189 comments on Has the Algae Cavalry Arrived?
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I am not so sure their intentions are heroic. From this link posted above (also discussed last month in a DrumBeat):
I smell a rat.
They said they would address the accusations, but I haven't seen anything about it. The last article I saw was this one, which wasn't very reassuring:
“our current production on the pilot plant is 144 000 litres in 24 hours – we’re running the plant 25 days a month, it is all consumed locally, and we have 50-million litres of diesel on our order book per month”.
Ima thinker Billy Sol DeBeers is gonna catch a few million stupid dollars with this deal.
No full scale production plant even built yet and they're selling franchises? You're right, this is quite odiferous.
As someone who covered Wall Street for 20 years, let me say that every boom brings out hustlers, and sometimes the hustlers are very very good at what they do. They often look more credible than honest folk.
That being said, there is much hope for a bio solution to our energy needs. Work is being done at the University of Illinois, suggesting we can get 3 gallons a day of oil from pig poop, per pig. You heat the pig poop under pressure.
We have 100 million pigs in America. If every pig does his patriotic duty, we get 8 million barrels a day. That is more than one-third of our (now declining) consumption.
Solutions there are many to this energy "crisis." Technical solutions will be found. If commercial, they will be implemented. The hard part of life is getting people to cooperate, ending wars, crime etc. Now, those are problems.
Dude, just think about that for more than 30 seconds, and you'd realize how ridiculous it is. The laws of thermodynamics hold, even for pigs. You don't get anything out of them that you're not putting into them.
For disposing of pig wastes, fine, it may be worth doing. But as a scalable energy source? Read up on that turkey parts plant, and get back to us.
You are right about scalability, but it is an interesting way to deal with manure.
Iron Creek Hutterite Pig Manure Methane->electricity, in production since 2001.
Biogas in Aberta
My dad had 500 feeder pigs until I was 5 years old, all I remember is they poop a lot.
They may poop a lot, but I seriously doubt it's 3 gallons of oil a day per pig.
CLOSE THE LOOP, PEOPLE!!!
If you take out energy from pig poop, you are taking energy from somewhere else.
The feed, the water, the farm implements, the diesel trucks to haul said pigs and poop. Building the collectors, and all the other infrastructure.
Cheap energy is cheap because we are burning fossil sunlight. There will be no energy bonanza from algae, pig poop, turkey guts, switchgrass, or any other solar budget energy scheme because the amount of sunlight we can capture and turn into the liquids which drive our drive-in shopaholic lifestyle will be insufficient.
STOP BEING SCIENTIFICALLY OBLIVIOUS!!! You must include ALL the knock on effects. You must include ALL the energy inputs, including the food the farmer eats while sitting in his airconditioned John Deere, the cost of the clothes he wears, and the gasoline he burns to drive over to the south-forty.
The next paradigm shift in science will revolve around holistic thinking. Too bad this shift may come too late to save the narrow, fix-the-problem-in-front-of-me-ignore-the-problems-the-solution-causes mindset people and their cheerleaders from the dieoff.
Bravo!! Your's is the first comment I've seen (by anyone, anywhere) that doesn't arbitrarily ignore inconvenient facts in order to promote a pet idea. Thank you!!
It is not "reserves". It is not "production". It is cycles that matter.
It all has to go all around.
But I disagree that there is no energy bonanza. There is 1kW/m2, everywhere, all the time. That is way much more than whatever we need. And not only in the Earth, but in a 1.5e11 m sphere.
We just need to figure the cycle.
"STOP BEING SCIENTIFICALLY OBLIVIOUS!!! You must include ALL the knock on effects. You must include ALL the energy inputs, including the food the farmer eats while sitting in his airconditioned John Deere, the cost of the clothes he wears, and the gasoline he burns to drive over to the south-forty"
That's fair enough Cherenkov, but I want the same thing done with the fossil fuels....
Count the steel in the rigs, the pumps, the pipe, all of it.....count the computers that are used to hunt for the oil, the man hours in computational time world wide, the food it takes to feed them....count the aircraft carriers and the patrols by the fighter planes and rader carrying AWACS....count the supertankers, the steel, the men, the portage facilities to onload and offload the oil....the refineries, the tractor trailers and railcars, the cost of excavatign the storage tanks down at the 24 hour bright white lit retail store, the pumps, the concrete pads and giant steel canopies that would not be needed if folks were not out there pumping gas in the rain....
And even with that, I know I have left out at least HALF the items needed to keep the oil flowing from the desert to the customer.....
Count fair and square and see if the worshipped holy oil is still so superior....
That old saw may have fooled people once, but no matter how much the oil industry apologists repeat in an attept to kill any alternative in it's crib, people are starting to take a closer look at that whole argument....
Oh, one more thing.....and this is strictly a personal observation....if your final argument is always going to be to try to scare somebody with that dieoff hysteria, that one don't work anymore either.....we're all gonna' die, it's how you want to live that matters. I have as much faith in pig manure as I do in the oil industries string of shiit......
Roger Conner Jr.
Remember, we are only one cubic mile from freedom
The cost has been factored in, Roger. That's what the market does - factor in costs. And that's the point of fossil fuels - we are taking fuels that have been stored over hundreds of millions of years by slow natural processes and using them now. We didn't have to account for the creation, burial, and conversion of vegetable matter to fossil fuel because it all occurred before we even existed. THERE WAS NO COST TO HOMO SAPIENS! DO YOU UNDERSTAND THAT YET, ROGER?
Biodiesel is an attempt to recreate the same process in a few weeks or months that nature took millions of years to do. This requires INPUTS, Roger. Inputs of energy, material, etc. There IS a cost to homo sapiens to CREATE biofuels.
The fact that you totally fail to understand this is demonstrative of how disconnected from reality you actually are. Go back to cheerleading for KSA, Roger. At least there you didn't sound like you were completely scientifically illiterate.
Ghawar Is Dying
The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function. - Dr. Albert Bartlett
GreyZone,
You have indeed been moody for the last couple of days....cheer up! :-)
"The cost has been factored in, Roger. That's what the market does - factor in costs."
My, how the worm has turned! On a board that lives and breathes to prove that the market is a complete failure (otherwise, how could we still be at these low oil prices right as we come onto the catastrophe?) you suddenly become a "market guru", ala CERA?!
The market had trouble remembering three days ago, and it suddenly factors in a century of sunk cost and externalities?
Allow me to ask you simply to ask yourself if you really believe that the current price of oil reflects a century of military protection, port and road building, refinery construction, pipeline construction (including the eminent domain that allowed property to be purchased on agreeable terms), construction of retail outlets, pumps, tanks, not to mention the funding poured to the universities to assist the industry in research in drilling......
Greyzone, do you really believe that? That there are no externalities, all the costs are reflected in the price? Do you really?
If you do, after considering your position carefully, then we simply will have to agree to disagree. Because I most certainly in no way believe it. If I did, I would not be here. Why would I be concerned? The price would reflect all, and look at the price...still the cheapest gas in most of the world (excepting some oil producers themselves!), and flat over the last year, I would assume the price run up has been currency weakening on the U.S. dollar and a bit of war premium (we are still at war, by the way, as a war time price, the current price is STEALING THE OIL)
"THERE WAS NO COST TO HOMO SAPIENS! DO YOU UNDERSTAND THAT YET, ROGER?"
But was there a cost in setting up the infrastructure to extract, move, refine, redistribute the oil? Is there now a cost in attempting to police the system that gets the oil to us? Is there a cost in dealing with the carbon and other byproducts of said production and use?
Your position does not seperate oil from any other potential energy supply. Allow me to take the same sentence:
"THERE WAS NO COST TO HOMO SAPIANS IN CREATING THE SUN, DO YOU UNDERSTAND THAT YET, GREYZONE!
Thus, solar energy is free! All you have to do is develop a way to capture and convert the energy! How is that different from oil, except that it is distributed over the surface of the Earth and it's cleaner? Oil did NOT gather and refine itself. And due to it's distribution, it has brought massive costs in foreign policy and human suffering.
By the way, on a more personal note: There are a short list of posters here at TOD whom I hold in enough regard to give them the allowence of calling me ill informed or ignorant, and based on the quality of their work, I will accept it and attempt to review my position and find my error.
It is a short list, and no offense GreyZone, but no post of yours has come near earning you a place on it. Do not assume that because I defer to some I defer in the same way to all.
Roger Conner Jr.
Remember, we are only one cubic mile from from freedom
Of course there are externalities, Roger. But the cost of creating the raw fuel was never a cost to homo sapiens. There is a cost to creating the raw biofuels. This cost entails doing everything that nature did in those hundreds of millions of years. Now you get to add that cost onto refining, and all the other externalities that already exist for fossil fuels.
You either do not or refuse to understand that. Why? God alone only knows. Your analogy about the sun totally misses that prehistoric plants converted that sunlight into kerogen, which was then, through natural processes, converted to petroleum. This is a major cost that biofuels incur. Then biofuels incur every other cost that fossil fuels have as well, including transportation, refining, sales, etc. Remember the topic, Roger? It is biofuels from pig manure, with which you were heartily in agreement until BenjaminCole found better data that refuted it. Benjamin at least had the honesty to apologize for being wrong. You, on the other hand, sit here trying to look right about biofuels when even the original poster has walked away from those absurd claims.
Finally Roger, I do not care whether I am on any list of yours. The fact that you didn't even check the data before agreeing with it, cheerleading it because it supported your position, is why I don't care. The fact that you are unwilling to recognize that you were flat out wrong and admit it is another reason why I don't care. I simply want to make sure that other readers see you for what you are and that your uninformed posts do not always go unchallenged.
Ghawar Is Dying
The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function. - Dr. Albert Bartlett
"It is biofuels from pig manure, with which you were heartily in agreement until BenjaminCole found better data that refuted it."
The nature of my "hearty" agreement was this statement:
"I have as much faith in pig manure as I do in the oil industries string of shiit......"
I will stand by that, given that I have 0% faith in the oil companies string of shiit, less with each passing day if that were possible.
As far as biofuels from pig manure, cow manure, chicken parts, hog by product, human manure in the form of sewer gas, waste methane from landfills, or any other source of free methane and waste, I have tried and tried to figure out why I would be against any of the above. I cannot. Can you find anywhere at anytime that I have said I felt they were the answer to the world or the U.S. energy problem? I don't think so, but your welcome to try (I always appreciate a dedicated reader!)
I still think that animal waste and byproduct should be captured when possible and used for methane, rather than releasing raw methane into the air. As I said, the greenhouse gas capture alone would be worth it, the energy is just a byproduct. And yes, before you begin again to set up straw man arguments to knock down, I am well aware that the net energy will be negative, the pigs, cows, chickens, etc have to be fed, watered, and the sun has to shine on their back, but again, I am talking about capturing byproduct since I am still (perhaps wrongly), convinced that people are going to keep eating beef, chicken, pork, etc. for as long as they possibly can.
Now, you go on to a lot of insinuation and useless insult about "my position" and your new found duty to "make sure that other readers see you for what you are and that your uninformed posts do not always go unchallenged."
If you are going to attempt to insult as to "what i am", by all means, please define. If you are going to say that what I posted was uninformed, demonstrate in what way. Again, I stand ABSOLUTELY by my belief that methane recapture does work, has always worked and will always work, and that of course we should be all for it. If you differ then that's your right.
What we seem to be confronting more here is a willingness to attempt to scream down anyone who does not share the hystrerical rantings of those who for some reason want to believe that there can be no solution to anything, and by browbeating attempt to force others into the same pathetic defeatism, or off the board, which ever they can achieve. This is generally the messiah complex writ large, the guy who stands in public with the "world is coming to an end" sign. Again, that's a persons right. But in the known history of the world, I have never heard of one of those defeatist prophets of doom coming up with any real solutions to anything.
The sad part is, newcomers may mistakenly judge those concerned about real, serious energy issues and real potential solutions by these types of mad ramblings if that is all they see here. The whole issue has been turned into a clown show of late by what has been nothing short of outright hysteria, to the point that any educated person can see it as comedy. This combined with the neo-primitivism of the radical greens occupies space that could better be used to discuss real possibilities for change. Will some of the ideas put forth by those who propose real ideas be wrong? Of course. That's the danger of proposing something other than hysterical defeatism. I have been wrong on MANY occasions, and will be again. So, if the goal is to make someone cry uncle, I have been wrong and caught myself out more times than anyone else has caught me out. (On methane recapture, I am not sure I have been proven wrong just yet, I still think it's a good idea :-)
But, it must be admitted, GreyZone, that if a peculiar kind of victory in which you insult, scream down and drive off all differing opinions, then the victory seems to be coming your way. When I first came here a year ago, the spectrum of discussion was wide, and the catastrophist hysteria had not yet taken hold. I was even able to recommend some friends I know personally to come here. Those days are gone, and that is an error I can no longer afford to repeat.
In my own case, I take responsibility for what I say. That is why I sign my posts. I would not feel it is responsible to say things and be unwilling to take credit or blame for my own words.
But there is a down side to that. Since I do acknowledge coming here, the concern is growing that simply by participating in a forum that has moved off to the radical edge of the sprectrum, one is contributing to the madness by simply being here "egging it on", than perhaps some of us should allow your camp to have it's little victory and move on. A person could stay, just to prove they are willing to, but I do not feel that my ego really needs the boost of arguing with those who are arguing with only the point of shutting up all opposition.
But, it has been fun and educational, and from the best here I have learned much, and made some fascinating new connections! :-)
And, as the old proverb goes, "one shoould listen also to even the dull and ignorant for they too have their story".
As far as biofuels, I am in an interesting problem there. Those who support biofuels see me as an enemy because I have grave doubts about that being the way to go, and those who are rabidly anti-biofuel see me as an enemy because I have not yet proven to my own satisfaction that they are completely without value. The old moderate's problem, as they say "out in the middle of the road, where all the dead animals lay." :-)
Roger Conner Jr.
Remember, we are only one cubic mile from freedom
Actually Roger, I enjoy factual debate. I challenge Robert and he answers with facts. I ask Alan a question and he answers with facts. You might take a lesson from them, Roger. Or you might not.
If you find disagreement to be "insulting" then you have a thin skin. I have not called you some of the names that have been thrown around here. I simply identified that you are ignorant of facts OR willfully ignoring those same facts. I have not even suggested which it is, leaving that open to you to rectify yet you refuse to correct any of your own errors instead going off on wild tangents yet again. Same old Roger.
Ghawar Is Dying
The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function. - Dr. Albert Bartlett
Better idea....since you are the one who is finding so many "facts" that I may have supposedly stated in error, you correct them, and I'll learn....have at it! :-)
Roger Conner Jr.
Remember, we are only one cubic mile from freedom
(that one is from a post by Khebab, not me, by the way....:-)
Um....yeah, sure.
I remember your first post. I remember it because it was a "Goodbye, Cruel TOD" post. Indeed, I assumed that that was why you chose the username you did. "That's it, I'm out of here, 'cause you guys are a bunch of doomer losers."
It was on February 13, 2006, and it was a rant against Deffeyes and other peak oilers. You said you were forced to "disavow and disown the so-called 'peak oil' movement."
So, more than a year ago, you were just as disgruntled as you are now. You're looking back at a glorious past that never existed.
Dude, you're starting to remind me of those Creationists who claim they used to be evolutionists who have since "seen the light." But if you check, they never really believed in evolution. They just like to say they did, because they think the conversion adds weight to their position.
Leanan
Well, that wasn't my first post, I have been here over a year, and that one was in August, so I had posted many previous to that (I don't know if they got lost in one of the upgrades....my first post was, by own dating, concerning the war in Iraq and Qatar, natural gas, and the U.S.'s declining strategic position.
The one you reference Leanan, was the "Dr. Deffeyes sets a date" string in which Deffeyes declared "Stone Age by 2025"
Now how was any intelligent person to react to that!? How insane was a sentence like that from one of the leading "voices" of the peak movemen?
Deffeyes words were used, by the way, over and over again by those who only wanted to make fools of anyone concerned about energy issues.
You win the point, But I fault myself for overreacting. I was completely outraged by Deffeyes words, and still think he did huge damage to the concept and words "peak oil".
But I fault myself for overreacting
(the only thing that allowed me to accept it was the realization that he is an old man, and was saying things he did not understand. We will all be there someday, if we live long enough.)
Roger Conner Jr.
Remember, we are only one cubic mile from freedom
Quite agree, when we are part of the loop it all works. How far we can push that loop is another question. Right now our loop is in a state hyperbolic.
Well, actually, the pigs don't poop as much as the article I read indicated. After e-mail conversing with the actual researcher, a Dr. Zhang, it turn out we can get only one-third of one liter per pig per day. Some pigshit reporter was off by a factor of 50 or so.
We have to feed the pigs anyway to raise them for slaughter. A good idea is to feed them potato mash, taken from a ethanol plant running on potatoes. You get really good vodka this way too, but also ethanol. The pig poop helps fire the plant.
Okay, I am hugely red-faced at overestimating the pig poop solution based on some sloppy reporting. Maybe we will freeze in the dark after riding our bicycles home in the cold sleet.
The ethanol plants here are either integrated directly with a feedlot or the biproduct is sold to feedlots.
Maybe we will freeze in the dark after riding our bicycles home in the cold sleet.
Ah! Now you're not cooking with gas. See how easy that was?
The news is all bad.
BenjaminCole,
Don't be too red in the face, the press often reports these things and gives some very wobbly numbers.
As you said, despite the dreams of the vegetarian crowd, we are not going to stop eating pork, chicken, turkey, or beef anytime soon. All these animals make methane gas, which can be captured in digesters and compressed to the closest thing you have ever seen to an artificicial natural gas. The chemical structure is very close between first, hydrogen (no carbon) and then methane, nat gas and propane. The best part is that by capturing the methane you are capturing and burning one of the most powerful greenhouse gases on earth, in other words, this would be worth doing purely from an environmental viewpoint, and you are NOT using the nutrients from the waste that need to go back into the soil.
This is the "closed loop" cycle that is often spoken of. If sun is captured with any efficiency at all, and some wind is used, the loop becomes fantastic in that it produces food and energy, reduces greenhouse gas release, and fertilizes the soil in a closed system. Robert Rapier has discussed it, as has several others here, (the so called bio solar habitat idea)
For a completely integrated line of thinking, go to
http://ergosphere.blogspot.com/2006/11/sustainability-energy-independenc...
This is engineer-poets fascinating opus on bio sustainability that takes in most objections right in the original plan, and amazingly survived the "buzz saw" here and in other forums relatively well! I am still digesting it, some half year after my first reading so it wil give you something to work on.
Engineer-poets work is one of the few bio plans I have seen that makes sense. The other is bio-butanol. This holds huge promise, in particular if cultivated in a "closed loop" type system, taking advantage of the confluence of animal and plant waste and solar and wind assist where possible.
The danger with bio fuels is that you have to be careful not to end up in a net negative situation, where you are giving up valuable fertilizer, i.e., natural gas, to create a fuel that is not as clean and handy as natural gas!
Here are some beginning links on bio-butanol:
http://www.butanol.com/
http://www2.dupont.com/Biofuels/en_US/index.html
http://i-r-squared.blogspot.com/2006/05/bio-butanol.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1-Butanol
The bug that makes it:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clostridium_acetobutylicum
Bio-butanol, by all indications is still a challenge in getting the yield needed per amount of imput crop (preferred right now is sugar beet), and Robert Rapier says as much. Given his personal experience on this subject I am not about to disagree. It is interesting that the big players BP and DuPont seem to see possibility however, and one wonders what they have up their sleeve.
The beauty of butanol is that it is a 4 carbon alcohol, and thus, interchangable with gasoline on an almost perfect one to one basis, with no loss of heat content and no need to change pumps, tanks, engines, etc. If it can be done, production of bio butanol would produce a far better finished fuel than ethanol ever could.
Of course, my personal view is very controversial here, but with day of study, I am becoming more convinced of it. All the above are simply bridges to where we will have to go, that being hydrogen by renewable energy. Any other path keeps us on the "depletion chase" and creates environmental and carbon release issues. As thin film solar panels begin to drop in price and in amount of raw material needed to make them, and rise in efficiency, they will be able to generate hydrogen at lower and lower prices. This is already moving very, very fast. Nano technology in this area is no promotional device, it is a real breakthrough in solar panels and batteries, two of the critical areas needed for advanced grid based transportation. Investor excitement is in the air, technology is moving fast, and competing formats are emerging. Thin film solar and advanced batteries are getting that "silicon valley" buzz of the 1970's-early '80's :-)
Just a bit of what's going, but only the tip of the iceberg!
http://www.solarforecast.com/ArticleDetails.php?articleID=322
http://www.solarforecast.com/ArticleDetails.php?articleID=322
http://www.aleo-solar.de/index.php/page_id/54/language/en
http://www.daystartech.com/
(‘German)
http://www.wuerth-solar.com/website/frames,LA,EN,KA,226.php
Solar hydrogen is the "straight line between two points". Clean, distributed power, it end runs almost every problem encountered with other alternatives.
The argument is often made that it is an inefficient way to use solar power.
There is some truth in this, given that solar direct to electricity or thermal solar show higher raw numbers. But the advantage that solar to hydrogen has is in making a containable transportable fuel. Until batteries get greatly better, it is the path, and even then, there will be many applications in which batteries simply cannot answer the call for fast burst of controllable energy.
yep, this is going to be fun! Notice the difference in the faces of people who know what is really going on....the doomers worry and frown.....the people in these businesses of the future smile. :-)
Roger Conner Jr.
Remember, we are only one cubic mile from freedom
Roger--
thanks for your leads and comments.
I am interested in many of these topics, not academically, as I am buying land in Thailand, and actually want to implement better ways of farming – but only if they make money. I have lost money for years running a "green" furniture making operation. And I have had my heart broken over pig poop.
I am also happy to see someone looking for solutions, rather than disaster.
And I still say, fossil crude demand – if this price regime holds – is in for a long, slow decline. There are tons of wonderful business opps if OPEC can keep the price up, and they are avaricious SOBs to be sure.
Unfortunately, oil prices tend to collapse after big run-ups. This time different? Maybe. But what would Hubbert's Peak look like if the US had taken Canada in 1812 and Mexico in 1847? What does a graph of North American oil production look like? I guess a plateau.
It looks like a peak in the US as we went elsewhere to pick low-hanging fruit. When all the low-hanging fruit is picked, we go up into the middle of tree (where we are getting now, thanks to Libya, Iran, Nigeria, Iraq and Venezuela being run by nutcases). The price of oil goes up – flatlining demand, so you no longer have a peak, but plateau.
Happily, the world can adjust to stable (not growing) supplies of oil. Bios are coming on, and hybrids and other devices promise major reductions in fossil crude demand. Bring on the nukes bigtime. France does it, so it must be doable.
Just do not count on pig oil. It will solve about about one-half of one percent of our crude needs. More, if we cut consumption. Oink oink
Reading the back and forth here it struck me just how much effort gets spent focussing on keeping these motorized machines alive. Sure they are nice and would be nice in the future but how about less? Less TV, less plastic crap, less drive in coffee shacks, less magazines, less less less. I grew up with less, seemed OK to me at the time. I do remember binge-ing on fresh fruits in season. Strawberry shortcake 3 x a day. Cherries until your stomach hurt. Canned fruit and veggies during winter.
I think there are alot of people dis-satified and unfulfilled with techno-life, maybe less will be more...
"Engineer-Poet's" "Opus" on Sustainability, Energy Independence and Agricultural Policy:
Jim Burke said "any discussion about the primary reason why this concept is deeply flawed" and was ignored.
vtpeaknik made the same type of comments on soil erosion, EROEI counting agricultural inputs, etc.
Again ignored and EP went off on some story about a farmer in Maine he read about on the Internet.
To EP's credit he did account for hauling the straw, he doesn't realize the effort and expense of baling and loading it. I would think because he has never even seen a baler, never mind baled and hauled straw. A modern round baler is a $45k piece of equipment. Baling wheat straw and loading the bales is as much effort as harvesting the grain. There is also the additional soil compaction of baling and transporting the straw/stover.
We used to own and lease out "hay hikers":
which improve the effort to transport round bails. Large square bails are another option or handling the straw loose like silage, but it is still a huge amount of effort to start transporting this volume of straw and stover.
If you take his paper and cut everything he said by 90% to account for proper soil stewardship and the effort to move this amount of biomass, it is solid work and everything he said as far as agricultural biomass for electricity is valid. The paper is very naive on effort to move the biomass and the output is extremely over-estimated based on references that don't take proper soil stewardship into account.
A lot of the "meatgrinder" here is Engineer-Poet himself. He thinks that name calling and berating people is a proper discussion form and people shy away from making comments on his armchair farmer bullshit because he starts quoting calculations from side issues while calling names and insulting anyone that disagrees with him. He is a schoolyard bully and behaves like at 12 year old behind an assumed identity. If he tried acting like he does in a farming community coffee shop and yapping the he had "reseach papers" to back up his nonsense, he would be eating lunch through a straw for the rest of his life.
opps, sorry, didn't realize I had stepped into someone elses fight....
and I didn't ignore Jim Burke and vtpeaknik, I just somehow missed their commentary...
So we are back to our old issues, topsoil, fertility and biomass returned to the land and fertilizer, the big three issues that make bio energy a tough challange.
Your just making me more and more a fan of the renewable hydrogen, all these conversions in bio mass still seem like a snake trying to eat it's own tail...we simply have to tap into all that heat and light falling on our head everyday more directly! :-)
RC
Remember, we are only one cubic mile from freedom
From your,
Which looks sensible, but I wonder if we replace the fossil fuels by solar aren't we in essence storing a lot of that energy that would otherwise be reflected into space. I am sure that a stable state would occur sometime but how much would this heat the planet in the meantime. (couldn't figure out how to add 'in between time ain't we got fun, so I'll cheat and just add it here anyway.)
If anything, converting sunlight into stored energy using solar panels reduces heating of the planet. Solar panels prevent the sunlight that falls on them from heating the ground. In the U.S., Only about 1/3 of electrical energy is used for heating and air-conditioning.
ahem?
Boris
London
IFeelFree,
Nice try, looks like everyone else is asleep or too bored by my small point to put up a good fight. Sorry but I would say that energy reflected is energy reflected, and energy that is trapped, that would otherwise be reflected by whatever means is trapped (by trapped I mean temporarily stored until eventually re radiated).
Part of that energy falling on the ground is immediately re radiated into space but Im afraid that once that energy is stored as electricity it still will eventually degrade on earth, and quickly, to lower forms of energy ie.heat This is a difference between using solar panels and wind power. Wind power is the use of energy that has already been converted from light into the mechanical energy of wind and would have only a slight effect of storing 'trapped' energy, it is part of the loop and therefore not like much of photoelectric which would imitate petroleum in that they both are bringing 'new' energy into what otherwise is a closed loop.
Today is ,'Be Mean to: Almost Green Photon day'.
Thatsit,
Is it you that has promoted lake storage of wind power? If so, Have you had any thoughts about doing this sort of thing on a wind tower by tower basis using individual cisterns? The tower directing surplus energy to pumping water instead of generating electricity.Many towers could be dedicated to direct mechanical water pumping (no tower generators) for peak load times. I don't know what size the storage tanks would be but they would be close to tower, or small farms of towers, and so not be involved in pumping water any great distance (cisterns would be closed to prevent evaporation). I don't know much efficiencies would be effected by turning wind to water storage to electrical generation in this way.
The earth's average reflectance is 29.7%. That means that about 60% of sunlight is absorbed (actually higher on land than the ocean). Therefore, solar panels absorb the sunlight, > 60% of which would heat the land underneath if the panels were not present. About 1/3 of the electricity derived from solar panels is used for heating and air conditioning which does contribute to earth warming. The rest is used to run appliances, industrial processes, etc. which is mostly mechanical work, .i.e., it does not contribute significantly to heating. (For example, the electricity that runs a fan is mostly doing the mechanical work of moving air and does not contribute much heat.) Therefore, on balance, solar panels which generate electricity contribute to cooling the earth.
As for lake storage of wind power, no, you've mistaken me for someone else.
And average reflectivity is dropping anyway since a large fraction of reflected light is from the poles, and the north pole at least is melting to blue water (which is a real efficient absorber of energy).
Ghawar Is Dying
The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function. - Dr. Albert Bartlett
Sorry, that was 70% of sunlight absorbed.
But all energy degrades to heat anyway, even the kinetic energy embodied in moving air (wind). Converting this energy to electricity and using it to run a fan or dishwasher or whatever has the same effect on the heatcontent of the earth as letting the wind blow freely in the first place.
The only way I can think of that would cool the earth using wind energy would be to try to send the energy into space as electromagnetic radiation using a wavelength that isn't blocked by our atmosphere, visible light would be a good choice I believe. Incidentally, with all the lightpollution on this planet, that is excactly what we're doing :)
Wrong. Mechanical work dissipates energy by moving things around. It does not necessarily produce heat (unless there is a lot of friction present). For example, if I use an electric wench to lift up a heavy object, I expend energy, but I don't create any significant heating (except a small amount due to friction). A fan creates a small amount of heat due to friction, but it is very small. Mostly the energy is expended as mechanical work -- moving the air around. (In addition, moving air can have a cooling effect by increasing evaporation.)
The point is, the electrical energy (from the solar panel) is largely used to do mechanical work, as opposed to >70% going to heat the earth if the sunlight struck the earth directly (instead of the solar panel). Only about 30% is reflected back to space. So, on balance solar panels would have a cooling effect unless the electricity produced is used mainly for heating and air conditioning.
I don't mean to pull rank, but I'm a physicist and electromagnetic energy measurement is my specialty (infrared, visible, x-ray, gamma-ray). I've been doing it for over 25 years.
Wow… wish I had one of those in my workshop… was it expensive? What model did you get? :-)
And I don’t wish to pull rank on you but as a fellow physicist… don’t you think your explanations are rather simplistic/flawed.
• Yes, you have lifted the object and (temporarily) increased its P.E. But when you lower it again… the energy goes?
• Moving air around with a fan… yes, you have (temporarily) increased its K.E… and when it slows down the energy goes?
Most “mechanical energy” is temporary before it degenerates back into low grade heat due to friction.
The only way energy is used and not degraded back to heat is: permanently increasing the PE of something, storing the energy inside a chemical or mechanical device (battery/spring)… etc.
So ultimately there is no cooling effect by a solar panel.
• In addition, moving air can have a cooling effect by increasing evaporation.
That’s not really the whole story either is it… the surface where the evaporation takes place cools because the more energetic (liquid) molecules escape… which thus means that the air is gaining (heat) energy.(conservation of energy?)
I think they are correct. I think you are confused.
It depends on what I do with that potential energy. I could use it to pump water, or generate electricity to power high efficiency LED lighting, neither of which creates much heat.
There is some heating due to the non-zero viscosity of air, but it is minimal. The question is similar to what happens to conserve momentum when I accelerate in my car? The car has forward momentum. Where is the corresponding backward momentum, so that the total momentum remains zero? ("conservation of momentum") The answer is that the momentum of the earth changes by an amount equal to the momentum of the car. (No motion of the earth is observed because the earth is so much more massive than the car.) Similarly, when a stationary fan pushes air, the earth gains equal momentum in the opposite direction. When the air slows, the earth regains its former momentum. The kinetic energy lost by the air is transferred to the earth.
A lot of mechanical energy is simply transferred to the earth. If a landslide occurs, does it cause heating? A little, but mostly it imparts kinetic energy to the earth, resulting in an infinitesimal change in the earth's motion, too small to observe.
Wrong. My argument stands.
Wrong. The air is not gaining heat energy. It takes energy to convert water from the liquid state to the gaseous state, so the heat energy of the water is reduced. (Heat energy is converted to potential energy.) That's why it is a cooling effect. It is true that the energy is recovered when the water vapor condenses, so there is no net energy gain or loss.
you clearly "outrank" me as a physicist, but this isn't very complicated in principle. The thing to keep in mind is that with every conversion there is some energy lost as heat, noise, light/radiation. Even with your fan the energy all ends up as heat in the end, or do you suppose the air keeps moving indefinately, and that the noise keeps travelling around the world in the atmosphere forever and ever? Molecules in moving air loses kinetic energy rubbing against other molecules, and that energy heats the air ever so slightly.
When you studied physics 25+ years ago perhaps you came across an experiment done by a certain James Prescott Joule in the early 1840s where a falling weight turns a paddle in an insulated barrel of water. Joule measured the mechanical work needed to raise the temperature of the water. Using the now rather archaic unit of ft·lbf/Btu he got a value of 819 according to wikipedia, in more modern units that's 4.41 J per gram per degree Celcius/Kelvin.
I suggest you put your fan in a calorimeter as Joule did with his paddle, and carefully measure the electric energy used to turn the fan and equally carefully measure the temperature increase in the air inside the calorimeter. You repeat the experiment, but this time you rig the calorimeter with a lightbulb and expend excactly the same amount of electrical energy as used by the fan in the first experiment. A third experiment can be performed, where you replace the lightbulb with a resistor. My hypothesis: The measurements will be in agreement with eachother in all 3 cases.
Its amazing how much confusion there is about this matter.
I assume you're referring to the Wikipedia article on James Prescott Joule.
I quote form the article:
The mechanical heating of water is "slight" because of the low viscosity of water. Most of the momentum of the water (and therefore the kinetic energy) is simply transfered to the container as kinetic energy and not converted to heat at all.
Think of it this way: If I kick a football, it doesn't heat up. It simply flies away. I've transferred kinetic energy to the ball. Similar with motion of air or water. It slows down because it transfers its kinetic energy to the environment (and ultimately, the earth). Some energy is converted to heat but that is just a very small amount.
Think of it this way: If I kick a football, it doesn't heat up. It simply flies away. I've transferred kinetic energy to the ball. ... Some energy is converted to heat but that is just a very small amount.
Only some? By the time the balls stops, ALL of the KE is lost due to friction, in the ball, with the air, with the ground. i.e. heat.
Ok, you say some of the energy goes into changing the momentum of the Earth. But the Earth is tidally locked with the Moon - momentum of the Earth is lost due to friction, i.e. heat.
I have seen your line of argument before, you keep adding convolutions to make it confusing to follow, but it doesn't change the underlying physics. Entropy can be a tricky thing to understand, even for physicists with 20 years experience.
It is not necessary to invoke momentum of the Earth to explain where the energy goes. I guess you like many others underestimate frictional heating. There is a lot more energy there than you imagine. Anyone who works machine tools will tell you where the energy goes - the workpiece and the tool gets hot!
So I think canbrit has it right. Energy captured by solar panels is released as heat somewhere sometime down the line.
well either that or non conservation of energy is a reality in which case the
universe is very different place than current thinking assumes
see "ahem"..
I thought we were beyond making this sort of mistake here.. ?
Boris
London
When you capture energy, you can just do four things with it. (i) You can store it in either a "capacitive" of "inductive" storage (the same concepts apply to all physical domains, not only electrical); (ii) you can convert it to another form; (iii) you can move it from point A to point B; and (iv) you can dissipate it to heat.
Hence indeed, all of the solar energy that is being captured by planet Earth eventually becomes heat, because moving and converting energy doesn't change the problem, but only delays its conversion to heat, and storage usually is not permanent (it may be kept in a "stored" state for a long time, like our fossil fuels, but sooner or later it will get dug up by intelligent apes, and that is when it also turns into heat.
Having said that, you may still get a local cooling effect. For example, if we place lots of solar power plants in the Sahara, and then ship the generated electricity to Europe, before it is being used up, then we indeed get a slight local cooling of the Sahara desert, whereas Europe gets slightly heated up.
It has nothing to do with non-conservation of energy. Light energy is converted to electrical energy in the solar panel which is then (mostly) used to due mechanical work. That transfers energy to, for example, an electric car which then transfers energy to the earth in the form of mechanical energy (mostly), not heat. It is basic physics. It is simply energy being transferred from one form to another and one system to another. There is some heat produced, due to friction, but in my example it is a small effect.
I'm sorry, but you are simply wrong about this. Some of the kinetic energy is transferred to the air as the ball moves through it, some it is transferred to the ground when the ball strikes it. Only a very small amount is converted to heat due to friction.
Now who's getting convoluted? Some of the earth's changed momentum is transferred to the moon, over time, by gravitational coupling. They remain locked.
It is not convolutions. It is what actually happens. (There are some complications when discussing fluid flow, such as air, but the underlying physics is the same.) I understand the concept of entropy quite well.
Entropy is an interesting subject. For one thing, energy flows can decrease the entropy of an open system. The earth may be considered an open system in that energy from the sun flows into it. That is why the overall entropy of the biosphere tends to decrease over time. Otherwise, how could incredibly complicated biological systems arise from the mud? Energy flows => decreased entropy => system moving further from equilibrium => greater complexity.
Gravity seems to cause a contradiction of the 2nd law of thermodynamics in that order can increase spontaneously in a system under gravitational forces. For example, a uniform mixture of particles of different density will tend to differentiate under gravity so that denser particles will fall to the bottom, and less dense particles will rise to the top -- a configuration of lower entropy.
Also, there is some controversy over the role of intelligence. It appears that intelligent beings can lower the entropy of their environment by their actions. However, it is argued that the disorder created by biological organisms with respect to heat production and consumption of food, insures that the overall entropy is increased. At the very least, intelligent beings can reduce the rate at which entropy increases (such as by building a dam to reduce the rate at which water flows and using the trapped energy to do work).
No, the friction of air is relatively small -- it has low viscosity. When moving air (or a ball) pushes against (or strikes) the earth, it transfers its kinetic energy to the earth. Its very simple. As for the machine tool, that's a different matter. The coefficient of friction is much higher and the machine part (saw blade, drill bit, etc.) is moving at a high velocity. Also, the machine is breaking a lot of chemical bonds as it slices through the material. All of that creates heat.
No. The energy gets converted to electricity. Some if goes to creating heat, but the majority of it is used to do mechanical work which ultimately gets transferred to the environment. Some of that mechanical work causes deformation and creates heat, but much of it is simply transferred to the momentum of the earth.
Think of it this way. Suppose I charge up my electric car from the solar panel. I then drive the car for 100 miles (at very low speed so that air friction is very low). How did that mechanical energy get converted to heat? It didn't. most of it was absorbed by the earth as a change in the earth's momentum. It sounds odd, but it is true.
so you are saying the solar PV cells capture the energy which powers the wheels of a car sending energy into the earth and into what would be low grade heat energy is fact transfered by the friction in the oceans/tides and gravitational coupling into increasing the moons P.E... (tides do do this) ie ultimately solar PV radiates energy to the moon
are we sticking with that?
I suspect solar cells reduce the earths albedo myself but not being a expert I will STFU
Boris
London
The PE in the Earth-Moon system increases, but the total kinetic energy in the system decreases by a greater amount. The difference is heat generated by tidal movement of each body, which is lost to space.
I'm not sure where all these electric cars are, but you might consider the effect of one million electric cars driving west and one million electric cars driving east. Where does the energy go? (Hint: the momentum of the Earth doesn't change).
Actually, his theory reminds of the high school example of the sailboat that has an electric fan blowing air at the sails. For the same reason, kicking a ball at a wall has no net effect. This is all simple Newtonian physics.
It's a pity his bogus theory doesn't work, as it would be a good way to combat global warming. We could cool the planet, get useful energy and transfer the waste energy to the Earth. Eventually of course, the Earth would be spinning so fast we would all fly off into space. Btw, that was a joke.
There is no point in arguing with you, but that conclusion is obviously wrong. The vast majority of electrical appliances are not electric cars or fans, but things like TVs and vacuum cleaners. Therefore virtually none of the energy expended could cause a change in momentum of the Earth, even if your theory was correct.
This "change in the Earth's momentum" thing is just irrelevant nonsense.
I'll agree on that. I wonder if this thread will make the shortlist for Most Stupid Thread Award? ;-)
Yet more convolution! Dude, that's what friction is caused by - bonds breaking. That's why friction generates heat. Doesn't change what I said.
Stirring the air, whether with a car, a fan or simply waving your hands about all generate heat. Not much, but they do. You are familiar with Joule's experiment, surely?
What you seem to be arguing is that there is a qualitative difference between something that produces a lot of heat and something that appears to produce very little. That is purely a quantitative difference, the underlying principles are still the same. Just because you don't notice any heating effect, it doesn't mean that the energy gets magically transferred to the Earth instead.
The fact that air has lower viscosity allows it to mix more quickly so the heat is spread widely. If you enclose the air in a small box, and stir it, it heats up noticeably. Why do you think disk drives get hot? A similar disc spinning in free air would not cause a noticeable change in the temperature of a room, because it is thinly spread. It has exactly the same total heating effect though.
How? VERY SLOWLY.
It sounds odd, but it is true.
I fear though, that the car is being driven in circles. Sometimes the more people know, the less they understand.
CrystalRadio asked,
That's It,
Is it you that has promoted lake storage of wind power?
I have. And your thoughts are close to what I have endorsed and in fact am working on, in that the wind turbine would be designed from scratch to be a lower, cheaper, slower windmill to reduce costs and be built for pumping, ala a low VAWT (Vertical axis wind turbine)
I would not rule out the cistern idea, although, like the lake storage idea, it would be determined as much by the capital costs as anything else.
My original proposal was for a set of lakes along the Ohio or Mississippi River, that would pump the water up out of the river valley and into lakes that would be multi-purpose, for irrigation, recreation, and wind storage.
Efficiency of pumped hydro storage is normally given at about 75% to
85%. which is not bad:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pumped-storage_hydroelectricity
A fascinating link to one of the older pumped hydro systems, and it's failure:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taum_Sauk_pumped_storage_plant
Since my original concept was concieved several years ago, the cost of construction has gone nowhere but up. Given the cheap cost of power in the South due to coal generated electricity, it would not be competitive at this time.
Another variation is compressed air storage, on a small distributed scale, but again, costs would be very important. The technology would work very well, but electricity is still very cheap in much of the country.
Interestingly, nana technology developments in batteries may soon may the whole point moot and the idea of pumped storage or compressed air storage seem primitive. As the cost of batteries drop, and they are produced in mass, the battery could win the day. We'll have to wait and see.
Roger Conner Jr.
Remember, we are only one cubic mile from freedom
Just a diagram I drew of wind generated compressed air storage and a combined cycle power plant:
http://www.shpegs.org/cawegs.html
Power Engineering CAES article
Robert Rapier Compressed Air blog article
This concept could be adapted to a very small scale, even to a single residence with a wind driven compressor, large air tank and a gas turbine microCHP plant.
A VAWT wind turbine would be a good fit for the compressor and if the compressed air is externally supplied to the gas turbine, they could be homebrewed from salvage turbochargers with the addition of a flame cone.
Nye Thermodynamics has a lot of fun in their shop with gas turbines and turbocharger conversions. Check out the videos of the 1200 hp helicopter turbine they mounted in a jet boat. Their moms didn't the guys at Nye's shop that "It's fun until someone reaches escape velocity."
Around 50% of the power of a gas turbine goes into powering the compressor. By doing this externally with wind powered compressors and putting the gas turbine in a combined cycle or CHP system, even by running it on NG, the efficiency is very high. Bio or Coal gas and this type of system would be efficient, reliable and cost effective.
I would also think that in areas with high peak electrical prices, if you had access to a bio-gas that skipping the wind power and running electrical compressors in off-peak hours and then firing up the gas turbine to sell back to the grid during peak would be a money maker. The 1200hp helicopter turbine would be a 900KW power source. With the electrical generator it would still be relatively small for a plant that could put out almost a MW. Noise would be an issue.
My previous comment is way over the top and I agree with EP that biomass to electricity has some potential to offset agricultural energy inputs. I think that upgrading the biomass as close as possible to the crop is more feasible than baling and transporting straw. I also think that ethanol and biodiesel are going to be a fact of farm life whether they make sense or not, and harvesting seed and then hauling straw isn't efficient if both are going to go to energy products anyway.
Biomass for fuel has to be managed very carefully and the sustainable energy output is much lower than he is claiming, but his basic idea is sound thinking. The problem with his personality is that instead of listening to someone with 25 years of farming experience he starts name calling and being rude.
This is a recent "discussion" on biomass. He also spent a lot of time slandering me in another thread without understanding the system or listening when it was explained: TOD: Why is Innovation Difficult?.
It's too bad he chooses to act like that, because it is far from productive.
FWIW...my experience has been the same. I went a few rounds with him awhile back. After that, I decided it just wasn't worth it. He's in my virtual killfile now. Life's too short. I got better ways to use the last of the oil than trying to reason with someone who resorts to name-calling whenever he's losing an argument.
As I said to Robert Rapier in the comments on peak-oil-and-lunatic-fringe
it's a software issue and the effect of a higher traffic site without a SlashDot style moderation system.
This type of behavior, especially as interruptions in third party discussions gets moderated flamebait on SlashDot and disappears below the threshold. Not that there aren't idiots on SlashDot that don't RTFA and moderators that don't catch it, but moderation lowers the noise and allows for the group to drop the weight of this type of poster without getting into an argument and getting called names themselves.
Reading the thread you mentioned, I have much the same opinion on biofuels and scalability. My grandfather and father mixed farmed with straw and manure going back to the land and used cultivation for weed control. In my grandfather's day, they used no chemical fertilizer and grew a decent crop. My dad would fallow 1/3 and use no nitrogen fertilizer on summerfallow which produces a comparable crop to 100lbs/acre of urea on stubble. This is an area with 6"-2' of dark brown soil and no wind erosion problems. Besides weed control and composting, fallow kills fungus and disease that thrive under a constant crop canopy. Disease is a major problem with Lentils and Canola and even if there are cereals in the rotation that aren't affected by the diseases, they stay active under the moist crop canopy and then become a major problem in the next year Canola or lentil crop.
There was a lot of promotion of low and zero till farming based on wind erosion prevention and total farm output claims in the last 20 years. Our custom spraying business does really well because of low and zero till farming. If it isn't perennial weed control and fertilizer topdressing, it's disease and fungus or Bertha Army worms munching Canola. There is always something to spray a pesticide on because of low and zero till practices.
If the organic matter is high, wind erosion isn't a problem and cultivation of biomass into the soil is really the only scalable method of keeping up organic matter levels. Fallow was practical with $0.10/L diesel in the 1970's, and is unfeasible now. If we start pulling off massive quantities of straw/stover, we are screwed in a few years. Land that is managed like that will have to go out of cereal/oilseed production and into forage or trees to regain the organic content.
It has often been noted that the people who are the most enthused about biofuels are the ones who know the least about farming.
We still get people arguing that the prairie doesn't need fertilizer, so we can harvest prairie grasses and make them into biofuel without ever having to put anything back. They don't seem to realize that it's the harvesting part that makes all the difference.
A friend of mine used to be an organic farmer in California. She tried to buy manure from a local family farm to use as fertilizer, and they were really reluctant to sell. They needed it themselves. Finally she stopped asking, because she realized that they were only selling it to her out of a sense of neighborliness, and it was actually a hardship to them to give it up.
I saw a flock of sheep grazing on a wheat straw stubble field.
There was a tractor trailer used to transport the sheep to the field parked there.
The farmer may have leased the stubble to the rancher rather than plow it under.
As retail mutton costs more than methyl alchohol per pound, loin chops @ $7.50-9.99 per pound (1999 Midwest prices), the green energy people were not able to procure the stubble.
The real beauty of butanol, IMO, is that it's not miscible in water, so can in principle be separated from the mother liquor without distillation. But doesn't that depend on making a GMO bug that can live in an aqueous solution that's saturated with butanol?
Hi Roger…
Is it just my reading of your posts today… or are you getting more cornucopian by the day? I don’t recall you being like this a year ago!
Look… I have no problem with bio-butanol… as your RR link points out it has numerous advantages over ethanol… not least the separation-from-water issue which is what costs ethanol so dearly in energy terms. So it should have a much higher EREOI. However, as you also point out…whether the yields can increased sufficiently is another question. Robert was due to give a new report on bio-butanol on his blog… but last I read… he said “But I have figured out why bio-butanol has not taken off”… We eagerly await...
However, to my mind, there are a number of much more fundamental issues to consider…
(i) Any bio-fuel is likely to have a relatively low EREOI… if bio-butanol were even 3x more efficient to produce than ethanol that only gives you an EREOI of ~4. This has implications… firstly in terms of the viable collection area of your raw product, but more importantly in terms of the % of that energy you can afford to immediately “waste” in distribution. ie Localised distribution only….
(ii) But even more important than this… as Ulf Bossel points out… in a low EREOI future you cannot afford to “piss away” your energy. Efficiency of use becomes PARAMOUNT. For this reason alone bio-butanol (or any bio-fuel) should never be burned in an ICE.
Would you go to the bank and take out $100 of your hard-earned cash and immediately burn $85 in the street so you could go and spend the other $15???
If we can design a bio-fuelled FC EV that is 75% efficient. Fine. (Or go E-P’s route of Zinc-Air fuel cell and use the bio-crop as a charcoal reducing agent.)
(The only reason we got into this motoring madness/urban sprawl mess in the first place was that with an initial EREOI of 100 for crude oil… we didn’t care about the energy costs of distribution of oil or the fact that the car delivers only 15% of that energy @ the wheels…)
To me “Hydrogen by renewable energy” makes the huge assumption that you have spare capacity after straight electrical generation. Is that realistically ever going to be the case?
Furthermore, what is to be the role for this renewable Hydrogen? As you state, then ignore… as a transportation fuel it has been shown that there is no point in going Electricity > Hydrogen > Fuel Cell > Electric when direct EV is 4x more efficient.
So, “Hydrogen by renewable energy”… sure… if the Hydrogen has some localised role that immediately recombines it into something in the liquid/solid state… and that ‘entirely’ uses its energy content… chemical manufacture, Ammonia fertilizers, bio-plastics or similar?
Finally, I’m staggered by your last statement… containable?/transportable?… it’s the least containable molecule there is!! There will never be a hydrogen distribution infrastructure… or let me put it another way… which would you rather distribute… Hydrogen or electricity? (PS Not to mention… one is already in place, the other would have to start from scratch)
So, to conclude... if we are to have some kind of “technological future”… we need to adopt the most efficient energy route in every aspect of our lives. As such I predict the long term goals could be:
• Solar & Wind /Hydro & Nuclear > variable & base grid-distributed electricity > used for industry, home appliances & efficient lighting and personal EVs. Any surplus (Ha!) or load balancing into Hydrogen products as described above.
• Personal transport > EV (probably running on gravel roads!)
• Housing/Workplaces > super-insulated passive-solar designs with heat exchange… very low heating/cooling loads
• Farming > locally produced fuels >> into FCs
• Bio-Fuels > chemical inputs to replace petro-chemicals; ie. Fertilizers, plastics, medicines
• Freight > trucks n’ boats n’ planes >> the toughest challenge >> the last of the oil?>> or bio-fuels in fuel cells/jet engines etc?
canbrit, to your question,
"is it just my reading of your posts today… or are you getting more cornucopian by the day? I don’t recall you being like this a year ago!"
First, you are the first person to ask this question in such a direct manner, concerning my writing and views of one year ago, and my views now. I am going to do some writing for other purposes than posts on TOD, so I have recently had reason to review my written work (all that I keep, which is most, excepting smaller conversational posts), and think about my changing views.
The most direct and simple answer is this: As regards energy, I am more at peace now than I have been not just in the last year, but in MANY years. This was caused by a variety of educational experiences over the last several years, but in the last year or two in particular. I will not go too long, but I will hit the most important of them in my own thinking in a few points below:
(a) My tag line, "We are only one cubic mile from freedom." I have posted on this several times, and it was a revealation to me. It is based on a post here at TOD by Khebab, and it was FASCINATING. Here is the post:
http://www.theoildrum.com/node/2186
This was the post in which Khebab quoted reliable sources, and I then did the math myself to prove that the world (not just the U.S.) consumes about 1 cubic mile of oil per year.
That was astounding to me. If I had been asked to guess at any time during the last 20 years how much oil the world consumed if measured in cubic miles, I would have easily guessed, 40, 50 or even more per year, and been certain that I would have been incorrect to the low side. Confronting that my ideas of world oil consumption were built on such a wild exaggeration of how much we actually consumed was an astounding breakthrough for me. I am still dealing with what it means in the real world. But I am more certain everyday that this is not such a massive volume of oil that it cannot be, if it must be, replaced. The Earth, and the solar energy falling upon the Earth so dwarfs that 1 mile of oil as to be astounding.
I saw the problem of declining oil and gas supply a challenge that could be overcome without great suffering. I had always somewhat believed that, and had studied methods of providing renewable power, but at first was VERY shaken in my belief that mitagation was possible by the "true" doomers.
That was my second breakthrough: After reading and studying the "doomers" and following their thinking back, I realized that they were not "predicting" complete collapse on any scientific or technical basis, they were voicing a deep desire for a collapse back to a more romantic primitive age. Neo-Primitivism, green-anarchism, and "deep green" theory has a long history. It was just not one I was at all familiar with. I am now, so I now know to take the "doomers" in context. I understand the philosophical underpinnings that drive their theory and thinking in much better context.
Thirdly, I realized that the "Linearizations" and charts given showing exactly when peak would occur and how fast the slide down would be had to be taken with huge doses of salt! This occured the first couple of times that during research I found many charts by many groups and people that showed world peak already far behind me, and at production levels that had far been exceeded. I don't have a copy I can get to, but one chart in Der Spiegal a year or so ago showed world production at peak in the early 2000's at barely above 70 million barrels per day, and dropping fast from there, so that right now (2007) we would be dropping below 48 million barrels a day or so!
Now, having said all of that, here is what you may remember from my earliest posts here, because it is on this that I have NEVER CHANGED, and it is what keeps me from considering myself a cornucopian: I do not think we can know how much time we have left, IF ANY, to peak. It has been my contention that we are running in the blind on oil and gas production, and all the projections, from the cornucopian side, but as well from the "peak" side of the debate are NOTHING BUT GUESSES. So much of the information is either hidden from the public or is outright disinformation that the United States and the whole of the developed world are in extreme danger, simply from lack of knowledge, and that the sheer drop in production could come AT ANY TIME.
It is this that I break completely with the cornucopians: There will come a day, we don't know when, that nothing short of astronical expense of money and machinery will be required to maintain the level of oil we are now able to extract. Soon after that date, the level will begin to fall. To repeat, we cannot KNOW when this date will occur. Westexes often gives the example of Texas, where all the money, men, best methods and advanced extraction tools simply could not hold or raise the level of oil extraction. The downslope was physically impossible to stop. It will happen. When? It may have already happened. It may be soon, or it may still be decades away. Not knowing is much more dangerous than the peak itself. And having to go abroad is already leaving the U.s. in a horrifically weakened situation. We are being bled to death, on money, on influence, and now, in real blood in trying to find the fuel we need. For the United States, the crisis is already here, even if there are decades of oil out there in the world.
Where I differ with the "doomers" however is in my belief that there are workable, scalable and usable alternatives to oil and gas. That was my other great breakthrough in thought. Until recently, for example, I thought solar photovoltaic was still decades away. I had not even heard of the recent breakthroughs in thin film solar. Likewise, plug hybrid electric and solar to hydrogen. I had frankly lost touch during the late 1990's with how fast technology was moving. And, in a major mental breakthrough, I realized for the first time that the oil/gas molecule just was not that special. That hydrogen and hydro carbon molecules are reasonably common in nature, oil and gas was just a great convenient storehouse for them.
I have become convinced that at this moment we are indeed dependent on oil and gas, but that is not because they are by construction superior to other energy options. It is simply that a century of infrastructure has been built up around them. We can change. But, and this is where I come closest to agreeing with the doomers, it will require will and effort. Right now, the Americans and in fact the world seem very unwilling to accept that change is coming, and must come, and that real effort on a huge scale must be made NOW. We are in a race against time. Even worse, we are not allowed to see the clock. We may be out of time NOW, we simply cannot know. We may have decades, again, we simply cannot know. We are taking chances with 1000 years worth of work. All the technical and cultural advances began in the days of the Greeks, and continuing right down to this hour hang in the balance. We can succeed and prevent great suffering, but it is not a done deal, we are given no assured outcomes. The effort must begin now.
So, am I getting more "cornucopian"? You be the judge. The old adage, "hope for the best but prepare for the worst" seems to be perfectly apt for the situation we are in. I am not cornucopian in that I believe that the worst as it relates to oil and energy could happen at any time. But I am not doomer in that I do not believe for one moment that there are no workable, and in fact potentially liberating alternatives. The age of oil will end, as it must. We can end it ON OUR TERMS.
(now, to more mundane matters, I do not want to launch into issues of hydrogen storage on an already long post, so I will simply send a link
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen_storage
You said "I’m staggered by your last statement… containable?/transportable?"
Of course hydrogen must be those, they use them on space craft, the most transportable device there is, and the Germans are developing autos using cryogenic hydrogen at this moment...not cheap but doable. As to your contention that "There will never be a hydrogen distribution infrastructure", on that we agree, at least not an infrastructure in any normal sense of that word. That is why hydrogen should always be seen as a "use it where you produce it" or very close to where you produce it program. I think the centralized type of "hydrogen economy" as depicted by the current administration is NOT the model that will prevail.
However, I will take my slap on the wrist for making the storage challenge sound a bit easier than it is....there are still great developments to be made.
Thanks for the feedback and the food for thought :-)
Roger Conner Jr
Remember, we are only one cubic mile from freedom
Roger, while acknowledging I'm not expert in this area, I would like to comment on hydrodgen as "containable transport fuel". I have read that:
1)Hydrogen, being the smallest atom, diffuses into steel and embrittles it. Because steel is a mature, inexpensive technology, I would expect most compressors, piping, and large tanks would be steel.
2)Hydrogen under pressure will leak out of the smallest flaws, flaws so small that the hydrogen will leak out but MUCH larger oderant molecules will be left behind. This makes leaks are very hard to detect.
3)Hydrogen flames are very hard to see in well-lighted circumstances, give off very little infrared, and produce only water. They are therefore hard to detect.
4)Hydrogen has a very low ignition temperature and the widest explosive limits of any substance.
To me, this adds up to: no way in the world will any public hydrogen systems be able to get liability insurance in the US. A litigious society and sensationalistic news media (remember the Hindenburg!) will make insurance unavailable.
Oil has been so doggone popular because it has high energy density, tolerable flamability, visible leaks (or in the case of natural gas, will carry oderants), and very visible flames. I'm sure gonna miss it!
Errol in Miami
If we wish to produce biofuels at all, then using a waste product to start with is clearly the way to go, as there is no competition between food and fuel in this way, and also, since the waste is being produced anyhow, we are not using up water and/or fertilizers to produce the biofuels initially. Finally, waste management is in itself a problem, and if we can turn true waste to something useful, we have accomplished something.
Of course, we need to define the term "waste." If pig poop is otherwise being used as a fertilizer, then it isn't waste to start with.
Finally, there are many ways to turn manure to something useful. First, we can burn it in a waste processing plant, and use the generated heat for heating houses; second, we can burn it to produce electricity, and then use the electricity for whatever purposes; and third, we can turn the manure to methane, and then use the methane, e.g. as a fuel.
Methane as a fuel can be quite interesting.
First, methane has a higher octane number than liquid gas (130 instead of 95 to 98). Therefore, it can be used more efficiently by a motor. The efficiency of a gas engine is about 35% at best, but usually, it is closer to 20% (because we are buying cars that are bigger than they need to be and then use them at low acceleration). The efficiency of a methane engine can be significantly higher (close to 40%).
Second, methane produces 20% less CO2 per distance driven.
Taking the two effects together, we can reduce the CO2 emissions by roughly 30% in comparison with a conventional car.
Finally, if we use the manure as a fertilizer, we actually release methane into the atmosphere. Methane itself is a potent greenhouse gas. By using the methane as a fuel, we reduce the release of methane into the atmosphere.
I forget who it was that said the best illustration of the irreversibility of the notorious 2nd law of t'dynamics is to try and stuff horseshit up the horse's arse and get oats out of its mouth. Pleasant metaphor that!
Please show how your 'pig shit' plan:
1) Can be done in such a way to handle the capitol costs of this magical fecal->oil conversion.
2) How the photons -> oil conversion works.
3) How the fecal matter is returned to the fields.
Solutions there are many to this energy "crisis." Technical solutions will be found. If commercial, they will be implemented. The hard part of life is getting people to cooperate, ending wars, crime etc. Now, those are problems.
Keep talking like that and you'll have a by-line in TOD just like Engineer-Poet.
Um. See reply above. My hopes for pigshit have been dashed by e-mailing the actual researcher. Okay, I am red-faced, and will be subject of ridicule all day. Maybe my new nickname will be "PigScat."
Well, you've gained some points with me, because you 1) checked up on the article and 2) admitted you were wrong. A lot of people wouldn't do either of those things.
Ditto. The pig poop is magically erased by 'fessing up.
TOD is a meat grinder for new ideas and concepts, but not an inhumane meat grinder !
It is difficult to sell new ideas here (because TOD is full of knowledgeable people capable of critical thinking and dealing with post-Peak Oil is a quite difficult problem). Bovine poop will simply not work here.
You have gained points by checking your facts and admitting error.
I will point you to two articles that I have written that have had some details criticized (reason gray areas) but have been largely accepted as a necessary PART of the solution.
And do *NOT* put down bicycling ! I am becoming more and more convinced that bicycling will need to become a non-trivial part of dealing with post-Peak Oil. It is a low tech, low energy, long lived solution that can be scaled up fairly quickly ! It has auxiliary health benefits that Americans are sorely lacking as well :-)
http://www.lightrailnow.org/features/f_lrt_2006-05a.htm
http://www.lightrailnow.org/features/f_lrt_2007-04a.htm
Best Hopes,
Alan
Pedicabs. An SF staple.
I am big fan of urbanization and bicycling. Even walking! One interesting observation; I live in Los Angeles. For decades, it was sprawl, sprawl, sprawl. Now, it is infill, infill, infill. We are finally building rails. Even downtown is has tons of new housing being built.
As I look upon the city, it is easy to visualize that the city, in 15 years, will consume less energy than before. The really really bad traffic will force new residents into rails or closer to work (the two-income family is big problem in this regard by the way. Whose job do you live near?)
Before, people would tend to criss-cross the city for jobs and recreation. Now, neighborhoods are developing, and people are reluctant to drive anyway.
If plug-in hybrids can work, daily commutes from a few miles away will take zero gasoline.
I may get a job downtown soon, and I live 2 miles away as a crow flies. I may be able to bicycle to work (sadly, it is a suit job, and showing up needing a shower is verboten) or maybe a small scooter (even that would raise eyebrows. )
A generation ago I would have lived on the Westside and drove a car in. About 10 miles each way. This is actually changing, due to traffic. Ther are tons of other problems, such as schools and crime. But, remarkably, things are getting better, not worse. Although in many regards we have become a Third World city.
I hope there will be a major attitude shift in riding bikes, something along the lines of bathrooms with changing and shower facilities, but I do not see it soon. I will probably just buy the smallest used car I can.
Too little too late? The Peak Oil people say so. Maybe so. I say we can drive down demand in front of Peak Oil. Historically, demand has fallen after price hikes.
Benjamin,
Just a small remark
Actually, we had that problem, and we choose my job as being the one close by.
Funny part was that my wife commuted for 3 months and then decided that she had enough. Job wasn't that good. Picked up the phone and within a few days she switched to another company.
Lessons learned: It turns out this is not really a problem. I would guess that holds for more people.
Delighted to hear it Richard. But, some people are "trying to make their pension" and others fear losing their health insurance. In time, as mass transit improves, and people cluster closer in, hopefully these problems will get better. But there are tons of "Average Joes" out there who are trapped, long commutes, rising gasoline prices and in dire need of two incomes. I read that it is not just L.A. but Atlanta, Houston, Dallas and virtually every major city.
I agree with Leanan. Anyone can make mistakes. It's very good of someone to admit to them, Benjamin.
Ghawar Is Dying
The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function. - Dr. Albert Bartlett
one of the smartest men i know was working on pig poop. he said it was the most difficult thing to work with. instruments corroded overnight to nothing.
he was trying to use kerosene bubbles to extract something from the liquid manure. most of the tanks simply corroded at seams and started leaking.
as others have mentioned, if the energy input to pigs is oil (through oil used for fertilizer and machines to produce the feed to transport the feed ect.) and therefore it cannot produce more energy than went into it, rather it will be orders of magnitudes less, maybe a thousand orders of magnitudes less.
Reading RR's TDP "turkey guts" article the other day, I learned an interesting factoid. They were adding fat or oil to the mess before cooking it to up the oil output.
The thing to remember about poop is that it's already been through a digestive system evolved to efficiently extract oil and other useful stuff from the passing biomass. So poop is a poor source of oil, and apparently the TDP process does not have sufficient magic to convert the mishmash of cellulose/chitin, porphyrins, various bacterial byproducts, dead/live bacteria, organic/inorganic acids, bile, ammonia, and salt water ... into oil.
A better use for the poop would be to dilute it up as fertilizer for the CO2-absorbing algae.
| The problem will solve itself.
| But not in a nice way.
Hi Leanan, I have linked a similiar report in the post above.
And its 92 now? Last I checked ( a week back) it was 91. Better sell them before more people realize the truth.
I know. That's what I meant when I said the link was "posted above." ;-)
This particular company sounds kinda shady to me. The ROEI on scamming people is likely a lot better than on diesel from algae. ;-)
You are right. Sorry. Missed the very first line. One point I did not mention is that although De Beer's has got the public into believing the hype, Greenstar which trades over the counter (OTC) in the US and plans to build the plants is getting no love with its stock trading at a whopping 4 cents.
http://finance.yahoo.com/q?s=GSPI.PK
http://thefraserdomain.typepad.com/energy/2006/11/greenstar_produ.html
"This particular company sounds kinda shady to me."
I know. That's what scares me. Even if this has real potential years down the line, a major scam/blow-up could really hurt a promising field's reputation.