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For SpaceNut re #625
Thank you for finding and posting this encouraging link!
Here is a snippet...
Synthetic fuels (Methanol to gasoline)
Our methanol to gasoline (MTG) process selectively converts methanol to a single fungible liquid fuel and a small LPG stream. The liquid product is conventional gasoline with very low sulphur and low benzene, which can be sold as-is or blended with ethanol, methanol or with petroleum refinery stocks. This minimizes offsite and logistic complexity and investment for synthetic fuel distribution.
Key benefits
(th)
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Make Fuel at Home With Portable DIY Refinery
The MicroFueler weighs about 200 pounds and hooks up to a water and 110 or 220 volt power supply and wastewater drain just like a washing machine. The MicroFueler costs $9,995, although federal tax credits can cut the price to $6,998. Another $16 buys you enough yeast to make about 560 gallons of ethanol, and you'll have to pay for the sugar and water. You'll need as many as 4 gallons of water to make 1 gallon of ethanol.
Well that is not good in a water starved area....
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Seems that the product is not available....
Why can't the US stop soaring oil and gas prices?
sure one would think increasing supply and the price should drop but when demand is still increasing then the supply will still not be enough
Chevron California refinery workers ratify contract; ending strike -sources
Well strikes did not help along with other actions that still are driving the price at the pump up...
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SpaceNut,
After investment dollars dropped to 1/3rd of the dollar figure previously spent on oil / gas drilling activities between 2013 and 2022, wonder of wonders, you start running out of fuel. Many of our energy investors did that because everything was supposed to be powered by "green energy" by now. Ideological beliefs override good common sense that took stock of the achievable "rate of changeover". We have not achieved anything like the transition required for "green energy" to mean anything except "cold, dark, and hungry" for most of its "early adopters". It took 100 years to repower most, but not all, manual labor processes using internal combustion engines. What do you want to wager that it'll take another 100 years to repower most, but not all, of those internal combustion engine vehicles using batteries or solar panels or wind turbines or whatever else that isn't "fossil fuel"?
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Age_of_Oil
thousand of years but considered 1800 due to drilling technology
https://www.vivintsolar.com/learning-ce … lar-energy
The earliest uses of solar power included focusing the sun’s energy through a magnifying glass to start fires for cooking. By the 3rd century B.C., Greeks and Romans bounced sunlight off of “burning mirrors” to light sacred torches for religious ceremonies.
Solar PV (photovoltaic) was first discovered in 1839 by French scientist Edmond Becquerel.
big difference is one works regardless of day or night and ignores all weather conditions.
While I am sort of liking the hybrids today's journey of 80 miles using at a rate of 44.1 mpg of fuel not all is rosy for the EV world.
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SpaceNut,
Thanks for the history lesson, but how does that help us?
As you noted, those photovoltaics don't produce power at night, they have fantastically high input energy requirements per square meter, and there's nowhere close to enough of them to make a minor dent in our total energy demands if we wish to continue living the way we do right now. Basically, photovoltaics and wind turbines and batteries are luxury items that are only somewhat affordable to first-world countries that have a massive surplus of input energy.
Should we "blow harder", or maybe try a different approach?
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Just face all the politicians in the same direction....
The issue is how and when we use energy at what amount is the issue.
Point was the old escape would have required 3 times as many gallons of fuel to achieve both of my trips that I just made with the Prius if not more.
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SpaceNut,
We can't do more things with less energy, because basic physics as we know it, will not allow it. We can use some forms of energy more efficiently, to the extent that our lusting after absolute efficiency doesn't create an even less-sustainable result, but our actual capabilities and methods are still fairly primitive in nature.
This issue, from my perspective, seems to be the total lack of understanding about scaling. You can use solar panels to power a small foam and composite airframe drone-type aircraft. The moment you try to scale that up to something a single human can sit in and use, you wind up with a $70M aircraft with a wingspan greater than an Airbus A380, which cannot actually fly above the stall speed of a Cessna 172 trainer type aircraft that seats two to four people.
Therefore, all beliefs about being able to electrify everything, and somehow drastically increase achieved energy efficiency, are not only misguided but fundamentally wrong. The battery powered trainer-type aircraft cost every bit as much as their internal combustion-engine powered counterparts, but they don't have a fraction of the range or payload capacity for a given weight. This is totally unsurprising to someone such as myself, because aircraft cost (a proxy for labor and energy inputs used to manufacture the aircraft) is very closely tied to weight and number of seats. The same concept applies to land-based motor vehicles, which is why a motorcycle costs less to make / buy / own than a 4-wheeled car.
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The kinetic energy needed to move a mass is well known but that is a mass in motion that also contains the mass of the energy
https://www.omnicalculator.com/physics/kinetic-energy
So while we want to move a mass we must minimize the mass for it to be able to do that work.
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SpaceNut,
I'm already aware of that fact. Science factoid lessons are not an adequate replacement for hydrocarbon fuels containing more than an order of magnitude greater gravimetric and volumetric energy density than batteries.
We keep coming back to this simple point I keep trying to make:
What does an actual solution look like, using technology we actually have?
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Interesting discussion with resource investor Adam Rosencwajg.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=HuTrWZakn-g
Two techie millenials try to discuss facts of life with Peter Zeihan.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=t_gw4eTr-hM
If the world were not in such serious trouble, it might actually be amusing. These two young idealists really think that heavy, battery electric trucks, charged by grid electricity, are going to be able to replace railways. This amounts to replacing an energy efficient long-range transportation option, with a less efficient, short range option, with huge embodied energy in the form of batteries. For all their idealism, they cannot see the physics flaws in their ideas.
There is another mythology that comes to light in their conversations. The idea that advances in communication technology are improving communications to the point that the economy is dematerialising. As if we can somehow negate the need for physical inputs through better communications.
I think this myth emerges because the past thirty years has witnessed impressive improvement in computer and communication technologies and cheap energy has allowed outsourcing of traditional industries. ICT has allowed us to better optimise some economically productive processes. But it sits at the top of a pyramid of infrastructure, all of which needs physical resources and energy to operate. To operate an ICT system, you must first build computers, fibre optic cable networks and the power stations needed to power it. You need to feed the people that build it and use it. You need to mine the materials from which it is made. And at the end of the day, ICT is really all about the more optimal use of physical systems that process energy and materials. These people talk as if the existance of ICT somehow negates the need for physical inputs just because it superficially allows us to better optimise human resources in limited areas. This level of dellusion illustrates a poor understanding of basic physics.
Last edited by Calliban (2022-05-30 08:42:53)
"Plan and prepare for every possibility, and you will never act. It is nobler to have courage as we stumble into half the things we fear than to analyse every possible obstacle and begin nothing. Great things are achieved by embracing great dangers."
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The issue with batteries is the mass to available energy time which it contains. The enemy is the time and speed of energy consumption from it that is the issue. Sure solar power after the systems payback is low for the cost of recharge and that time to recharge is also why we have a heap of batteries in the land fills. The heat of discharge and or recharge is what will kill them if we try to do it to fast as they are not typically design for that.
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They also talk about economic localisation as a means of cutting out the difficulties imposed by maintaining supply chains. That does have some potential benefits. But it also means reduced economies of scale and more limited options in terms of access to physical resources. A localised economy presumably means less availability of Chilean copper, Middle East oil, Chinese and Indian steel, Russian fertiliser, Chinese and Russian rare earths, etc. Either we use much less of these things or find ways of sourcing them locally, presumably at greater cost.
I expect for the average American or European, relocating the manufacturing base to home territories will improve their wages and reduce wage inequality. But some goods will be more expensive if we do this. There will be winners and losers. Overall, nations may end up being poorer, but with a better distribution of wealth remaining. The world does appear to be heading in this direction, albeit slowly, and it is in many ways a better way of doing things. But people that talk about this should realistic about what it is likely to give us and what it may take away.
One thing that I notice about techno utopians is that they tend to talk about the economy and certain innovations in a very generalised way. They talk about the economic value added by things like ICT without really exploring what these things have actually done and how they have done it. They talk about BEV trucks displacing trains, without really understanding why the transport system looks the way it does already. They essentially assume certain things because they want to. It is a classic sign of being guided by an internal mythology, that is then externally justified by arguments that appear rational at a superficial level. They make big assumptions, because it suppirts their argument and fail to properly scrutinise assumptions, because they don't want to.
I remember all of this sort of euphoria around the hydrogen fuel cell mania that emerged in the late 1990s. It burned investment capital and gradually went nowhere for ten years, before being obliterated by the financial tightening of the great recession. Essentially, people were seduced by an elegant idea. Because the idea of a hydrogen economy was attractive to many people on an emotional level, they failed to properly scrutinise problems that undermine the idea. Pyschologists call this Confirmation Bias. Idealists always pour a lot of intellect into rationalising weak ideas that are attractive at an emotional level, and they lack the courage and introspection to face up to weaknesses that undermine cherished concepts. Publicly, they can be very convincing. And they often have qualifications that would suggest that they know better. There will always be suckers that believe them because they want to. But ideas that are fundamentally weak on physics grounds, do not turn into better ideas just because you are good at arguing them. Instead, they turn into bubbles, which then swallow up money from gullible investors, without producing anything practical at the end of them. Gullible investors then loose a fortune when the underlying physics problems that they ignored, undermine their product and reveal it to be weak. The fool and his money are easily parted.
Last edited by Calliban (2022-05-30 09:34:53)
"Plan and prepare for every possibility, and you will never act. It is nobler to have courage as we stumble into half the things we fear than to analyse every possible obstacle and begin nothing. Great things are achieved by embracing great dangers."
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SpaceNut,
The fundamental issue with photovoltaics and wind turbines and batteries is that in present forms they do not work at all when you attempt to scale them up to a human civilization level, because the EROEI is so low that there is zero chance of any economic growth, which is ultimately dependent upon the growth of humanity's energy base. If there's no real economic growth, then all these fantastically expensive electronic devices are not sustainable to produce. You run out of capital or you run out of natural resources, or both at the same time. You could also easily run out of educated and healthy labor required to make all this stuff, even if most parts of the manufacturing process are highly-automated. The notion that the cost of these energy-intensive electronics can continue to decrease over time also begins to violate basic thermodynamics. If your purported solution achieves its efficiency increase / cost decrease by violating those laws, then nobody can help you. Thermodynamics laws are as ironclad as any that we know of.
This a basic math issue, even if that's not what some of you want to hear. The math doesn't work out and I don't know how to make it work. I strongly suspect that it "simply doesn't work", and never will within our lifetimes. I've proved, at least to myself, that this cannot and will not work when we attempt to scale it to a human civilization level. It requires production capacity for critical materials that are well beyond what we can manage. There is one and only one way to use solar energy affordably and sustainably, and that is to use solar thermal power to make a liquid hydrocarbon energy products. This can be done affordably, it does not require any fundamentally new technology or scarce materials, and it can be scaled out to a human civilization level. My selected method is CO2 and sea water recycling into hydrocarbon fuels. My selected input power generating technology will last a human lifetime, as it already has, same as nuclear thermal power. This is long-term sustainable energy production. Producing ever-greater numbers of energy-intensive to make and difficult-to-recycle electronic devices is not long-term sustainable. I realize that this requires quite a bit of ideological adjustment for some of our ideologues, but CO2 recycling is a win-win for both the economy and environment.
I've already shown how Germany would require 1,550% of their installed wind and solar generating capacity in order to truly get all of their energy from "renewable energy". We know full well how expensive and energy-intensive that would be, in order to create the additional generating capacity. We also know that that level of over-consumption of natural resources is grossly unsustainable when applied at a human civilization scale. There's not enough Cobalt, Nickel, Copper, or any of the various other raw ingredients to make that work. Worse still, the CO2 emissions that would be associated with trying to carry forward with an unworkable plan are astronomical. My plan is not to explode our CO2 emissions on false premises, it's not to over-consume scarce and energy-intensive resources, and it's not to create an even less-sustainable "way of life" for those of us here in The West, at the expense of impoverished people around the world.
I've already told you and others here what "right looks like". If you don't invest in nuclear, and I'm tired of beating that dead horse, then you invest in solar thermal power to gradually draw-down CO2 emissions over the next 100 years by turning all that CO2 into high-value saleable products, namely liquid hydrocarbon fuels and advanced structural materials such as Carbon Fiber and CNT (a form of "Carbon Sequestration" that actually makes money and reduces energy requirements over time, as more structures are made lighter, rather than costing money). As a bonus, you also gradually acquire the surplus of metals required to electrify most forms of transport, namely Lithium and Magnesium. You also rapidly acquire a thermal energy storage medium, in the form of salts harvested from the oceans. This is the only method that improves the economy, because it improves access to cheap and abundant energy sources that can get you to where you say you want to go. We need a lot of steel and concrete for the fuels synthesis plant, but these materials are abundant, relatively low-cost, and we're still not talking about much material relative to what we produce every year.
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I'm less certain about the solar thermal fuel factory idea now. I calculated the amount of steel needed in the post below, based upon the assumption that the factories could generate synthetic fuel with equal efficiency to electrical power. This allowed a direct read across from the DoE data.
http://newmars.com/forums/viewtopic.php … 94#p194894
This gave a figure of just over 4 billion tonnes of steel, about 2.2 years of global production, to produce factories that would produce 100% of the world's diesel for 40 years. So that would work out at 5-6% of 2019 global steel production on a sustainable basis. But, my assumption about efficiency turned out to be optimistic. The Prometheus Fuels process requires that we first generate hydrogen (70-80% efficient) and then use it to chemically reduce CO2 into alcohols, which then react over a zeolite catalyst to yield hydrocarbons.
This whole process will be 50% efficient at best. So the reality is that replacing the world's diesel production for 40 years will require 4.4 years of global steel production, or about 11% per year once we have built up volumes. It may still be doable if we recycle most steel. But we still need coal or some other energy source to make the steel. If that energy source is not coal, but also needs to be sourced from solar thermal, then you need even more steel to make the steel. And this is before we factor in all of the other non-diesel energy needs of the economy.
The problem with solar thermal is that power density, whilst better than PV, is still low compared to fossil energy sources. The fact that most of the components of solar thermal are recyclable is a boon that may make the difference between being viable and non-viable on a resource level. I suggest that solar thermal be coupled with wind power which has better power density overall and also different seasonal availability. Producing a 50/50 mix of wind and solar electricity reduces total metal requirements by about 30% compared to solar thermal alone and should result in a more smoothed input power to the fuel factory. This is especially the case if the molten salt energy store can be fitted with heating elements to absorb excess wind based electricity. We want the capacity factor of the fuel factory to be as close to 100% as possible.
Last edited by Calliban (2022-05-30 10:20:33)
"Plan and prepare for every possibility, and you will never act. It is nobler to have courage as we stumble into half the things we fear than to analyse every possible obstacle and begin nothing. Great things are achieved by embracing great dangers."
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posting on nuclear life seems dismal at best of just 40 years even when all of the unit is kept up to operational standards.
Weighing that against solar lasting 20 years is not any better. With Batteries lasting possibly 10 at best.
So all we are then comparing is cost to set each up and replacement when they are done being usable.
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Calliban,
Can you show your work in your calculations?
In reference to your post that you linked to, if 5,920t of steel used in solar trough type concentrators produces 1TWh of electricity per year and diesel provided 17,100TWh of energy per year. At 100% conversion efficiency, which I am well aware that we will never achieve, we would require 101,232,000t of steel.
5,920t of steel per TWh per year * 17,100TWh per year (energy supplied by diesel fuel) = 101,232,000t of steel
If our process is only 50% efficient overall, then 101,232,000t * 2 = 202,464,000t of steel (to produce 17,100TWh of diesel per year)
That's still a lot of steel, no doubt about it, but it's nowhere close to 4 billion tons. It's about 10% of one year's worth of steel production. Spread over 40 years, it's 0.0025% of total global production. The alternative to not having diesel fuel is much much worse, so this is still a relative bargain, even if the steel becomes more expensive over time. After 40 years, we can presumably recycle most of that steel into new solar trough concentrators.
National average steel price per ton in America is $220 per ton, as of 05/30/2022. America is also very well-known for making every type of product more expensive than it needs to be.
202,464,000t * $220 = $44,542,080,000USD
$45B USD, at current US steel prices. Spread across the entire world, that is a pitiful amount of money. America and China are the largest consumers of all types of fuels, so most of the price tag would be absorbed by their economies. Africa could also become opulently wealthy as a function of their proximity to the Sahara, so maybe their brain power could be devoted to better solutions about one generation down the line. In the US federal government's yearly budget, that amount of money would be considered "noise", especially over 40 years. It is noise when compared to our yearly GDP. We could take some of the money we printed but still haven't spent on COVID relief and provide economic relief for all those middle class Americans that said money was supposed to go to, but didn't. This problem of diesel depletion is a minor annoyance that brute force will overcome.
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Kbd512,
Here is the link to my calculations.
http://newmars.com/forums/viewtopic.php … 91#p194891
To produce 1TWh per year requires 233,000 tonnes steel. Divide that by an assumed 40 year lifespan and you get 5825 tonne per TWh. Multiply 5825 by 17,100 and you get just shy of 100 million tonnes of steel needed per year to replace worn out plants with a total of 4 billion tonnes of embodied steel.
However, this initial estimate failed to include the energy losses in manufacture of synthetic hydrocarbons, which are about 50% efficient at converting electric power into stored chemical energy. So the total steel needed is about 8 billion tonnes for 100% of global diesel production, with about 200 million tonnes used every year in a steady state replacement scenario. I think it is achievable. But it is a major undertaking. It is about the amount of steel used each year, to make all of the worlds vehicles; road, rail and shipping. But it is still only 11% of total steel production as of 2019. We could build up synthetic diesel production at a rate sufficient to avoud supply disruptions, without requiring huge increases in glibal steel production or prices.
Last edited by Calliban (2022-05-30 11:34:32)
"Plan and prepare for every possibility, and you will never act. It is nobler to have courage as we stumble into half the things we fear than to analyse every possible obstacle and begin nothing. Great things are achieved by embracing great dangers."
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Calliban,
I still think something is off with your math.
At 20% thermal-to-electrical conversion efficiency, 1km^2 of panel surface area (photovoltaic or solar thermal trough) generates about 2.4TWh per year.
17,100TWh / 2.4TWh = 7,125km^2, or 84.4km per side.
4,048,000,000t of steel / 7,125km^2 = 568,140t per square kilometer / 0.56814t per square meter.
568.14kg of steel per square meter of collector area?
Even with the collector tube, space frame support structure, and a steel-reinforced concrete foundation, that figure seems astonishingly high to me. That means each square meter of collector area requires the same amount of Iron as a pair of Chevrolet 454 Big Blocks.
What are we talking about building here, a massive electric generating plant or a synthetic fuel plant?
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Let us assume an annual solar flux of 2500kWh per year where we build our solar power station. Peak sun on Earth surface at noon, at the equator, is about 1000W/m2. With perfect atmospheric clarity with no clouds or dust, you therefore get just over 8kWh/m2/day and about 3000kWh/m2-year. So a flux of 2500kWh/m2-year in the desert regions of the US is probably about right.
Let us assume a 20% conversion efficiency from thermal power into electrical power. That means each square metre of reflector will produce 500kWh of electric power. To produce 1TWh per year (1000,000,000kWh) we therefore need 2 million square metres of reflector panels. The actual area covered by the plant will be more, because the panels must avoid shadowing. According to the DoE estimates, a power plant producing 1TWh per year, will need 233,000 tonnes of steel. That is 117kg per square metre of collector area.
I don't think that is an unrealistic estimate. It includes the reflectors themselves and the support frames; heat transfer pipework and generation plant. The average car contains about 1000kg of cast iron and steel. So a single square metre of collector is about 1/9th of a cars worth of steel.
To make synthetic fuels, you must first make electricity. You must then use electricity to electrolyse water into hydrogen, which then reduces CO2 into methanol. That is how the prometheus process appears to work. The neat thing about it is that methanol synthesis takes place within the electrolysis cell at the cathode. That is neat, because it avoids having to put H2 and CO2 into a seperate chemical reactor. But that saves capital cost rather than energy cost.
The only alternative method of producing the H2 required, is some sort of thermochemical process. There are a number of possible processes. But they typically require much higher temperatures than the 400°C that is achievable using trough solar collectors.
Last edited by Calliban (2022-05-30 13:50:23)
"Plan and prepare for every possibility, and you will never act. It is nobler to have courage as we stumble into half the things we fear than to analyse every possible obstacle and begin nothing. Great things are achieved by embracing great dangers."
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https://www.carboncommentary.com/blog/2 … on-economy
https://www.energy.gov/eere/fuelcells/h … ectrolysis
it appears that the electrical power is converted to only 80% of it in hydrogen produced.
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A more efficient use for electric power generated by your solar thermal plants, would be to power electrified freight railways using a 30kV catenary system. For every 100kWh generated by your power plants, 5 - 10 would be lost in transmission and the AC motors on the train can be 90% efficient. So 80% of the power generated by the powerplant would reach the train wheels as mechanical power. That is a four fold improvement on attempting to power the train using synthetic diesel.
This isn't to say its bad idea to produce synthetic diesel, as there are a lot of applications that simply cannot run on direct electric. We established that well enough innour discussions on cables connected vehicles in the planetary transport topic. But for freight transportation over land and between regional hubs, it is very hard to beat the energy efficiency of rail, especially electrified rail. The best part of any sustainable transport initiative for USA would look at ways of extending and electrifying America's rail freight network. Battery electric road trucks are a solution that is only suitable for short ranges, due to the inherently poor energy density of batteries. But that becomes less problematic if railways can deliver freight to regional hubs. BEV or diesel trucks then only need a range of fifty miles to take freight from the hub to distributed customers. We probably want smaller trucks for that job. Large industrial customers will probably have tgeir own dedicated rail freight depots.
Electric transportation has been a part of most major economies for a long time. But that transportation has been largely rail based until very recently. Conveyors and cable ways were secondary niche electric transportation systems over short distances. No one took the idea of a battery powered truck seriously until recently. For the very good reason that it would be utterly unsuitable for anything other than short range distribution. For some reason the more sensible and demonstrated option of electric railways are beneath the tech utopian radar. Maybe they are just too 'last century' to be exciting to them.
Last edited by Calliban (2022-05-30 14:49:50)
"Plan and prepare for every possibility, and you will never act. It is nobler to have courage as we stumble into half the things we fear than to analyse every possible obstacle and begin nothing. Great things are achieved by embracing great dangers."
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Natural from oil created vs synthetic comes down to a gallon per gallon cost total for all processes and where is that break point for where one is more expensive as compared to the other under inflation conditions.
https://afdc.energy.gov/fuels/prices.html
https://dieselnet.com/tech/fuel_synthetic.php
http://egon.cheme.cmu.edu/Papers/Mertin … hgrass.pdf
Optimal use of Hybrid feedstock, Switchgrass and Shale gas, for the Simultaneous Production of Hydrogen and Liquid Fuels
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Calliban,
I see what I did wrong. I was using the Wh/m^2/year that the Earth receives at TOA. That's what always happens when I go from memory, rather than re-verifying what numbers I'm using.
17,100TWh * 2km^2 per TWh = 34,200km^2
34,200km^2 * 1,000,000m^2 per km^2 * 117kg = 4,001,400,000,000kg / 4,001,400,000t
However, I also note that we keep fixating on producing electricity, which is not all or even most of the energy input into the fuel synthesis process. A standard "nothing special" trough-type solar concentrator converts about 70% of the energy it receives into heat. Our steel requirement is then 1.6 billion tons. It's probably less than that since we're not attempting to convert most of the heat into electricity. The US only uses about 20% of the world's energy supply, so I presume we would need 320 million tons of steel. However, 1.6 billion tons over 40 years 40,000,000t per year. That seems doable.
Around 90% of the total global energy consumption is supplied in the form of heat energy, so if we supply all of our gasoline / diesel / kerosene from endlessly sustainable sources, then that pretty much covers everything worth mentioning. We still need electricity, but if we can supply all of our fuels from scratch, then that's pretty much the entire shooting match.
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