Why the Green Energy Transition Won’t Happen

Calliban · 2024-09-05 07:50:41

Very simplistically, maybe something like this:

Or maybe this for the vac tank, using concrete with a clay and rubble filling.

Or maybe the tank can sit within a weather proof enclosure, like a shed. This ensures that the clay providing the compressive strength is kept dry. You may notice that I am trying to use as little concrete as possible, as the tank needs to be cheap.

Pumping water instead of air allows greater energy efficiency overall, because water is an incompressible medium. Pumping water therefore minimises heat generation. But it is also presents a problem as concrete and cob, rammed earth and adobe, all lose a great deal of compressive strength when wet. So a good waterproof lining is important.

Last edited by Calliban (2024-09-05 08:39:26)

kbd512 · 2024-09-05 13:38:19

Calliban,

We've seen steel compressed gas cylinders used for welding fail during highway crashes. They don't blow entire vehicles hundreds of feet into the air. They can't generate enough force to do that. Heck, even fuel-air explosions with gasoline and natural gas don't do that. Lithium-ion battery explosions don't do that, either. 10 feet, sure. 50 feet, maybe. Some of the most powerful high explosive detonations can toss a vehicle or heavy chunk of metal like the engine block that far, but they tend to rip the vehicle apart, which is worse in some ways. Let's not wildly over-exaggerate any particular danger. A Lithium-ion battery fire is not going to burn a hole through the center of the Earth (China Syndrome), nor will a nuclear reactor meltdown ever do any such thing. The cap or valve on a compressed gas cylinder might get blown that far from the vehicle, but the entire vehicle is not going to be launched into the air, Hollywood style, unless it's done with high explosives. Granted, the energy release from any of these energy stores is fairly spectacular, but it's also a relatively rare event (ignoring severe quality control issues with Chinese products), and we are in fact running H2 powered vehicles on American highways which are laden with highly combustible Hydrogen gas pressurized to 700bar.

On the issue of "range anxiety", I think the "real anxiety" revolves around the myriad of other related issues with Lithium-ion batteries, such as waiting 1 to 2 hours for the battery to recharge on a "fast charger", the fact that the vehicle cannot be left unattended during that process, and all the other supposed benefits which turned out to be pure marketing drivel not tethered to the practical operation of an EV as most people use them. No significant planning process is required to use a vehicle that can be refueled in a matter of minutes.

Vehicles made from the 1970s backwards frequently had a range of 200 miles if they had large displacement V8 engines or poorly tuned carburetors and ignition systems. Some burned so much fuel that you could literally see the fuel gauge needle rolling back while the engine was running. Assuming "range anxiety" wasn't a serious issue back then, it was because there was a gas station every 50 feet and you could refuel your car in about 5 minutes for a reasonable price. You can still do that with compressed air. You get your 200 miles and then you can fill the tank up again in less than 10 minutes.

For the EVs, if you recharge at night from the convenience of your own home, then you're not drawing power from renewable energy in most cases. Unfortunately, this is when it's most convenient to recharge the car, because grid demand and prices are low and you're not using the car. You cannot put your car in your garage, plug it in, and then go to sleep while your car recharges. If anything goes wrong, your house might burn down if you're not present to unplug the vehicle. EVs typically quit functioning entirely if it has an internal electrical short somewhere that the computer detects, which causes it to turn off the car, so then the vehicle cannot be moved to a safer spot where a vehicle fire might be inconvenient but not life-threatening. Worse still, serious failures during operation frequently leave you trapped in a car that might go up in flames, due to "electronic everything", which includes the stupid door handles. Someone needs to accept that not everything can or even should be electronic. Door handles are one example of a device that should remain mechanical forever.

If you routinely fast charge the car, doing so rapidly degrades the battery capacity, decreasing its useful service life and increasing the risk of a thermal runaway that destroys or seriously damages the entire car. If some cell or electronic component within the battery pack fails, you have to replace the entire battery pack. If minor damage occurs during an accident, then the insurance company typically totals the vehicle. An accurate mechanism to evaluate true vs superficial or repairable damage doesn't seem to exist.

If a pressure regulator valve fails in a compressed air car, you don't have to replace the air tank, which is the most expensive part of the propulsion system, nor all the other valves and connected components in the car, in most cases. No power electronics are required to operate the propulsion system. The electronics in a modern car, especially an EV, represent 50% of the cost of the car. If anything but the air tank fails, all the rest of the components can be repaired or replaced in isolation from the air tank, at nominal cost. A pressure regulator valve is a rather cheap and simple part to replace using hand tools. No special skills are required, beyond knowing how to use a torque wrench and how to check for leaks. Special test equipment is not required to "know" that the valve repair was successful. If it was not, then you can both see (using soapy water) and hear the air escaping, as well as monitor the pressure inside the main tank.

As a mechanic, you don't have to worry about being instantly electrocuted by a battery subsystem capable of delivering hundreds of kilowatts to about a megawatt of power. Due to its complexity and materials costs, a very large battery pack is never going to be "cheap" in the sense of it being something you stock on the shelf as a spare part. It's so large and heavy that it's literally integrated into the frame of the vehicle to save weight. Thus, removal is never going to be fast and easy, in the same way the removing an engine is not fast or easy. On top of that, a variety of highly specialized and very expensive electronics diagnostics tools are required to test the entire battery pack and evaluate serviceability. A diagnostics check can be run very quickly in most cases, but that's the extent of how user-friendly maintenance and repair will ever be. It's certainly still doable, but never fast / cheap / easy.

If I roll into a compressed air car repair shop and tell the mechanic I hear a hissing sound from this spot near the tank, he's going to be able to rapidly figure out what's leaking, how badly using a pressure gauge, and how much time and materials it will cost to fix it. There could be other problems discovered after the initial repair, but all the parts except the tank, engine, and atmospheric heat exchange radiator are low-cost bits of mass manufactured metal that you can hold in your hand and replace with your hands using hand tools.

Calliban · 2024-10-22 02:46:08

Gail Tverberg's latest article is well worth reading.
https://ourfiniteworld.com/2024/10/14/o … -even-war/

In her opinion, Climate Change is spin designed to tackle the real issue without publicly acknowledging it: Energy Resource Depletion. The problem is that the politically popular solutions to climate change (wind and solar power) have thus far proven incapable of replacing the abundant low-cost energy provided by fossil fuels during the post-war growth period of the second half of the 20th century.

Growth in OECD countries has been anaemic since 1973. Until the first oil crisis, wages and living standards were growing rapidly. But growth stalled after 1973. Real inflation adjusted wages for the bottom 90% of US workers has not grown in the past 50 years. Wages for the top 10% have grown, but even this growth appears to have stalled. Why is this happening? Wealth is a product of surplus energy. Whilst overall energy production has risen, the Energy Return on Energy Invested (EROEI) of new energy projects is no longer as high as it was for the abundant onshore oil & gas resources that met world demand until the 1970s. The energy cost of accessing new energy has increased steadily since the early 1970s.

Last edited by Calliban (2024-10-22 03:19:32)

kbd512 · 2024-10-23 11:09:07

To maintain our present quality of life, an annual per capita energy expenditure of 80 million BTUs per person, equates to 23,445,686Wh per person per year. This is a huge amount of energy to generate using other methods, be it coal, natural gas, liquid hydrocarbon fuels, or sunlight, wind, and water. Frankly, the other methods are hilariously inefficient in terms of input materials required, even when the "fuel" comes from the Sun. The sunlight and wind are "free". The materials required to convert that into electrical or thermal power are not "free", and all of the current methods used to create and process those materials into energy generating machines are incredibly environmentally destructive. Furthermore, all of those "other methods" are not truly sustainable because all of them are artifacts of burning hydrocarbon fuels. That means it's in everyone's best interest to find the least consumptive and most productive methods to generate the energy required to lead a "technologically advanced modern life".

In terms of what we call "high level nuclear waste", the US alone has accumulated 90,000t / 90,000,000kg of "un-reprocessed spent fuel" over the past 75 years of using commercial nuclear power. The reason we don't reprocess fuel is to keep our Uranium miners in business, not because there's a shortage of Uranium or Thorium fuel. If we never mined another kilo of Uranium for the next few centuries, we already have accumulated sufficient fuel to supply ALL of humanity's energy needs. Estimating actual energy consumption can be difficult to quantify, so below I'm also going to include the total US annual electrical energy consumption of 4,000TWh as a measuring stick. Americans consume about 1/5th of the world's energy inputs, which means extrapolating to the rest of the world, using America as a proxy, is very easy to do. Take whatever America consumes, multiply by 5, and that's a reasonably good proxy for global energy consumption of the electrical or thermal variety.

When we talk about "spent" nuclear fuel or "high level nuclear waste", what are we actually talking about?

Each kilogram of spent fuel or high level nuclear waste contains a mixture of U235, U238, U238 transmuted into Pu239 or various other fissionable or non-fissionable isotopes, and lighter elements created during fission. Inside a commercial electric power reactor, there are an incredible variety of lighter daughter products created by fissioning, some of which can actually kill the fission process over time by absorbing neutrons thrown off of fissioning atoms, which could otherwise be used to split other fissionable atoms. These are true nuclear waste products that must be removed during fuel reprocessing. Whenever the "spent" fuel comes out of the reactor, it consists of a bunch of "cracked" ceramic metal pellets in metal cladding. This definition of "high level nuclear waste" actually means "otherwise usable Uranium and Plutonium fuel containing 97%+ of its original energy content". If the neutron poisons could be removed and the cracking didn't matter, instead of 18 months, the fuel could stay in the reactor for about 900 months, and then it truly would be "spent" fuel. Reprocessing includes extracting the cracked fuel pellets from the rods, grinding them into fine powder, chemically or centrifugally stripping the various daughter products and neutron poisons, re-sintering the remaining "good fuel" into new pellets, and sorting them back into a fresh fuel rod based upon remaining energy content. Some fuel pellets require nothing more than stuffing into a new rod cladding because the reaction rate was so low, due to their physical position inside the reactor, which affecs reactivity rates. Until this process has been repeated about 50 times, there is nothing "truly spent" about a load of Uranium fuel extracted from a reactor after 18 months of operation. There is merely accumulated thermal / pressure / radiation damage, along with neutron "poisons" that kill the fission reaction, and fission daughter products, such as radioactive Cesium and Strontium, that truly are "nuclear waste". The swelling that ultimately cracks / destroys the fuel pellets stems from the release of Radon and other trapped radioactive gases, as well as volume expansion from the production of lighter elments during fission.

Approximately 2.5% of our "high level nuclear waste" is "true nuclear waste" (Strontium-90, Cesium-137, Radon, etc) which must be removed and stored over varying lengths of time:
90,000,000kg * 0.975 = 87,750,000kg

The length of time something must be stored, because it's radioactive, is a total misnomer. The shorter the half-life, the greater the radioactivity. The longer the half-life, the less the radioactivity. Radioactive for thousands to millions of years means, "this substance is barely radioactive at all". In all probability, it can't hurt you so long as you don't eat it or inhale it. Isotopes that emit gamma rays or neutrons are the exception to that rule. If you don't make a habit of cuddling up to your spent fuel rods at night, the probability of this kind of waste hurting you ranges between nonexistent and exceptionally remote. Radioactive for 5 minutes to 5 years means, "this substance is insanely lethally radioactive". You don't need to be exposed to it for decades before it might cause cancer in old age. Fatal radiation doses from very short-lived radioactive substances can be accumulated in minutes to hours. This best describes nuclear fuel rods the moment after we shut down the reactor. Inside of a few years, most of the really radioactive stuff has decayed into otherwise harmless elements- but once again, harmless to be in close physical proximity to, not to eat or inhale. If you eat non-radioactive Cesium metal that's never been in a nuclear reactor, it will still kill you. Heavy metals are still heavy metals. Lack of radiation, on top of being a heavy metal, doesn't render them any less intrinsically toxic. In all probability, all such "insanely radioactive" material is so thermally "hot", in addition to being radioactive, that it's kept in a spent fuel pool so it can "cool off" (dump its residual radiation and thermal energy harmlessly). Some notable exceptions include the Cobalt-60 metal rods from nuclear medicine facilities or radio isotope thermo-electric generators, which have killed a literal handful of people through improper disposal. This is far more common in the developing world. The last American killed by radiation from a nuclear reactor died in 1964 or 1965, IIRC. Nobody has died from commercial nuclear power since then, unless they fell off a ledge or ladder or balcony at the power plant, were electrocuted by the electric portion of the plant, or a steam pipe ruptured and cooked them.

Whatever the potential for civil nuclear power is to kill lots of people, such a scenario has never been actualized here in America. We can "what-if" all the possibilities to exhaustion, but at the end of the exercise, exhausted is all we'll end up "being". If a modicum of care and thought is devoted to handling of nuclear materials, they're no more intrinsically dangerous than Lead poisoning of the non-Judge-Roy-Bean variety. The moral of the story is, don't treat radiactive materials like play toys, because they're not. Put them to work for you, the same way we put explosive gases and flammable liquids to work. Oil ended slavery. It's not profitable to use forced human labor when forced machine and materials labor is so much cheaper and benefits everyone (even when it doesn't benefit everyone equally, everywhere, at all times).

UO2, the most common ceramic metal fuel type used in most light and heavy water reactors, is 88.15% Uranium by weight:
87,750,000kg * 0.8815 = 77,351,625kg

Fissioning U235 releases 24,000,000,000Wh / 24 GigaWatt-hours of thermal energy per kilogram of virgin U235. After 18 months, when "spent" fuel is taken out of the reactor, it's only generated 600,000,000Wh of thermal energy. The remaining unfissioned Uranium and Plutonium still contains about 23,400,000,000Wh of thermal energy. Pu239 provides a little less, at 23,000,000,000Wh/kg, but we're going to treat U235 and U238 transmuted into Pu239 as possessing equivalent energy content for evaluation purposes, because all those short-lived daughter products add to the total thermal energy output, and U235 mixed with U238 in a nuclear fuel rod ultimately transmutes fertile U238 into fissionable Pu239. U235 is the only type of natural fuel source that can be used to "make" or "breed" more fuel. For example, if you drop a lump of coal into a gallon of diesel fuel, you don't magically "get" more diesel fuel, merely because the coal contains a lot more Carbon than diesel fuel. In any event, whether we use 24GWh or 23GWh as our energy content figure, the math really doesn't change much, as the back-of-envelope calculation below shows, with regards to our accumulated "spent" nuclear fuel stockpile.

77,351,625kg * 24,000,000,000Wh/kg = 1,856,439,000,000,000,000Wh
77,351,625kg * 23,000,000,000Wh/kg = 1,779,087,375,000,000,000Wh

Whenever this nuclear fuel is "stored" inside a working nuclear reactor, rather than sitting outside on the ground, not only is it a very slim nuclear weapons proliferation risk, it's actually doing something rather useful- generating gobs and gobs of heat energy without combustion.

24,000,000,000Wh per kilogram of U235 / 39,750Wh per gallon of diesel fuel = 603,774 gallons of diesel fuel

A kilo of U235 has the same thermal energy output as an olympic swimming pool filled with diesel fuel.

The actual volume of waste produced is so small that all the spent nuclear fuel in the entire world, after 75 years of commercial electric nuclear power, will fit inside a single football field. Is there really no patch of land in the entire world, the size of a single football field, which we cannot declare "off limits" to everyone?

If one football field per century is "too much", to power all of humanity, then how much CO2 are we willing to release and how many cubic miles of land are we willing to destroy to get at the metal underneath it?

Such a tiny volume of waste could be buried many miles underground, far below any aquifer, if we decided to do that and quit playing dumb games with the waste.

Onwards...

4,000,000,000,000,000Wh per year (4,000TWh) = US total annual electrical energy consumption (about 1/5th of the global total)

1,856,439,000,000,000,000Wh of total thermal energy / 4,000,000,000,000,000Wh per year = 464 years of thermal energy, or 232 years of mostly electrical output with waste heat recovery (combined heat and power). If we convert all of that heat into electricity, then we get 35% to 50% of that energy content as electricity, dependent upon how we choose to generate electricity. Steam will be 35%. Supercritical CO2 will be 50%. Most plants get around half of the energy out through various means, so 232 years is a good approximation for how much accumulated nuclear fuel energy the US has sitting around uselessly at various "spent fuel" storage sites.

350,000,000 people * 23,445,686Wh per person = 8,205,990,100,000,000Wh for all 350 million people per year

1,856,439,000,000,000,000Wh of total thermal energy / 8,205,990,100,000,000Wh = 226 years (covers all energy consumption of all types, for the entire US population)

If nuclear fuel was our only option for reliable power, we are not short of energy to maintain our present standard of living, but it's not even close to our only option at this point. We still have incredible natural gas and oil reserves as long as the person in charge of our government is not canceling drilling permits to commit treason by handing our money to terrorists to appease our pistachios. We still have entire mountains of coal, which should probably be upgraded to diesel and bunker fuels using thermal power input from a nuclear reactor. We have a functionally inexhaustible source of heat energy from the Sun. We have wave action thanks to our moon, which can be used with trompes to compress air. We have hydro power from all the dams, some of which may need to be rebuilt at this point. We have plenty of wind in specific spots.

To build-out the wind and solar energy reserves, we need a LOT of energy input to get the enormous quantities of metals required. That energy has to come from somewhere. It can come from burning coal and natural gas, as it presently does, or it can come from electricity generated by nuclear fuel. At the present time, nobody makes photovoltaic panels using previously manufactured photovoltaic panels. It's not impossible, but it would mean ALL of the energy they generate is consumed by the act of expanding photovoltaic panel manufacturing, which means for quite some time they generate nothing on our electric grids.

To that total for existing Uranium sitting in spent fuel casks, America alone can add around 400,000t of Thorium-232 in known deposits or actual separated Th232 stored in the ground under our deserts at various undisclosed locations. Th232 converted into U233 generats 22,764,000,000Wh/kg. We can safely assume that we can economically recover half of that total as a ballpark estimate, so 200,000t buys us another 502 years of energy. Our Thorium reserves are estimated at 595,000t. If we truly could recover all of that, then 1,494 years. IAEA estimates 13,000,000t of Thorium are recoverable at a cost of $130/kg or less. That would provide for our energy needs for the next thousand years, at the very least. More Thorium is recovered every day during rare Earth metals mining. Th232 may be transmuted into fissionable U233 by sticking it inside a commercial power reactor. The daughter products from fissioning U233 are short-lived, relative to fissioning U235 and Pu239. It's a quirk of the nuclear decay chain for U233 vs U235 and Pu239. However, you still need some U235 or Pu239 to begin transmuting Th232. That seemingly "small change" has a dramatic effect on how long the waste remains radioactive. Almost all of the dangerous radiation is gone in far less than a human lifetime, about the same amount of time it takes for a child to become an adult. We can handle 10 to 20 year sequestration processes quite easily.

We can now passively recover Uranium from sea water, at costs ranging between $400 to $1,400/kg. There's about 4.5 billions tons available. That's plenty for everyone for a period of time longer than homo sapiens have existed. I would also very much like to believe that we will coax fusion into working for our benefit in less than a thousand years. Henri Becquerel discovered Uranium in 1896. It was about 60 years before the first commercial power reactor appeared in the UK, in 1956. The first fusion reaction was discovered in 1933. The first non-weapon fusion reaction in a Z-pinch machine took place in 1951. Our first operable fusion reactor of sufficient size / scale will come online in 2035 and is anticipated to be fully operational by 2039. ITER won't be a power reactor, but it will pioneer all the basic concepts required to run commercial fusion reactors. If some upstart runs a fully functional fusion reactor before 2039, then kudos to them. 60 years from discovering Uranium to a commercial power reactor is a break-neck pace of innovation. Creating sustainable fusion reactions is easily multiple orders of magnitude more difficult, so if we achieve that in about 100 years that is a blistering rate of technological advancement. Either way, we have plenty of energy and time. We're not going anywhere, unless we choose to self-destruct.

If all of 7.5 billion of us consumed energy the way Americans do, and we burn U233 from Th232 only:
7,500,000,000 * 23,445,686 = 175,842,645,000,000,000Wh per year (total primary energy consumption for 7.5B Americans)
13,000,000,000kg * 22,764,000,000Wh/kg = 295,932,000,000,000,000,000Wh
295,932,000,000,000,000,000Wh / 175,842,645,000,000,000Wh = 1,683 years

There are many many more millions of tons of Thorium available, but the Thorium shown above is economically recoverable at today's natural Uranium prices. Thorium is about twice as abundant as Uranium.

Here's how long 4.5 billion tons of natural Uranium would last, if everyone lives like Americans do:
4,500,000,000,000kg * 24,000,000,000Wh/kg = 108,000,000,000,000,000,000,000Wh
108,000,000,000,000,000,000,000Wh / 175,842,645,000,000,000Wh = 614,185 years

You can extrapolate out how long 9 billion tons of Thorium would last.

Divide by 2 or 3 if you wish to account for any inefficiencies, but there's enough energy there to provide heat, food, fuel, lighting, medicine, and housing to 7.5 billion people, all living the way Americans do, for an exceptionally long time. After we crack fusion, we have enough materials here on Earth to last until the Sun goes supernova, although I'd suggest we get serious about finding our next star long before that happens. Maybe we can create a warp drive large enough to move our entire planet. That's how much energy we can get from materials dug out of the ground or filtered out of sea water. Our green goofballs don't want humanity to have access to it, because they're pistachios.

We don't presently collect Uranium from sea water, but we've proven that we can do it, and have done it just to prove that we could. One method using plastic fibers has a cost of $80.70/kg to $86.25/kg. For nations that already have nuclear power, there's enough stored energy in terms of on-hand un-reprocessed fuel to cover the next century or two of operations, even if we didn't mine another kilo of Uranium from all the existing Uranium mines. That means we have fuel galore, but no political will to use it. I suspect that if we run short of energy, the political will to start using the fuel will be "discovered" quite rapidly. No explanation that passes muster has been given as to why we're burning so much coal, oil, and natural gas, when the energy available in Uranium and Thorium is so plentiful. If we reprocess our spent fuel, there is zero danger of ever running out of Uranium and Thorium over the next two million years.

Climate change is either a fraud / hoax of truly epic proportions, or else the same people advocating for the phase-out of hydrocarbon fuels are charlatans to their own cause, pushing fraudulent "non-solutions" that they should be intelligent enough to know cannot possibly function without hydrocarbon fuels, or quantities of batteries we simply cannot make, or nuclear energy providing the backstop whenever natural energy sources run out. Norway has 85%, maybe 90% by now, EV adoption. They only burn 10% less oil. Replacing 100% of the existing gasoline and diesel powered vehicles reduces hydrocarbon energy consumption by 15% at most, if you have oil money from selling oil to developing nations, which you then use to make your own nation appear to be some clean green economy that it's not, never has been, and never will be. At the same time, you drive out all heavy industry, and make virtually none of what you use and consume.

The longer our pistachio-colored climate changing scientologists go without creating an examplar national economy that runs purely on wind turbines and photovoltaics and batteries, the more self-evident their fraud becomes. The utter lack of progress shows they are not serious about confronting their boogeyman. All the "green energy" added has not simply maintained pace with the rate of energy consumption increase as our population peaks. If such an energy system cannot keep pace with increased demand, nor readily contract if less energy is required, then it's neither durable nor scalable. Our pistachios are only serious about using their fraud to continuously extract wealth and resources from otherwise productive economies, for as long as they can possibly perpetuate their green energy fraud.

Calliban · 2024-11-16 16:10:58

Refining Reality: The hidden problems of a world still dependant on oil.
https://www.artberman.com/blog/refinery-crisis/

The last refinery built in the US was finished in 1977! Yikes. That is older than I am. This sort of infrastructure is expensive to build and older plants are now retiring without being replaced.

kbd512 · 2024-11-17 06:34:10

1bbl of crude = 139.3kg
Carbon = 127.6kg (468kg CO2)
Hydrogen = 11.6kg
1kg CO2 (direct ocean capture) = 1.8kWh
1kg H2 (water electrolysis) = 50kWh

CO2 = 842.4kWh/bbl
H2 = 580kWh/bbl
Sabatier reaction = 4,637.3kWh/139.3kg

Input Insolation = 6.85kWh/m^2/day (in a Midwest desert)
Polished Aluminum Mirror = 6.165kWh/m^2/day

6,059.7kWh / 6.165Wh/m^2/day = 983m^2 of solar thermal collector area per bbl per day
20,246,575bbl/day * 983m^2/bbl/day = 19,902,383,225m^2 = 19,903km^2 (141km by 141km)

2mm x 1m x 1m = 34.5394lbs/m^2 of rolled / stamped steel (hot-dipped in Aluminum, then polished)

19,902,383,225m^2 * 34.5394lbs/m^2 = 687,416,375,162lbs / 311,807,194t

$880/t * 311,807,194t = $274,390,330,720

Let’s double that figure to $550B to account for the steel support structure for the solar thermal mirrors.
Crude currently sells for about $67/bbl.

$67/bbl * 7,390,000,000bbl/year = $495B

Let’s double the cost again to account for fabrication and installation labor. We’re sitting at around $1T.

Over 20 years, we’re spending around $50B/year to supply our hydrocarbon energy input requirements for the next century.

3.11Bt of steel produces sufficient energy input for global supply of petroleum of petroleum base product (Methane). We produce about 1.85Bt of steel per year, so the materials input to supply the petroleum base product for at least the next human lifetime is equivalent to 2 years of steel production. We'll have to add more equipment and energy to go from Methane to gasoline or diesel, but after you produce the Methane, the input energy requirements to go from Methane to gasoline are not nearly so high.

Almost anyone with a pocket calculator could quickly and easily figure out that not running out of energy is dramatically more important than the paltry amount of money and steel required to ensure that never happens. It's nuts (to me) that an oil company hasn't already determined that making sure the profits never stop rolling in is the absolute best reason to recycle CO2. If there are energy surpluses to be had, then we make sure we capture extra CO2 and convert that to solid Carbon ("coal") using Gallium.

No tire company functions without Carbon Black. No coal-fired power plant functions without coal. No Carbon Fiber company functions without Carbon. None of our advanced manufacturing tech, or not-so-advanced tech, functions at all without on-demand energy. That is a fact, no matter how much we attempt to ignore reality.

An actual synthetic petroleum production facility is at least guaranteed to produce the goods. Another oil well may or may not, and it won't produce for very long since we've already consumed the easy-to-get oil.

It seems as if we need some long-term thinking here.

Calliban · 2024-11-17 12:01:37

Kbd512, you and I both know that synthetic hydrocarbons can be made and you have worked out a viable plan. But for whatever reason, this isn't being done at scale. At least not yet.

The refinery problem is something I don't entirely understand. But Art Berman suggests that refining is being squeezed between a high price of oil ($70/bl) and the limits of what consumers can afford to pay for refined products. This is squeezing refiners margins, making new refining capacity unproffitable to build. Electric vehicles make this problem worse by reducing the proffitability of gasoline sales. The problem is that refineries produce a range of products from tar for roads and waxes, all the way up through lube oil, bunker fuel, middle distillates (diesel), gasoline, naptha, LPG and methane. If one of these products is reduced in value (gasoline) it undermines the business case of the refinery and creates a disposal problem. But the other products are still needed and EVs do nothing to reduce demand for lube oil, diesel or tar for roads. Refineries can marginally reduce production of one product and expand production of another. But only to a limited extent.

This suggests to me that any plan to reduce global oil consumption needs to simultaneously reduce consumption of all of the products from oil refining. Using less gasoline needs to be accompanied by reductions in consumption of every product coming out of the refinery. Otherwise, efforts to reduce consumption of one oil product (gasoline) creates a disposal problem and really is a waste of time. If EVs reduce gasoline consumption on the roads, but we continue to need other oil products, then gasoline will end up being burned somewhere else.

Last edited by Calliban (2024-11-17 12:05:29)

Terraformer · 2024-11-19 09:29:39

There are people working on this -- Terraformer Industries, solar powered methane synthesis.

Personally I think the money is in Dimethyl Ether more, but, we presently have infrastructure for using Methane. Pricey for heating but usable for electricity generation.

kbd512 · 2024-11-19 11:16:31

Terraformer,

It's about time somebody started working on this. If we want to do solar and wind power in a way that makes an actual difference to global CO2 emissions, then we're looking at using solar thermal power, mechanical wind turbines, and a surrounding ecosystem of energy storage technologies that don't require quantities of specialty metals we can't realistically obtain.

Capturing and repurposing CO2 emissions into saleable products was always the correct way to address this issue. If recycling is not a dirty word when it comes to metals or plastics, then it shouldn't be looked down upon when it comes to CO2, either.

We've so little to show for the money spent thus far because we pursued academic ideological solutions past the point where technology could keep pace with the rhetoric broadcasted by mass media. Making everything electrical is no longer a technological dead-end when we can source and recycle the specialty metals required, but not a moment before. Thankfully, electrification is not required for reducing or capturing our CO2 emissions, and may be an impediment in some cases.

What I've proposed is still a "wind and solar" solution at the end of the day, so it would be nice if the people advocating for "wind and solar" took a hard-nosed look at what we can do using what we can actually make in the volumes required to put a measurable dent in the overall problem. We're going to progress a lot faster by pursuing scalable solutions with a low entry bar, technologically speaking.

Calliban · Yesterday 16:42:44

Solar thermal vs solar PV on the moon.
https://youtu.be/3oFi6S-4mp8?si=jvEhmCNcoHujZpzX

The comparison appears to neglect the enormous energy cost of semiconductor grade silicon. Compared to that cost, the energy cost of supporting frames is small.

Last edited by Calliban (Yesterday 16:43:05)

tahanson43206 · Yesterday 18:14:17

For Calliban re #410

There may be a shortage of energy collection equipment on the Moon.

However, that may be a temporary problem.

My understanding is that the flow of energy TO the surface of the moon is substantial, and reliable, and what it more, it is provided at no charge.

It seems to me that if humans learn how to make solar panels on the Moon from local materials, then there should be enough energy available to support an exponential growth process.

The last time I looked, humans are harnessing a pathetic small fraction of Solar output.

(th)

kbd512 · Yesterday 18:40:05

Calliban,

I wrote a rather lengthy comment on that video illustrating a basic math breakdown of Supercritical CO2 gas turbine component masses based upon a real installation here in Texas, and about two days later either the channel owner or YouTube deleted my comment, despite praising the effort he put in and subscribing to his channel.

What I've found is that the people who believe in this electrification of everything silliness are so lost in their fantasy world that when ugly reality is presented to them, they ignore it and try to pretend that reality isn't real. Sadly, physics is not very charitable to ideological beliefs.

In the very first sentence of my comment, I illustrated how the mass of Copper wiring alone would exceed the mass of the entire solar thermal solution based upon sCO2, even if I was "off" by a factor of 2X.

I'm reproducing my comment left on his channel below so that people with basic math skills can see what reality actually looks like:

Photovoltaics require about 5,500kg of Copper per 1MWe of output, or 5,500,000kg per 1GWe, especially low efficiency thin film arrays, especially when the copper wiring will be heated to 121C before we start trying to pump electricity through it. Most Copper wiring ampacity charts only go up to 90C.
Major component mass breakdown for a 50% thermally efficient solar thermal Recuperated Closed-loop Brayton Cycle (RCBC) Supercritical CO2 (sCO2) gas turbine power plant operating at 255bar and 715C:
Commercially available material:
52,872kg for 2,591,726m^2 of 15 micron / 20.4g/m^2 Aluminized mylar collector to generate 2GWth on the lunar surface
Estimates based upon an actual working sCO2 gas turbine power plant components already built by SWRI and operating in Texas:
6,250kg sCO2 gas turbine rotor, Haynes 282, at 160kW/kg, but 200kW/kg is closer to reality for 50MW to 300MW sCO2 turbines, so I went with a working system component mass from a sCO2 pilot plant that's already making power
25,000kg sCO2 gas turbine rotor and casing, Inconel 740H
31,250kg sCO2 re-compression turbine rotor and casing
368,098kg 316L diffusion bonded printed circuit heat exchanger, at 16.3MWth/m^3
Estimate based upon Wright Electric's liquid-cooled plain old Copper and Iron, non-superconducting aircraft electric motor:
62,500kg 1GW high speed electric motor-generator, at 16kW/kg
Estimates using NASA high temp space radiator tech info from NTRS:
990,040kg for 20mm ID Haynes 282, at 1.146kg/m, hoop stress is 22.491ksi at 255bar, ~3m of collector area required to generate 715C, I think (may actually be closer to 4m, I just guessed at this based upon a high temp solar thermal receiver tube design built for NREL, and zero flow or thermal-hydraulic analysis to determine if other factors will prevent this from working at all)
250,000kg for Carbon Fibers (not CFRP) vacuum brazed to Inconel 718 (NASA high-temp space radiator for nuclear power), at 600C
Mass Total: 1,786,010kg
There will be additional masses associated with the mounts for the sCO2 turbine and generator, plumbing, valves, CO2 thermal power transfer fluid, a separate coolant loop to cool the generator, and thermal energy storage materials since most places on the moon have 336 hours of light followed by 336 hours of darkness. Storing 336GWh of electricity in Lithium-ion batteries will also be a mass-related show stopper for thin film photovoltaics, if the batteries are protected to NASA standards. I didn't bother to calculate how many kilos of CO2 are in the loop, either. I could be off by a factor of 2X and a 1GWe solar thermal power plant is still substantially lighter than the mass of Copper wiring required by a 12% efficient 1GWe thin film solar array. The same holds true on Earth. The ERoEI of photovoltaics and wind turbines vs solar thermal is not much of a comparison after plant longevity, all material inputs, and appropriate energy storage devices are considered.
I thought this video was a solid attempt at comparing solar thermal and thin film photovoltaics. NASA uses small Stirling engines for power due to their high reliability without maintenance. Nobody there, or at least nobody that I've ever spoken to, is seriously considering them for large power plants. The radiation environment that the thin film will be subjected to should also be considered. I doubt it lasts longer than 10 years. NREL's solar thermal demonstrator built in the 1970s has already operated for 50 years. Kudos to AnthroFuturism. I love the work he put in. Subscribed.

It's amazing how poorly received plain old energy reality tends to be, but that's because I don't allow ideological beliefs to "control" what I think about real tangible power generating technology.

Source documentation, which I'm more than willing to provide, comes from NREL, SWRI, NASA, and private industry. In my mass estimates, I was very conservative, and based them upon straight linear scale-up of the existing sCO2 pilot power plants which are now operational.

It later turned out, after doing even more reading and listening to test results YouTube videos reported by SWRI, that I overestimated the mass of most sCO2 pilot power plant components, such as the recuperator. They're actually transferring 43MW/m^3 of thermal power through their prototype heat exchangers. That is a stupid amount of power crammed into such tiny components, relative to steam plants. One of the PhDs from SWRI said the power density of the sCO2 turbine is very similar to the high pressure LOX turbopump on the RS-25. What's more, they're designing all the "hot section" components for 100,000hr service lives or greater. Few parts of a RS-25 lives for 100hrs, never mind 100,000hrs. That's why this tech took 20 years to develop. The tiny 16MWth / 10MWe turbine rotor was actually 200kW/kg, not the 160kW/kg I used in my estimate, apparently based upon smaller prototypes from SWRI documentation. That means a scale-up to 50MW to 300MW will deliver greater power density. If they start making components from CMCs, gravimetric power density will further increase by a factor of 3X to 4X with no increase in operating temperature. C/SiC ceramic composites are designed to live at 1,000C to 1,200C, rather than 715C. 600kW/kg is already a crazy power density figure, but sCO2 turbine rotors operating at 1,000C could go as high as 1MW/kg. That is just plain nuts. The reduction gearbox, electric generator, and its base support may very well become the single heaviest component of a 1GWe solar thermal power plant on the moon or Mars.

There are 4X 300MWe power plants being built at 4 different sites here in America by Occidental Petroleum and 8 Rivers Capital (2 are natural gas and 2 are coal-fired and recapture their own CO2 emissions for piping to the fracking industry), with multiple smaller units under construction elsewhere in the US, UK, EU, Russia, India, and China. I think there's one being built in Brazil as well. I didn't check what South Korea and Japan have in the works. The 50MW units are for natural gas pipeline compression and the 300MW units are for commercial electric power.

So far as I'm aware, there is no serious attempt to use Stirling engines for commercial power. We're moving to Recompression Closed-loop Brayton Cycle (natural gas or oil) and Allam-Fetvedt Cycle (coal) power plants, because all of it fits inside of the area occupied by a normal American-sized house.

kbd512 · Yesterday 18:45:35

tahanson43206,

Why are photovoltaics and wind turbines not being used to build more photovoltaics and wind turbines here on Earth?

Hazard a guess as to why you think that is.

tahanson43206 · Yesterday 19:14:36

For kbd512 re #413

The question you have posed appears to be offered in a serious manner, and it deserves a serious response.

My estimate of the time required to fully understand the human behavior of thousands if not millions of people would be on the order of years, depending upon the number of researchers available, and the quality of the leadership.

What I can verify from my vantage point in 2024, is that writers have been thinking about this problem since at least 1985 and probably much earlier.

Humans ** have ** achieved self-replicating systems that depended upon renewable energy in the past. Those systems were called "farms". They existed before the modern industrial age. I doubt there are any left on Earth today. The Siren Call of oil-from-the-ground has obliterated the skills and knowledge that allowed self-replicating systems like that to not only survive but succeed.

This topic is fresh in mind, because a relative pointed me toward a history of the American revolution, and I opened the book to a passage that talked about how the revolution was funded.

I am confident that eventually ** very ** bright people will put together a chain of hardware that harnesses solar energy to replicate the machinery of which it is made.

We can get a hint at what is possible by looking at a computer chip factory. If we have income from sale of chips, and we use those funds to make more chips, and we able to sell ** those ** chips, then we would have an example of a self-replicating system.

My knowledge of the chip manufacturing industry is insufficient to know if we have already seen that happen on Earth, but it is certainly possible.

The challenge of trying to fund a factory to make semiconductor products using nothing but solar energy as input is quite likely beyond human capability at present. However, only 200 years ago, humans were able to figure out how to create self-replicating systems using nothing but solar energy as input. The accomplishment was not recognized at the time for the achievement it was, because it was so commonplace.

I am confident we (humans) will achieve at a comparable level at some point in the future. The Moon is an excellent place to look for developments along those lines, because there are (apparently) no 5 million year old deposits of free energy. Instead, the Sun bakes the Lunar surface each and every Lunar day, and at this point, humans are capturing only a teeny tiny sliver with the probes scattered around the body.

Thanks again for a terrific question!

(th)

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