Posted on 04/11/2012 8:26:05 AM PDT by Red Badger
Copper — the stuff of pennies...
Actually, that would be Zinc.
Just goes to show you that researchers and writers know little about money.
Silly comment.
Of course you wouldn’t use methane to produce hydrogen to be used to produce methane. One of the holy grails of catalytic chemistry has been efficient water splitting. That is the best place to find hydrogen for this process. And yes, it requires energy. My point was, simply, that if solar energy could create the current necessary to power this reaction, it would be an efficient way to produce a mobile fuel.
Of course, by trapping more solar energy, we could change the earth’s heat balance and create global warming.
(BTW, I am not a warmist, but I believe it is prudent to explore as many alternate energy processes as we can. It’s just good science.)
“Creativity is putting known facts together in new and unusual ways.”
You’re still ahead of me - everything I know about hydrocarbons I learned from watching McGyver. :-)
As for the Hydrogen, you would likely get it from water, but you need energy to separate it. You could get it from H2S, which is interesting because its a byproduct of hydrocarbon refining.
Either way, you have to add energy here to get the hydrogen. Question is whether you could generate enough using solar to make it work at scale.
The earth is producing all kinds of DC power everyday, just by having its metal core turning within the magnetosphere - 186,000 lightening strikes a day.
I saw a video of a refueling tanker manifesting ‘St. Elmo’s Fire’ and the fuel nozzle arc’ing and sparking against the jet its trying to refuel.
Consider they are likely using JP-4, which is pretty flammable and not JP-5, which you could use to put out a cigarette.
Lot’s of free electrical energy out there. It’s just a matter of putting lightning in a bottle, as it were.
But electrolysis of water is far more expensive than steam reforming methane. That makes a bad idea even worse.
This scam is not about energy production, it is about carbon nature. They may have improved the losses but it still operates at a loss.
Apart from recovering and recycling waste CO2, another angle to this process (if it is efficient enough) is that it could be another effective way to store and transport electric power. As methane, it transports nicely.
Isn’t thermodynamics the science that determines the size of showerheads and water reservoirs for toilets as developed by congresscritters?
Hmmm. I believe I’ve used copper to make ethanol too! :)
Will it end up as inefficient as the other "green" technologies?
Well, let's see...First you burn coal to make steam to turn a turbine that drives a generator that produces electricity. The process also produces CO2 which can be reacted with a copper/gold electrode in an undefined solution to produce methane (natural gas). So lets just burn the methane along with the coal, oh oh, we just produced more CO2...Back to the magic cells to make more methane.
At some point could we drop the coal altogether and just burn methane to produce electricity and CO2 while reacting the CO2 with the copper/gold electrodes and the secret sauce (with just a pinch of the electricity produced, leaving enough power to keep our customers smiling!) Let's look a little closer, we have a closed process with a fixed amount of CO2 which we convert to methane using a catalyst and electricity. We then burn the methane, extracting heat to produce electricity and more CO2 to continue the process indefinitely.
Neat! Except that the laws of physics regarding the conservation of energy require that the amount of energy needed to synthesize the methane will be greater than what you can recover by burning the same amount of as fuel. This is why all thermodynamic processes reject heat to the environment (cooling towers!!).
Lastly, converting all the CO2 produced by a coal fired power plant to methane or methanol does not destroy the gas forever, it hides it as unburnt hydrocarbons in the newly produced fuels. As soon as those fuels are burnt, presto, the same amount of CO2 is released into the environment, the energy recovered will be less then the energy input to the synthesis as electricity. And what a long strange trip it's been...
The closed box that produces perpetual energy output is just as imposable as the proverbial "free lunch".
Regards,
GtG
Sounds like enough energy to keep the stack blowing eh!
I have no doubt they will be utterly mystified!
...and I bet the Feds didn’t like it!........
Roger that. I was also thinking of long distance transportation. One of the difficulties of electrical generation is that it needs to be fairly close to the consumer. Long distance transmission is terribly inefficient, and means losing non-trivial amounts of power the farther it goes. This sounds like it might be a good way of storing up energy in one place and moving it over long distances.
CNG meet pipeline. Solar electric + water + CO2 ->CNG.
We run HV transmission lines for hundreds of miles for cost effective generation to consumer.
Long distance transmission is terribly inefficient
A few percentage points of loss is terribly inefficient?
I thought the loss on long distance high voltage lines was more on the order of 10 or 20%. Is that wrong?
The electrical loss of electricity leaving the power plant, through the step-up transformers, across the high voltage transmission line, through the local substation including step-down transformer, across local distribution lines, through the end transformer to the customer meter totals 6~7% typically. The transmission line alone is a fraction of that total.
High Voltage DC lines have even less losses, but the stations of HVAC-HVDC are very expensive and this set up is normally only used to move power either through long distances without intermediate drop off, or systems isolated by frequency.
High Voltage transmission lines are used because as the voltage increases, for the same amount of power flow, current decreases. Losses are impedance (resistance plus reactance) times the current squared. If you double the voltage, halving the current, the losses are quartered. This why we use voltage up to 765kV in the US for long distances.
Thanks skinkinthegrass.
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