Right now we’re in the giddy early phases of The War Against Oil.
The best analogy for my money are the early months of America’s Civil War, where young men both North and South were signing-on as volunteers as quick as they could be taken, and the prediction was made (by a Southern gentleman) that the war would spill no more blood than could be mopped up in a handkerchief.
What we’re seeing in this case are special pleaders, all with dollar signs in their eyes, grabbing for government subsidies and promising that they’re the answer, even when we know they’re not. Nuclear. Coal. Ethanol from corn and sugar cane.
Fission has never shown how to safely dispose of its waste, and fusion is still years away from its first commercial production. Coal, no matter how clean, is a hydrocarbon. Ethanol, too is a hydrocarbon, but more important is the fact that when you take it from food crops, you compete directly with food production.
Electricity from wind, from geothermal sources and from the Sun is going to be primary in the future. These can be brought to market far more efficiently than they are, using new materials, and our grids need to become more interactive, so that localized sources can be tapped. All this requires far more planning, more capital, and more government intervention than anyone anticipates offering at the present time.
But these alone won’t get us there. We badly need a portable power source to replace gasoline, for jet transport, for back-up power, and for reliable power production off-the-grid.
Cellulosic ethanol is the big buzzword here. Richard Branson, who I have used as a hero in my recent fiction, is a big booster of it, partly because jet planes can use it. (How big is the hype? This picture came from the Whitehouse.Gov site.)
But cellulosic ethanol has its special pleaders as
well. Most especially the wood people. They talk about pine trees,
which we normally use as toilet paper, being the solution to our energy
problems.
Bull cookies. Here is inconvenient truth number one. When seeking to supply a cellulosic plant, you go for the fastest-growing feedstock you have, the plant with the highest tolerance for extreme conditions (so you don’t lose yield). Trees? Please. Think more of kudzu. Or giant kelp.
You also want a plant that yields multiple generations each year, because demand is continuous. We don’t know the final answer to this, but we need to be open to the fact it could an inconvenient answer indeed.
Still, alcohol may not be the best, transportable energy source. A
hydrogen cycle would be preferable to anything using hydrocarbons. A
hydrogen fuel cell yields water as its "pollution," and if that water
is collected where it is produced, it means you are creating more fresh
water wherever more people live. Water is as much a problem in our
modern world as energy.
Previously here I have mentioned Amminex,
which has a sort of sponge that allows ammonia to be broken down at a
set rate into its component parts, nitrogen and hydrogen. You can
produce hydrogen by simple electrolysis, separating it from the oxygen
in water with electricity. But transporting it is a big problem.
As John Holbrook of Ammpower noted in a recent response to this blog, most ammonia today is produced using natural gas.
This is our second inconvenient truth. Dr. Holbrook notes that a
company called Norsk Hydro produced ammonia from electrolysis for many
years, but it was not competitive with gas-based sources.
Holbrook added in his note that attempts are now underway to produce ammonia
efficiently, and without hydrocarbons, through a company called NHThree
LLC. (NH3 is the chemical formula for ammonia.) But these are very,
very early days. One thing Holbrook doesn’t note in his response to my post is that he runs both Ammpower and NHThree.
Holbrook, a Stanford graduate who has studied hydrogen for three decades (about as long as I’ve studied business), mostly at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, dreams of an ammonia pipeline taking
the place of today’s oil systems, of hydrogen replacing natural gas.
Special pleaders are also at work, within the Oregon legislature,
touting hydrogen and ammonia as energy sources, claiming that Oregon could be another Saudi Arabia. Such hype worries me. So does the fact that capital has not yet been made available for Holbrook’s proposals.
Sometimes this is the mark of a genius, a Bell, an Edison, or a
Chester Carlson. Sometimes it’s the mark of a crank. (Sometimes, as in
the case of Nicola Tesla, it’s a bit of both.)
And we won’t know — any of us — until we find out. Finding out will take time, money, and the assumption of risk.
The War Against Oil has just begun. This may be the most inconvenient truth of all.
Your anti-fission comments are just not true. The rest of the developed world is moving quickly down the path in terms of modern low environmental impact nuclear energy. Obviously fission alone is not the solution, as fission-power cars are still science fiction, but to say that it has no place in the solution is just foolish. You undermine what would otherwise be compelling discussions with your anti-fission propaganda. If you insist on being anti-fission, use reason and evidence to back up your claims, like you do with Ethanol, instead of baseless pronouncements.
Your anti-fission comments are just not true. The rest of the developed world is moving quickly down the path in terms of modern low environmental impact nuclear energy. Obviously fission alone is not the solution, as fission-power cars are still science fiction, but to say that it has no place in the solution is just foolish. You undermine what would otherwise be compelling discussions with your anti-fission propaganda. If you insist on being anti-fission, use reason and evidence to back up your claims, like you do with Ethanol, instead of baseless pronouncements.
Take the Pledge
All Presidential Candidates should make pledges like those below. If they
refuse, then you should refuse to vote for them.
1. No More Oil Wars.
2. Work for independence from foreign oil on day one.
3. No more wars for corporate profit.
4. No more secret deals for $4 per gallon gas.
5. No more Chicken Hawks promoting wars of choice when they themselves avoided combat.
6. Make government green–if you can’t make what you have the most control over
green, I don’t care about your plans to make the country green.
7. No more torture.
8. No more lying about torture.
9. No more re-defining torture.
10. No more drunken hunting.
11. No more secret deals with big corporations to divide up the spoils before the war even starts.
Take the Pledge
All Presidential Candidates should make pledges like those below. If they
refuse, then you should refuse to vote for them.
1. No More Oil Wars.
2. Work for independence from foreign oil on day one.
3. No more wars for corporate profit.
4. No more secret deals for $4 per gallon gas.
5. No more Chicken Hawks promoting wars of choice when they themselves avoided combat.
6. Make government green–if you can’t make what you have the most control over
green, I don’t care about your plans to make the country green.
7. No more torture.
8. No more lying about torture.
9. No more re-defining torture.
10. No more drunken hunting.
11. No more secret deals with big corporations to divide up the spoils before the war even starts.
Mechanical Engineer (BME 1961 U of MN) has tested over 100 different fuel saving products since 1979 looking for one that would reduce fuel consumption by at least 20% in a clean engine. Recently found one.
–
Energy Related Bio
http://tinyurl.com/2n9bbc
–
Sworn affidavit of Professional Opinion
http://tinyurl.com/2kxap3
–
EPA Lab Tests
http://tinyurl.com/3aakis
–
ENERGY INDEPENDENCE IN SIX YEARS OR LESS
http://tinyurl.com/kgrys
–
phillipratte@msn.com
Mechanical Engineer (BME 1961 U of MN) has tested over 100 different fuel saving products since 1979 looking for one that would reduce fuel consumption by at least 20% in a clean engine. Recently found one.
–
Energy Related Bio
http://tinyurl.com/2n9bbc
–
Sworn affidavit of Professional Opinion
http://tinyurl.com/2kxap3
–
EPA Lab Tests
http://tinyurl.com/3aakis
–
ENERGY INDEPENDENCE IN SIX YEARS OR LESS
http://tinyurl.com/kgrys
–
phillipratte@msn.com
Our ancestors, single cell life forms, wasted most of the U235 that the earth had by not using it for fission power. It goes away whether we use it or not. We might as well get and use the energy. Since all the earth and all its inhabitants have always been radioactive, one solution to the radio-active waste problem is clear: Just divide it up so that it is not dangerous. The ocean would not significantly more hazardous to any kind of life if its radio-activity were doubled, and it would take far more than all the uranium on earth converted to fission products to double the radioactivity of the ocean. The same is also true of the earth’s surface to a depth of two meters or about seven feet.
Again, the earth and all its lifeforms have always been radio-active, and nothing that can be done with fission products can make human life significantly more dangerous than it now is. When a few hundred people a year are killed by fission products then we might consider a safer more expensive method of storing them than putting them in the Los Angeles land fills. Many times more man hours have been lost from fossil fuel production use and pollution than were lost in all uses of nuclear energy including those lost at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Considering only the losses at Okinawa of Japanese army and civilian persons, the events at Hiroshima and Nagasaki prevented far more Japanese losses than they made. ..HG..
Our ancestors, single cell life forms, wasted most of the U235 that the earth had by not using it for fission power. It goes away whether we use it or not. We might as well get and use the energy. Since all the earth and all its inhabitants have always been radioactive, one solution to the radio-active waste problem is clear: Just divide it up so that it is not dangerous. The ocean would not significantly more hazardous to any kind of life if its radio-activity were doubled, and it would take far more than all the uranium on earth converted to fission products to double the radioactivity of the ocean. The same is also true of the earth’s surface to a depth of two meters or about seven feet.
Again, the earth and all its lifeforms have always been radio-active, and nothing that can be done with fission products can make human life significantly more dangerous than it now is. When a few hundred people a year are killed by fission products then we might consider a safer more expensive method of storing them than putting them in the Los Angeles land fills. Many times more man hours have been lost from fossil fuel production use and pollution than were lost in all uses of nuclear energy including those lost at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Considering only the losses at Okinawa of Japanese army and civilian persons, the events at Hiroshima and Nagasaki prevented far more Japanese losses than they made. ..HG..
This is a business that can grow if resources are invested in the sector.
This is a business that can grow if resources are invested in the sector.