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Posted on 05/17/2007 4:09:52 AM PDT by saganite
self-ping for later
More like $1.5 - $2 Billion and 5-6 years. A coal fired plant the same size cost around $1 billion and takes 4-5 years to build. Coal or nuclear are to only real options for large baseload power plants.
Yes, but Liquid Plummer is rarer than gasoline.
Gasoline would have to cost $9 a gallon for solar power to make sense... And that $9 would be spent on a manufacturing and maintenance project that itself is polluting. So for now, solar power wastes money and destroys the environment faster than gasoline.
Actually I don't think it sounds all that great.
but people should think things entirely through instead of being so casual about nuclear power....
My point too. The energy has to come from someplace. The likelihood of getting even 2 or 3 nucs approved and financed in the next few years is about zilch. Ga Power's Plant Vogel (PWR) was one of the last to go on line, and it cost in excess of $10 billion and ran over time due to the constantly changing nuclear regulations.
Aluminum is just an energy carrier. You could run a car on Calcium carbide and water too. BFD in this case the calcium carbide is the energy carrier.
If you just built a solar field around this "recycling" plant, the plant operates when the sun shines. When the sun does not shine, the plant does not operate.
The problem with solar and wind on the electric grid is twofold. One, they can't be called on demand so other conventional plants have to be kept on stand-by for times when the sun does not shine or the wind does not blow. There capacity is less than 40%. The second problem is connecting them to the grid. These plants are very land intensive and are generally built in remote areas. It costs over $1 million per mile to build transmission lines to hook these facilities to the grid.
With a processing plant with it's own dedicated solar or wind farm, the 40% capacity might not be a problem and there is no issue with long distance transmission lines.
Please Freep Mail me if you'd like on/off
Personally, I love renewables. I save about $1K per year by heating with wood. Unfortunately, a large scale switch to renewables is a recipe for raping the planet.
This is not an indictment, per se...it's true of all fuels. We're just not used to having to manufacture fuels, instead of pumping them out of the ground.
Great analogy. Like all change-the-basis-of-competition ideas, it's very existence (if successful) will change lots of things. Think of the poor carbon paper manufacturers after copy machines were invented.
At this point, this is nothing more than an intriguing idea that should be investigated and developed as far as feasible. It sounds to me as if it has great potential. Just the prospect of becoming independent from oil imports is exciting.
It may or may not work. We can't decide that today. My best wishes to the inventors and developers. May they live long and prosper.
First, I think the “350 pounds” was a typo. Since the article several times said with recycling, the aluminum would cost one dollar a pount, 350 pounds would cost $350 rather than $60.
And 350 pounds of aluminum wouldn’t fit in a tank either. And since 350 was also the number of miles listed that they would travel, I’m guessing the 350 was replicated by mistake.
So let’s assume instead that it was 60 pounds of aluminum — that would fit in a tank, and would cost about $60.
Comparing things using a car driving 350 miles isn’t useful though, because we all think about different vehicles. For example, my car would do 350 miles with about 8 gallons of gas, costing me about $24 bucks.
The real way to compare is to compare the amount of energy in the hydrogen vs the energy in the gasoline, and then feed that into the efficiency of the hydrogen-to-wheel power transfer vs gasoline-to-wheel transfer.
We probably wouldn’t “burn” the hydrogen, usually we convert it to electricity in a fuel cell and then run an electric motor. The question is, can we incorporate that into this hydrogen generator directly? There’s apparently a lot of waste heat in the process, which maybe you could capture as well.
The real question is, does a “battery” using flow-through water and replaceable pellets cost less, and work better, than actual battery packs that are replaceable, or rechargeable?
I mean if you are pulling 60 pounds out of your car and putting 60 pounds (plus water) into the car, why not swap a charged battery instead?
It sounds like the 60 pounds of material has to be swapped every 350 miles.
Actually it is more like $200 B. Also, that capital is rasied and expended over the life of the construction of the plant, so it is more like $20B per year out of a $13 T per year economy. That is a lot of money, still, but not beyond the pale.
Furthermore, long term nuclear power is profitable because, though the capital cost is high, the operating costs (especially fuel) are low. The principal issue is the haphazard regulatory environment, which puts the capital investment at risk, though the government is putting in place a system of loan guarantees to overcome this problem.
Personally, I think the US has lost control of its own future because of politics and greed accumulating over the years. Importing millions of illegal immigrants will not help us in the near future.
I think this article is a must read for everyone on FR.
Foreign investment in our nations refineries owners explains why we are getting gouged at the pump because at this time, the US is the largest economy in the world and foreign investors want/need our cash. Globalization is here to stay. Power shifts in global oil business
From the article:
As oil prices tripled over the last four years, a new group of oil and gas companies rose to prominence. They have consolidated their power as resource holders and pushed the world's biggest publicly traded energy companies, which emerged out of the original Seven Sisters — ExxonMobil Corp. and Chevron Corp. of the U.S. and Europe's BP and Royal Dutch Shell — onto the sidelines and into an existential crisis.
The "new seven sisters," or the most influential energy companies from countries outside the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, have been identified by the Financial Times in consultation with numerous industry executives. They are Saudi Aramco, Russia's Gazprom, CNPC of China, NIOC of Iran, Venezuela's PDVSA, Brazil's Petrobras and Petronas of Malaysia.
Good point. If you have to “swap” something that heavy, might as well make it all electrice from the get go. That 60 pounds of Al sounds more likely than 350 pounds, unless he was talking about the weight of the water PLUS the Al needed to produce the H. Either way, that’s a lot of mass to haul around. What is the weight of a 20 gallon tank of gasoline or diesel fuel? Plus, can you imagine the “filling station” there would have to be to implement this system? The storage area would have to be huge! Cars would have to line up for hours while forklifts ferried container after container of these “pellets” to the next car, or conveyor belts. WHile this seems a nice lab curiosity, I cannot see it being a practical way of delivering fuel to billions of drivers all over the world..............
Even at $3.00/ gallon, its actually only a little more than $2.00/gallon for gasoline (And this is the highest prices EVER).
The rest is taxes.
This is a cool science project, nothing more.
I don't know of any such facilities in the US. I suspect that there aren't any because they're not cost justified
Go Boiler Makers!
In the not too distant past, the aluminum industry consumed closed to 10% of the electric power produced in this country. Aluminum’s high chemical reactivity manifests itself by requiring more electric energy to produced its elemental form.
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