Why
environmental energy sources can't do it alone.This is the ARTICLES page. ● to: Home Page Energy Related Articles (This site works best in Full Screen Mode)
The Answer Isn't Blowing In The Wind. Environmental energy - wind, solar, geothermal - cannot end Global Warming by themselves - but can be improved.
Our Resources Energy Is The Master Resource
1. Converting From Oil To Electricity Opportunities to move away from both the Peak Oil crisis and Global Warming's CO2.
2. Peak Oil What the entire fossil fuel reserves situation seems to be.
3. Total U.S. Energy Flow A one-diagram overview of what fuel sources, and how much of each, the United States is using and what it is using them for.
4. The Non-Fossil Synfuels - from Air and Water Gasoline and diesel from air and water using electrical energy.
General Topics
Are Environmentalists To Blame For Global Warming? Examines the role the environmentalists played in causing and furthering Global Warming.
Technical Details of the Coal Yard Nuke system More details about the idea of using a supercritical water thermal interface in a steam power plant.
Power Plant Steam Path Detailed, but generic, description of a power plant's steam flow.
How to end the
CO2 climate change threat quickly.
Coal Power Plant and Nuclear Power Plant Emissions Examines some of their emissions issues.
Here is what I know about Big Bend's boilers: Technical information about TECO's 1,800 megaWatt Big Bend coal burning power plant.
Archive Section
My Old Power Plant CO2 Data Hate to throw out a lot of calculations even if they are less than the best.
The [Entire] Answer Isn't Blowing In The Wind. Top
Texas, a model of wind power’s potential, now is a model of wind power’s pitfalls too.
Minders of the Lone Star State’s electricity grid had to cut power to some offices and factories Wednesday evening when the wind dropped—and with it, electricity produced from the state’s many wind farms. The green juice slowed from 1,700 megawatts to the trickle of 300 megawatts. Oh, well. Now that wind is big enough to be a real part of Texas’ electricity mix, the state is coming to grips with one of wind power’s biggest problems: the power flows only when the wind blows. --- WSJ 2/28/08
Understanding why wind, solar, geothermal, or natural gas can help, but not end, Global Warming.
Why
environmental energy sources can't do it alone.
Wind Electricity (Over 90 days.) Solar Electricity (One day, scattered clouds.)
Wind and Solar 101: Both wind and solar produce low-quality electricity that causes Global Warming CO2 to be produced. They need grid electricity, usually made by burning coal, to fill in their irregular outputs. Wind turbines don't make 100% of their power until the wind is blowing faster than 30 miles per hour (flags are square in this wind). Solar only delivers 100% on clear days during the sunburn hours of 10:00 A.M. to 2:00 P.M. As you can see from the blue 100% line in the wind plot, it's far more likely you will have weak winds rather than strong winds. Since weather systems are usually larger than 100 miles across, even very large wind farms can't 'average' their power. Life would be an endless series of dim, flicker, and off if all you had for electricity were wind turbines with no coal-powered grid to fill in their drop-outs. Dim, flicker, and off are not options for a mega-city.
Mega-cities can't be places where
you wonder if a light will come on when you flip a light switch. Hospitals,
traffic lights, and ice cubes are at stake.
Electricity is not an option for Americans; it is
part of the way that we have constructed our society and is something that we do
without only at some amount of peril.
Bottom Line: When you add wind turbines or solar, you also have to add (and keep running) CO2-producing fossil-fuel grid power plants. Not really good. As a random electricity source, environmentals can usually make a 10% contribution to a grid without destabilizing it. This does reduce the grid's fossil fuel consumption.
By
adding energy storage using hydro electricity,
two very good things will happen:
Wind and Solar will cause less fill-in CO2 to be produced and fewer
environmental energy opportunities will be lost (i.e., strong wind at 3:00 A.M.).
Examples: Storage of
Mega-City size amounts of electricity is being achieved at Ludington, Michigan,
and in
many
hilly locations around the world.
The equipment at right is part of a Pumped Water storage system that will hold enough electrical energy to keep Detroit going for about 8 hours. 85% efficient, this facility enables the power company to buy cheap electricity from the grid at night and to sell it back into the grid at costly times such as hot summer afternoons or when generating plants are down for service.
The round machines in the ground are motor-generators with their shafts connected to water pump-turbines in Lake Michigan's water. Electricity from the grid is used to pump water from Lake Michigan to an artificial lake at the top of a high sand dune behind the camera. When electricity is needed the water is drained from the artificial lake - driving the pumps as turbines and their motors as generators - to return electricity to the grid.
Pump-generators can go from pumping water to generating electricity far quicker than either fossil fuel or nuclear power plants can go from idle to full power. In theory, its quick mode-change ability and fast throttle response would balance out wind and solar electricity power system surges and drop-outs very nicely. Unfortunately, there are very few wind turbines or solar electricity arrays in Michigan.
(Above, Right) Underground and underwater pump/generators at the 1,800 megaWatt Ludington, Michigan, pumped energy storage facility on Lake Michigan's east coast.
Geothermal steam: From 6 miles down, is only 400°F at best, (250 PSI, 375 BTU, 0.018 Ft3 per pound) - about the same as a 1920's steam locomotive - a small fraction of a modern coal plant's 1,000°F steam, (2,600 psi, 1,500 BTU, 0.30 Ft3 per pound). Not needing grid backup to fill in dropouts, geothermal carries it's own weight better than wind or solar but there is still far too little energy in even very large amounts of that steam to power a mega-city. New York City alone consumes 9,000 megaWatts, that's about 3 times the nation's entire geothermal electricity output. (Data from 2006 MIT Geothermal study http://geothermal.inel.gov/publications/future_of_geothermal_energy.pdf )
Natural Gas: Natural gas produces 2/3 as much CO2 as coal (table 4) No big reduction in CO2 emissions from using expensive natural gas instead of cheap coal.
United States' electricity big picture: Installed wind capacity as of 9/2007 was 13,000 megaWatts * 33% capacity factor (see blue averaging line in wind chart above and American Wind Energy Association [very generous]) = 4,290 delivered megaWatts or about four modern coal power plant's worth. Installed solar capacity as of 2006 was 6,000 megaWatts * 6/24 = 1,500 delivered megaWatts or a little less than two modern coal power plant's worth (see solar plot above). Installed geothermal capacity is 3,119 delivered megaWatts. Since geothermal runs 24/7, like nuclear, coal, and gas, we can include the whole installed base.
To put those numbers in perspective, installed nuclear capacity is 100,000 megaWatts (100 modern coal power plants worth) * 0.92 = 92,000 delivered megaWatts, Natural Gas is 97,000 megaWatts, (natural gas makes 2/3 as much CO2 as coal) * 0.9 = 87,000 delivered megaWatts, Hydro is 34,000 megaWatts * .7 = 24,000 delivered (seasonal water availability limitations) or about 24 modern coal power plants worth, and installed coal capacity is 335,000 * 0.9 = 300,000 delivered megaWatts or about 335 modern coal power plant's worth.
Many of today's green energy schemes contain large amounts of the element 'Unobtanium'. In today's energy discourse, unobtanium includes hydrogen, biomass, cellulosic ethanol, negawatts, Jimmy Carter's cardigans and any other dream technology that someone can come up with to avoid focusing on the epic problem of keeping an ever-brighter planet's lights burning.
There are hundreds of "green gizmos" for harvesting environmental energy. Unfortunately, wind, solar and geo are as good as it gets. Without continued government subsidies, these and all the other alternative energy investments have little financial viability. Enough said.
Installed U.S. electricity from coal is 335,000 megaWatts. All Year. Every year. It's time to stop fooling around with Global Warming.
I like environmental energy and still buy every issue of "Home Power" off the newsstand. When I was a young engineer, I was totally convinced environmentals alone could do the job. Over the years I learned alternative energies have about the same advantages and disadvantages as alternative medicines. Some are valueless, occasionally even harmful, some can help a bit. Any of them can get you into deadly trouble if using them delays effective treatment of a serious underlying problem.
Puffery too good to ignore: "LoWind Turbines are aesthetic; they arouse emotions and project an image of being committed to the future." Wind turbines are the lovable "Panda Bears" of the energy world. Disregard them at your peril. LoWind Turbines
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Since energy is the master resource, if the world has abundant clean electrical energy to provide the needed CO2-free heat and mechanical energy, it can make abundant synthetic crude oil - and almost any other needed material - from almost any feedstock - using CO2-free processes that do not harm the environment. Examples: Carbon-neutral Fischer-Tropsch synthetic oils ELCAT Syntroleum
We do not have to make CO2 to make electricity. That is the sad tragedy of the Climate
Change Crisis. Only nuclear energy can provide us with the massive amounts
of CO2-free electricity we actually need. However impressive windmills and the
such may seem when you are standing there looking up at them, they are almost toys
producing little in the long run when compared with the electricity producing
abilities of nuclear power. W
We can have all the nuclear electricity we want for as long as we want - beginning now. Just take a look at nuclear (yellow) on the 2007 IPCC report's chart of the world's 2004 energy and CO2 situation: 2004 .pdf Unfortunately, they omitted the pebble bed reactor's favorite food - thorium - which is three times as plentiful as uranium. The IPCC is aware thorium presents an energy opportunity but consider thorium nuclear technology an energy source for the future.
(Right) The benefits and limitations of efficiency.
Conservation always has severe limitations. We cannot starve ourselves strong.
Again, we will need much more, not less,
Summary. The objective of this entire web site is to get everyone to understand that:
1., We have the ability to quickly and economically eliminate 11 billion tons of annual man-made CO2 production. Converting coal burning power plants to nuclear is the unavoidable major step we must take very soon to stop the ever-increasing accumulation of climate-changing CO2 in our atmosphere.
2., We have the ability to quickly and economically add massive amounts of additional electrical energy to the world's energy base to cope with Global Warming, Peak Oil, Food Shortages, or Fresh Water Shortages without risking future damage to the environment.
Unlike a conventional nuclear power plant, adding a Pebble Bed Reactor to a fossil fuel power plant does not turn it into a nuclear 'Water Hog.'
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THIS WEB SITE IS ABOUT A TECHNOLOGY THAT IS KEY TO ENDING GLOBAL WARMING. Please, if any of you nuclear-knowledgeable old-timers come across this web site, contact me so a pool of knowledge focused toward this goal can be formed and passed on to the generation who will have to fight the technical battles necessary to end Global Warming. I'll be delighted to post any opinions or thoughts about this subject you want me to.
GETTING REAL: It had to start somewhere. This web site is a collecting and sharing place - to create a design brief - for old and new ideas about Doppler Broadening HTGR nuclear reactors that could lead to the replacement for large fossil fuel boilers. By being open - in the spirit of open software design - we can combine our best ideas to give the world the best possible replacement for CO2 producing fuels. May this be an effort that serves as a launching pad for the overlooked technology that can successfully fight Global Warming.
TECO, Consumers Energy, Westinghouse, Combustion Engineering, Riley, ESKOM-PBMR, and General Atomics have nothing to do with this paper. They are entirely unaware I am using their plants and products as "concrete" examples in my advocating the principle of converting coal-burning power plants to nuclear power. I might be writing a book with this web site being my rough draft.
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) web site with all their major Global Warming reports downloadable: http://www.ipcc.ch/
The BIG picture: Excellent IPCC diagrams showing all the world's major energies and the CO2 they make: 2004 .pdf 2030 .pdf
The above is downloadable information. When you add it all up, the information economy requires massive amounts of solid electricity.
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Here is what I know
about Big Bend's boilers:
"Three of Big Bend's four boilers are 445 MWe (MegaWatts electric) Riley Turbo® opposed wall-fired, wet-bottom coal units, and one is a 486 MWe Combustion Engineering tangentially fired coal unit. Typically, the boilers are designed for a safe drum operating pressure of 2,875 psig and can produce 2,868,000 lb/hr of steam continuously at 2,600 psig and 1,000°F at the superheater outlet when supplied with feedwater at 487°F at the economizer inlet. The steam outlet temperatures of the superheater and high temperature reheater are both 1,000°F, and the pressures are 2,600 psig and 552 psig, respectively." --- This came from a government study report on Big Bend that was posted on the web.
(Notice: TECO, Consumers Energy, Westinghouse, Combustion Engineering, Riley, ESKOM-PBMR, and General Atomics have nothing to do with this paper. They are entirely unaware I am using their plants and products as "concrete" examples in my advocating the principle of converting coal-burning power plants to nuclear power.)
I am looking to duplicate each of Big Bend's four coal burning boilers with three PBMR reactors (Westinghouse has a stake in PBMR) running in tandem per coal-fired boiler. A PBMR reactor is rated at 180 MW Electrical on the EIA certification status board. At 40% efficiency, that comes to about 450 MW Thermal per PBMR reactor, or about 1,350 MWT for the combined output of three reactors. If Big Bend delivers 35% overall efficiency, the combined output of three PBMR reactors (472 MWe) will almost exactly match one 445 MWE coal-fired boiler. Close enough for environmental mitigation.
The reactor-gas turbine package PBMR is selling has the reactor set up to take in helium at 932°F and put it out at 1,652°F. I think the best way to match Big Bend's boilers is to design a PWR-type steam generator that will duplicate the boilers exactly. Hence, the use of supercritical water to heat the turbine's steam generator. I suspect pebbles run best at the temperatures PBMR has set up since they also own the pebble factory. The supercritical water is 1,150°F at 3,200 psi.
This means a helium-to-supercritical water heat exchanger that's not too efficient (500 degree loss across the exchanger's metal) if we want to keep those gas turbine inlet and outlet temperatures for the reactor. There is plenty of reserve temperature on tap. A more reasonable approach is to back off to a couple hundred degree differential across the exchanger's metal by reducing the reactor's neutron flux. At the other end of the hot water line, we have 150 degrees delta-t across the steam generator's metal to match the 1,000°F superheated steam specification.
I'm actually visualizing a common header with
isolating valves for all 12 of the Big Bend reactors so that they can pool
their heat in a trunk line as needed. At the other end, isolating valves
could bypass unneeded steam generators. If you think you have a better
way of duplicating a coal fired boiler, I'd like to hear about it. If
you think I have something wrong, I'd certainly like to hear about it. ●
Let's see if Clean Coal's "Coal Carbon Capture and Sequestration (Storage)" folks can top that claim.
"Combustion of fossil fuels coupled with sequesterization of the carbon dioxide is unsustainable and immoral because it burdens future generations with the responsibility for protecting the earth from our irresponsible carbon dioxide build-up." --- Laurence Williams, author of: “Global Warming Can Be Conquered” (ISBN 07 414 426 8 X)
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The
Coal Yard Nuke Supercritical Water Thermal Distribution System.
1.
Conventional nuclear reactors run at
about 550 degrees F. Pebble bed
reactors run about 1,600 degrees F and are cooled using a
gas, often helium. Since almost all coal-fired steam power
plants use 1,000 degree F, 2,400 pounds per square inch steam
(called superheated steam), I have to use
something that is even hotter, so I must use a PBMR
pebble bed reactor since that's the nearest thing to a
catalog item that will do the job.
At the Coal Yard Nuke sketch's extreme right, there is an underground silo with a pebble bed reactor (the little red dots are the pebbles) and a helium-to-water heat exchanger (not all that different in function from your residential gas hot water heater) with the reactor's very hot 1,600°F helium gas being blown through it. Because the pebble bed reactor can easily heat the water to 1,150 degrees F, the water has to be under very high pressure (3,200 psi) or more to remain water. This type of water is called "supercritical" water.
"Temperature as energy" is somewhat comparable to "voltage as energy" if the water volume (or electrical amperes) remains constant.
There are hot water lines running from the underground reactor silo to a new steam generating heat exchanger sitting on the boiler room floor to the right of the blue feedwater equipment.
Think of the high temperature, high pressure, hot water line coming from the reactor as a high-voltage power transmission line. Think of the new steam generator on the turbine room floor as something like a step-down transformer in an electrical substation. The hot water-to-steam generator is designed in such a way that it duplicates the steam the large original boiler (device 19 in the sketch) made. Obviously, the analogy breaks down as soon as you think about increasing temperature at the expense of volume as if it were a voltage-amperage tradeoff. But, within it's limitations, the analogy has some value.
A "refresher" note at the bottom of this web page describes a generic steam path through boilers and turbines and, as such, is a good illustration of the complexity of this situation in real power plants.
Old coal power plants are always a collection of different size boilers and generators made over a span of perhaps 50 years by different vendors to meet different budgets. This makes it extremely important to be able to match a nuclear reactor that runs best at it's own fixed set of temperatures to whatever turbine pressures and temperatures the power company customer happens to be running. Realize the turbine could be between 5 and 50 years old!
Different size and different temperature boilers in different coal burning power plants can be duplicated by simply changing the coils in the water-to-water steam generator. It's not that much different than changing the secondary coils on a transformer to get a proper voltage (or temperature) and current (or steam volume) match. Take a close look at how the coils are positioned in my sketch. They are almost a mirror image of the the original coal fired boiler.
Duplicating some boilers will cause the secondary coils to have more turns for hotter, dryer, higher pressure steam, duplicating other boilers will cause the secondary coils to have larger diameter pipes for great volumes of cooler, wetter, lower pressure steam. Another possibility are several different types of small turbines all "feeding" off the same steam generator or several reactors "pooling" their heat to drive one monster steam generator that, in turn, drives a monster ex-coal power plant turbine - Big Bend comes to mind.
The key is that the supercritical hot water be substantially hotter than any power plant steam a Coal Yard Nuke system will have to duplicate.
2. Coal Yard Nukes might also be pushing the envelopes of both steam and nuclear power plant thermodynamics. Heat exchangers always exact a penalty but it may be insubstantial in a Coal Yard Nuke compared to the overall efficiency improvement. If we duplicate those Riley boilers exactly, the load on the plant's turbine condensing tubs will remain the same and the retention of untransferred BTUs in the reactor's helium loop instead of going up the smokestack (25% of heat?) means a boost in plant efficiency in addition to eliminating CO2 along with all those other noxious coal emissions.
This
idea will eliminate about 60% of Global Warming's CO2 every year while improving power plant efficiency.
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The following describes a generic fossil fuel power plant's steam turbine connected to a hybrid nuclear power station's pebble-heated steam generator instead of a coal-heated boiler. - It is almost identical to a coal plant's steam path.
(A) The new steam generator makes identical steam pressures (1,000°F and 2,400 pounds per square inch) for the high pressure turbine stage (device 11) of the power station's electricity generator (device 5, above). Depending on heat availability and power needs, the steam is either expanded through the high pressure turbine (device 11, above) or by-passed and sent back to the steam generator for reheat.
(B) Either way, the steam is then returned to the steam generator for a reheat pass to become intermediate pressure steam (1,000°F, 552 psi, again, no change) for the intermediate pressure turbine (device 9, above).
(C) After leaving the intermediate pressure turbine, the steam, now expanded to low pressure, goes immediately into the double-ended low pressure turbine (device 6, above), exiting both ends of it's bottom at a slight vacuum into the condensing tub (device 8).
(D) There, in a cool environment that no longer supports steam, the spent low pressure steam will flash condense back into boiler feed water so it can be turned back into steam again by repressurizing it to 2,400 pounds per square inch (device 7) and pumping it back into the bottom of the steam generator. Big Bend's boilers do this at the rate of 23 tons, or 750 cubic feet - a 9 foot cube - of water a minute.
(E) The condensing tub is kept cool by a loop of 75°F in, 95°F out, cooling water (circulated by device 2) from either a 60°F cooling tower or a 60°F cooling body of water (as shown on the extreme left on the diagram).
(F) The electricity produced by the electrical generator (device 5) is carried by the 3 electrical phase wires to a step-up transformer (device 4) located next to the power plant. It takes about 1,000 volts per mile to efficiently push high-current electricity - so the step-up transformer will have to transform the three-phase electricity from the generator's perhaps 5,000 volts to perhaps as high as 500,000 volts to send the electricity via the high voltage transmission line system (device 3) to a load as much as 500 miles away. Lesser distances mean lesser losses.
Original power plant image: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fossil_fuel_power_plant GNU Free Documentation License
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Are
Environmentalists To Blame For Global Warming?
"Had the United States gone on with its nuclear power plant building program after Three Mile Island, it's likely there would be no climate change crisis today."- Dr. James Lovelock, (World's top environmental advocate, author of the GAIA theory.) His papers
Exceptionally eminent figures in the environmental movement such as James Lovelock have long since recognized that, whatever the challenges of nuclear power, they are as nothing compared to those of global warming.
Reasoning anything nuclear must be bad, combined with their very understandable
By helping to prevent a general evolution from coal electricity to nuclear electricity, environmentalists inadvertently helped to bring about Global Warming.
By about 1995, climatologists identified dirty electricity from coal-burning power plants as being the cause of 2/3 of the accumulating CO2 problem.
Real anti-nuclear advocates will continue doing all they can to oppose nuclear technology in any form except when they personally need nuclear medicine.
Environmentalist opposition to nuclear electricity has become the biggest single barrier to solving the Global Warming CO2 crisis.
Environmentalists must decide whether the environment or their continued opposition to CO2-free nuclear electricity is most important to them.
"When people fight against fission, they are - either knowingly or unknowingly - fighting FOR combustion." -- Rod Adams
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How to end the CO2
climate change threat quickly:
Want to stop global warming? Stop Coal
Eliminate CO2's Mr. Big: COAL BURNING POWER PLANTS.
"Look at it this way: More than 600 fossil-fired electric plants in the United States produce 36 percent of U.S. emissions -- or nearly 10 percent of total global emissions -- of carbon dioxide, the primary greenhouse gas responsible for climate change. Nuclear energy is the only large-scale, cost-effective energy source that can reduce these emissions while continuing to satisfy a growing demand for power. And these days it can do so safely." --- From: "In an era of global warming, some environmentalists are taking a second look at a much-maligned energy source." by Dr. Patrick Moore, one of the original GreenPeace founders.
Man now dumps 36 billion tons of CO2 into the air every year.
Global warming is picking up speed like a runaway coal train.
We should be very afraid to use fossil fuels because they are not from our time. They are the remnants of life from another time. Coal fire is zombie fire from long-dead wood. It's almost as if coal were from another planet.
World-wide, coal burning to make electricity causes over 10 BILLION tons of CO2 to be dumped into the atmosphere every year. The United States burns 1.3 BILLION tons of coal a year, making about 2.6 BILLION tons, or 25% of the world's coal CO2.
World automobiles make about 15% (perhaps 2 billion tons per year) of the world's CO2. U.S. automobiles make nearly 45% of that, or about 6.8% of the world's total man-made CO2. Unlike power plants, which don't have to produce CO2 to make inexpensive and reliable electricity, light weight road and air transportation combustion engines cannot provide the needed power, range, and efficiency they must have to do their jobs in an acceptable manner without producing a certain amount of CO2. CO2 emissions from vehicles can be minimized in a variety of ways by obtaining a substantial portion of their routine energy from clean nuclear electricity, think plug-in hybrid automobiles and, of course, electric trains and busses. Keep in mind nature absorbs about 20 billion tons of CO2 every year so man's production of CO2 does not have to go to absolute zero.
How big is this Fire-Breathing monster?
According to Platts 'World Electric Power Plants Database' there are more than 130,000 generating units at more than 50,000 plant sites in 225+ countries.
Now, That's a big problem. The good news - such as it is - is that very few of them are the size of Big Bend. Most of them are more like J. R. Whiting where one pebble bed reactor has enough power to drive all the generating units in the entire plant.
A single page refreshers on how our fossil fuel power plants work: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fossil_fuel_power_plant http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_plant
Some coal burning power plants have already been converted to natural gas. and while that's an improvement, natural gas is much more expensive than coal and still produces almost 65% as much carbon dioxide as coal, so converting to natural gas doesn't really get the job done.
Coal Yard Nuke conversions will end CO2 production much faster and at far less cost than
The coal industry's CO2 fix for power plants: "Coal-Carbon Capture and Sequestration"
(This is the bizarre and extremely fossil-fuel wasteful plan that moved me to come up with "Coal Yard Nukes.")
The coal industry's fix for their own environmental disaster is "Clean Coal", which means using one of several different (proposed) processes to grab 40,000 tons a day of about 500°F CO2 in a 12% to 18% concentration from every power plant stack in the world, separating it from the stack's nitrogen gas (with 10% to 20% of the CO2 slipping past), cooling it using massive amounts of refrigeration, then compressing it to 1,200 psi to liquefy it so it can be stuffed into the ground to "sequester" (store) the CO2 in a disposal well that may or may not leak and kill people later. The parasitic losses of energy needed to run all this additional equipment will consume an estimated 25% of a power plant's total power. That means we will have to build even more coal-fired power plants to make up for all the electricity lost. Dumb. And no one is willing to guarantee that earthquakes won't crack the ground, causing it to leak and kill people. Dangerous.
Even a 10% concentration of CO2 in the air you breathe is lethal. Thousands in a low-lying area were killed by CO2 leakage as recently as 1986. http://www.Biology.lsa.UMich.edu/~gwk/research/nyos.html and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Nyos also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bhopal_Disaster
The coal folks want you to believe that this process can be achieved cheaply, safely, and without drastically increasing the amount of coal we're already burning just to power this additional work. Get real. Even they are saying this technology may take a generation to perfect and get the cost down to something tolerable, and another generation to completely install, perhaps costing more than a war, and then eventually we'll just burn up our remaining fossil fuel reserves even faster. No one except the coal companies and the politicians on their payrolls thinks "clean coal" is a good idea.
Don't take my word for it. Here is the United States Department Of Energy's take: http://www.fossil.energy.gov/programs/sequestration/capture/
Instead of Carbon-Capture and Sequestration in 10 to 30 years, we could be up and running on Coal Yard Nukes in as little as 3.
Coal industry advertising has us dancing around the real root cause of CO2 when, instead, we could quickly fix it.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not against coal or coal mines. The way I see it, with pumpable oil running out in about 100 years, coal has become way too precious just to burn to make electricity since we have all the nuclear energy we'll ever need - forever - in the form of breedable uranium and thorium.. Coal can be heated with electric heaters in the presence of steam to add hydrogen to form coal gas, then reacted in the presence of iron acting as a catalyst to form an excellent crude oil. The impurities in coal can be captured right at the processing plant, producing, for example, ultra-clean diesel and jet fuel. Oil is a much more useful form of coal, and, as a consequence, a potentially much more profitable form of fuel for the coal companies to sell. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal_mine http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synthetic_fuel http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal_liquefication#Liquefaction
Coal's clean contribution to mankind remains a frequent television ad.
Nuclear electricity produces less than 1% of fossil fuel's carbon dioxide.
(Vattenfall, the Swedish energy company, produces electricity from Nuclear, Hydro, Coal, Gas, Solar Cell, Peat, and Wind energy and has produced accredited Environment Product Declarations for all these processes. Vattenfall finds that, averaged over the entire lifecycle of their Nuclear Plant including Uranium mining, milling, enrichment, plant construction, operating, decommissioning and waste disposal, the total amount of CO2 emitted per KW-Hr of electricity produced is 3.3 grams per KW-Hr of produced power. Vattenfall measures its CO2 output from Natural Gas to be 400 grams per KW-Hr and from Coal to be 700 grams per KW-Hr. Thus nuclear power generated by Vattenfall emits less than one hundredth the CO2 of Fossil-Fuel based generation. In fact, Vattenfall finds its Nuclear Plants to emit less CO2 over the lifecycle than even green energy production mechanisms such as Hydro, Wind, Solar, and Biomass.)
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Coal Power Plant
and Nuclear Power Plant Emissions:
COAL POWER PLANTS: Burning coal spews out vast amounts of dust, sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxides and carbon dioxide, creating air pollution and filling the atmosphere with greenhouse gases.
The Environmental Integrity Project report notes: “Nationwide, the power plants that provide electricity to run our homes, businesses, and factories also account for 40 percent of carbon dioxide, roughly two thirds of sulfur dioxide, 22 percent of nitrogen oxides, and roughly a third of all mercury emissions (in the U.S.) … Power plants are major contributors to global warming, emitting billions of tons of carbon dioxide (CO2) each year. In addition, power plants emit millions of tons of sulfur dioxide (SO2) and nitrogen oxides (NOx), pollutants that trigger asthma attacks and contribute to lung and heart disease, and cause smog and haze in cities and national parks. And, power plants emit dangerous toxins like mercury, a neurotoxin especially harmful to children and developing fetuses.” http://www.dirtykilowatts.org. http://carma.org/
It is not unreasonable to expect coal to be financing anti-nuclear political activities and publicity. Nuclear is a solid alternative to coal. Australia has no nuclear electricity and the coal organizations there are openly doing everything they can to block all attempts by Australians to "go green" by going nuclear on their next power plants. Australia has large reserves of easily mine-able uranium which they currently sell on the world markets with China being a major customer.
http://www.ans.org/pi/resources/dosechart/ If you are still concerned
about how much radiation you are receiving from the environment around you,
you can visit this web site, fill out a short questionnaire and get an
idea of your exposure level. What is not debatable is the fact that only nuclear reactors can
permanently destroy the material that is left over once nuclear weapons
are taken out of service as the result of arms control agreements. For the
past ten years, just such a weapons material destruction program has been in
place in what is known as the
Megatons to
Megawatts agreement between Russia and the United States.
You are afraid of nuclear energy for only
one reason: You have been told to be afraid (usually by television news
sensationalizing some nuclear-related event) and you believed whatever whoever told
you. We can't allow fear to keep us from ending
Global Warming.
This fear has real consequences. Heavily promoted by organizations
like Greenpeace and The Sierra Club, who claim to care most
about the environment, it may have actually brought about Global
Warming: Nuclear reactors are almost as simple and
natural as fire. They have occurred in nature long before man .
Natural_nuclear_fission_reactor
What I think are a couple of u
nreasonable Nuclear Concerns: Proliferation: Nations that produce the most CO2 already have nuclear electricity programs and some have nuclear weapons. Waste: Recycling rather than accumulation of spent nuclear materials is common except for the United States, which abandoned its recycling program in 1980. The French have an excellent recycling program. Reprocessing adds about 10% to the retail cost of nuclear electricity.Conventional reactor safety has proven itself over time. While Pebble Bed reactors are even safer, it is for their appropriate size and the fact that pebble heat resembles that of coal, gas, and oil that I am suggesting our fossil fuel power plants be converted to pebble bed reactors to speed the end of Global Warming. Because the physics that control the pebble's fission activity is inherit in the pebble's nature rather than controlled by external machinery, which is always subject to failure, Pebble Beds may be seen to fall between conventional pressurized nuclear power plants and a medical facility that uses nuclear or X-ray therapy equipment powerful enough to kill cancerous cells in humans. Nuclear fuel 101 How Pebbles Work
"In the 18 years since I left my nuclear submarine, I have been
trying to figure out how nuclear power got its bad rap and the best answer that
I can find is that a large number of people worked VERY hard to spread as
much Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt (FUD) about the technology as possible.
From my experiences in other competitive industries and my deep research, I
finally figured out that the energy business is the world’s largest single
enterprise. I also figured out that people who sell coal, oil and gas are not
all that concerned about the effects of their fuels, but they really like the
money and power that those fuels can bring.
Every time a new nuclear power plant gets started up, it removes a market demand
for about 1.8 BILLION cubic meters of natural gas worth about 150 million
pounds. If it replaces a coal fired power plant, the number is about 4 million
tons of coal - I do not have a market price available for that commodity, but I
know that the number is pretty big.
Fossil fuel companies and the supporting industries and organizations (banks,
railroads, unions, governments, shipping companies, pollution control equipment
manufacturers, etc.) all have a vested interest in protecting their markets and
making people afraid of nuclear power. They do not have to coordinate their
efforts; opposing nuclear is natural for them. They do, however, often do a
great job of hiding their real motives behind the actions of people hired to
spread the FUD who call themselves “environmentalists. Feel free to
disagree - but whatever you do, please think critically and follow the money.”
--- Rod Adams
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1.
Not Conservation, But Conversion, From Oil To
Electricity:
Ending both Global Warming's CO2 and Peak Oil's shortages: Shifting from Coal, Oil, and Gas to Electricity
Our
Nation's Carbon Footprint: Total
U.S. Fossil Fuel Use
KEY: Ending CO2, Coal, OIL, and Gas: It's very important we understand that we need to make much more nuclear electricity in the near future than we ever did fossil fuel electricity in the past because the time has come for the world to shift as much of its energy burden as possible to non-Global Warming electricity.
All countries have a "National Carbon Footprint Grid."
The "United States' National Carbon Footprint Grid" (right) by Jeffery Winters clearly shows big opportunities where we might substitute nuclear electricity for CO2-producing fossil fuels, often oil. The chart shows in great detail the carbon dioxide (and equivalent warming from other gases) emitted across the entire United States economy, as determined by a draft report of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency released in February, 2007.
Each square represents 10 million tons of carbon dioxide emissions and there are 726 of them for just the United States.
(This chart would make an excellent educational table place mat at environmental and energy conferences.)
In 2006, the United States was 20% of the entire world's economy. That gives you some idea of how much of the world's oil could be saved and fossil fuel CO2 eliminated if the entire world both converted to, and then grew, its nuclear electricity energy base. Above chart from the April, 2007, Mechanical Engineering Magazine feature article "Carbon Loaded" by Jeffery Winters. Read his idea-filled article: http://www.memagazine.org/april07/features/pwindow/pwindow.html
After being displaced by electricity, those large "re-assigned" petroleum components, while still ending up making CO2 in the transportation sector, won't increase the transportation CO2 and will help the world substantially in its efforts to reduce its dependence on pumpable oil.
Nature is absorbing about 20 billion tons of man-made CO2 each year (per NOAA). KEY: If we get rid of ALL 11 billion tons per year of the CO2 that is being unnecessarily produced by fossil-fuel power plants while making electricity, nature might then be able to absorb CO2 from other combustion engine sources that cannot function efficiently without emitting some CO2 - such as automobiles, trucks, and airplanes.
This seems quite feasible since road and air transportation produces about 15% (perhaps 2 billion tons per year) of the world's man-made CO2. Electric trains are common and practical for busy tracks. Large ships, which currently consume about 5% of the world's oil and produce about 3% of the world's CO2, could easily be powered by pebble bed reactors.
Further, converting the world's fossil fuel power plants to nuclear for CO2 emissions mitigation, along with building additional generating units at existing plants, will enable the world to practice oil consumption mitigation by shifting stationary consumption of energy from fossil fuels to electricity.
KEY: Residential, commercial, and industrial heating can be shifted from natural gas and oil to electricity very rapidly and inexpensively - just as we shifted rapidly from coal to natural gas for heating immediately after WWII - if sufficient inexpensive electrical energy were available. In addition to reducing CO2 emissions, Peak Oil demand, and the need for a big fleet of liquefied natural gas tankers from the mid-east to keep our natural gas pipelines full, nuking our heating needs would have a rapid beneficial impact on the Consumer Price Index while also keeping dollars in the United States.
Electric heat can be used to make synthetic oil from coal without producing massive amounts of CO2.
There must be two parts to our synthetic oil program: 1. Sufficient electrically heated coal-to-oil conversion equipment for 200% of military oil energy needs running at all times with unneeded synthetic oil being sold into the civilian market. (At about 500,000 barrels/day, the U.S. military uses as much oil as the entire country of Greece), 2. Sufficient electrically heated coal-to-oil conversion equipment for 100% of civilian oil energy needs built, tested and ready to run at all times.
This is how things look for pumpable oil.
(This chart would make an excellent educational table place mat at environmental and energy conferences.) (From The Oil Drum @ http://www.theoildrum.com/node/2716 )
Price is the economic mechanism that relieves demand. Reducing demand by switching from oil to electricity will relieve oil's price.
It's really a CARBON CRISIS. In addition to the 'Global Warming' crisis, the entire world is also dealing with the 'Peak Oil' crisis.
The chart below shows there's a huge amount of fossil fuel (and its Global Warming CO2) remaining.
GTL or Gas To Liquid:
Natural gas makes excellent synthetic ultra-clean diesel and jet fuel. When stranded in remote locations it is also extremely cheap and has the advantage over coal of producing almost no tailings. Often, stranded natural gas is just flared off, needlessly wasting a valuable fossil fuel while needlessly producing CO2 emissions. Huge stranded natural gas flares can be seen at night from space.
Better to turn it into diesel. Examples: Shell , Syntroleum - The "Turn Anything Into Oil" company.
KEY: CO2 emissions and Peak Oil make it critically important the world immediately stops burning natural gas for electricity and heating purposes and begins using it instead for making large amounts of ultra-clean synthetic diesel and jet fuel.
CTL or Coal To Liquid:
Longer-term, converting coal to oil by using pebble bed reactors for conversion heat to minimize CO2 emissions, shouldn't be all that bad either. Coal has the advantage of being both less costly and much more plentiful than natural gas. Putting the coal-to-oil conversion plants near coal mine mouths provides an excellent place for synthetic oil tailings sequestration piles next to existing coal tailings piles. These conversion plants will not have massive outputs like oil fields, so are well-suited to small eastern coal mines.
The Germans produced over 5 million gallons of synthetic crude oil a day from coal during WWII. Their gasoline, diesel, and jet fuel came from lignite coal, a very low-grade, dirty form of coal.
Be mindful that even if all our oil were domestic, that fact would not shield us from high world oil prices. Our oil companies would just sell our oil into the world markets, raising domestic prices to global parity. Like Global Warming mitigation, energy base expansion has to be done at the global level to be effective.
KEY: THE BETTER THE WORLD CAN MANAGE CO2 PRODUCTION, THE BETTER THE WORLD CAN ALSO MANAGE UNAVOIDABLE OIL CONSUMPTION.
(Right)
Notice that Mother Nature will
clean up the CO2 produced by a certain amount of fossil fuel burning.
These are all reasonable goals:
1., Ending Climate Change:
Converting all fossil fuel burning power plants to nuclear to end their yearly 11 billion tons of CO2 is the unavoidable major step we must begin immediately to quickly stop the increasingly dangerous accumulation of climate-changing CO2 in our atmosphere. Also, all fossil fuels are now far too precious to just burn. Mankind needs them as synthesis feedstock if we want to continue living well for the next 500+ years.
*2., Clean Energy:
If we
hope to cope successfully and simultaneously with both Global Warming and Peak Oil shortages,
we will need to increase nuclear
*3., Clean Resources Forever From Abundant Electricity:
Since energy is the master resource,
if the world has sufficient clean
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3.
Total U.S. Energy Flow:
(A Quad is a unit of HEAT. One Quad = 1015 BTU or about the heat from 167 million barrels of oil. The United States uses about 1/4 Quadrillion BTUs each day.)
The REALLY BIG picture: Excellent IPCC diagrams showing all the world's major energies and the CO2 they make: 2004 .pdf 2030 .pdf
The above is downloadable information. When you add it all up, the information economy requires massive amounts of solid electricity.
(The above charts would make excellent educational table place mats at environmental and energy conferences.)
We will need abundant ELECTRICITY to survive climate change. Examples: Air Conditioning, Plug-in hybrids, Reverse Osmosis Water Desalination.
Note the 'Second Law of Thermodynamics' impact on efficiency as expressed in "Lost Energy (far right)." This always occurs when heat energy is converted to mechanical energy. Unavoidable thermodynamic losses are why we will always need huge amounts of heat to move the machines that provide our food, transportation, and electricity. A 100% efficient heat engine will have an exhaust temperature that is the same as the air being drawn into it. Direct heating, such as heating a house, is almost 100% efficient as is demonstrated by the presence of plastic exhaust pipes on the high-efficiency furnaces. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_law_of_thermodynamics
In the United States, 10 calories of fossil fuel are consumed by all the various machines involved in the production of 1 calorie of food.
A gallon of gasoline contains about 31,000 calories.
(The above chart would make an excellent educational table place mat at environmental and energy conferences.)
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4.
Non-Fossil, CO2-Neutral Synfuels From Air and
Water
Electrocatalytic Gas-Phase Conversion of CO2 in Confined Catalysts (ELCAT). The key to: A Link To ELCAT
We can make low cost, and CO2 neutral, oil fuels forever.
No Fossil Fuels Needed! Make Oil. Not War.
We don't need oil wells! We don't need oil wars!
Our technology isn't failing us in our quest for a steady supply of oil forever.
Because this is so important, I have cited four different sources of the same general idea:
1., General Atomics: http://bioage.typepad.com/greencarcongress/docs/H2__Synfuel_poster.pdf A slide show describing the chemistry.
http://bioage.typepad.com/greencarcongress/docs/HydrogenSynfuel.pdf The slide show's narration.
2., George Olah's Book: "Beyond Oil and Gas: The Methanol Economy". http://www.wiley.com/WileyCDA/WileyTitle/productCd-3527312757.html
3., Oak Ridge National Laboratories: http://www.ornl.gov/~webworks/cppr/y2001/rpt/125102.pdf
4., The Massachusetts Institute of Technology Center for Advanced Nuclear Energy Systems: http://mit.edu/canes/publications/abstracts/nes/mit-nes-006.html
This is the most environmentally-friendly fuel source yet for real-life vehicles. Far more realistic and practical than fuel cell automobiles.
Remember DRY ICE? Dry ice is carbon dioxide frozen solid. Carbon dioxide can be removed from the air and added to hydrogen removed from water. This combination can be reacted in the presence of a catalyst and, if you do it right, you have the hydro-carbon called oil. Think about it. Burning hydrocarbons makes carbon dioxide and water. Everyone has seen water dripping from a car's exhaust pipe every now and then. Gasoline is a hydrocarbon. Making oil from air and water is the burning process running backward. Instead of giving off heat energy, it consumes a lot of heat energy. That's where massive amounts of nuclear heat comes in.
If the carbon dioxide comes from the air and is returned to the air when the synthetic gasoline is burned in your car it is considered "carbon dioxide neutral" like ethanol or biodiesel. We can continue to drive ordinary gasoline cars but not add to the greenhouse gas problem anymore.
As I understand it, the above is a proposal that was made in March, 2006. They claim it's do-able at reasonable cost if you've got enough nuclear energy. Note the sponsor.
The United States doesn't need more gasoline refineries. It's time to build 25 or more synthetic gasoline-from-air-and-water manufacturing plants.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fischer-Tropsch_process Details about the basic process used to turn carbon and hydrogen into oils.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_capture_and_storage How carbon dioxide is captured and stored. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dry_ice
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_splitting http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_gas_shift_reaction Using water in industrial processes.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Hydrogen_production Making hydrogen.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-temperature_electrolysis Making hydrogen in industrial quantities.
Critically Important Book:
Beyond Oil and Gas: The Methanol Economy. Nobel laureate George Olah, PhD, Alain Goeppert, PhD, G.K. Surya Prakash, PhD. Intended for the general public, it's an easy-for-anyone-to-read book sorting all energy forms out and describing an energy future that's reasonable and attainable. One of the most important books ever written about our energy future. People involved with any aspect of energy or energy investing ignore it at their peril.
http://www.wiley.com/WileyCDA/WileyTitle/productCd-3527312757.html
Concerned that since I'm an Electrical/Electronics engineer I might be misunderstanding the above, I asked S.T.A.R.T. member Jerry M, an expert in chemistry, to evaluate what's being said above. Here is his (gray-highlighted) reply:
Your email was timely. I'm reading George Olah's new (2006) book, co-authored with Goeppert and Prakash (all from USC), Beyond Oil and Gas: The Methanol Economy. Answers to your questions are based largely on information from this book. If you can, check it out of your library. If they don't have it, ask them to order it, as I did. It's one of the best I've read on the general subject of energy. Olah was awarded the Nobel prize in Chemistry in 1994.
The reverse watergas shift reaction is discussed on page 212. It's endothermic, and requires heat. How practical it is for commercial use is questionable. Fischer-Tropsch is commercially proven. Olah isn't sanguine about it as a promising future technology. It consumes too much energy and yields a poor product mix.
The second equation ( CO + 2H2 = (CH2)n + H2O ) is not balanced, except when n = 1, and is used merely to show that long chain hydrocarbons are formed using Fischer-Tropsch (F-T)
I believe a better chemical route for the Air + Water + Nuclear pathway is provided by Olah et al. Briefly it goes like this:
1. Carbon dioxide is reduced by hydrogen to produce methanol ( CO2 + 3H2 ---> CH3OH + H2O )
2. Methanol is converted to dimethyl ether ( 2CH3OH ---> CH3OCH3 + H2O )
3. Dimethyl ether is converted to ethylene ( CH3OCH3 ---> CH2=CH2 + H2O )
4. Ethylene is polymerized to oils/gasoline ( CH2=CH2 ---> hydrocarbon products )
5. Methanol can be directly converted to high octane gasoline
Reactions 2, 3, 4 and 5 are referred to as Methanol to Olefin Process (MTO) and Methanol to Gasoline Process (MTG), and collectively are a "major new route to synthetic hydrocarbons", i.e. new after F-T.
The challenge is to obtain sufficient quantities of the two raw materials CO2 and H2 used in reaction 1, if operated on a large scale. Hydrogen would be generated by electrolysis of water, using electricity from any number of energy sources, nuclear, as you suggest, or renewables, including wind (see WindHunter!).
Carbon dioxide in short and medium time scales would be available from fossil fuel sources (rather than sequester it). Later on, when fossil fuels are no longer available or too expensive, Olah envisions using atmospheric carbon dioxide. Its concentration in air is about 0.037% and can be isolated chemically with potassium hydroxide, requiring regeneration.
I suspect other routes would be developed when really needed.
Using routes to H2 and CO2 from water and air to make methanol (reaction 1) and MTO/MTG technology (which have been used commercially) we would indeed be making oil and gasoline from air and water. An appropriate modification would be: Air + Water + Energy (nuclear or renewable) ---> carbon neutral synthetic Oil and Gasoline
Hope the above is clear. Olah's book has much, much more to add.
My personal point of view is that we are going to need a great many energy sources across the globe in the next 50 to 100 years. With the world population expected to grow to 9 billion by mid-century and energy demand doubled, no one energy source will be able to meet future demands for electricity and transportation. I need not elaborate further to someone who knows the field as well as you do. When those with a favorite energy source downplay other sources by emphasizing their shortcomings, however real, it gives me a heavy heart with disappointment at scientific infighting. Enough said.
Please do not hesitate to ask for clarification regarding the chemistry or to provide other points of view.
(After checking additional references, Jerry sent me a follow-up note a few days later:)
I had some reservations about my opinion that the reverse watergas shift (RWGS) was not likely to be practical. A Google search revealed that it has been studied extensively and has interest at present for the Mars mission. There is plenty of CO2 on Mars. Hydrogen would be imported and/or produced by electrolysis. Based on what I read, my uneducated guess is still that RWGS is not practical for large scale production of CO and water.
You might want to look at the following:
http://spot.colorado.edu/~meyertr/rwgs/rwgs.html
http://www.sbir.nasa.gov/SBIR/successes/ss/9-070text.html
http://pubs.acs.org/cgi-bin/abstract.cgi/iecred/1999/38/i05/abs/ie9806848.html
The length of the addresses are about equal to the information they contain. The last one shows a RWGS reactor aligned to a methanol synthesis reactor to yield methanol.
In a sense, this bridges your original proposal and Olah's use of methanol to make oil products.
Jerry M.
This review is something darn few folks out there in cyberspace could do for us. Thank you, Jerry. -- JH
What a great way to remove the excess CO2 from the atmosphere! Of course, we'll return it to the atmosphere again when we burn it in our cars, but at least the scheme is CO2 neutral.
To summarize, here is what's being looked at: CO2, Hydrogen, and a heck of a lot of heat and electricity are what you need. In the extreme case, CO2 could be obtained by absorption from the air through the chemical process mentioned above. Hydrogen looks to be best obtained by high temperature electrolysis - the most frequently encountered process idea for that these days is by very high temperature gas cooled nuclear reactors (VHTR. Then, using Fischer-Tropsch chemistry and subsequent oil refining, the gasses can be turned into gasoline, diesel fuel, and any other simple hydrocarbon that people will buy.
In the beginning, it will be cheaper to use CO2 from some sequestration facility, such as a so-called "Clean Coal" power plant (they'll be glad to give it away) and Hydrogen made by high temperature electrolysis driven by a small Very High Temperature Gas-Cooled Reactor (VHTR) such as a Pebble Bed reactor. This same reactor could also provide the heat and electricity needed to drive the processes to its final hydrocarbon products.
http://www.greencarcongress.com/2006/03/a_proposal_for_.html A good overall introductory description of the idea.
http://bioage.typepad.com/greencarcongress/docs/H2__Synfuel_poster.pdf A slide show describing the chemistry.
http://bioage.typepad.com/greencarcongress/docs/HydrogenSynfuel.pdf The slide show's narration.
http://www.ornl.gov/~webworks/cppr/y2001/rpt/125102.pdf Similar idea from: Oak Ridge National Laboratories.
http://mit.edu/canes/publications/abstracts/nes/mit-nes-006.html Similar idea from: The MIT Center for Advanced Nuclear Energy Systems.
It's important to remember that the Fischer-Tropsch synthetic oil process produces a spectrum of oils, not unlike crude oil itself, so F-T oil must always be further refined (using additional local nuclear heat) to produce specific oils like diesel or gasoline.
-----> Air + Water + Energy = Oil is the really important message of this web site. <-----
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Archive Section
My Old Power Plant CO2 Data.
I'm keeping these around because I worked my tail off getting these numbers before the CARMA web site with it's higher quality numbers came on the scene. These numbers, while less accurate, provide second and third sources of data.
(2) 130,000 Power Plant Boilers: Their Enormous Contribution To Our Planet's Global Warming CO2.
Power plant CO2 FACTS: The CIA World Factbook, December, 2007, (nothing clandestine, just a clear presentation) said 2005 world electricity consumption was estimated at 15.8 trillion kWh ♦ ♦ . Making one kiloWatt hour (kWh) of electricity using Coal causes about 2 pounds of CO2 gas to be produced, using Natural Gas, 1.3 lb CO2, using Oil, 1.9 lb CO2 ♠ ♠ . About 39% of the world's electricity comes from coal, 15% from Gas, and 10% from Oil ♣ ♣ . Gas and Oil are two much smaller, but still very significant, fossil fuels. World Power Plant Database
There have to be thousands of 10 mWe diesel units for remote villages included in the oil figure along with thousands of natural gas rapid-peaking units that are needed to cover for wind turbines and solar, so we'll have to keep the rapid-peaking natural gas units around as long as wind turbines and solar are around. I don't have a good coal transport CO2 number so I'm not adding anything in for that, but it's big, and could push the total CO2 caused by fossil fuel electricity to well over 60%. The IPCC has a number of 10.5 billion tons of CO2 from just the world's 5,000 largest fossil fuel power plants so I'm certain my number is conservative to the point of being downright wrong.
CO2 being produced each year by the world's fossil fuel electric power plants: (Using the CO2 per kilo-Watt-hour method)
Coal: (15.8*1012 kWh/yr) * 39% * (2 lb CO2/kWh)/(2*103 lb/ton) = 6.2 billion tons of CO2 Added to Atmosphere every year ← 6.2 billion is why I pick on coal in this paper.
Gas: (15.8*1012 kWh/yr) * 15% * (1.3 lb CO2/kWh)/(2*103 lb/ton) = 1.5 billion tons of CO2 Added to Atmosphere every year
Oil: (15.8*1012 kWh/yr) * 10% * (1.9 lb CO2/kWh)/(2*103 lb/ton) = 1.5 billion tons of CO2 Added to Atmosphere every year
Total: = 9.2 billion tons of CO2 added to the world's atmosphere every year from power plants.
These are the two biggest sources of man-made CO2.
By ending all of both of them we would Almost Reverse Global Warming.
1. Power plants at 58% of the annual net CO2 accumulation. Power plants can be quickly converted to clean nuclear. This is a problem of the first and second world that can be corrected with certainty by a technological change. This is a staggering amount of completely unnecessary Global Warming CO2. It clearly shows that "Nuking" our coal burning power plants is the right thing to do if we want to make a huge dent quickly in annual CO2 accumulation.
2. Deforestation at 25% of the annual net CO2 accumulation. Deforestation is diffuse. This is a problem of the second and third world that can be reduced by social-economic change. This is a staggering amount of avoidable Global Warming CO2.