Renewable Fuel Pretenders
Posted by Robert Rapier on September 3, 2009 - 10:16am
Introduction
This essay initially started out as "Pretenders, Contenders, and Niches." However, the section on pretenders grew to the point that I have decided to split that essay up. The first part, Renewable Fuel Pretenders, will cover some of the current media and political darlings. The second part, Renewable Fuel Contenders, will discuss some options that have received less attention, but in the long term are more likely to have staying power in my view. The final part on niches will discuss situations in which certain options might work in very specific situations.
One thing that probably goes without saying. Most pretenders don't believe they are pretenders. They are often completely sincere people who believe they have cracked the code, and thus they take exception to my characterization. The cellulosic guys, the algae guys, and even the hydrogen guys will insist that I have it all wrong. In fact, following the posting of this essay on my blog, I heard from all of them. I got numerous e-mails assuring me that they really had come up with the solution. What I have discovered in many of these cases is that people often believe this because they have no experience at scaling up technologies. They might have something that works in the lab, but this can instill a false sense of confidence in those who have never scaled a process up.
Reality Begins to Sink In
There was an interesting article in the Wall Street Journal this past week:
U.S. Biofuel Boom Running on Empty
A few pertinent excerpts:
The biofuels revolution that promised to reduce America's dependence on foreign oil is fizzling out.
Two-thirds of U.S. biodiesel production capacity now sits unused, reports the National Biodiesel Board.
Producers of next-generation biofuels -- those using nonfood renewable materials such as grasses, cornstalks and sugarcane stalks -- are finding it tough to attract investment and ramp up production to an industrial scale.
This all boils down to something I have said on many occasions: You can't mandate technology. Just because you mandate that 36 billion gallons of biofuel are to be produced by 2022 doesn't mean that it has a remote chance of happening. This is not a hard concept to understand, but it seems to have eluded our government for many years. Politicians would probably understand that they couldn't create colonies on the moon in 10 years via mandate. They know they can't cure cancer via mandate. But in the area of biofuels, they seem to feel like they can just conjure up vast amounts of hydrogen, cellulosic ethanol, or algal biodiesel.
Domestically produced biofuels were supposed to be an answer to reducing America's reliance on foreign oil. In 2007, Congress set targets for the U.S. to blend 36 billion gallons of biofuels a year into the U.S. fuel supply in 2022, from 11.1 billion gallons in 2009.
Cellulosic ethanol, derived from the inedible portions of plants, and other advanced fuels were expected to surpass corn ethanol to fill close to half of all biofuel mandates in that time.
But the industry is already falling behind the targets. The mandate to blend next-generation fuels, which kicks in next year, is unlikely to be met because of a lack of enough viable production.
Most people don't realize that the Germans were the first to produce ethanol from cellulose. That happened in 1898. For our political leaders and many industry boosters, cellulosic ethanol is a recent discovery, and thus they expect big leaps in the technology in the next few years. These expectations completely ignore the fact that researchers have been hard at work on making cellulosic ethanol a reality for decades - with little success. The situation is like needing to make a journey of 100 miles, and companies send out press releases every time they move an inch. This gives the false impression that the technology (same story with algae) is expanding by leaps and bounds.
In President Bush's 2006 State of the Union address, he broadly expanded the mandate for ethanol. He voiced his strong support for cellulosic ethanol, and included billions of gallons in the Renewable Fuel Standard - as well as billions of dollars of financial support.
How quickly our politicians seem to have forgotten the 2003 State of the Union, in which Bush set forth his vision of the hydrogen economy:
"A simple chemical reaction between hydrogen and oxygen generates energy, which can be used to power a car producing only water, not exhaust fumes. With a new national commitment, our scientists and engineers will overcome obstacles to taking these cars from laboratory to showroom so that the first car driven by a child born today could be powered by hydrogen and pollution-free."
We spent some two billion dollars toward that goal. Once again, this ignored many technical and economic realities, and so in May 2009:
Hydrogen Car Goes Down Like the Hindenburg: DoE Kills the Program
The dream of hydrogen fuel cell cars has just been put back in the garage. U.S. Energy Secretary Steven Chu announced yesterday that his department is cutting all funding for hydrogen car research, saying that it won’t be a feasible technology anytime soon. “We asked ourselves, ‘Is it likely in the next 10 or 15, 20 years that we will covert to a hydrogen car economy?’ The answer, we felt, was ‘no,’” Chu said.
My prediction is that in the not too distant future we will start to see headlines like this for cellulosic ethanol. The troublesome barriers to commercialization are quite fundamental, and aren't likely to be resolved by government mandate. If enough money is thrown at it, cellulosic ethanol will certainly be produced. After all, the Germans could do it 110 years ago. But it can never be a scalable, economic reality.
Pretenders
Broadly speaking, in the world of next generation renewable fuels there are contenders, pretenders, and niches. Over the past decade, we have thrown an awful lot of money at pretenders and have little to show for it. There are many reasons for this, but fundamentally I believe it boils down to the fact that our political leaders can't sort the wheat from the chaff. If a proponent extols the benefits of hydrogen, cellulose, or algae - the politicians just don't know enough to ask the right critical questions. They listen - generally to the very people who will benefit from more funding - and then they allocate money. Billions of dollars and little progress later, they or their successors may begin to realize that they have been misled and they start to dial the funding back.
Here is how I define a next generation Biofuel Pretender: A company or group that makes grandiose promises about the ability of a technology to displace large amounts of fossil fuel, despite facing significant (and often unrecognized) barriers to commercialization.
Here are some examples:
Hydrogen
One of the original renewable energy pretenders. Proponents ignored practical realities in many different areas, including fuel cell vehicles that cost a million dollars, the fact that most hydrogen is produced from natural gas, the fact that the energy density of hydrogen is very low, and the fact that there are multiple issues with hydrogen storage and transport. Technical breakthroughs were being counted on to solve these challenges. After all, we put a man on the moon. Surely we could solve these challenges.
The real problem is that the potential for success falls rapidly as the number of needed breakthroughs pile up. Imagine for instance that each of the following - cost of vehicle production, cost effective storage, and cost effective transport of hydrogen - individually have a 25% chance of achieving commercial viability in the next 20 years. The total chance for success of all three in that case falls to 1.5%. Thus, most technologies that truly require multiple technical breakthroughs will fail to materialize commercially except perhaps over a much longer period of time.
Cellulosic Ethanol
As was the case with hydrogen, this one requires multiple technical breakthroughs before commercial (unsubsidized) viability can be achieved. I won't go through them all now, as I have covered them before. The fundamental reason that cellulosic ethanol won't scale up to displace large amounts of gasoline is that the energy efficiency of the process is so low. You have the sugars that make up cellulose locked up tightly in the biomass - which has a low energy density to start with. So you add energy to unlock the sugar and turn it into ethanol, and then you end up with ethanol in water. More energy inputs are required to get the ethanol out. Even if the energy can be supplied by the by-products of the process like lignin, the net BTUs of liquid fuel that you end up with are going to be low relative to what you started with.
For example, assume you start off with 10 BTUs of biomass. You expend energy to get it to the factory, to process it, and then to get the water out. You burn part of the biomass to fuel the process, and input some fossil fuel. You might net something like 3 BTUs of liquid fuel from the 10 BTUs of biomass you started with. Don't confuse this with fossil fuel energy balance, though. If the external energy inputs in this example only amounted to 1 BTU of fossil fuel, one could claim a fossil fuel energy balance of 3/1. But that doesn't change the fact the final liquid fuel input is a small fraction of the starting BTUs in the biomass.
This is analogous to the situation with oil shale, which is why I have compared the two. There may in fact be a trillion or more barrels of shale oil locked up in Colorado, Utah, and Wyoming. But if the extraction of those barrels requires a trillion barrels worth of energy inputs and lots of water - then that oil shale might as well be on the moon. So, a trillion barrels isn't really a trillion barrels in the case of oil shale, and a billion tons of biomass is much smaller than it seems when talking about cellulosic ethanol.
So despite the claims from the EPA that the Renewable Fuel Standard program will increase the volume of renewable fuel required to be blended into gasoline from 9 billion gallons in 2008 to 36 billion gallons by 2022 - that is not going to happen unless the government is willing to throw massive amounts of money at an inefficient process.
Algal Biofuel
Like many, I was initially enchanted by the possibility of weaning the world away from fossil fuels by using fuel made from algae. Proponents wrote articles suggesting that we could do just that, provided the necessary investments are made.
Sadly, the story is much more complex than that. The U.S. DOE funded a study for many years into the potential of algae to produce fuel. (For an overview of where things stand from John Benemann, one of the men who co-authored the close-out report of that study, see Algal Biodiesel: Fact or Fiction?) The problem is again one of needing to surmount multiple technical hurdles, and the close-out report discusses that reality. Again, I won't go into those details, as that has been covered before.
While it is a fact that you can produce fuel from algae, the challenges are such that John has written that you can't even buy algal biofuel for $100/gallon. He said that if you want to separate the reality from the hype, just try to secure a contract with someone to supply you with algal fuel.
Note: Following the initial publication of this essay, a person who has been active with algae research for many years wrote to me: "In spite of all the hype and non-stop press releases, no one to my knowledge is producing algae on a commercial basis for biofuel production." Again, if someone claims they are, ask where you can buy some of their fuel.
First Generation Biodiesel
This story is primarily about 2nd generation fuels, and as such I won't get into corn ethanol issues. But I will say a bit about biodiesel. As indicated in the Wall Street Journal story, conventional biodiesel producers are in trouble. Briefly, a conventional biodiesel producer is someone who takes vegetable oils or animal fats and generally uses methanol (almost all of which is fossil-fuel derived) and converts that into an oxygenated compound (called a mono-alkyl ester). This compound has been defined as 'biodiesel', and can be used - subject to certain limitations - in a diesel engine.
Again, the problems are fundamental. It takes a lot of effort (energy, cost) to produce most of the oils that are used as raw materials, and then you have to react with methanol - which usually contains a lot of embodied fossil fuel energy. Presently, the first generation biodiesel producers benefit from a high level of protectionism (to the extent of punishing the more efficient 2nd generation producers). But even with the protectionism and the subsidies, producers are still struggling to survive. What really killed them is that they were exporting a large amount of the biodiesel production to Europe. This enabled them to collect double subsidies - U.S. and European - but the Europeans recently put a stop to that, thus putting the industry in financial crisis.
Miscellaneous
There are a number of miscellaneous pretenders that we probably don't need to discuss in depth, such as various free energy schemes or water as a fuel. If you think you might be dealing with a pretender, one caution flag is when their promoters are from backgrounds that have nothing to do with energy. For instance, the person who founded the dot.com that ultimately morphs into an energy company is almost certainly a pretender chasing funds.
Summary
To summarize, the biofuel pretenders fall into several broad categories. The big ones are:
• Hydrogen
• Most would-be cellulosic ethanol producers
• Most would-be algal biofuel producers
• Most first generation biodiesel producers
This isn't to say that none of these will work in any circumstances. I will get into that when I talk about niches. But I will say that I am confident that none of these are scalable solutions to our fossil fuel dependence. Frankly, I wish the algae story was true. I love the idea of getting renewable fuel from brackish waterways. But I try not to let a hope get confused with what I believe is realistic.
The problem is that political leaders have been, or are still convinced that there is great potential for some of these and we waste billions of dollars chasing fantasies. This is a great distraction, causing a loss of precious time and public goodwill as taxpayer money is squandered chasing schemes that ultimately will not pan out.
In the next installment, I will talk about contenders - options that I think can compete with fossil fuels on a level playing field.
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Thanks, Robert, for this summary!
I understand that you are traveling, today, Thursday, but will check in tomorrow and make some responses to commenters.
You mean renewable, right?
Obviously, Mr Napier is not aware that innovation holds the key to the issues he outlines. And, yes there is a lot of innovation out there including a technology called RET radiant energy transfer that converts water vapor from any source of water (e.g. wastewater, seawater or tap water) into hydrogen just using low grade heat. This proven patented technology, www.genesys-hydrogen.com has been in development for several years and they are at the point of scaling to commercial quantities. Since the resource is free (e.g. wastewater and low grade waste heat) and the capital costs are low, the actual efficiency of the process is not as important as other modalities and methods for producing energy (e.g. biofuels, solar voltaic or even wind). Given that the primary resource is only heat and the feedstock is any form of water, one can say that we will be enjoying renewable hydrogen fuel for ages to come. It is time to get off the fossil fuel kick and look toward the future where energy security and global warming is a thing of the past.
Rapier. Napier, that's the chap that invented logarithms.
Finally! Someone has gotten rid of that pesky 2nd Law.
Just looking at the presentation at Genesys' web site
Slide 9:
Ummm... We have a little problem here. The reaction in my gas stove is just the opposite (methane to CO2) and I can assure you it is quite exothermic; meaning CO2 to methane has to be quite ENDOTHERMIC (requires energy input). Of course that is not news to 99.999% of us.
The reaction of CO2 with hydrogen to make CH4 is exothermic. (CO2 + 4H2 -> CH4 + 2H2O.)
Hydrobaron, I hope you read Genesys release better than you read Robert's name. I read the release. While you say it is not important, the efficiency of the system is remarkably absent. The release says that the system produces it's own electricity but then states it requires a significant heat source. Why does it need heat if it produces all it's own electricity? Any idea how many BTU's of heat are required to get a BTU potential of hydrogen? What was the name of the Scottish or Irish company that had the last perpetual motion machine?
You write that this ( technology has been in development for several years and they are at the point of scaling to commercial quantities.) Why does that statement sound so familiar? Oh wait yeh! I remember now. It was cellulosic ethanol, no wait it was biodiesel from algae, no wait, it was----
Hydrobaron IS Genesys. He's been pimping his website here since late 2007. He has made eight posts total but don't bother to question him, he has never responded to a question, criticism, or request for additional info.
Yes, he does have a patent. That doesn't prove a thing. There's lots of patents for perpetual motion gizmos and machines that don't necessarily play by the laws of physics.
Now that's funny. I went and read his Genesys link right after he posted and was wondering how much money they had hooked him for.
You obviously have not read the technical papers nor do you understand the technology of RET. There are a lot of backseat pseudo scientists who make sweeping conclusions based on NO DATA. Geothermal energy is a significant resource for heat. Since the bond energy of water is very high, it is obvious to any Thermodynamics 101 student that you cannot convert ALL the geothermal water to hydrogen. A typical well will produce about 3,000 kgs per hour which is competitive with the best oil wells in the world. It is all in the end economics!
According to the claims of US Patent 7384619 - Method for generating hydrogen from water or steam in a plasma the water (steam) is being injected into a plasma. Plasma is a state of matter in which electrons have been stripped off of atoms which requires high temperature. The patent refers to generating the plasma using microwaves, radio waves or an arc discharge. The water is split into hydrogen and oxygen as it is injected into the plasma and the gases are separated using a membrane.
From the patent:
Before proclaiming a key innovation has been discovered, you should establish the efficiency of the system. These methods appear to be power hungry.
Your using facts and logic against a Techno-Cornucopians dreams? It will never work... :o)
Nick.
Blue Twilight:
Does line 51 in that patent really mix apples (°C) with oranges (°K, and BTW the patent holder ought to have kept in mind that Kelvins are NOT reported as "degrees Kelvin" but simply as "Kelvins"...) as blatantly as it seems??!
Those mistakes alone, never mind the ridiculous range of temperatures, should be reason enough to put this patent in the circular file.
Indeed. I have to wonder if Hydrobaron is as blind to irony as he is scientifically illiterate, because if he realized just how hilarious he is he would probably die of embarrassment.
Wrong! The system operates at room temperature water vapor. If you would bother to contact the company they would be most happy to enlighten you about aspects of their technology. I understand that they are moving into a mini-pilot plant operation for customer evaluations. In addition, the technical papers on the web site clearly show the physics and thermodynamics of the process. Giving ignorant comments to the general public does not enhance this website but detracts from giving truthful information.
You mean renewable, right?
Yeah, I went through and thought I cleaned all that up. Still missed one, I see.
Some time back, it was Gail I think, did a post on railway network as essential part of the Plan B Solution Set.
In the United States, politics of energy still lock us into Auto-think regardless of whatever energy source is in discussion. It is a tragic fact that we cannot get through the Oil Interregnum in private cars and rubber-tire trucks alone. As long as leadership cannot muster the guts to say highway oriented economic policy is passe', we will continue the current energy panacea search free-for-all. One might have said "Chinese Fire Drill", but that would be absolutely wrong, because the Chinese are currently into the World's largest railway expansion in the history of the industrial age. $50 Billion that they admit to... Money we spent on Chinese goods, folks!
Christopher C. Swan's "ELECTRIC WATER" shows local scale energy generation linked to domestic and mobility infrastructure. Most current thought process cannot fathom the backwardness of spending time or resources on replicating the pre-freeway railway matrix, including redundant mains, branchline feeder lines, and "shadow" Interurban Electric Lines: day passenger, night victuals & freight service to city core warehousing & handling facilities.
Some argue against rail because of capital intensive requirements for start-up. If particular inexpensive routes (dormant branchlines abound in America still) are demonstrated, then "labor costs" stymie thinking it through. Fortunately for Americans, the railway mode is still well established, and selected branch routes are currently under rehab even as the alternative energy frenzie goes on & on...
In round numbers, 100 million useless automobiles will provide 100 million useful tons of steel for strategic rail corridor expansion, extension & rehab. In the United States, we shall recommission some one hundred Railroad Operating & Maintenance Battalions, Army/National Guard RR logistics units, tasked with "adopting" strategic dormant rail corridor (Agricultural, manufacturing expansion, resource extraction, etc.) and follow through with rebuilding phase and return to operating status. After take over by private operator, Military RR Unit moves to next branchline on list.
This methodology of rail branchline & feeder matrix replacement and
stewardship of rail battalions is essential into foreseeable future, as US shall be subject to manmade disaster well over the horizon, and weather events affecting transport as well. The Oildrum Personnel do notusually concern themselves with unforeseen impediments to energy supply from whatever source; some readers do, and therefore urge expanding railway network as an indispensible given as we slide irrevocably into the Oil Interregnum.
US railway network model Circa 1900-1975 is desireable and attainable, in being and boring as an Erector Set. Easily repaired when broken, runs on any usual or planned energy source, and notable bulwark against famine. High Speed Rail segments planned should add new Trans Sierra route from Sacramento-Carson Valley/Reno, as example of Coastal evacuation asset. Important consideration in the High-Speed Rail planning exercise; inclusion of freight capability, as added redundancy to the existing main trunk system. Plus, the local feeder matrix replacement as stated above.
Railroad technology is integral to reaching preservation of life goals as Oil Depletion & Climate issues hit all segments of economic life. Sustainable distribution of food being the easiest rationale to understanding need for railways as trucking suffers in terminal stages of Peaking Oil. In peakoil.net, see articles 374 & 1037.
Army lingo for railways is: "Second Dimension Surface Transport Logistics Platform". Planners of bygone days said it differently: Guarantor Of Societal & Commercial Cohesion". Or maybe "Parallel Bar Therapy" is easier to remember!
Tahoe;
I'm generally in agreement, but help me think through the achilles heel from the Rail-Age. Remember how the RR's figured in the Monopoly boardgame? How do we balance the power-structure to help check against abuses? Publikly owned track, private wheels? Do you see models in other countries for how this can be made to be so big, and yet moderately evenhanded?
I'm pro rail, but this is a significant worry.
Bob
At the risk of being attacked for appearing to defend "Government or our leadership," it does no good for leadership to "muster the guts" if the voters don't likewise "muster the guts." You'll be out of office before the first stick is in the ground.
Thanks for pointing this out, Debbie. A lot of people don't understand what you just said. By and large, leadership must have the backing of those being led. Witness the health care debate right now.
Are they still towing old NYC subway cars out to sea and dumping them to form artificial reefs? Some intelligent life-form is going to look at this after the end of the age of oil and ask, what were these people thinking?
How difficult is it to recycle old/obsolete rolling stock? I cannot imagine that it would be cheaper to manufacture new rail-cars from scratch rather than refurbish/retrofit the old stuff. I have a felling that the lack of interest in rail services since the advent of the motor car is something the world and the US in particular is going to regret when it becomes obvious that we are post peak.
Alan from the islands
Since I routinely use streetcars built in 1923/24, the answer is that GOOD DESIGNS can be refurbished for many decades.
The EMUs that Ed Tennyson speced for SEPTA 43 years ago are being retired. He believes that a reasonable cost refurbishment could ad at least 20 years. Stainless steel bodies help.
Doors are a major headache with aging fleets. Plus new features (my streetcars have no a/c), level boarding for wheel chairs, etc. make new desirable.
For a number of years after new vehicles come into service, maintenance costs drop.
I have called for a "Strategic Rail Reserve" before. Store, and minimally restore old cars in older systems "just in case". The FTA only wants to fund 10% spare cars, increase that to 20% to 33% to provide a greater surge capability.
Best Hopes for More Rolling Stock,
Alan
...and another oil soaked shoe drops...
EDITORIAL NY Times Published 9-3-09
Another Astroturf Campaign
It was probably only a matter of time, but the oil lobby has taken a page from the anti-health-care-reform manual in an effort to drum up opposition to climate change legislation in Congress. Behind the overall effort — billed, naturally, as a grass-roots citizen movement — lie the string-pullers at the American Petroleum Institute, the industry’s main trade organization and a wily, well-funded veteran of the legislative wars.
"Greenpeace, the advocacy group, uncovered a letter last month from the A.P.I. president, Jack Gerard, to industry C.E.O.’s revealing that the campaign’s central objective is to “put a human face on the impacts of unsound energy policy,” specifically the Waxman-Markey bill recently passed by the House.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/04/opinion/04fri2.html?_r=1&ref=opinion
if it looks like a duck, walks like a duck and sounds like a duck... unsound energy policy "unsound energy policy" now there is something API knows a thing or two about!
.
Obviously you put hydrogen on this list, but what about the fact that its net energy is negative? I'd say thats the most important reason why it will never work.
Also, Honda said something about them deciding that while they are currently making hybrids and what not, Hydrogen is the way of the future and that that is their long term car plan. Based on what Steven Chu said, does that mean they plan on pulling out of the US market entirely? Are they dumb?
Until I see money/efforts going into the infrastructure for delivering hydrogen, I will continue to believe it is a scam, with private and public institutions doing nothing more than trolling for grant funding.
Depends on which "hydrogen" you mean.
There's energy-storage "hydrogen", which exhibits losses. But all known storage media - Li-ion cells, clock springs, firewood, coal, oil, molten salts, etc., likewise exhibit losses, some small, others massive. So, while there are reasons to think hydrogen might remain uncompetitive for large-scale storage, "negative net energy" is certainly not one of them.
Then there's primary-source "hydrogen". There's been some work on producing it directly, in lieu of electrons, with devices vaguely resembling solar cells. It's at least conceivable that some such process might eventually prove scalable.
Finally, there's poetic "hydrogen". Politicians and ignoramuses (but I repeat myself) wax ecstatic over it as the most abundant chemical element in the universe.
Politicians, hucksters, and wishful thinkers will go on conflating these three "hydrogens" as they see fit. However, there's no need for us to work ourselves into a lather by repeating their mistake.
Sinking Finances Throw Iceland's 'Hydrogen-Based Economy' Into the Freezer - NYTimes.com
As for cost of generation of the fuel:
They tested a fuel cell Ford Explorer, getting a 350 mile range out of it - better than CNG vehicles. They're more impressed with hydrogen owing to the impact of cold on the performance of EVs; don't they generate their hydrogen right at the station, too?
As for cutting down the cost of the fuel cells, this is an interesting wrinkle: Carbon Nanotubes Could Replace Platinum and Lead to Affordable Hydrogen Cars | 80beats | Discover Magazine
What energy was producing all of that hydrogen?
Iceland uses geothermal steam for electricity.
I was trying to imply that if Iceland can produce all of that electricity already, then why go through the pointless process of converting that energy to hydrogen when they could just use the electricity directly. Electric cars are much more promising from a functional standpoint anyway, so such a decision on the Icelanders part seems very misguided. Probably the same thinking that caused their economy to utterly collapse...
No, one can't use electricity from a stationary source directly in a road vehicle. You can use it to charge batteries or use it to make hydrogen. The Icelanders bet that hydrogen would give them better range and lower cost. Probably a bad bet, but not transparently ridiculous. And the jury is actually still out. Batteries for practical EVs are still far from economic viability, and their energy density is even lower than that of a pressure tank full of hydrogen.
As to what sort of thinking caused their economy to collapse, they bought into the fairy tales of quick profits from highly leveraged derivatives that US financial institutions were peddling. And they weren't exactly alone. But perhaps you're right; that is similar to buying into the fairy tales the DOE under Bush was peddling to the world about hydrogen.
No cause to pick on the poor Icelanders, however. There's plenty of gullibility to go around, however.
"No, one can't use electricity from a stationary source directly in a road vehicle. You can use it to charge batteries or use it to make hydrogen."
I guess this kind of brings up the question of whether EVs and Hydrogen cars are really any different from a theoretical standpoint. Then its just a matter of which technology is cheaper and more scalable and more practical. Now I have to rethink my entire approach towards hydrogen. Actually, not really, because I'm not convinced that the electricity to make all that hydrogen will ever be supplied, and therefore the technology will probably not see its heyday for quite a long time, or ever.
Batteries lose efficiency in cold weather.
"They tested a fuel cell Ford Explorer, getting a 350 mile range out of it - better than CNG vehicles."
Ummm...uh, huh. We'll just have to stay tuned. For example, how many 350-mile trips does one get before major expensive repairs are necessitated by hydrogen creeping into and damaging nearly everything it touches? How long does the hydrogen stay in the tank if you use the bus everyday and need the car only once in a while? I dunno.
I do know, from living in a university town, that I've seen every manner of test vehicle, test setup, test mockup, test this, test that, and test the other thing. Nearly all those test whatsits are produced with great earnestness and at great expense, and nearly none of them turn out to be of great practical use in the real world. It's just part of the educational process, a part normally carried out in a sandbox where the abundant failures can serve as lessons without harming society.
It may well turn out that Iceland's approach belongs in a sandbox but is instead yet another governmental boondoggle - its continual need to have great gobs of money thrown at it may be a hint - so that at least for mass use something else may prove more practical. That's often a problem with grand plans imposed by pharaonic politicians and ignoramuses (but I repeat myself for a second time) trying to immortalize themselves at public expense. Iceland has famously had issues with hubris in the recent past, so yet another one would be no surprise. On the other hand there's no theoretical reason why some version can't eventually work. We'll simply have to check back 20 years from now and see who occupies what niche.
I was just trying to find anything in the way of good news about hydrogen, contrary to the almost universal pessimism attached to it here, most of which seems justified, with current tech anyway. There were some stories about carbon nano for the tanks as well, addressing those leakage issues. Pricey material, doubt it would offset the savings if carbon replaces the platinum as catalyst. Or maybe it would, beats me.
Agree with you about the KISS principle here though. Those RAV4 and EV1 owners seemed pretty happy with their vehicles.
Hydrogen in theory is a good replacement for oil.
The idea is to produce hydrogen to feed fuel cells which are glorified batteries, so in one sense hydrogen replaces electricity.
Fuel cell technology has a theoretical maximum efficiency of +80%. Special high temperature hydrogen generators have an efficiency of +80%. Together that's 64% efficiency.
Unfortunately hydrogen isn't there yet at 50% efficiency(65% electrolyzer and 75% for compression of H2--Ulf Bossel) and with PEM fuel cells at 40%. A mere 20% efficient!
Fuel cell advances and storage issues are holding hydrogen up but mainly infrastructure issues; under cap and trade that could change radically.
If there is a price for carbon of $50 per ton CO2, I can see a lot of natural gas reformer hydrogen stations being set up.
Compare that to a nuke station feeding EVs at 30% with a battery efficiency of 75%(Ulf Bossel). A miserable 22.5% efficiency.
What you do with hydrogen, see..., what you do is...
you burn it in a nuclear fusion reactor 93 million miles away, and collect some of the radiant heat.
Fuel cells have always been the power plant of the future. No reason to think this will change.
Regarding storage, have they reached the 6% target for hydrogen storage yet? This was, for a container the size a car's fuel tank, the mass of hydrogen contained is 6% of the container mass. Last I heard (five years ago?), they'd pretty much run out of ideas at just over 3%. Makes its energy density pretty feeble, when you have to divide the headline figure by 30.
Not sure what 6% means as the whole tank is filled with hydrogen at pressure.
By Boyle's law--1 bar /.09 kg/m3 STP = 333 bar /29.97 kg/m3 or .03 kg/liter. .03 x 171 = 5.13 kg...versus 4 kg...eh
A 171 liter (45 gallon) tank at 5000 psi(333 bar) will hold ~4 kg of hydrogen or 4 gallon of gas equivalent which in a Honda FCV fuel cell car will go 270 miles, better than any EV.
http://www.edmunds.com/insideline/do/Drives/FirstDrives/articleId=123662
http://www.autofieldguide.com/articles/010802.html
Toyota had a hydrogen/fuel cell test vehicle with 3 carbon wound tanks filled with 700 bars of hydrogen and they recorded a range of 300 miles. A bar is one atmosphere of pressure, 14.7 pounds per square inch. 700 bar times 14.7 pounds per square inch works out to be a little over 5.1 tons per square inch in roughly a 1.7 ton vehicle. If one of those tanks ruptures, you have a fairly hefty missile ala the same principles of letting an inflated balloon go.
220 million vehicles on the road times 3 tanks per vehicle is 660 million tanks. If the chance of tank failure is 0.00001% over the life of a vehicle, you still have a major safety problem.
Bear in mind that I wanted to build an alternatively fueled vehicle and looked at all the current technologies. I decided to go with an electric vehicle because of its current usefulness and later because battery improvements would extend the range.
With that said, hydrogen needs to be stored in a molecular "sponge" to the point where modest temperatures and/or pressure are needed to drive the hydrogen into and out of storage. The problem will be finding and developing the materials. That will only solve one of 9 major technical issues such as issue surrounding the durability of the fuel cells, operational ability in cold weather by beating the -4 degrees Fahrenheit (20 degrees Celsius) temperature limit, producing hydrogen in an ecologically friendly way where the current efficiency garners an equivalent fuel rating of around 12 to 16 mpg. The are issues with platinum scarcity, trapped moisture, separation of anode and cathode PEM sheets so they won't short out due to vehicle vibration, etc.
I looked at the hydrogen/fuel cell economy after 9/11 and found the political hyperbole excessive and the lack of MSM "uncovering the truth" abysmal to down right irresponsible. The powers that be were covering up and delaying the truth. One had only to scratch the surface to see the blatant lies that could have been easily uncovered and on the front page of major newspapers.
Well, CNG tanks are also rated at 300 bar.
http://www.theoildrum.com/node/5615
Also hydrogen is no more dangerous than CNG or gasoline.
http://www.jari.or.jp/en/pub/jido_pub/197.html
$50 per short ton is about 50¢/gallon of gasoline, give or take. This isn't going to drive any great shift. Plus, natural gas is also a depleting fuel (ask the Kiwis) and emits CO2 itself; if you cut emissions by 50%, your price differential is far less per gge.
Nuclear heat is a lot cheaper than natural gas, and emits no carbon at all.
DOE's target for hydrogen storage is, IIRC, 9% H2 by weight. Compare that to a gasoline tank and you'll see just how hard it is to hold hydrogen.
Cheap..cheap..cheap..
Your whole word is based on the delusion that nuclear power is supercheap, highly efficient and infinite.
Suppose for just a moment that you are wrong and that natural gas and oil uranium are becoming exhausted and thorium isn't going to happen.
Only 20% of US electricity comes from nukes and you pretend that
we can suddenly power millions of battery powered vehicles that don't even exist(dependent on rare minerals) as well as replace fossil fuels.
Get real.
The US currently consumes 30% of all the uranium so assuming the US gets 30% of all world uranium reserves of 6 million tons and burnt it in 500GW of LWRs( covering 4000 Twh of US electricity)--127,000 tons per year it would last only 16 years, well before there are any new FBRs are even built.
The US has very abundant fossil fuel resources mainly coal (and I would argue oil shale as well).
Any hydrocarbon can be converted to hydrogen by water shifting.
Coal can be converted (via syngas) to hydrogen (at a ratio of 8 to 1) with CO2 can be captured and stored in underground reservoirs which exceed all the CO2 those resources could produce by combustion.
The US mines 1.1 billion tons of coal per year(a 250 year supply), converted to hydrogen(137 million tons of H2) that would be 2.75 Gboe (US uses 7.6Gb).
Natural gas can be converted to hydrogen (at a ratio of 200 cf to 1 kg) with CO2 can be captured and stored in underground reservoirs which exceed all the CO2 those resources could produce by combustion.
The US produces 20 Tcf of natural gas per year(a 250 year supply), converted to hydrogen(125 million tons of H2). The US has at least 600 Tcf of natural gas which some people say is 1200 Tcf based on unconventional gas.
You can base your worldview on geological reserves (as prepared by geologists) or a fantasy world of low prices and Buck Rodgers technology.
Why should we make those assumptions about uranium and thorium? They are about as realistic as assuming that the atmosphere will vanish into space next week and we will all asphyxiate. There's plenty of uranium and Thorium Power is bringing thorium to conventional reactors.
Suddenly? You're going to <poof> these vehicles into existence overnight? And lead, steel and copper are "rare minerals" now?
You first.
A few years ago I calculated that the replacement of US gasoline consumption, using fairly generous assumptions about the efficiency of LDVs, would require about 107 GW of average power. If we built twice this much capacity (214 GW) over 20 years (10.7 GW/yr) in 1600 GW increments (AP1000's), we would need to install about 7 reactors a year. I believe we already did this once. If we did it with modular thorium MSRs at 300 MWe apiece, we'd need ~36 a year or one every 10 days. Given the small size of the basic hardware, we should be able to build them at one a day.
Not only is that hopelessly vague (8 to 1 of what?), it's not even grammatical.
First you say it's a 250 year supply, but then you quote a figure which comes out to a 60 year supply... at current consumption rates. If you add all US petroleum requirements to this (37 quads/year at last year's rate, compared to 23 quads of gas) the 60 year supply becomes a 20 year supply.
You are too stupid to see what your own numbers mean. You yank nice-sounding numbers from other sources without understanding that they are not even self-consistent.
There are some 8000 tons of thorium nitrate declared surplus and buried as waste in Nevada. At 0.8 ton per GW-yr, this "waste" alone would supply a 200 GW fleet of thorium reactors for ~50 years. All this requires is 1965 technology. US high-grade thorium reserves have recently been calculated at 190,000 tons; that's sufficient to produce 500 GW for 475 years. 500 GW is more than total US average generation. It could replace US fossil-fired capacity while adding a fleet of electric vehicles, all without having to worry about carbon.
But this will not affect you at all. Facts will not change your thinking, because you don't do any thinking.
They tested a fuel cell Ford Explorer, getting a 350 mile range out of it - better than CNG vehicles.
But when you start adding up the fact that most hydrogen comes from natural gas to start with, is only converted with significant energy inputs, and it then takes a lot of energy to compress and deliver hydrogen - the overall energy comparison isn't even close.
The Iceland scheme is not totally out of the question, though. If you have excess electricity capacity - for instance excess solar at peak power - you could electrolyze some to hydrogen for storage. Not the most efficient thing, but better than simply not utilizing that potential.
[rolls eyes]Yes! Not only is there a lot of Hydrogen in the depths of the Pacific Ocean, but also each star has a lot of Hydrogen, and Jupiter (some scientists claim) has a lot of Hydrogen, not to mention the inter-stellar regions, which are rich in Hydrogen.[/rolls eyes]
Net energy from hydrogen source to the wheels is the key. A hydrogen fuel cell vehicle is an electric vehicle whose batteries are charged by the fuel cell. If the hydrogen is made by splitting water electrically, it's going to be energetically more efficient to use the same electricity to charge the vehicle batteries directly. If the hydrogen comes from natural gas, it's going to be more efficient to burn the natural gas in an IC engine. (Edit: And, of course the distribution systems for electricity and natural gas are already built.)
Hydrogen was sold to politicians decades ago as an attainable fuel of the future. It’s become entrenched in a political system that doesn’t pay much attention to physics, and in an industrial/academic circle that would like to continue living off the money for government priorities. Secretary Chu was right to axe these grants and subsidies. Will a less educated Congress succeed in restoring them?
http://www.fuelcells.org/basics/how.html
No.
In a fuel cell protons move like electrons do in a battery while stripped electrons move back to the anode.
No battery is necessary.
My mistake. I'd read Daimler's news release for their F-cell B-class, a couple of hundred of which will be made late this year for testing by customers in Europe and California. I'd focused on the 35 kW lithium ion battery, which the media release says will be used to boost acceleration and recover braking energy. This is a larger capacity battery than in the pure EV Daimler showed at this year's North American International Auto Show and which the company intends to market next year.
Daimler, incidentally says that their fuel-cell B class gets the equivalent of 3.3 L of diesel per 100 km in the New European Driving Cycle. The same car with a diesel engine gets 5.2-6.0 L/100 km. I'll take the diesel, thanks.
It's still useful to have a battery in a hybrid powertrain to get regenerative braking and extra power for acceleration. Some fuel cells are undersized wrt peak power for acceleration, and it's not clear if they have adequate throttle response without a battery or capacitor setup. GM's fuel cell in the Equinox isn't undersized, being rated at the same power as the electric motors, but 93 kW in a 4400 lbs vehicle doesn't give you much freeway performance or power for cargo.
Is anyone still trying to field a "pure" FC vehicle? AFAIK there's a pretty solid consensus that the most feasible way to make fuel cells practical is to use them as a the "range extender" power source in a range-extended EV. In that role, they only need to be about 30% of the capacity - and 30% the cost -- of what would be required to drive the vehicle without batteries.
Yesterday, on Gail's request for topics thread, I made a comment that, due to the fact that the BAU economy is starting a long-term decline, that any technology or alternative energy that is not ready to roll NOW, on a commercial/industrial scale, for all practical purposes will never exist on that scale. As we seem to be bumping into the first of the Limits to Growth, I don't see any long-term turnaround and resumed growth in the economy which will be necessary to support the years of research and experimentation required. I have heard that when money and budgets get tight, R+D is one of the first things to hit the chopping block. I suspect that in two or three years the economy will have sufficiently tanked so that most of this work will be history. And this means that Robert's "Contenders" will likely never expand beyond a niche level.
Antoinetta III
Robert you seem to be leaving a critical component out of the analysis: There is an expectation that there will be "scalable" equivalents to our massive car-centric society and there isn't (and I think you know that). When "the people" realize that they might have to get out of their cars at the Starbuck's drive-thru and perhaps tolerate mass-transit rubbing elbows with their fellow citizens it is going to be right back to "drill baby drill".
The bigger obstacle to all of these schemes is cultural not technological.
Joe
When we start the slide down the back-side of the peak oil curve, what life boat or combination of life boats will accommodate 6-plus billion people and their associated industries? Take for example replacing individual cars with buses. A hybrid bus can get about 3.1 to 3.6 mpg vs. about 2 for a standard diesel bus. If you put 30 people on said bus (50% occupancy), then it’s getting the equivalent of about 90 to 120 mpg for each person @ 3-4mpg. That's about the same efficiency as the emerging plug-in hybrid cars. So while the bus will in the end will have a smaller Life Cycle footprint in terms of consumables, labor and alike, mass transit will only yield reasonable dividends in the first round of conservation. Especially if you still have to maintain the same transportation network. This does not apply to rail, where maintenance is far smaller, but rail has a vastly larger upfront cost. Thus, we are left with no easy choices and the smartest ones may be the most expensive and the most politically difficult to achieve.
What does this mean? After the first round of savings from available conservation and efficiency technology, further savings are going to be expensive, intensive and socially disruptive. The key here will annual decline rate. Anything beyond about 1 to 1 1/2 % and we will immediately need very agressive, expensive and socially disruptive changes. Where does 1% come from? If you replace all domestic vehicles that are scrapped each year with plug-in hybrids, you reduce our annual oil consumption by 1% (ignoring the oil needed to produce the cars of course.)
Hybrid busses in Seattle – Not what was hoped for
http://www.seattlepi.com/transportation/203509_metro13.html
Trolley buses are no option in Seattle?
Keep in mind that people don't need to travel far in a down-scaled economy. Walk, ride a bike, take a short trolley ride. The mistake is people keep projecting our current lifestyle with some minor modifications.
That's not the change I'm talking about.
Joe
What does this mean?
It means bicycles, and walking, and staying at home (telecommuting?, teleshopping? teleteaching?).
There isn't one.
The hydrogen economy - probably even wind power - won't cut it. The politicians, business misleaders and consumers advocating such things are only in denial. But it's ok, because they get to sell that denial back and forth to each other - reinforcing what they believe.
And we've already started the slide, lest you forget.
cfm from "The Growlery", Gray, ME
"They might have something that works in the lab, but this can instill a false sense of confidence in those who have never scaled a process up."
Viable scaling is ever the death trap of a budding technology. Algal biofuel may fall into this trap, though it appears that small production/pilot facilities are underway. It should be clear, however, that it (and likely the aggregate of the 'solutions') will never replace the level of fuel energy that we have been consuming via refined petroleum.
PetroSun to launch first commercial-scale algae farm for biofuel in US; 1831-acre facility to produce 5,000-8,000 gallons per acre
It seems that there are many efforts underway in algal biofuel across the R&D spectrum at the above link, from basic and applied research to demonstration and technology transfer. I'll reserve judgement on this right now, except to note the issue of scaling Robert talked about. Every claim should be viewed critically with an eye on the questions;
- How long (and with what resources) will it take to reach 1 million barrels/day production?
- What will the cost be?
- What is the balance of the inputs, including EROEI calculations, water, and land needed?
- How long will it take to reach 5 million barrels/day production?
Late last fall, PetroSun announced a letter of intent to supply 54 million gallons of algal oil to a new 54 Mgy Bio-Alternatives biodiesel plant in south Louisiana. The initial delivery to Bio-Alternatives refinery will be in the third quarter of 2008. Does anyone know if any of the promised biodiesel feedstock was delivered?
"PetroSun, Inc. (Other OTC:PSUD.PK - News) is pleased to announce that PetroSun BioFuels Marketing, a wholly owned subsidiary, has completed an Interim Biofuels Agreement to market an initial 384,000 gallons of certified B99 biodiesel." Does anyone know if this offering ever materialized?
In Virginia, researchers at Old Dominion University have successfully piloted a project to produce biodiesel feedstock by growing algae at municipal sewage treatment plants. The researchers hope that these algae production techniques could lead to reduced emissions of nitrogen, phosphorus and carbon dioxide into the air and surrounding bodies of water. The pilot project is producing up to 70,000 gallons of biodiesel per year.
One of my closest friends has founded two algae research companies in the past decade. It does hold real promise but is still a decade away from real commercial scale production. Out of all the technologies on Robert's great summary, I would argue for more Govt. funding of algae based biofuel research simply because it does hold the potential for capturing lots of sunlight and converting it to oil (and a lot of usable protein too).
Don,t forget the other two parts of the process CO2 and water. It is a potentially great way to convert CO2 from the atmosphere or from fossil fuel burning plants into carbohydrates/hydrocarbons while cleaning up sewerage and other nutrient rich water. I think algae research could be justified as a means of CO2 sequestration and waste water processing on it's own. Has any of the research up to now examined the whole spectrum of products and by products with a view to using all the outputs (fertilizer, fuel, biomass, treated wastewater etc.)?
Alan from the islands
Thinking historically, why should we now in 2000+ be able to do better than the sugar cane, slave and gun-runners of the 1700s? That was a society much more integrated, developed and refined than anything we can codger up with nanotech buckyballs. There is only so much wattage per square foot. How we optimize systems costs around that matters greatly. But the slave/sugar cane/rum trade was largely a "solar" and "sustainable" system. One has to wonder how much margin there is for improvement, because after all, nothing is wasted and energy not immediately harvested stays in the fields to help the next harvest.
cfm, The Growlery, Gray, ME
Not the case in my neck of the woods. Cane fields are set on fire in preparation for cutting which is still done manually. I think it was originally done to make manual cutting easier since the leaves would burn off leaving the stalk and rid the fields of insects (ants) at the same time. So in the case of Jamaica a lot is wasted and the soil is "killed" in the process. Every time I see a cane field on fire I wonder about all that stored sunlight going up in smoke.
I guess that's why the Jamaican sugar industry is basically a failed industry, kept alive by government subsidy since the production cost have exceeded world market prices for decades. The government is desperate to sell off the sugar factories but, there are not many takers for old run down plant with a heavily unionized work force and centuries of entrenched bad practices (like burning cane). Last year some Brazilian bio-fuel interests were in negotiations to buy the whole lot but, the deal fell through. I had great hopes that the Brazilians would be able to put sugar production back on a good footing here.
Worthy of note is that private interest have done very well for themselves out of sugar cane but they don't do sugar. They have concentrated on the much more profitable product. Rum
Alan from the islands
Farmers, government officials and even ethanol producers are finally waking up to the logistics issues of cellulosic ethanol that I and others have pointed out many times before. Corn ethanol has its problems mainly related to cheap gasoline prices, but at least the infrastructure is in place. Cellulosic ethanol is a whole different can of worms.
http://www.nccoop.com/index.cfm?show=4&id=0702BF51
Using these figures for the Percentage Of Corn Crop Used For Ethanol (Cattle Network) (currently 34%) you have 2.94 x current production before you hit 100% of the crop for ethanol, i.e., 2018. What do we do to compensate? Import more? Assume harvesting will be more efficient? Assume one of Chu's cellulosic pathways will lead to something marketable?
Who wrote that piece analyzing the various cellulose schemes statistically, too? I thought it was Dave Cohen, can't find it.
While looking for a career in geothermal energy, I accidentally stumbled upon http://www.marshallsystem.com
Bruce, the guy who thought of this, wants to harness the superheated fluid coming out of deep sea hydrothermal vents. The fluid usually comes out of these at 1-5 m/sec at around 400 degrees Celsius under enormous pressures. He wants to cap these off with insulated pipes and pipe the fluid to a floating oil-rig like structure. The fluid could then be used to make steam or generate electricity. It could also go through desalination to make freshwater. A major oil company has already looked at it and from the numbers, it looks certainly feasible. For some reason they gave him the cold shoulder after crunching the numbers. You can get about 20 GW from a single vent. A typical nuclear power plant generates 4GW.
Spec out a 3-mile long pipe able to support it's own weight, then ask yourself how practical this idea is.
Some discussion on a slightly more practical version of the same concept.
You put floats at intervals in the pipe. The insulation is made of bubbles, of course.
I'd think hydrodynamics of current would require thrusters at intervals, powered, of course, by valve-diverted hot water.
OK, make it stable, prevent pipe breaks, and allow for multiple thruster failures.
And you don't get anchors for the platform, so it has to be stable enough to deal with 20M waves and Hurricane winds and have thrusters powerful enough to keep it in position under those conditions so it doesn't break off the pipes itself.
Now that you have all of that, transmit the power to shore (what's left of it, anyway) and try to make a profit.
At the bottom end of the pipes deal with mineral deposition making your heat exchangers progressively less efficient at a pretty good clip as well as biologicals trying to colonize pretty much the whole mess top to bottom.
The ocean, especially the DEEP ocean, is a hostile environment that makes moon colonization look like a piece of cake. The only reason we've been able to explore it to the extent we have is gravity works with us instead of against us.
Far from shore, the oceans are very calm, especially the Pacific Ocean. The platform floats and the portion of pipe near sea level could be flexible to accommodate changes in sea level. The platform itself could have engines on all four sides and be locked into place via computers controlling the engines and using input from GPS satellites.
If companies can drill deep sea oil wells I don't see how these pipes can be stabilized as well. In fact, it would be easier because any leaking fluid wouldn't float to the surface and kill wildlife.
These vents produce anywhere from 20-50 GW of energy and I'm sure any loss can be mitigated by an increase in power production. There would be little loss through the insulated pipes. The main problem would be transmitting to power to shore.
The heat exchanger is one option of the system but I think the open fluid system would be preferred. I'm not sure about the buildup of stuff on the pipes.
There's deep, and then there's DEEP.
Deep-water oil rigs are still on the continental shelf.
Volcanic thermal vents are characteristic of mid-ocean ridges and the abyss.
This, of course, also places them about as far from land as it is possible to be in most places.
http://www.wired.com/cars/energy/magazine/15-09/mf_jackrig
If we can go through 5 miles of rock I'm sure we can go through the 1 mile of water to reach the nearby Juan de Fuca vents.
How many miles to the nearest land from there?
If it were done as a wholly submerged operation with HVDC transport to the nearest land it *might* be possible.
Whether it would be feasible even then given the maintenance difficulties inherent to the environment and the sheer expense involved in working that deep that far from shore is something that has yet to be demonstrated.
It hasn't even been proven that the deep water oil finds in that area will be able to be exploited profitably.
duplicate post
You don't suppose anyone trying to harness all that energy to maintain BAU would worry about the environmental impact of robbing the ecosystems that exist around those deep sea hydrothermal vents of their basic energy source, now would they?
Yes, the open system would be very invasive. There is a closed loop version of the system where only the heat from this vent is used. The first version of this generator might use this/
One question I would ask-When you remove heat from the Superheated fluid does material precipitate on your heat transfer surfaces? When this sort of thing happens it tends to require expensive cleaning of the heat tranfer surfaces. That may be a reason the major oil company backed away.
Precipitation is both a problem and an opportunity. The materials precipitated might be worth as much, in revenue, as the power generated. You wouldn't want to use a solid heat transfer surface. Probably bubble cold compressed gas through a descending column of the hot water in a counter-flow heat path. Then there'd be a surface onto which the precipitates could settle.
Dunno. Could work. It would take some development and testing, but I don't see any fundamental problems.
Other than raising funding. of course.
Hi Roger, I'm contacting you on behalf of Bruce, the Marshall System inventor. He would like to discuss this idea with you further. Could you please contact him at info@marshallsystem.com ?
1GW is close.
There are merits if hydrogen is mixed with natural gas:
http://hythane.com/
Efficiency is improved in an internal combustion engine, if hydrogen is added to the natural gas fuel:
http://www.all4engineers.com/index.php;do=show/alloc=3/lng=en/id=2866/si...
http://www.sae.org/technical/papers/2007-24-0065
http://alturl.com/cavu
In addition, dependence on fossil fuels is reduced, combustion is cleaner and GHG-emissions are reduced.
Also considering that there may be more trucks powered by natural gas in the future:
http://www.joc.com/node/412241
And that there may be more combined heat & power plants with reciprocating engines powered by natural gas in the future:
http://www.cat.com/cda/files/698811/7/CPGS_Bramming.pdf
And that there may be benefits in converting a surplus of wind energy to hydrogen in the future:
http://www.physorg.com/news87494382.html
I see diesel/nat gas dual fuel engines being installed as backup generators and/or CHP as grid power gets less reliable and/or more expensive.
With lots of renewable and nuclear on the grid spot prices could be driven very low during some hours. It might be possible to make small amounts of hydrogen from this very cheap electricity and use that to extend the lean limit of natural gas in engines.
Theres some interesting stuff with plasma assisted combustion extending the lean limit of natural gas.
http://www.grcblog.com/?p=676
Also making renewable natural gas from catalytic gasification of aquatic speices looks promising
http://www.genifuel.com/text/20090420%20Renewable%20Natural%20Gas%20via%...
http://www.greencarcongress.com/2009/05/genifuel-pnnl-20090506.html
And natural gas from organic waste is already being produced and commercially available now.
http://www.kompogas.ch/uploads/media/Vergaerungsanlage.pdf
Also, CO2 which is produced during anaerobic digestion (or catalytic gasification for that matter) could additionally be turned into CH4, if a surplus of wind energy was being used to generate H2:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sabatier_reaction
(And if there was no direct use for H2).
I do like holistic 'joined up' thinking/answers but I can't help thinking there is an awful lot of plant/capital investment needed to enable it on every farm... How much of this stuff is there already and would it be possible to mass produce as a sort of kit with varying output sizes (all tailored to 'x' amount of input say)?
[I'm thinking like "Model XYZ Farm Kit" produces X Kilowatts of Electricity, Y'000 BTU of heat and Z tons of waste fertiliser for $$$$...]
Nick.
Fact is that organic waste power plants do exist and produce power and heat and sell it with a profit. The proof is obviously in the pudding.
Not every farm has its own mill, so why would every single farm need to invest in its own power plant?
Denmark gets almost 100 PJ (28 TWh) from straw, biogas, wood and waste and is 250 times smaller than the US.
http://www.ens.dk/EN-US/INFO/FACTSANDFIGURES/ENERGY_STATISTICS_AND_INDIC...
The organic waste produced in a farm is not sufficient to power an entire economy but it can be combined with organic waste produced elsewhere it can be combined with biomass specifically grown to increase the total biogas output and organic waste processing reduces the Methane output of a farm (reduction of GHG-emissions).
As always: One single component never solves the entire energy issue.
So what? So far there's no law stating that the energy issue has to be solved by one single option and mustn't be solved by variety of options.
Besides if one wants to give the people in the developed world a break, one should invent cheap rent and cheap healthcare as energy costs are still small in comparison (well if one happens to live in a country with some reasonable efficiency standards).
You can do without most of the equipment and just use the gas for cooking
http://www.off-grid.net/2006/11/04/cooking-with-biogas/
Hydrogen can also be used to make ammonia. Anyone planning to attend the upcoming ammonia fuel conference in Kansas City?
http://www.energy.iastate.edu/Renewable/ammonia/ammonia/ammoniaMtg09.htm
It can also be combined with carbon to make methanol. Hydrogen is already the building block for a huge sector of the chemical industry. The question of how to store it is a logistical problem more than a technical one. If it can be produced from renewables it will be used, the issue seems to be can enough be produced at an efficient price, and are there better ways to store power. Battery advances may make hydrogen a non-starter, but no matter how much we try to deny it, it is still the most abundant element in the universe, it is still the cleanest burning, and the technology does exist. It is a question of logistics and economics (as all things are in technology.) A post above mentions Honda's continuing work. Honda does not have a history of being "dumb". It all depends on how far down the road you are looking...Honda seems to be working toward "leapfroging" past where many of the current technologies are, and going for the brass ring. They are to be watched.
RC
The ammonia fuel conference should be interesting with Matt Simmons as a keynote speaker. Hopefully, someone will upload it to youtube.
Shirley you must be joking.
In every power plant on earth you put in 10 BTUs (of coal, gas, nukes)and get 3 BTUs of electricity out.
In gas combined cycle plants, efficiencies of over 50% have been attained.
3 BTU's of electricity are 'worth' as much (financially and thermodynamically) as 10 BTU's of fuel. In the process of converting the biomass you go from 10 BTU's of sold fuel to 3 BTU's of Liquid fuel (or 6 BTU's of gas assuming ~60% efficient gasification) which are not 'worth' as much as the solid fuel.
Though arguably you could use the 3-6 BTU's of liquid fuel to run CHP and heat pumps and make up for the energy 'lost' in conversion.
Let's please not be foolish about this. Useful work (thermodynamic free energy) is typically extracted at on the order of 25%-30% efficiency from various fuels, by means of internal combustion engines, electric power generation and final use, and so on. The putative 70% loss incurred in converting biomass to liquid fuel will be on top of this thermodynamic loss, for an overall loss exceeding 90% - it will most assuredly not be instead of the thermodynamic loss.
No.
A hybrid car gets 51 mpg on gasoline from oil and an EV goes 4 miles on a kilowatt from coal.
A ton of coal has 18 million Btus in it and produces 2000 kwh.
A barrel of oil has 5.8 million BTUs in it. 15% is used at the refinery for heating, etc so 42/.85=50 gal per barrel.
5.8E6 Btus/ 51 mpg x 50 gal/bbl = 2275 Btu/mi.
18 E6 Btus/ ton x 1 ton/2000 kwh x 1 kwh/mile = 2250 Btu/mi
This shows that in terms of miles driven(useful work) an efficient car is basically equal to an EV based on input primary energy.
Even though the refinery is highly efficient at 85% and the power plant is only 30% efficient, the drive trains at the other end--a relatively inefficient IC engine(with hybrid tech) or efficient electric motor cancel the energy supplying plant out.
Of course, if we CHOOSE to drive inefficient cars then they don't cancel that out.
OTOH, the possibility of raising energy efficient power stations is limited by the laws of thernodynamics, leaving aside claims for CCGT (which are frankly ridiculous IMO becuase we will get most of grid energy from coal--not IGCC or nuclear).
Shouldn't that be 42x.85=35.7 gal per barrel. ?
(If so, it will change result to)
5.8E6 Btus/ 51 mpg x 35.7 gal/bbl = 4060 Btu/mi.
18 E6 Btus/ ton x 1 ton/2000 kwh x 1 kwh/mile = 2250 Btu/mi
(I also find your 51 mpg to be a "not very representative" choice of figures)
Illogical.
42 gallons per barrel would mean 42 gallons of oil produces 42 gallons of gasoline. 50 gallons of oil produces 42 gallons of gasoline as refineries are 85% efficient which is a standard number.
It reflects the fact that EVs are nothing like normal cars.
I have a Honda Insight which the EPA rated at 56 mpg. The hybrid engine is one reason for its efficiency but it's quite small and made out of aluminum which also saves a lot of fuel. You must compare apples to apples.
Even more illogical
A Barrell of oil (42 gal) yields 44 gal of net petroleum liquids.
A Barrell of oil net 19.65 gallons of gasoline. (10.03 of distillates, 4.07 of jet fuel, and 1.72 residual fuel oil, rest is other products...still gas, asphalt, coke, liquified refinery gas, foodstock, lubricants, etc)
Gasoline has a net BTU content of 125000 BTU's per gallon
19.65 * 125000 = 2,465,250 BTU
so 19.65 gal of gas at 51 mpg will drive you 1002.15 miles
so 2,465,250 BTU's will motor you along for 1002.15 miles
Your cost is = 2459.96 BTU / mile
If we want to compare apples to apples, we need to do the same BTU/mile for the distillates and jet fuel to derive the milage one barrell of oil gives us.
140000 BTU = one gal of #2 Diesel
Take a Volks Turbo Diesel at 52 mpg.
10.03 * 140000 = 1404200 BTU
10.03 * 52 = 521 miles
1404200 / 521 = 2695.20 miles / per BTU
Put them together
1523.15 miles : 3,869,250 BTU
2540.29 BTU/mile
So then we have to look at the other side. @ 4 miles per khw, for 1523.15 miles we need 380 kwh
The conversion to BTU from here is much tricker. How many BTU's does it take to generate 380 kwh? Using the coal example...
18,000,000 BTUs to make 2000 Kwh = 9000 BTU per KWH (coal fired)
380 KWH to travel 1523.15 miles = 3,420,000 BTU to travel 1523.15 miles
2245.34 BTU/ mile
So your results were close, but your route was incorrect, one has to account for the net gain in liquids from oil if you start with oil. Starting with Gasoline as a finished product is better, cleaner. And you should really use joules for your energy unit. then express your EV as watts to derive more accurate KW/h numbers. This highlights where the focus needs to be.
What is scary I suppose is that really electric cars are not that much more efficent than gasoline when it comes down to it. Until we replace about 70-80% of the US's electric production capacity with renewables or nuclear...electric cars hurt the environment, as coal is much dirtier than oil to burn. ( I should qualify that to say using high gas mileage diesels are just as efficent as EV, a SUV getting 12 mpg is nowhere near as efficent as an EV, but high MPG diesels are a fast, scalable, and profitable at 2.50 gal)
Just my opinions
I am often wrong.
PooBah
http://www.rxp.com/DieselFuel.htm
http://www.quoteoil.com/oil-barrel.html
which are frankly ridiculous IMO becuase we will get most of grid energy from coal--not IGCC or nuclear
Not sure about the US, but CHP already accounts for 10% of global electricity generation:
http://www.iea.org/files/CHPbrochure09.pdf
And its combined efficiency can be over 92%:
http://www.cat.com/cda/files/698811/7/CPGS_Bramming.pdf
And it appears to be growing rapidly:
The number of on-site reciprocating engines and gas turbines delivered last year was close to 100GW (the capacity of almost all US nuclear power plants combined in one single year): http://www.dieselgasturbine.com/pdf/power_2008.pdf#zoom=100
And CHP can also be an option in warmer climates where its excess heat can not only be used for hot water generation but also for air conditioning:
http://www.solarserver.de/solarmagazin/anlage_0308_e.html
http://www.solarcool.com/index.php?article_id=1&clang=2
CHP is actually a good idea but we are talking about producing mechanical energy, not heat.
When CHPs operate to produce electricity there is waste--they put on a waste heat exchanger and heat the Great Outdoors.
The key is to reduce electricity consumption.
Yes, but CHP generates hot water and if that hot water replaces direct electric water heaters (resistance heating), electricity consumption is reduced or if that hot water replaces fossil fuel heaters more gas is available to generate electricity (more electricity per unit fossil fuel).
Keep in mind most household energy is in most cases needed for heating (incl. hot water) and cooling purposes:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/6176229.stm
So, if CHP is going to be increased, most heat won't go to waste.
Besides the CHP power plant in the link above has an electrical efficiency of 43.4%.
This is the first small scale CHP I have seen brought to actual commercialization. It is a significant step in that it is designed for a individual home and being incorporated into the boiler sales of 5 or 6 of the largest boiler suppliers in Europe. A silver BB but a good one.
http://www.worldofcogeneration.com/index.php?do=viewarticle&artid=82&tit...
No again. Hardly.
In your own words: "You might net something like 3 BTUs of liquid fuel from the 10 BTUs of biomass you started with." Now, the efficiency of both cars in terms of finished fuel is indeed similar as you just said - that's an important part of the point.
But the biomass-to-miles efficiency is awful, and you were originally talking biomass. Using your ratio and numbers, it would take 2275*10/3, or 7583 BTUs of biomass to move the liquid-fuel car a mile. With the EV, you could have bypassed the woefully inefficient liquid-fuel middleman and burned the biomass directly in a power plant. That probably would not attain quite the full coal BTU efficiency but it certainly should get much closer than your biomass to liquid fuel example.
In other words, contrary to your original assertion, a large conversion loss in power plants or IC engines does not 'excuse' an equally large conversion loss in going from biomass to liquid fuel. When BTUs are converted via the power plant or IC engine, roughly 2/3 are thrown away and the remainder become useful work. But when biomass is converted to liquid fuel, many of the BTUs are simply thrown away, with the remaining ones yet to be converted to useful work. When they are finally converted there will be another large loss, compounding the biomass-to-liquid loss.
Au contraire,
It is ridiculous to count renewable biomass energy input in any calculation because renewables are basically 'free' energy (leaving aside 'embodies energy').
It is like adding oxygen as a fuel to your fuel inputs (even though oxygen carries most of the energy of combustion)--nobody does it because it's free.
If I built an ethanol plant that used solar collects to make steam how many Btu would you input? How many BTUs of fuel do you input to a hydroelectric dam?
Now calculate the conversion factor.
Been lurking on here for an age but this interests me:
I'm always amazed how many times this is either stated or implied - the feedstock might be free but it still matters how much useful heat or work you actually get out of it.
For the figures given we have 30% feedstock to liquid fuel efficiency then 30% in the IC engine giving 9% overall which is probably possible in a reciprocating steam locomotive! (up to 12% was thought possible on coal).
If it were burnt in a power station at 40% with 90% efficient motors to generate the work you get 36%.
If it were burnt in a stove for pure heat you could likely get 80%.
If you used the power station to run a heat pump at a COP of 3 you could get 120%.
If you used it in a CHP power station with an electrical efficiency of 30% and 10% heat loss you could have either:
27% shaft power plus 60% heat making 97% or using the heat pump 150%
So it must matter how you use the free biomass - so long as someone is using oil for heating (at least in the UK heating oil is basically diesel) it must make more sense to use one of the heat or electricity options (the choice depending on how much is lost in transmission - neglected above) and save the most oil possible for vehicle use rather than going through massive contortions to make liquid fuel from a poor starting material.
There's low temperature heat and then there's mechanical work.
To be honest low temperature heat has very marginal value.
By thermodynamics COP heating = Th/(Th-Tc)
and COPcooling=Tc/(Th-Tc).
In other words, the smaller the difference between the hot source and cold sink, the higher the efficiency.
In a house with an indoor temp of 26 and a year ground temp of 13 a ground source heat pump would be quite efficient.
294/(26-13)=23 theoretical COP.
But it would be far less efficient than simply insulating the building to the point where almost no heating or cooling (based on exterior heat loss/gain)is required like in a passivehouse.
If you used an air source heat pump your COP would be marginal at the extremes -10 degrees which is where most of your fuel consumption would be. 263/(26--10)=7.3 theoretical COP.
In the UK they have nice gaspowered 1 KW CHP units like Whispergen which make some hot water and electricity. I like these units a lot but 1KW electricity(a refrigerator?)/ and make 12 KWH of hot water is tiny(run a shower?).
http://www.whispergen.com/main/acwhispergen/
The best idea I've seen is using low efficiency Stirling engines
burning direct biomass to make hot water with a small bit of electric power. Stirling engines can run on pretty much anything.
You best bet is to by a house that doesn't need a heating/AC system and a small CHP system to make hot water.
If you have some land you could put in a geothermal heat pump.
Biogas is 50% CO2 so it's heating value is very low but you can possibly run a stirling engine on it.
Very true, but you're wasting your time. You can repeat this until you are blue in the face (or your fingers fall off), but you will never get majorian to acknowledge the difference between the losses in conversion from biomass to liquid fuel and the losses in conversion from heat to work. He is either lacks the mental capability to understand that they are completely different things, or very adept at trying to hide it behind a smokescreen of irrelevancies.
Flagging the stupid may be more productive than attempting to rebut it again (and again, and again....).
Loss?
There is no loss.
Ethanol(for example) is net energy positive. You put in energy and get more energy out.
Thanks E-P for allowing me to correct the illogical silliness you propagate.
Ta-ta, E-P!
Everyone: See what I mean about the stupid? A bushel of corn has about 392,000 BTU of energy; at 2.8 gallons per bushel and 78,000 BTU/gallon, the ethanol produced yields perhaps 218,000 BTU before processing energy is considered (30,000 BTU/gallon of natural gas comes to another 84000 BTU/bushel). This is a substantial loss, yet majorian blows right past it as if we have an infinite amount of corn energy and losses are of no significance.
Whether stupid or breathtakingly dishonest, it is pointless to argue with him.
E-P,
Don't you understand EROEI?
(Apparently not!)
Why would you add in the energy of the feedstock?
ROI--return on investment is NOT return on investment plus the value of the raw materials.
Even the Department of Agriculture only calculates the EROEI of corn ethanol at 1.6:1 (and uses voodoo accounting to get it). Even granting their methodology, that is at most 1/3 of what we need to sustain society.
Unlike you, I don't have to ask what you don't understand. You don't understand NPP (net primary productivity) or opportunity cost; using 392,000 BTU of grain to make 218,000 BTU of liquid fuel means you cannot use the lost 174,000 BTU (plus processing energy) for anything else.
You are too stupid to understand. On the other hand, some readers who were unclear on the concept are bound to see the various refutations of your nonsense and become enlightened.
392000 btu/ bushel x 1 bushel/2.8 gallons = 140000 btu per gallon.
Basic innumeracy, E-P.
That's your problem. That and your sparkling personality.
See what I mean about the stupid? 392,000 BTU (140kBTU/gallon) is one of the inputs, not the output.
The output is 2.8 gallons * 78,000 BTU/gallon = 218000 BTU/bu.
Yes, that's your problem. And a tin ear for irony.
A barrel of oil has 5.8 million BTUs in it. 15% is used at the refinery for heating, etc so 42/.85=50 gal per barrel.
5.8E6 Btus/ 51 mpg x 50 gal/bbl = 2275 Btu/mi.
Picking nits here, but I think you've got two problems with this.
First is that you're trying to calculate BTU/mile from the well to wheels, and you're using the BTU value of crude rather than gasoline. Gas is ~120K btu/gal. If you want to alot an 85% efficiency to the refinery process, you should have 120K/.85 = 141K BTU. Per mile then is 141,000/51 = 2768. Still fairly close to 2250.
I think what you meant to say was (5.8E6 / .85) / (42gal * 51 mpg). That gives you total BTU / total miles, and comes out to 3185 BTU/mile. That's 42% more than the electrical load.
Try it your way.
A barrel of oil has 5.8E6 Btus of energy.
It goes to the refinery and comes out with 4.93E6 Btus of energy (85% efficient) in the form of 42 gallons of gasoline.
This is a little tricky because oil refineries don't just make gasoline and diesel and volumetrically oil and gas are different.
5.8E6 x .85/(51 mpg x 42gal/barrel)= 2301 Btus/mi (I rounded up to 50 gal per barrel rather than 49.4 where I get 2274 Btus/mi).
Your attempted 'correction' misses the point; part of the oil input is used up making gasoline by fractional distillation. Oil refineries also use natural gas and use coke to make hydrogen, which is less efficent than simply heating up oil. Dividing by .85 would mean that refineries magically increase the value of their feedstock.
The point is that considering the whole chain of well to wheel
coal fired EVs are not an improvement over efficient cars of a similar build.
Your attempted 'correction' misses the point; part of the oil input is used up making gasoline by fractional distillation. Oil refineries also use natural gas and use coke to make hydrogen, which is less efficent than simply heating up oil.
You started with 50 gallons per barrel. I presumed you got there by dividing a 42 gallon barrel of oil by .85 to account for the total BTU input to the refinery to account for losses at the refinery to deliver a barrel of finished goods. "50 gallons" refers to the BTU input to the refinery; 42 gallons refers to the BTU in a barrel of refined product. The hybrid car will travel 51 mpg * 42 gallons or 2142 miles on the BTU input of 50 gallons. Total BTU to the refinery = 5.8E6/.85 (your numbers). That's 6.8 E6 BTU to the refinery to create the fuel for 2142 miles; that's 3185 BTU per mile.
Dividing by .85 would mean that refineries magically increase the value of their feedstock.
No, dividing by something less than one shows how much more raw material they had to have to produce the finished product. Just like you started with - 50 gallons of input to produce a 42 gallon barrel.
The point is that considering the whole chain of well to wheel
coal fired EVs are not an improvement over efficient cars of a similar build.
We just got done demonstrating that to move your car 1 mile with oil takes either 3185 BTU (using the raw BTU value for crude) or 2768 BTU (if one takes the lower BTU value of gasoline) per mile. That means that coal -> electricity -> EV uses either 81% or 71% of the BTU per mile of the liquid fueled vehicle.
Both, as you say, are pretty inefficient. Where the EV wins is where the electricity is produced more efficiently - combined cycle gas plants exceed 50% efficiency. Wind, hydro and the like are mechanical systems and not subject to thermal efficiency limitations.
David
Oy!
Re: 85%
I was thinking the same thing. There are 42 gallons in a barrel. If 15% of the barrel is used for heating, as you say, that is 6.3 gallons out of each barrel. This leaves (42.0 - 6.3) or (35.7) to be refined.
There is "refinery gain" so that one gallon of oil produces more than one gallon of gasoline, but... that isn't the description of the calculation in the post.
I might as well add that coal fired plants are major industrial sites, and maybe 30% of the power they generate they use themselves to run the conveyor belts and grinders and lights and fans and precipitators and ...
Try this.
7.3 barrels of crude = 1 metric ton of oil
374.5 gallons of regular gas = 1 metric ton of crude
or
357.5 gallons of premium gas =1 metric ton of crude
374.5/7.3 = 51.3 gallons of regular gasoline per barrel
or
357.5/7.3 = 49 gallons of premium gasoline per barrel
Even though few people buy premium(9% in the US) lets average the two to get
(51.3 + 49)/2 = 50.1 gallons of gasoline per barrel.
http://www.eppo.go.th/ref/UNIT-OIL.html
How about this: WikiAnswers: How many gallons (of gasoline) in a barrel of oil? Ans:23.
You say:
You don't see how a person reading this pair of sentences would understand you to mean, from your use of the word "so", that not all 42 gallons of crude are available for refining into gasoline? But that 15% of the crude is burned for heat, leaving 37 gallons to be refined? Yes or no? and so interpret you calculation of 42/.85 as ---- not right? I am just trying to communicate.
No.
Gasoline is lighter and has less energy in it than crude.
42 gallons of gasoline, NOT 42 gallons of crude, a barrel of crude. Think energy basis, not volumetrically. I tried to simplify it stating that 42 gallons of gasoline come from a barrel of oil which has been reduced by 15% at the refinery.
A barrel of oil is broken down into a variety of products as I pointed out such as jet fuel 3.8 gallons, heating oil 1.7 gallons, diesel 9.2 gallons, gasoline 19.15 gallons, LPG 1.7 gallons, residual heavy oil 1.7 gallons and 7.27 gallons of other products totalling ~44.7 gallons, an average of the US refining industry.
An oil refinery is designed to make all the above products, or maybe just one. Whoever at wikianswers left that 23 gallons means it in the sense above.
My point was to show that you could turn 1 barrel of crude into 50 barrels of gasoline using the energy in that initial barrel of crude.
Looking at the energy terminology you can see how they determine
how much gasoline they can produce from a barrel of oil. They need this because the oil refinery produces products on demand.
So if someone says we need 100,000 gallons of gasoline ASAP, they know they need X number of barrels of crude (say 2000).
Capiche?
Well written summary!
There exists all across the country in even the smallest municipality, operating efficient fuel/biomass bioreactors--human waste treatment plants that accept complex cellulose for conversion to natural gas or methane. Currently the production is flared off.
Our local plant installed a methane ICE to power the paddles in the primary settling pond. The experiment failed and we are again flaring off the natural gas. It is cheaper for the city to buy electricity to run an electric motor.
However exciting, elegant, or ancient a technology turns out to be the SCALE and boundary-controlled recursive life-cycle NET-ENERGY RETURN of the process counts for everything.
There is a really good reason why we, as a country, keep chasing our tails with one hairbrained bio-fuels scheme after another, why money gets thrown at the wow-factors, etc. How many politicians, lobbyists, corporate executives, venture capitalists, etc. have taken more than perfunctory introductions to physics (probably in high school if at all)? Let alone a college-level course in ecology where trophic budgets are discussed. How many lawyers have taken any physics? Yet guess what job skills are held by the first two groups on that list?
Unfortunately this extends to the general public as well, regardless of careers or education. Most people have no idea of how to tell snake oil from medicine when it comes to energy solutions. What else should we expect but waste of time and resources chasing dreams and fantasies?
Question Everything
George
Nice work Professor. I bookmarked your site.
Joe
While I certainly deplore ignorance of all kinds I do not think that science ignorance is the primary barrier to the solution of our problems. Internet forums are full of commentators with lots of accurate knowledge about physics, chemistry, and engineering who insist that some combination of alternate energy sources and greater manufacturing efficiency will allow economic growth to continue in the OECD nations for 50 more years at a minimum, without significant risk to the integrity of earth's biosphere. You can argue, of course, that even if such people know physics, chemistry, and engineering, they must be ignorant of ecology. However, it appears to me that this ignorance is willful rather than the result of a defficient education. Admitting ecological limits to growth would force them to confront unpleasant social and political truths which they cannot bear to face. To paraphrase Franz Kafka:
Logic is doubtless unshakable, but it cannot withstand a man who wishes the stock market to go on growing.
Our major problem is our lack of social intelligence rather than our lack of technical intelligence. The global warming debate shows that ecological limits can be sold to the general public. But selling social solutions to our problems which involve eliminating wasteful and unnecessary forms of production and equitably sharing the earth's remaining resources cannot even be talked about, let alone sold. We need a revolution in our social and political paradigms before our technical knowledge can be properly brought to bear against the dilemma created by private finance capitalism.
Roger - I've read your comment carefully and I'm pretty sure that we're in agreement but I need to ask: Do you believe that there isn't a "significant risk to the integrity of earth's biosphere." at the present time?
Joe
Joe,
According to E.O. Wilson species extinction rates are approximately 1000 times their prehuman levels. Yes, I think that there is a significant risk that the current mass extinction event could turn into mega-extinction event.
Roger
Nobody ever went broke overestimating the stupidity of the public.
The original is better:
"Nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public:
-HL Mencken
Present company excepted?
Hurray for PaulS. There are mechanical efficiencies, cycle efficiencies, thermal efficiencies. They throw efficiencies around with not a clue as to what they mean. 25 - 30 % IS ALL YOUR GOING TO GET.
From my experience in the UK this is a major worldwide problem that doesn't bode well for a timely adequate solution to the world's predicament - our politicians seek information from so called 'experts' - unfortunately these people have a very narrow view of the world, worse, they feel it necesary to put an unwarranted positive gloss on the likelyhood of research sucess.
In my experience the 'expert' problem solvers in industry are actually 'generalists' - people with a narrow field of knowledge can't do the job.
Truth is stranger than fiction—ripped from today's headlines!
You couldn't make this stuff up...
BP drills deepest well ever to discover one year's supply (pending ability to extract) of oil equivalency for U.S
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/03/business/global/03oil.html?scp=1&sq=bp...
While in other drilling news...
"A $17 million energy project in California that was supposed to demonstrate the feasibility of extracting vast amounts of heat from the earth’s bedrock has been suspended indefinitely after the drilling essentially snagged on surface rock formations."
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/03/business/energy-environment/03alta.html
clearly there is drilling technology and then there is drilling technology...depends on what energy product you are drilling for...snagged on surface rock!!!!????
in other media venues the halt in drilling is attributed to fear
of earthquakes!!!????
drill for non-carbon based energy source and there is fear of setting off earthquakes drill six miles down for oil no problem...
who is kidding who?
time for everyone to buy hip waders and stock in the firms manufacturing hip waders...
One aspect of this that RR hasn't really addressed though, is the distribution infrastructure and the end users. In my mind, one of the strongest arguments in favor of biodiesel as a substitute for petrodiesel is that the diesel distribution infrastructure already exists, as does the equipment that uses it. This is not an insubstantial matter. Building out an entirely new infrastructure and an entirely new fleet of vehicles to utilize a new biofuel would be an enormous financial proposition. At this point, given that our economy is already on the ropes and is likely to remain so, it is probably a prohibitive proposition. Thus, new fuels that can substitute for existing FF-derived fuels and slip into the existing supply chain with minimal need for modification must therefore be a prime consideration. It is probably worth putting up with less than the theoretically best possible level of efficiency in order to avoid having to make those huge capital investments.
The other consideration is the degree of importance of the uses to which the fuel is being put. I assume that most of us are agreed that keeping farm machinery, fire trucks, city buses, utility trucks, and other civil equipment should be a high priority for our society. Most of this equipment runs on diesel, and diesel replacements are available for most such equipment that does not presently run on diesel. On the other hand, the automobile-centric lifestyle has come in for a lot of justifiable criticism here. Keeping the cars fueled and running would seem to be of much lower priority. As most of these run on gasoline, and ethanol in particular seems to be driven by the (to us, misguided) desire to keep "happy motoring" going, is something that I (and I suspect most of us) would view with less sympathy.
Biodiesel is not going to be the salvation of the existing paradigm. Our society and economy are going to have to change and to adjust to getting around with less liquid-fueled transport. However, there are a few categories of liquid-fueled vehicles and equipment that are so highly advantageous to us as to be very much worth our while to continue operating if at all possible. Can biodiesel be scaled up enough to fuel at least these, and can it be done without diverting too much crop land from vital food production? I don't know for certain, but I hope so.
Scotland is especially good at growing oil seed (Oil Seed Rape / Canola; B. napus ) but one expert calculation, http://www.angus.gov.uk/ac/documents/sacreport.pdf suggests EROEI of perhaps 2.5:1. The same evaluation suggests maximimum (total) Scottish area that could grow oilseed would provide less than 6% of Scotland's diesel. Refineries are expected to suck in imports, Argentinian Soy oil and presumably more than a little Palm Oil depending on economics and blending requirements.
A recent report for the European Commission (executive civil service for EU) includes the following:
I add that palm oil as a food substitute is fingered as highly atherogenic (read arterial disease).
Robert,
In the September-October edition of the magazine American Scientist there is this article:
Taking Measure of Biofuel Limits.
If hydrogen is stored as liquid NH3, and then decomposed to N2 and H2 by a catalyst,
do you think there could be H2 powered trucks and buses
(burning the H2 in an internal combustion engine ?
"...we waste billions of dollars chasing fantasies..." one man's wasted billions is another's windfall of billions...
And while we are talking fantasy—is their a bigger fantasy than the sustainability of any aspect of modern life as it exists today?
all the efficiency gains imaginable, all the alternative fuel miracles dreamed of, all the local food growing in every urban/suburban dreamscape conceivable won't get us out from the overhang of the people of China, India, Africa and Latin America who want (and deserve as much as anyone else does) what the western world parades in front of their faces everyday.
The fiddling continues while the carbon burns, ice melts and climate changes.
No that isn't an earthquake triggered by drilling for geothermal energy, that is a tipping point being passed by the unabated burning of fossil/carbon based fuels and the banking of the profits from the doing of it.
Well said RR, and with the usual ferocity! Gail posted yesterday asking for suggestions for upcoming post topics and I requested more in terms of these energy topics, parameters or attributes:
Now to this I would also add appropriate scale. As you point out, not all of these are complete losers, and this may depend upon the scale at which they are deployed. I'd be interested in your thoughts on small-scale and mid-scale applications of these or other contenders.
How pyrrhic of you and the WSJ to highlight the fizzling of a biofuel industry caught in the throes of a global economic conflagration.
And while I agree that you certainly ‘can’t mandate technology’ – I would counter that that is not the issue. The technology exists.
On the contrary, the mandates (for cellulosic ETOH in particular and ETOH overall) were implemented for a wholly different purpose at a time when oil was rapidly approaching triple digits.
Nor for that matter, did said mandates come about from a politician’s visit to Iogen or the like and to assert otherwise, is a disservice to the professionals who put thousands of hours into the white papers that formed the basis of the RFS legislative initiative.
The mandates were/are intended to mitigate peak oil through reduced exposure to petroleum inputs – something that all biofuel s do exceptionally well – via an integrated bio-refinery construct that would deploy first, second and third generation ETOH production/distribution facilities throughout the continent.
A solid plan, save for a number of externalities; not least of which being that 85MM bbl/d geologic iceberg we hit last year.
Most people don’t realize that the Americans had originally set out to establish an ethanol fuelled auto industry in 1896 but were hampered by Civil War era taxes on alcohol.
Great American minds such as Kettering and Ford would advance this ethanol agenda until the invention on tetra-ethyl lead (Kettering) and the foundation of the chemurgy movement (Ford), sent both men and the country, on separate paths. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chemurgy
Ford’s path would have seen autos made out of and fuelled by America’s vast cellulosic resources.
Kettering’s path, however, would later merge with that of Standard Oil and the American Petroleum Institute.
I look forward to the next instalment...
And while I agree that you certainly ‘can’t mandate technology’ – I would counter that that is not the issue. The technology exists.
The technology doesn't exist for doing it anywhere close to economically, and that is the point. The technology exists for getting us to Mars. There is a good reason we haven't gone yet; a cheap technology doesn't exist.
At $100bbl, the primary economic externality is distribution -the infrastructure of which- is owned by the Majors.
The Majors, as you know, haven't exactly been supportive of a replacement for their product since... oh... circa 1900. Not that I don't blame them of course - that's capitalism. That's the game. A game where the rules are based on capitalistic market theory.
Unfortungately for us, however, said rules will not foster the most effective and sustainable strategy moving forward vis-a-vis Peak Oil mitigation now will it?
As such, the Majors co-operation (along with the NOCs) will eventually be necessitated under some sort of a global energy treaty.
At $100bbl, the primary economic externality is distribution -the infrastructure of which- is owned by the Majors.
No, it is energy inputs into the processes, which cost them dearly when oil is $100/bbl. Right now, nobody in the world has any sort of demonstration scale cellulosic or algal fuel plant that is close to energy efficient. In most cases, the net energy is negative, in which case your economics worsen when oil prices get high. Sugarcane ethanol manages to run their process on waste biomass, so they are one exception that becomes more competitive at higher oil prices.
I noticed corn ethanol wasn't on the list, so I guess that means Robert Rapier is now a big supporter of corn ethanol. Welcome aboard! lol
Algae - T Rex wouldn't be investing in this if there was nothing to it.
Cellulose fuel - It can't be that hard if termites do it. But perhaps wood chips for heating is a better use for wood. Sometimes low-tech works best.
Hydrogen - IMO, the research dollars would be better spent on anhydrous ammonia. You don't need an expensive fuel cell for this technology.
On a worldwide basis, I believe there is great potential for sugar cane ethanol, jatropha biodiesel, and palm oil. The real big problem for biofuel is what it always has been - cheap plentiful oil. Until that situation changes, biofuel will not be truly economic. I don't fault the government for trying to build up alternatives. Right now a lot of people are blaming the government for wasting money on subsidies. But if we do run into an oil shortage in the future, everyone will say the government should have been doing something.
But perhaps wood chips for heating is a better use for wood.
Or you may consider running a CHP plant with it:
http://www.power-technology.com/projects/wartsila/
Or you may consider running a wood gasification CHP plant:
http://woodpower.ch/energie
http://holzstrom.ch/
So long as oxygen is free we will always need hydrocarbon fuels for
- high power to weight applications such as aircraft
- long range with hours between 'fill ups'.
A possible way of using hydrocarbons well into the future is to combine organic carbon with hydrogen from water. The hydrogen could come from electrolysis, high temperature dissociation or a hybrid approach but each with severe energy costs. Even more energy may be needed to force the hydrogen into combination to make liquid or gaseous fuel. However when the fuel is burned CO2 and water are cycled within the biosphere. The EROEI could be lousy, say 0.5 which is negative net energy but the synthetic fuel can do things that batteries cannot.
Other advantages of hydrogenated carbon synfuels are
- blending eg methane and hythane with natural gas and biomethane
- easier storage and no embrittlement compared to hydrogen
- alternative applications such as CHP, ICE and solid oxide fuel cells
- known management problems unlike ammonia.
Obviously to be able to do this we need every thing else to be super efficient as hydrocarbon fuels will be severely limited. That is elites get to fly and drive but you and I have to take the train. Hopefully when poor folks need an ICE powered ambulance there will be enough synfuel.
Robert made a big point about not being able to force unworkable things with government mandates. I think the problem is nearly reversed, we have powerful political forces pushing the government into those mandates, rather then having government getting a panel of experts (including generalists) evaluating which -if any, mandates actually make sense. So naturally, given the structure of our political system the process of deciding what programs are sensible to pursue gets captured by those with lots of money to spend on lobbying.
Mr. Rapier,
Very good post. I believe you made a very good point about scalability. Unfortunately there are 72 posts as I write this and it appears to me that many of the posters who talked about scalability missed your point. There is a very real problem going from a test tube scale to a full size commercial operation. A number of posters seemed to take your comments about scalability to be scalability of some alternative to replace oil as a fuel.
Short of running these people through a course in Chemical Engineering I am not sure there is any good way to explain the problems in scaling from a lab to full commercial production. For that matter I can show you Chemical Engineers who don't get scaling problems.
That's not necessary. This isn't, after all, a BTU or production problem. Engineering misleads - suggesting that there is a "solution" if only we look hard enough and invest enough of our children's flesh.
Basic thermodynamics is plenty.
We humans have been consuming geological epochs worth of ancient sunlight. Ancient sunlight that we have been able to mine by sticking a straw into the ground. There may be niches that might function a little better than the 18th century. Some of them our current technology might open up. But there won't be many - and how long they stay open, eg high-tech wind, is not so clear to me. [I think it depends on the overall EROEI of the civilization and economy.] Scaling requires increased emergy, so it is highly improbable that anything will scale better than what worked in the 18th century; there the scale was small and local - one boat, five masts at most.
The Quest for Solutions is mythological. Amnesic. The Arrogance of Hope, as some black shill wrote about corporate America. [Babblefish suggests a better title might be "Suckers'R'Us". Because we humans want to believe. We need to believe. So it's an easy sell.] All false promises. But false promises are way easier to sell than reality. That's what Robert doesn't want to acknowledge.
cfm, Growlery, Gray, ME
ll false promises. But false promises are way easier to sell than reality. That's what Robert doesn't want to acknowledge.
I thought that is precisely what I was acknowledging with the entire "Pretenders" argument.
I'd like to repeat George Monbiot's point about biofuels.
If you persuade people that they want biofuels, the market will decide what kind of biofuel is produced, on the basis of lowest cost. Currently, the lowest cost is to bulldoze virgin tropical rainforest and plant oil palms to make biodiesel.
It's worth pointing out, too, that there's a lot of potential for increasing yields (per unit of capital invested) from oil palms. Oil palm diesel is going to be cheaper than biofuel from algae or any cellulosic ethanol technologies for a long time to come.
Biofuel is evil. Plain and simple.
I agree. Oil palms produce the highest yield. And there is still plenty of rainforest to exploit.
Palmoil is the "low-hanging fruit" of biofuels.
First of all, it's not about persuading people that they want biofuels in as much as they need to be persuaded to reduce their petroleum exposure through biofuel usage.
Second, palm oil biodiesel is not the lowest cost form of biofuel to produce.
Third, aside from the glaring fact that you cannot use palm oil in northern latitudes, biodiesel serves a different purpose than that of ethanol. As such, biodiesel cannot replace ethanol or vice versa, therefore, your comparison of which biofuel will prevail over the other is moot.
Indeed, as you are obviously uninformed on the subject matter, perhaps you should think twice before 'repeating' the inane commentary of a pundit like Monbiot.
error
me too
The Last Law of Sustainability ......
It must be Economically Viable.
People from an engineering background develop a gut feel for which projects will and will not work, based upon well-to-wheel thermodynamic work efficiency and the cost and embedded energy of the infrastructure involved
I can see a number of useful applications for biomass and hydrogen, but generally not on the scale that many enthusiasts envisage. Part of the problem I think is that politicians are looking for solutions that will allow us to continue exactly the lifestyle that we have today. The nature of renewable resources is simply not suited for those sorts of power levels. Hence we end up chasing unrealistic dreams of trying to pursue ultrahigh yield algae and a national hydrogen infrastructure that will fuel 200million SUVs. The lack of technical expertise of western politicians also tends to blind them to seeing more viable niche applications for these technologies.
A few viable applications do spring to mind:
1) Solid biomass from farms can be fed into anaerobic digesters. Agricultural wastes digested in this way will provide a nitrogen and organic material rich fertiliser that will help maintain soil fertility, cutting down on the need for synthetic fertilisers. Some of the biogas produced can be compressed using a modest amount of wind generated electricity and used to power the vehicles on the farm. Most farms will produce an excess, which can be either piped into the US natural gas network if it is logistically easy to access, or burned in combined cycle gas turbines, producing electric power with an efficiency as high as 60%. Waste heat can be fed into greenhouses or fish ponds. CCGT can be used to balance the output from wind turbines on an expanded US grid.
2) Modest amounts of biomass and coal can be partially combusted to yield a carbon monoxide rich syngas, which can be used as a starting point for all manner of synthetic petrochemicals and plastics manufacture. This is practical application for biomass because the value of the end products is very high and the physical demand for the input is relatively low, compared to the demand for vehicle fuel that is.
3) As an end use fuel, methanol is far more useful than hydrogen, as it is easy to store, transport and handle and can be burned in small and efficient fuel cell or diesel/electric hybrids. Hydrogen derived from coal or electricity can be used to produce methanol. Coal can be converted into syngas which is then converted into methanol via a fischer-tropsch process. Hydrogen produced by electrolysis can be combined with the CO2 output from electrically powered batch cement kilns to produce methanol from waste CO2. I would not expect production of methanol to feasibly reach more than 10% of present US transport energy use. But the fuel is a viable alternative for a greatly reduced US road vehicle fleet.
4) Raw hydrogen produced from electrolysis can be usefully used to reduce iron ore into crude iron powder, which can be processed in electric furnaces to produce high grade steel. This negates the need to store and transport the hydrogen gas and provides a small but useful way of using excess wind generated electricity.
Hydroelectric, Wind, Geothermal, Solar PV to power Electrified Rail
About 90% of Swiss Rail's (SBB) electricity comes from hydroelectric plants that they own. The rest from hydro & nukes (Swiss & French). SBB is 100% electrified.
Swedish rail is 77% electrified and they generate from a 50:50 mix of hydro and nuclear power.
The Trans-Siberian railroad is largely powered by hydroelectric once east of the Urals.
Only recently has a partially unpaved road been opened parallel to the Trans-Siberian, so rail was the ONLY option for a half century (till aviation improved) and the only ground option for a century.
Since 1 BTU of renewable electricity can displace 20 BTUs of diesel for truck freight (slightly lower for passengers), not that much electricity required.
Problem solved :-)
Alan
...and another oil soaked shoe drops...
EDITORIAL NY Times Published 9-3-09
Another Astroturf Campaign
It was probably only a matter of time, but the oil lobby has taken a page from the anti-health-care-reform manual in an effort to drum up opposition to climate change legislation in Congress. Behind the overall effort — billed, naturally, as a grass-roots citizen movement — lie the string-pullers at the American Petroleum Institute, the industry’s main trade organization and a wily, well-funded veteran of the legislative wars.
"Greenpeace, the advocacy group, uncovered a letter last month from the A.P.I. president, Jack Gerard, to industry C.E.O.’s revealing that the campaign’s central objective is to “put a human face on the impacts of unsound energy policy,” specifically the Waxman-Markey bill recently passed by the House.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/04/opinion/04fri2.html?_r=1&ref=opinion
if it looks like a duck, walks like a duck and sounds like a duck... unsound energy policy "unsound energy policy" now there is something API knows a thing or two about!
...and another oil soaked shoe drops...
EDITORIAL NY Times Published 9-3-09
Another Astroturf Campaign
It was probably only a matter of time, but the oil lobby has taken a page from the anti-health-care-reform manual in an effort to drum up opposition to climate change legislation in Congress. Behind the overall effort — billed, naturally, as a grass-roots citizen movement — lie the string-pullers at the American Petroleum Institute, the industry’s main trade organization and a wily, well-funded veteran of the legislative wars.
"Greenpeace, the advocacy group, uncovered a letter last month from the A.P.I. president, Jack Gerard, to industry C.E.O.’s revealing that the campaign’s central objective is to “put a human face on the impacts of unsound energy policy,” specifically the Waxman-Markey bill recently passed by the House.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/04/opinion/04fri2.html?_r=1&ref=opinion
if it looks like a duck, walks like a duck and sounds like a duck... unsound energy policy "unsound energy policy" now there is something API knows a thing or two about!
The liberals in charge of the US government have already gotten enough rope to hang themselves. You might want to check a few recent numbers, Obama's approval (or should I say disapproval) ratings, and the latest unemployment numbers. The SS Obamatitanic is going down fast. The Blue Dogs are scrambling for life boats. Waxman-Markey will never pass the Senate, either will socialized medicine.
C-
We are not dealing with "socialized medicine", but insurance reform in the US. The argument is over on the most effective way to finance health care, as all industrialized democracies have universal health care (except the US), have longer life spans, and lower infant mortality rates.
It is a moot point, we know what is best, This is a political argument over what share a minority elite is going to still take from us, and what part of the corporate whore class will retain their cash cow flow.
Robert--Is there any news about butanol? I seem to remember the problem with butanol was scalability.
Multiple problems with bio-butanol. I laid them out a while back, and nothing much has changed:
http://i-r-squared.blogspot.com/2007/06/problem-with-biobutanol.html
from the lead paragraph...
That expresses my feeling about the whole useless argumentation phenomenon that keeps everyone on every side from narrowing down even what the persistently unanswered questions are... Why, for example, do no "problem solvers" seem to ever connect where their solution starts with where it runs out. If they did that they'd see quite quickly that any alternative fuel for feeding limitlessly growing demands has to be offered with qualifications. People don't do that though.
I think the basic problem is with that flickering image we call "consciousness" that serves as everyone's momentary reality... and seems to INSIST on representing itself to us as the one universal and true reality, that we ourselves just made up on the spot.
That feature, of perception constantly giving us a cartoon reality to depend on, is somewhat distracting. Having consciousness full of holes... located strategically where the open questions are, would be more productive perhaps, but it is even more distracting to most folks.