Posted on 11/23/2009 2:25:44 PM PST by staffjam
As scientists, Governments and Industry look for viable replacements to our quickly dwindling supply of fossil fuels, attention has again turned to biofuels and the potential they offer. You’ve all no doubt heard of Ethanol, rapeseed and other popular bio-diesel crops, but it is now possible to turn our quickly growing garbage mountains into biofuels.
Scientists have now discovered some amazingly effective, mutually beneficial, symbiotic processes that could single-handedly solve both imminent problems with the creation of “bio-fuels” and “synthetic fuels” derived directly from our trash and garbage.
Full article is: http://www.oilprice.com/article-biofuel-of-the-future-turning-our-garbage-into-energy.html
(Excerpt) Read more at oilprice.com ...
Oil itself certainly doesn’t have subsidy-free past. Those subsidies can take a different form, but are expensive nonetheless.
Governments are subsidized by oil companies, not the otherway around.
In my book, reducing a piece of the tax/royalty structure so that the net payment to government is ONLY two to three times greater than net profits hardly meets the description of a subsidy.
Far different from a company receiving government payments in excess of their own profits.
Our dependence on foreign source is based more on policy decisions than a lack of resources.
Besides, how many air craft carriers and embassies do you think we would sell if we were energy independent?
I believe full development of our coal, oil shale, hydro, methane hydrates, solar, nuclear along with oil and natural gas would take us far down the road towards independence. I just do not believe the need for subsidies; we need only remove the excessive roadblocks while keeping reasonable regulations and royalties for use of resources.
I’m not against any of those development options. However, like science research, I don’t have a problem with subsidizing promising energy research. Admittedly, it’s hard to determine which research is promising and which is being funded due to political lobbying. But that’s no reason to stop imagining and preparing for a time when (for whatever reason) we can’t run the country on fossil fuels in the same percentage we do right now. It’s undeniably a national security issue, as well.
Neither am I against reasonable tax payer support to develop new technologies that are hopeful to lead to future benefit to us all.
But Trash Gas is long past this point. If three decades of large (commercial) sized operations in dozens of different facilities is not enough to figure out how to make it economic, then I don’t see it reasonable to expect it to change.
We are no longer supporting developing technology, we are supporting the same developed but uneconomic technology over and over.
Sorry, not dozens but rather hundreds of existing Landfill Gas facilities.
http://www.epa.gov/lmop/proj/index.htm
Why continue to subsidize? At this point the should be a revenue source like any other energy facility.
Any subsidy should be treated as grants currently are : you have to report yearly and reapply every few years. I don’t support unlimited subsidies to landfill gas any more than I support endless foreign interventionism to maintain our oil supply.
We have a sewer gas generating facility locally. The gas is not clean and even after using tax dollars to pay for the infrastructure, the city generally leaves it idle because is costs more to maintain than to just buy electricity to run the facility.
They do fire it up from time to time, I think when they have dog and pony show to demonstrate how green the city is.
“Neither am I against reasonable tax payer support to develop new technologies that are hopeful to lead to future benefit to us all.”
The reason petroleum is so important is our dependence on the internal combustion engine. Not only is it relatively inefficient, make that very inefficient, it requires very high quality fuel.
There are some technologies on the horizon that have a real chance to replace the ICE. Direct fuel to electric such as solid oxide fuel cells still require high quality fuels but when integrated into a vehicle would drive about 4 times as many miles per unit of fuel compared to a standard vehicle. Direct heat to electric will probably not be more efficient that ICE engines but would run on low quality fuel. Basically any thing that is flamable and can be bottled or pelletized could fuel our transportation system.
Both technologies are probably a decade away from the roads but would make our country more independent.
About 4 times as many miles?
Do you have a link to a sample technology? It doesn’t need to be a vehicle as long as it is applicable technology.
Thanks
There’s hundreds of links. I get about 10 new links a week. Google solid oxide fuel cells. The technology is finally becoming practicle, stationary solutions are coming on the market now, mobile versions are a few years down the road.
A car is about 10% efficient when taken as a whole. New generation solid oxide fuel cells are reaching 60%. assuming about 80% effiency from stack to asphalt, 4x the miliage is pretty reasonable. Solid oxide fuel cells can reform their fuel internally which means no need to replace the infrastructure, they will burn currently available fuels. Fuel cells are not thermodynamically limmitted, in that they do not rely on the carnot cycle, they can push 100% true effiency.
Less developed but potentially more interesting is thermoelectric generation. They are limitted by the carnot cycle which means that using common materials they can reach about 30% true effiency. But like a steam engine, they can potentially use any heat source for energy to drive the system. Pelletized trash, wood, ag waste, coal or even current petro fuels could be used as transportation fuel.
As both systems are electrical sources, you get to use a light high torque electric engine with super caps or a small battery for brake energy recapture and an extra boost for passing or accelerating from a stop.
I get a kick thinking about the posibilities the future holds.
A little low but close.
New generation solid oxide fuel cells are reaching 60%. assuming about 80% effiency from stack to asphalt, 4x the miliage is pretty reasonable.
Even assuming the 60% is realistic under greatly variable load conditions required with the automobile (this is where a link should be used to support your claim), the jump to 80% overall system efficiency makes no sense. You cannot add drag, friction, braking, heat, air conditioning, etc and improve efficiency.
Ahhh, I see the misunderstanding. When I say from stack to asphalt, it translates to the driveline losses as found on your diagram.
If you want a source for effiency of the stack, that is a work in progress. There are several teams doing really cool stuff with oxide chemistry. Actual cells running in labs now are over 50%, some are predicting better than 70%, 60% looks pretty reasonable.
But how do you get 80%?
Increases of efficiency in drive train with CVT and lower drag coefficient help the gasoline ICE as well.
You don’t get a 4 fold increase replacing a 38% efficient engine with a 50-60% efficient power source.
Look at mysterios’s post above. A gasoline engine is not 38% efficient when operating a car. In addition, that power is going through a drive train that is turning a good portion of the mechanical power of the engine back into heat. His figure gives the overall effiency of the car as being close to 12% which is in line with figures that I have heard.
The 80% is not the total efficiency of the car, it is the effiency of turning DC electricity into car movement. Multiply the 80% x the efficiency of the stack (60%) giving the car an over all effiency in the mid to upper 40’s, or about 4 times what a standard car gets. Regenerative braking and some reduction in overall weight help to keep the overall effiency up.
Are you talking about my post in #35 or some other post by Mysterio?
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