Okay, folks! About this carbon thing that seems to get the Lefties and the environmentalist whackos (usually, but not always the same group) in an uproar, did you NOT pay attention in science classes? Or did they water things down when we weren’t looking?
In case you’ve missed the announcement, we’re carbon-based life forms. Us. Human beings. And bigger surprise, so is EVERY other living thing on the planet. And every thing that USED to live.
Most current scientific thought calls our major sources of energy “fossil fuels” meaning that they derive from the carcasses of critters long past. Now, back to that chemistry class you dodged in high school: Most fuels (well ALL of the commercially viable ones) contain some amount of carbon. Why? Because it’s an excellent source of energy. You can dig it out of the ground, or pump it out, and with varying amounts of processing you can do wonders with it, from heating homes to making electricity, running planes, trains and automobiles, and it’s also the building block of civilization.
Building block? Yep! The wonderful carbon atom combines with other molecules to make plastics, drugs, dyes and things, many of which there is NO “organic” substitute.
Why did I put “organic” in quotes? Because, friend, the classic definition of “organic” is “carbon-based” just like all life on this planet.
Think about it. What’s the “organic” equivalent of, say, vinyl? Leather? Let’s talk about leather. I used to be stationed in Mainz, Germany. Across the river was a big factory for the German company UHU, known for its glues. The factory processed animal hides for glue, and when the wind was right in the summertime, the phrase “smells bad enough to make a maggot puke” comes to mind. Such is the case with leather. And leather can be processed but much of the durability of modern leather footwear comes from synthetics like rubber soles and polyester stitching, etc. Besides, leather supplies are tied directly into the number of animals produced. Sure, there’s enough leather right now, but what if we do away with synthetics, because they’re made with those horrible chemicals? People still need shoes and belts. And there’s a leather shortage because we don’t raise THAT many cattle.
Fuels? You are talking here to a guy who’s been on the periphery of the use of various hydrogen streams as fuels on an industrial scale. One plant I worked with used waste gas from its process. In short, the production of carbon black gave the primary product, amorphous particulate carbon, and a gas stream of nitrogen and hydrogen. We built a couple of boilers that would burn that waste gas to product 100,000 pounds per hour (if I remember correctly) of steam at 600 PSI. That’s a pretty decent amount of energy for “free” since absent burning the stuff in a boiler it was just discharged into the atmosphere. That worked, at least until the contaminates in that waste gas corroded the tubes out of the boilers.
My second foray into burning hydrogen was at a whopping big chemical plant where hydrogen was generated as a result of breaking salt water down into caustic soda and chlorine. Your high school chemistry class will tell you that you generate hydrogen from this process, and tons of it per day just went off into the atmosphere. Somebody got the bright idea to use the hydrogen as a fuel to fire a couple of gas turbines to make electricity. Sadly, it never worked. Hydrogen is energy, but not very dense energy. Trying to stuff enough into a gas turbine to generate 80 million watts of electricity just never happened. We ended up giving the hydrogen away for a while to a company that took that free stuff and reacted it with nitrogen from the atmosphere, also free, and made ammonia which was useful and could be sold. Apparently THAT venture turned out to be a loser too, because the plant that did that is no longer in operation.
To get enough hydrogen to run the internal combustion engine in your car, you have to store it in high pressure tanks at thousands of pounds of pressure. If Detroit couldn’t stop the stupid little sheet metal tank of the Pinto from exploding, are you REALLY going to trust them to make a hydrogen tank that is good for six thousand pounds per square inch? Oh, yeah, I HEARD about some of the exotic storage methods that work in the lab. They’ll be on your dealer’s showroom floor about the same time as those unicorns.
The truth, sadly, is that right now, the internal combustion engine and liquid hydrocarbon fuels are the ONLY viable technology.
What about electric cars? What about ’em? Present battery technologies do NOT support 200 miles at freeway speeds for two people and luggage. Fifty or a hundred miles, just maybe. That takes care of a short commute and a trip to the grocery on the way home every day. And then you have to plug it in and recharge it. And where, dear reader, does that electricity come from? 77% of it comes from powerplants that burn those nasty hydrocarbons like coal, oil and natural gas. Another 10% comes from nuclear, and 7% comes from hydro, you know, those dams that are killing our rivers? And when you plug in your eco-friendly electric car, that’s where the electricity comes from. Except for the 7% that’s lost in the lines bringing it to your house. Short answer? If everybody goes to electric cars, we’re gonna need more electricity. And right now, more electricity is going to take more carbon.
Yes, there are ways to “sequester” the carbon dioxide produced by combustion so that it doesn’t go into the atmosphere. You can take it out. I’ve read of schemes to inject it into the earth. yeah, that’ll work. The “earth” is not an a perfect storage place. things injected have a way of showing back up. Not to mention that the method for stripping the carbon dioxide out of the exhaust stream is going to take energy. There’s that pesky “efficiency” thing.
“Efficiency” works like this, in simple terms. Let’s say that the object is to heat a room. It takes, for our example, a thousand BTU’s. (A BTU, British Thermal Unit, is the amount of energy it takes to heat (or cool) a pound of water one degree. A thousand BTU’s is a bit over a fourth of a kilowatt-hour of electricity. It’s also basically equiavlent to the energy of one cubic foot of natural gas at atmospheric pressure. Or a sixth of a pound of hardwood. Or 1/125th of a gallon of gasoline. If you burned that fule in the room and captured all the energy. Now, let’s do it with electricity. Generating the electricity from fuel costs you 10%. That means that NOW you need 1100 BTU’s. Getting it from the generation station to your house takes another 7%. Now you’re up to 1177 BTU’s. And your electric heater is 85% efficient. So there’s another 15% lost, so in order to heat the room, you have to burn 0ver 1300 BTU’s at the powerplant. And that’s for heat. and it doesn’t talk about the energy it took to get the energy to the power plant. All those huge motors I talk about with their thousands of horsepower chugging away day after day? those are part of the energy equation to heat a house in Michigan, folks. Not unicorn farts. Infrastructure. That uses energy.
Now, let’s go get us some “pie in the sky”, those wonderfully efficient electric cars. Same thing goes to get electricity to those cars. Except we add another little inefficiency: charging batteries. An electrical storage battery is the same as your gas tank. You have to put energy into a battery just like you have to fill your gas tank. However, when you go to fill your gas tank, every gallon you suck out of the gas pump goes into your tank. When you plug in your eco-mobile, though, more watts (BTU’s) goes INTO the charger and battery than you can get out. On standard lead-acid batteries you have to put a hundred and forty watts in to get a hundred watts out, and that doesn’t count what you lose as heat in the charger itself. Basically what this ends up doing is making somebody burn twice as much energy at the powerplant as you actually USE in your eco-mobile. Trendy, maybe, but wise, nope.
The whole energy/carbon/ecology discussion is filled with little corners of knowledge like these that I’ve just dipped into briefly. Many of us out here in the blue states know about this stuff and we know how bad policy, based on bad science is going to hurt this country.
Folks, another thing to consider is that energy, synonymous with carbon, already costs. You pay for it. The people who run the factory have to pay for it to give you what you want, and YOU pay for the energy. And now Obama and the eco-whackos are trying to make it more expensive to USE energy. and guess who will pay. Can YOU afford it?
Amen.
GREAT article.
A couple of nits to pick… We actually get about 20%, not 10% of our electricity from nuclear power. Also, about the best thermal efficiency you will get in any electric generating plant is ~40%, give or take a few percent. Thus, to get your 1000 BTU’s from electricity, you will have to burn approximately 2500 BTU’s worth of fuel, Then when you take line losses and conversion inefficiencies into account, you are up around 3000+ BTU’s. Electricity is a very costly way to make heat.
Well, you ask, what about solar power. We have that big fat free sun up there in the sky all day – why not use it? Well, Buckey, good ol’ Sol puts about 1 kw/meter2 on the Earth’s surface per day. For simplification, let’s just say 1000 watts per sq. yard. When you work out the math, correcting of course for conversion inefficiencies again (the 1st Law of Thermodynamics is an unforgiving bitch!), we find that it will take several square miles covered with solar collectors to capture enough energy to replace that pesky 1000 MWe electric plant down there that puts out so much carbon. Oh, by the way, solar plants don’t work so well at night – there’s no sun if you recall, so I guess we need to triple the size of that solar plant and add a big buncha batteries to store the electricity for nighttime. Suddenly, natural gas and coal don’t look so bad.
Jeez, I just wish that those fools that came up with “Cap and Tax” had to pass a Thermodynamics 101 course before they were allowed to foist off their idiocy on an uneducated public…
Distributed PV generation (home rooftops) makes the math a little better but still pretty expensive/KW. Not so much here in the Southwest but still… Big PV plants ramping up in China with current panel costs of $4/watt projected to head south of $1/watt. That’s an interesting prospect.
Me? I just wanna build me a serial hybrid electric pickup with a woodgas generator in the back to provide generator fuel. :-)
Lefties would fail thermodynamics class, just as they fail anything to do with science! They also don’t seem to be good at math or economics, what with the way they think they can promise the moon to everyone without having to pay for it.
Is there any hard science academic subject that lefties are good at? (No, sorry, lying is not actually a hard science.)
–chiopanther
This is why they are liberal politicians instead of engineers, or any other sort of people who actually have to work for a living.
None thing is free, in energy or economics but a lot of idiots don’t know that.
Heinlein said it best about 50 years ago.
TANSTAAFL
There aint no such thing a a free lunch.
Great post, but as chicopanther noted the Left will never buy it.
But maybe, just maybe someone will come along and embrace a bit of education.
I don’t agree with your premise on rejecting an H2 powered vehicle.
In other words, I’m pretty sure it will be the way we end up (many, many years from now) powering vehicles. Gasoline is pretty explosive, too, as you noted re the Pinto. People already run propane, etc. Yeah, H2 must have a good container because of the pressure. So?
A bunch of pointy head engineers will knock that out in a few years of hacking away at it. I have absolute faith in their/our ingenuity and persistance and, most importantly, the necessity of a mobile power source. Necessity is the mother, right?
It’ll just take more time than quite a few of us have left here on this earth before it becomes viable.
Carbon emissions = bad, but pay enough $ make’s it ok. Same as murder = bad, but pay enough $ it’s ok. Oops, OJ already proved that… SLEEP possum SLEEP!!!
jdallen, there is nothing that tricky about storing high pressure (or for that mater liquid) Hydrogen. It has been done fairly commonly for at least half a century, and less commonly for half a century before that. The problem is these containers are effectively bombs waiting to go off, hence the hazmat signs on trucks carrying welding gas, etc. Sure these tanks are big and massively over built for most situations, that is the tanks we have today, however they are VERY heavy, and do still fail, imagine the light weight tanks that will be needed for automobile use. Have you ever seen the emergency response to a traffic accident with a fire where a vehicles was carrying gas cylinders, you will note it often involves firemen standing back maybe spraying some water in the general direction, and mostly waiting for things to cook off. There is a reason for this, they know they are dealing with bombs that may blow at any moment, and not in a big colorful woooosh like a typical gasoline tank. Now can you imagine life where every major traffic accident has a stay back 500 feet exclusion zone and all that goes with it?
Damned laws of physic always seem to prove that unicorn farts aren’t a viable form of energy. Maybe it’s going to take more wind farms and unicorn logistics. We can point their butts at the windmills, use the farts to turn the blades, and recover the valuable farts to burn in our automobiles. Call it a perpetual motion machine. The only drawback is finding enough rainbows to feed the unicorns. We can overcome this problem with hope and manipulation of the weather. Somebody help me with a grant. I figure it will take about a half billion for the feasability study.
Ike & Jess–
My sentiments exactly. Flaming gasoline is pretty bad stuff, but if you’ve ever seen the aftermath of a high pressure cylinder of gas ruptured by accidnet, it’s a whole new world. It brings a new level of fatality to a car wreck, not to mention, as Ike says, the idea that I’m a firefighter showing up at an accident expecting to water down a fuel spill and the wreck involves a 3000 PSI tank of hydrogen waiting to pop a relief valve or just rupture outright. ‘Nother angle: hydrogen burning the the daylight is essentially invisible. Your only hope is that the hydrogen flame involves some carboniferous material to give flame some color, otherwise you walk right into it.
Some of the hydride absorption schemes work well in labs but don’t seem to scale real well.
Besides, where are you going to get all that hydrogen? The majority of hydrogen in commercial quantities today comes from hydrocarbons. You still have to get rid of the carbon.
And it’s yet another thing for Bubba to pull up with seven thousand gallons of gasoline and drop a nozzle into a hole in the ground and fill up the storage tank at a gas station. Handling high pressure hydrogen is a different world. Yeah, we do high pressures all the time at refineries and such, but how much of that expertise are you going to be able to bring to bear at Billy-Bob’s gas and grocery in Piney-Woods, Mississippi?
As the saying goes: “I smell catastrophe upon the wind.”
MC
Sure bring stuff like basic chemistry and economics 101 into the arguement. All you have to do is is believe in hope and change and everything will be all right. SARCASM alert.
I graduated from HS 21 years ago. I remember my econ class well, a large number had a hard time grasping the basics of supply and demand.
Hydrogen? One word – Hindenburg. As soon as it is uttered, the Lefties will ban Hydrogen cars. It will be the association of words, even before the reality. Or try the two words – Hydrogen Bomb. – Yes, you and I both know its not the same thing? but will the hippies know. Hydrogen will e banned faster than carbon.
You left out the fact that we’re already pushing the limits of our power grid, and that’s BEFORE we have everybody plugging in huge 220 or 3-phase chargers at night.
Solar? Sure. No output at night, when everyone will be charging these things. Batteries? Consider the aforegoing efficiency info, then bear in mind you’ve got losses from charging the “solar” batteries, more losses converting back to AC, then more again to charge the car. If you’re lucky you MIGHT get 20% of the PV output into the car.
Personally, I think a propane/NG-powered generator might be the best option for charging these cars, this could even be built-in, and allow plugging in a small BBQ tank for emergency “get me home” situations.
Methanol/Ethanol is probably the best option for “alternative fuel” but making it from FOOD is insane. I’ve read of chemical/industrial processes that would allow them to make basically everything we now make from petroleum from CO2 pulled out of the air – thus also helping to remove the “pollution.” I don’t agree with the whole GW/CO2 nonsense, I’m just sayin’…
Bottom line is that we have an awful lot of INFRASTRUCTURE work to do before we can even begin to THINK about this…
Doesn’t matter – we’ll still bulldoze full-steam-ahead, blow out a bunch of electric cars with no supporting infrastructure, then the whole thing will die for lack of necessary infrastructure.
In other words, this is just another example of demmunist wishful thinking which we’ll all end up paying for…
DD
I am surprized at you guys. I know as much about dealing with compressed gas as most of you – I used H2, etc., for 30 years doing chromatography and other stuff. They fretted over the same problems regarding gasoline tanks. It is only an engineering problem and if we want to solve an engineering problem – we (humanity) don’t seem to have failed very often in the last couple thousand years.
It is also an engineering problem when you go to extract H2 from water via electrolysis. Not the doing of it, that’s simple. It’s dealing with the scale and corrosion of the equipment. Things we do with varying levels of success all the time in the chemical industry. You guys all know that if you are in that field. Sure, it’s a pain. But it is done, all the time.
Burning petroleum is just wasting it, when you can use it to make stuff – meaning almost everything and anything. And when it gets to a certain financial tipping point and we have to have a mobile power source of SOME sort – we’ll frikkin’ do something else. No matter what.
I could easily be wrong on H2 – that’s just my guess as to the possible solution. I’ll never see it, or any other viable substitute for gasoline/diesel/hydrocarbon gas, because I am way too old. But I guarantee that a thousand pounds of batteries in your trunk, that won’t run 85 MPH from Big Spring to Lubbock will never go over.
Not going to get quite as techical as the other posts, as I’m not qualified.
However, you echo my sentiments exactly about the electric cars. I’ve been trying to square how they can can be considered eco-friendly, when the folks that are running them are probably paying for electricity from coal powered plants? I’d like a look at their electric bills, too. Eco-friendly my @ss.