is very closely linked to our fuel resources at the moment. The Haber Process produces ammonia fertilizer for a very large portion of the world's food supply, and currently uses hydrogen sources like natural gas to catalyze with nitrogen toward that end. If we assume ammonia factories will continue using this process, eventually an alternate source of hydrogen will be required. The most likely sources I can think of would be captured methane from water treatment plants & landfills, and hydrogen produced by electrolysis. This would take a considerable amount of energy seeing as we most likely will not have enough methane produced by this method to supply the necessary hydrogen, leading back to the question of where do we get the extra electrical power. The only alternative I can see is some kind of biotech breakthrough like finding a way to mass-culture a supercharged nitrogen fixing bacteria or figuring out how to make new GM crops with the same root nodules as legumes (which harbor symbiotic nitrogen fixing bacteria).
One solution begets the other. Electrolysis is relatively expensive at the moment, but I really doubt it's going to stay that way - the problem is we don't have the right catalysts, nor any incentive to make them large scale since the setup costs are expensive for any small entity. But once the technology exists, the economies of scale will start up and I very much doubt the price will stay high - it'll plummet and keep plummeting since unlike the 20th and early 21st century, you'll be able to get the energy you need from literally land with sunlight and some type of water.
We also have a perverse political situation: with the right commitment, the nuclear industry can summon ridiculous amounts of electricity out of the ground, but the public hates the idea that they even exist. Let their feet get put to the fire and see how much resistance the idea gets later though. We only need 1 decent over-reaction to bottom out energy prices again since once built you can't shut it down, which means we'll have huge excesses for hydrogen, ammonia and biodiesel production.
It's not like green tech needs anything special to work: that's kind of the point. I mean let's remember solar panels are made from arsenic and sand. One is an industrial contaminant, the other is one of the most common elements on the planet. With enough energy they're not complicated things to make, and you only really need heat which is much more readily extracted from sunlight with mirrors.
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HarrierThe Star Spangled ManRegistered Userregular
The chancy part is, and always will be, deploying all this new infrastructure before our supply of oil runs out. It's certainly doable, I just worry we won't do it in time.
I don't wanna kill anybody. I don't like bullies. I don't care where they're from.
It's not like green tech needs anything special to work: that's kind of the point. I mean let's remember solar panels are made from arsenic and sand. One is an industrial contaminant, the other is one of the most common elements on the planet. With enough energy they're not complicated things to make, and you only really need heat which is much more readily extracted from sunlight with mirrors.
Well it's really easy to make a bad silicon solar cell, but the structures start getting complicated once you want to pass ~12% efficiency and you have to pair it with layers made of other materials (germanium, gallium, etc) if you want to break 28%.
For industrial scale electricity production I don't see there being any advantage of going PV instead of solar thermal. If you live in the right places they can work decent as a roof top type unit, but right now even in those spots the break even point is something like a decade plus for the average home owner.
For industrial scale electricity production I don't see there being any advantage of going PV instead of solar thermal. If you live in the right places they can work decent as a roof top type unit, but right now even in those spots the break even point is something like a decade plus for the average home owner.
Yeah, on the industrial scale, it doesn't really make sense. But it would be a good way to have a distributed generation capability to handle peak loads where the baseline is handled by more traditional sources like nuclear.
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HarrierThe Star Spangled ManRegistered Userregular
Solar PV also doesn't provide baseload power- that is, it can't operate at 70-90% capacity all day, every day. Neither can classic wind power, with turbines dependent on more intermittent surface-level wind. If you want to use electricity the way we use it right now, you need baseload power. Here and now that means fission, geothermal, and concentrated solar thermal, assuming you're using a molten salt core that can release heat overnight. In the next five years the list could be expanded to include tidal power, fusion, and high-altitude wind.
And really, electricity isn't the largest problem with running out of oil. That would be running out of fuel for transportation and freight.
I don't wanna kill anybody. I don't like bullies. I don't care where they're from.
is very closely linked to our fuel resources at the moment. The Haber Process produces ammonia fertilizer for a very large portion of the world's food supply, and currently uses hydrogen sources like natural gas to catalyze with nitrogen toward that end. If we assume ammonia factories will continue using this process, eventually an alternate source of hydrogen will be required. The most likely sources I can think of would be captured methane from water treatment plants & landfills, and hydrogen produced by electrolysis. This would take a considerable amount of energy seeing as we most likely will not have enough methane produced by this method to supply the necessary hydrogen, leading back to the question of where do we get the extra electrical power. The only alternative I can see is some kind of biotech breakthrough like finding a way to mass-culture a supercharged nitrogen fixing bacteria or figuring out how to make new GM crops with the same root nodules as legumes (which harbor symbiotic nitrogen fixing bacteria).
One solution begets the other. Electrolysis is relatively expensive at the moment, but I really doubt it's going to stay that way - the problem is we don't have the right catalysts, nor any incentive to make them large scale since the setup costs are expensive for any small entity. But once the technology exists, the economies of scale will start up and I very much doubt the price will stay high - it'll plummet and keep plummeting since unlike the 20th and early 21st century, you'll be able to get the energy you need from literally land with sunlight and some type of water.
I would say the problem is less one of catalysts and more one of the increased electrical power demand. We're making great strides in developing new catalysts, and even if you need to use a cheaper material that wears out (unlike platinum-based catalysts) the problem will still be that all of that "free" chemical energy you were using before now needs to be generated. Which leads me to:
And really, electricity isn't the largest problem with running out of oil. That would be running out of fuel for transportation and freight.
To which I say yes and no. Yes in that we will require an expensive overhaul of several areas of at the very least our freight transport systems, and no in that electricity is precisely the problem of running out of oil. We effectively need to - within around 40 years - double our electrical generation capacity to handle the energy demands of a non-fossil fuel transportation network. No matter what its form (batteries, super capacitors, fuel cells, catalyzed petroleum, biofuels, etc) it will only exist as a means of energy storage, not of energy generation.
HarrierThe Star Spangled ManRegistered Userregular
And doing that is going to be tricky if we run up against The Energy Trap.
Do The Math is a great blog, by the way, and I encourage everyone to check it out.
But the idea is that once you hit peak oil, and pass it, everything gets more expensive because oil gets scarcer. That includes the deployment of new energy sources, which still have to be generated by the burning of oil and other fossil fuels.
Honestly, I'm not sure the US will do it. We would have to start right now, and we'd have to build power plants of all sorts at the same rate that France built nuclear plants in the 70's and 80's. And we'd have to bring the new energy sources online as soon as they were built to offset the declining utility of fossil fuels.
Here's hoping that if we fail, China and Germany and South Korea and others can succeed. I'd like to think that renewable energy could win the day somewhere, even if it's not here.
I don't wanna kill anybody. I don't like bullies. I don't care where they're from.
Well in regards to transportation, lithium ion batteries are expected to drop to about $125 per kwh if this company can get commerical manufacture ramped up. Even without the transport benefits, at that price I'm going to install a big array of them in my basement and give the middle finger to Australia's power companies.
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HarrierThe Star Spangled ManRegistered Userregular
Down in Oz you, like us here in the US, are blessed with abundant land, wind and sunlight, which makes the options in both our countries broader than in, say, Europe. I think the US could certainly run all its electricity off of solar thermal, but again, we'd need to invest heavily in it right now.
Another thing that continues to intrigue me is the idea of flywheel energy storage, using mechanical energy to store power from intermittent sources like conventional wind turbines and solar PV. It certainly seems like a utility-scale solution.
I don't wanna kill anybody. I don't like bullies. I don't care where they're from.
Down in Oz you, like us here in the US, are blessed with abundant land, wind and sunlight, which makes the options in both our countries broader than in, say, Europe. I think the US could certainly run all its electricity off of solar thermal, but again, we'd need to invest heavily in it right now.
Another thing that continues to intrigue me is the idea of flywheel energy storage, using mechanical energy to store power from intermittent sources like conventional wind turbines and solar PV. It certainly seems like a utility-scale solution.
Western Europe - especially Germany - is covered with wind farms and solar plants. Germany's southern cities, especially, are surrounding by wind turbines.
All of that discounts the tendency of more expensive sources to become less expensive as technology advances.
Unfortunately, technology can only do so much such that energy returns still prevail. That is why we are now resorting to non-conventional oil, which is more expensive energy-wise, and why the most optimistic forecasts reveal only a 9-pct increase in global production from oil and gas. And that assumes conventional production not dropping. Meanwhile, demand has to go up around 2 pct per annum to maintain economic growth.
Well sure if we had waaaaaay more cultivated farming land than we currently do and were willing to let a few million people starve. Let's not even talk about the enviromental impact farming on that scale would have, and that's before you've used the produce to to run an engine that makes green house gassess ect ect.
Biofuels are a PR exersice, not a meaningful fuel source.
Well not with your pessimism, they won't.[/quote]
It has more to do with being realistic than with pessimism.
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One solution begets the other. Electrolysis is relatively expensive at the moment, but I really doubt it's going to stay that way - the problem is we don't have the right catalysts, nor any incentive to make them large scale since the setup costs are expensive for any small entity. But once the technology exists, the economies of scale will start up and I very much doubt the price will stay high - it'll plummet and keep plummeting since unlike the 20th and early 21st century, you'll be able to get the energy you need from literally land with sunlight and some type of water.
We also have a perverse political situation: with the right commitment, the nuclear industry can summon ridiculous amounts of electricity out of the ground, but the public hates the idea that they even exist. Let their feet get put to the fire and see how much resistance the idea gets later though. We only need 1 decent over-reaction to bottom out energy prices again since once built you can't shut it down, which means we'll have huge excesses for hydrogen, ammonia and biodiesel production.
It's not like green tech needs anything special to work: that's kind of the point. I mean let's remember solar panels are made from arsenic and sand. One is an industrial contaminant, the other is one of the most common elements on the planet. With enough energy they're not complicated things to make, and you only really need heat which is much more readily extracted from sunlight with mirrors.
Well it's really easy to make a bad silicon solar cell, but the structures start getting complicated once you want to pass ~12% efficiency and you have to pair it with layers made of other materials (germanium, gallium, etc) if you want to break 28%.
Yeah, on the industrial scale, it doesn't really make sense. But it would be a good way to have a distributed generation capability to handle peak loads where the baseline is handled by more traditional sources like nuclear.
And really, electricity isn't the largest problem with running out of oil. That would be running out of fuel for transportation and freight.
I would say the problem is less one of catalysts and more one of the increased electrical power demand. We're making great strides in developing new catalysts, and even if you need to use a cheaper material that wears out (unlike platinum-based catalysts) the problem will still be that all of that "free" chemical energy you were using before now needs to be generated. Which leads me to:
To which I say yes and no. Yes in that we will require an expensive overhaul of several areas of at the very least our freight transport systems, and no in that electricity is precisely the problem of running out of oil. We effectively need to - within around 40 years - double our electrical generation capacity to handle the energy demands of a non-fossil fuel transportation network. No matter what its form (batteries, super capacitors, fuel cells, catalyzed petroleum, biofuels, etc) it will only exist as a means of energy storage, not of energy generation.
Do The Math is a great blog, by the way, and I encourage everyone to check it out.
But the idea is that once you hit peak oil, and pass it, everything gets more expensive because oil gets scarcer. That includes the deployment of new energy sources, which still have to be generated by the burning of oil and other fossil fuels.
Honestly, I'm not sure the US will do it. We would have to start right now, and we'd have to build power plants of all sorts at the same rate that France built nuclear plants in the 70's and 80's. And we'd have to bring the new energy sources online as soon as they were built to offset the declining utility of fossil fuels.
Here's hoping that if we fail, China and Germany and South Korea and others can succeed. I'd like to think that renewable energy could win the day somewhere, even if it's not here.
Another thing that continues to intrigue me is the idea of flywheel energy storage, using mechanical energy to store power from intermittent sources like conventional wind turbines and solar PV. It certainly seems like a utility-scale solution.
Western Europe - especially Germany - is covered with wind farms and solar plants. Germany's southern cities, especially, are surrounding by wind turbines.
Unfortunately, technology can only do so much such that energy returns still prevail. That is why we are now resorting to non-conventional oil, which is more expensive energy-wise, and why the most optimistic forecasts reveal only a 9-pct increase in global production from oil and gas. And that assumes conventional production not dropping. Meanwhile, demand has to go up around 2 pct per annum to maintain economic growth.
Yes, but the energy returns are not very high. Also, we eat up food resources.
Well not with your pessimism, they won't.[/quote]
It has more to do with being realistic than with pessimism.