust 26, 2008 - 5:36pm

I haven't researched it but.

Remember that algae are in the plant Kingdom and like I said, if plants could absorb the unbelievably huge amounts of CO2 we put into the atmosphere, they'd already be doing it. The land and oceans are covered with plants (including algae). The reason we have this problem in the first place is that even an entire planet covered in CO2 scavangers can't absorb it all.

Also, CO2 has limited solubility in water so bubbling it through ponds, septic tanks, etc. is also not practical. It's not that it doesn't work in theory, but that the sheer tonnage of CO2 is overwhelming.

I think the only realistic solution is to centralize new-technology fossil-fuel power plants and sequester the CO2 underground.

Let's face it. The only thing that's going to save us is nuclear fusion. Nuclear Fusion is the perfect solution. It's clean and virtually limitless. I still think we ought to put everything we've got into nuclear fusion.

The Europeans are putting a lot of resources into it. Whoever resolves the technical problems will own the world and return the middle eastern oil nations to their lives as nomadic goat herders.

By A GAugust 27, 2008 - 6:25am

A G

I agree that Fusion would be the best system to use, but until they can nail down certain problems, we're stuck in the dugout. We need better containment, triggering, and energy collection. I have copies of NASA's report on duplicating the Pons-Fleischman experiments, and Farnsworth's Fusor patent. While they are very interesting, major changes would have to be made.

We can use the solar and wind systems now. I'd like to imagine that I've shown a few workable solutions to current power problems. The wind power systems are so simple and modular that even Shedd and Froggles could set a micro-grid up in 3 weekends. (The rest of us could set up a house-power system in a weekend, but we can read instructions, work together, and actually bother to learn certain tech skills.)

Using greenhouses to grow the algae, and then harvesting the algae is doable. In essence, we'd be adding the equivalent of several several forests. I'd say the problem with Plant using the extra carbon load is that we're growing the wrong plants. Grass seems to be the plant of choice among Americans. The problem is that grass isn't useful until it's over 6 inches tall.

The underground sequestering of CO2 is taking a big risk. Any leaks to the surface give us local heat problems. Worse, the easiest way to sequester the CO2 would be in the form of carbonated water. When the CO2 starts to leave the water, we've got pressure issues to think of. This may even lead to gas pressure induced tremors.

Personally, I like the idea of bleeding off some percentage of power from a solar thermal power plant, and using said power to crack the CO2. It would give the local power plant a source of building materials, and the whole place would smell nice, given that some of the O2 would be in the form of Ozone (less than 1 percent, but that's enough for that "fresh clean smell.")

give me lever, and a place to stand...

By wrenchboyAugust 27, 2008 - 7:26am

Comments

(10)