Better All the Time #32

By | January 30, 2008
17 Comments

Are you as sick of election coverage as we are?

Well, take heart. There are only 10 months left until the presidential election! So if you’d like something else to think about in the mean time, may we suggest these nine positive developments on the energy front?

No need to thank us — it’s all in a day’s work here at The Speculist.

  • Om3g488

    In numbers 5, 6 and 7 hydrogen is basically named the fuek of the future. But my question is “Where is all this hydrogen going to come from?”. As far as I know hydrogen is not available on earth unless you break apart water molecules; which requires the buring of fossil fuels to do so. Also if we keep using our water to make hydrogen won’t there eventually be a shortage of water?

  • Phil Bowermaster

    We’re hardly touting hydrogen as the “fuel of the future,” rather noting that it might have an important role to play in storing and transporting energy. It’s more like “the battery of the future,” or maybe just “a battery of the future.”

    Producing hydrogen doesn’t require burning fossil fuels if you use nuclear or solar power to break up the water molecules.

    As for running out of water — I don’t know, that’s a good question. I know that water is one of the by-products of using hydrogen power, but I’m not sure how much is lost in the process. Seems like we would have to be using masssive amounts of the stuff before it would mae a dent, however.

  • Stephen Gordon

    More energy goes into making a AA battery than you ever get out of it too. But we buy those things by the gross because portable power is very useful.

    Hydrogen could be like that. The question is, will it be the best possibility? None of us know yet, so we don’t need to count anything out yet. Let everything compete in the market and may the best techs win.

    I do have one prediction about hydrogen. We will find much more efficient ways to get it than water electrolysis. For example, green plants get hydrogen from water as part of the process of photosynthesis. This is done very efficiently (and why would nature bother to get hydrogen from water if hydrogen were useless?). We are beginning to understand how this works and we might use that method to get hydrogen.

    Or, we might use John Kazius’ microwave method.

    The point is that we have this huge network of potential possibilities – and hydrogen is just one of them. Some of these possibilities pay off big, some are dead ends, and many payback in some weird way we never expected. This is Spock’s chessboard in action.

  • Phil Ammar

    I have one comment about item #1. While I think developing biofuel is an excellent idea as oil supplies grow tighter every year, I don’t really find it any more attractive than regular petrol as an environmental solution. Biofuels will still release carbon into the atmosphere if burnt – they wouldn’t to the same degree (methane notwithstanding) if they were sequestered in a landfill somewhere. I think biofuels are at best a stopgap measure to get us through to the time when nuclear power, fusion preferably, comes of age and supplies are sufficient to fully power purely electric vehicles.

  • newscaper

    I’ve got one giant objection — even when(if) possible, the “pure electric car economy” is a terrible idea in the real world.

    Why?

    You’re f***ed when the grid is down for long — that’s coming from someone living in hurricane country.

    All-electrics are fine as 2nd or 3rd family cars, but every family should have either liquid fueled car or a hybrid as their mainstay.

    Ideally this would be a plug-in hybrid (with hopefully cheaper, longer lasting batteries) that can run on Zubrin’s flexfuel concept (gas & ethanol plus adding methanol as an overlooked option) or diesel (with a biodiesel fallback).
    Better yet, do as some military concept vehicles are doing and add an *out* plug. Presto – every family has a backup generator of sorts for a $100 option.

    You have to think about natural disasters and civil defense.

  • Stephen Gordon

    Newscaper:

    You might be right. Plug-in hybrids might not be the bridge to EV’s as some (not Phil… but some) have suggested.

    A car that can run EV most of the time but still burn some form of liquid fuel when necessary might turn out to be superior to a pure EV. Options are good.

    But it could go the other way:

    Why is liquid fuel valuable? Because it doesn’t take long to refuel and we already have the infrastructure. But what if, after a few years of plug-in dominance, quick charge tech is developed to the point that fuel stations start becoming quick charge stations?

    If you can refuel just as fast with electric as with liquid fuel, and you can get the same range from a full battery as a full tank, and electric is just as readily available as liquid fuel (because our gas stations have had the time to convert to electric stations) – why haul around a heavy, unnecessary internal combustion engine?

    But that step could be years away. Plug-in hybrids are right around the corner.

  • newscaper

    “But what if, after a few years of plug-in dominance, quick charge tech is developed to the point that fuel stations start becoming quick charge stations?”

    When an area has no power (grid damaged/down), gasoline (or other fuel) can be trucked in from places outside the disaster zone to replenish gas stations (which, BTW supply people’s home generators as well as vehicles). One issue these last few years of big storms was that, w/o power, too many stations had gas but no way to pump it — hence regulations to start requiring stations to have their own generators.

    I think a scheme by which electricity could somehow be “trucked in” to charging stations is extremely unlikely. Perhaps you have the e-stations keep much larger generating capacity (expensive since unneeded most of the time!) if the grid is knocked out — but then you’re back to trucking in fuel, IOW back where we started.

    Pure e-cars are totally dependent, at the mercy of centralization. Everything else about modern tech empowering people stems from growing DE-centralization (or at least pushing it much further back upstream). Hybrid 2.0 (or 3.0) decentralizes electric generating capacity, at least as a fall back.

    Now if every charging station had their own Toshiba pocket nuke reactor… :)

  • http://cumulativemodel.blogpsot.com aaron

    Om3g488,

    It’s my understanding that hydrogen can be extracted directly from fossil fuels cheaply and easily through chemical processes, we simply build hydrogen extraction plants instead of new refineries.

    Some people have suggested burning it will suck the O2 out of the air though, since H2O doesn’t break back down like CO2 etc.

  • Right Wing Nutter

    Regarding H2 production, take a look here (I don’t think I can insert links here so assemble the url as required.

    http://www1.eere.energy.gov/
    hydrogenandfuelcells/
    production/
    current_technology.html

    There are some low energy H2 production methods coming up that should be ready by the time the infrastructure is ready to use it.

    Note to Phil Ammar:
    Burning bio-fuels releases CO2 into the atmosphere, yes. However that CO2 came from the atmosphere when growing the biomass and will be used again to grow more biomass. It isn’t “fossil” CO2 such as that released by burning coal, oil, and natural gas. Furthermore, converting biomass to alcohol keeps it from naturally producing methane, a far more potent greenhouse gas, as well as CO2.

  • Jim Strickland

    Given sufficient battery capacity, having electricity trucked in is entirely reasonable. This is analogous to people who have their heating oil or propane trucked in once or twice a season. It’s all about the capacity and cost of storage vs the cost of direct delivery. When calculating the latter cost, don’t forget to include the cost of energy lost to resistance in transmission lines, and the vulnerability thereof.

    -Jim

  • Right Wing Nutter

    Re. solar power

    Photovoltaic (PV) panels have some advantages over reflector (aka solar concentrator) installations such as the one pictured, but energy density is not one of them. Current reflector installations (in service for about 20 years) produce about 7x the energy for the amount of area covered as current PV technology. If you want to power the air conditioners of a city on a hot day, solar concentration is the way to go.

    The PV advantage is no moving parts, portability, and it can be used in small applications. PV technology is getting more efficient and cheaper and will have a place in lots of portable applications for the foreseeable future.

  • newscaper

    “Given sufficient battery capacity, having electricity trucked in is entirely reasonable.”

    Dirt cheap air travel is also “reasonable” when anti-gravity is perfected :)

    Silliness aside, yes, true massive breakthroughs in “battery” storage capacity/density and life of charge would be paradigm-shifting.
    If you can predict twhen that will actually happen… well we could all be rich.

    What is practical and doable in the next, say, ten years?

  • Stephen Gordon

    Newscaper:

    Plug-in hybrids.

    That’s what we’ll be experimenting with over the next decade or so.

    I’m sure we’ll try all sorts of variations on the plug-in hybrid tune:

    Plug-in gas hybrids
    Plug-in diesel hybrids
    Plug-in flex fuel hybrids

    And those three varieties will be tried in serial and parallel versions. Serial is where the gas engine drives the wheels directly when necessary.

    Parallel means that the internal combustion engine never directly powers the vehicle. Instead, it charges the batteries. The vehicle is being pushed by electric at all times.

  • Phil Ammar

    Right Wing Nutter,

    Thanks for addressing my main concern about biofuel. I guess since the carbon in biofuel is already part of the carbon cycle, it makes less of an impact than bringing in ‘fresh’ carbon that has been out of the cycle for some time.

  • Far_Fetcher

    Hydrogen will be produced in a way that might surprise the Greens. Although touted as an emission free, carbon neutral fuel, hydrogen has to come from somewhere, and cracking it by using expensive electric power is not economically feasible. Google “Hydrogen Production by Coal Gasification” for the insight on the near future of hydrogen energy.

  • KEXSMALERAK

    Hello. :)

    Martha Louise, who is the only daughter of King Harald and Queen Sonja, gave up the title of ‘royal highness’ upon her 2002 marriage to writer Ari, and has a reputation for not standing on ceremony.
    Bye.

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