Midweek Open Thread and News Drop...
Posted by Prof. Goose on January 25, 2006 - 12:56am
Topic: Miscellaneous
Just because the best community in the blogosphere deserves it...
Posted by Prof. Goose on January 25, 2006 - 12:56am
Topic: Miscellaneous
OK, here's my topic: Coal-to-Liquid conversion. Just what is its EROEI? How favorably or unfavorably does it compare to tar sands, heavy oil, oil shale, etc.? How difficult and expensive is it to scale up the infrastructure necessary for it to make a significant contribution to pending US and/or liquid fuel shortages? Etc., etc.
HO
Still, if there are any experts floating or "lurking" around out there, don't be shy!
Some processes that have been done on small scale:
- Solvent refined coal
- H-coal process
- Various pyrolysis and hydro-pyrolysis
And all of them require more investment than your typical refinery.Fischer-Tropsch is the only GTL process in large-scale industrial use today, AFAIK.
While blimps are energy-efficient, you can't replace the planes with them due to lack of new helium reserves. We already had a full depletion cycle!
The direct coal to liquids process was used to produce high quality gasoline, while the FT process yielded diesel fuel. The 1931 Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded to Friedrich Bergius for the development of the direct process.
I don't know of anybody using his process nowadays.
Green Car Congress points to a new tar sand technology which liquifies the oil underground where it can be pumped out. It's just a test at this point but it looks like it could be a significant improvement over current technology.
http://www.greencarcongress.com/2006/01/petrobank_ready.html
Interesting article. At least on a basic concept level, the THAI process looks like a major improvement over the conventional schemes, as it actually uses part of the bitumen as fuel rather than more valuable fossil fuels. Furthermore, the more in situ you can make the process, the better.
A major consideration that may not be sufficienly appreciated at this time is the composition and disposition of the combustion gases. Unless these are just allowed to migrate to the surface through the porous overburned, then they would probably have to be collected via some sort of a network of exhaust wells.
The disposition of these gases will not be a trivial matter.The article cites a combustion gas generation rate of 255,000 cubic meters per day for a system producing 660 bpd of bitumen liquid. That is a LOT of gas for a relatively small amount of production.
Being that the combustion is underground and proceeds from a highly oxidizing state to an oxygen-starved state (i.e, near the face of the liquifying bitumen), it is a certainty that the combustion gases will contain a high fraction of unburned hydrocarbons, possible mixed with carbon monoxide and sulfur dioxide. For a full-scale system I very much doubt that it will be acceptable to release a huge volume of such highly contaminated gases to the atmosphere without some sort of emission controls. A network of exhaust wells connected to a vapor incinerator would handle the unburned hydrocarbons and the CO, but additional controls would be needed to remove the SO2. I'm not saying that air pollution control is going to be a project killer, but it is something that will add to the complexity and cost of a full-scale system. It is not obvious from the short blurb that I read that this requirement has been fully appreciated.
Flooding with oxygen and steam (and recycled CO2?) might improve energy recovery; it would certainly reduce gas volumes.
I'm not sure I see the significance of the fact that the off-gases will contain a lot of nitrogen, other than that it increases the volume of the off-gases. Certainly, it will not result in any significant NOx emissions, because you need very high reaction temperatures for that to happen. As such, the nitrogen is largly just going along for the ride.
True, using oxygen plus steam would reduce the volume of the off-gases several fold, but then you would need to build a very large oxygen plant on site. Depending on how the economics look, that might be a good way to go.
I know the whole reason for doing tar sands is to obtain liquid fuel, but I can't help wondering whether in some cases it might be a whole hell of a lot easier to just do in situ gasification of the tar sands and use the product gases (probably much like coal gas) as a substitute for our increasingly tight natural gas supplies. What do you think?
http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?chanID=sa006&colID=5&articleID=00052DCC-FEF6-13CB-BC1C83414 B7F012A
If you find the February Scientific American on the newstand you could look for this article discussing new technologies to allow refineries to deal with high sulfur "sour" oil. More and more oil is coming out sour these days as the light sweet is getting hard to find. Desulfuring the oil will both let existing refineries use this oil and also help to meet new stricter air quality standards.
I wonder how my BTUs per cord of mummy you get?
Good question !
So sulfur might be there because the earth is full of life living where we are just now finding them.
http://www.pnas.org/cgi/reprint/0503705102v1
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences is a highly respected, peer-reviewed journal, right up there with Science and Nature. This article is quite skeptical about Peak Oil but I didn't find it super convincing. Here is a blurb about the article, from Johns Hopkins:
http://www.jhu.edu/news/home06/jan06/mideast.html
We learn that the author, Roger Stern, is a grad student at Hopkins (an older student judging from the picture). So there is not a lot of reputation backing up this analysis, aside from the fact that it got published in a good journal.
Most of his Peak Oil skepticism relies on publications and analysis which will already be familiar to readers here, particularly Michael Lynch's work; also Maugeri's "Never Cry Wolf" Science article, http://phys4.harvard.edu/~wilson/energypmp/maugeri%20science%20may04.pdf
(Here is a link to a couple of letters responding and taking exception to Maugeri: http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/sci;309/5731/52 )
I need to track down a few more of Stern's references; I don't think the paper is worthless but he is definitely making very strong statements about oil abundance that would require more backing than I have found so far.
Both of your last two sites (1. and 2. below) are pranksters playing with a powder keg of rhetorical words.
1. This one: Forgetta-bout dat the Wolf ate the Wolf-crying-Boy (--Besides, we's Harvard) concludes that wood, coal and oil are interchangeable commodities and the only issue is price.
What wolf dung! Oil is a LIQUID. Can those Harvard graduates spell (spill) "liquid"? Coal and wood are SOLIDS.
Children in elementary school learn about the differences between solids and liquids. Solids cannot be easily pressure squirted through a fuel injector valve to be admixed with oxygen and to thereby create a highly combustible mixture otherwise known as the big bang inside your automobile engine. Solids cannot be easily pumped through pipelines. Coal and wood leave behind solid ash product when burned. It takes a lot of work (and human deaths) to cut the solid fuel product out from where it is found (i.e. West Virginia coal mines) and transport it to market. Duh, thanks there Harvard wise ones.
(On a deeper-think level, well beyond Harvard economist capabilities; oil and natural gas are fluidic compositions which Mother Nature has pre-filterd for us by passing these fluids through porous filter rock before it gets to the trap dome rock reservoir from which it is extracted --or "produced" as the oil companies like to pretend. In other words, Mother Nature has already done a lot of the hard hard work (as Harvard graduates refer to it) of separating out undesirable particles from the more desirable ones. Yeah we humans still have to do a final "refining" step with oil to separate out the various distillates, but think how much harder it would have been if Mamma Nature had not silver-spoon fed us by pre-filtering the stuff for us over those millions of years through the porous rock filters.)
2. This other one: When-oh-When Will the last drop of Maple Syrup Ungunk itself from My Dispenser? plays the old-and-tired game of: When Will the last drop of Oil Disappear?
It's a deceptive word game. It's pure rhetoric. The answer is never. We will never get to the last drop of oil buried somewhere in undeground rock. But what does that have to do with the price of gasoline at the pump?
Deceptive word games.
http://phys4.harvard.edu/~wilson/energypmp/maugeri%20science%20may04.pdf
you say "concludes that wood, coal and oil are interchangeable commodities and the only issue is price." But I see nothing about that. The only place wood and coal are mentioned is as examples of energy commodities that got replaced. 99% of the article discusses evidence that oil is abundant. You may or may not find it convincing but your comment about the difference between solids and liquids is a total non sequitur.
As far as the second link, I am even more baffled:
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/sci;309/5731/52
You claim this is a "deceptive word game" about "when will the last drop of oil disappear". But actually this is a letter criticizing the first link and taking a pro-peak-oil position. He accuses Maugeri of double-counting reserves and of ignoring demand growth. He concludes "Oil resources are running down, and the supply is inelastic."
I can only imagine that you failed to read the link and perhaps just responded based on the title. Your comments are totally off base.
However, when someone frames the question as "are we running out of oil"? --or allows others to do so-- that is a set up. We will never "run out of oil". There will always be a last drop of that gooey molasses stuck somehwere between rock particles underground.
The Harvard article states:
The Harvard article also states:
The first block quote irks me because "they" don't know either. It could be much less than what the so-called "proved reserves" numbers say.
In the second block quote, maybe I'm reading it wrong, but the author appears to suggest that oil is a mere substitute based primarily on cost.
Do most fields in produciton use secondary or tertiary techiques, and how long after 50% of the reserve is gone, can they keep production at or near peak levels?
For instance, could most fields be 60-70% depeleted and still be producing at or near peak levels?
Thanks..
http://www.ceri.ca/Publications/documents/GoE_Oct05.pdf
This is courtesy of Peak Oil Debunked, a rebuttal to Matt Simmons' "Twilight in the Desert". Apparently the article is normally not freely available but this shortened version is available free for now.
The author is Jim Jarrell, president of Ross Smith Energy Group, http://www.rseg.com , a Canadian energy advising group.
I won't try to summarize the whole thing here, but they take issue with several of Simmons' points. Of course, Simmons wrote a whole book, while this is just a few pages of analysis, so probably there is a lot that Simmons said that they don't address here (I haven't read the book). But they do give some reasons why Saudi analyses should be seen as credible, why water cut should be manageable, and why SA has great potential for future exploration and development. They also point out a number of errors in Simmons' book, although it's not clear how significant these are.
In any case it is always useful to see another side to the story. It's too bad that the full report is apparently only available to RSEG clients but this at least gives some of the flavor. Perhaps Simmons will someday post a reply, which will help to clarify the issues further.
Isn't that the same USGS that predicts a vast amount of oil in Greenland?
Gonna be tough to make that up...
I've based the calculation on the response to supply shocks of the 1970s but not derived it in any scientifically meaningful way.