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A resource management issue

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Dr. Slack

Thu Aug 27 2009, 09:36AM

Registered Member #72 Joined: Thu Feb 09 2006, 08:29AM
Location: UK St. Albans
Posts: 1659

Am I missing something, or thinking too simplistically?

For the last few hundred years, we've been digging carbon and hydrocarbon up, combining it with oxygen, and throwing the ash into the atmosphere. The general view is that the ash pan is getting dangerously full, and we don't seem to slowing the rate at which we are filling it. With the mooted Carbon Capture Sequestration plan, we intend to continue to dig carbon and hydrocarbon up, combine it with oxygen, and then bury the ash. There are also plans to use (renewable) energy, capture the ash from the air, and bury it. However, there are concerns about where we bury it, how much we've got to bury, whether it will stay where we've put it.

This post was sparked by seeing what I considered to be the least bonkers CCS scheme, which was to install windmills as "artificial trees", where the energy generated would be used to capture carbon from the air and liquify it, basically concentrating it as the front end for a burial scheme. But this is still digging up and burying stuff, two activities which seem to be surplus to requirements. Why are we digging stuff up, and then wondering how to bury the waste. We can almost consider the ash-pan getting full as a side issue, because we've *got* to stop digging stuff up when it's all been dug. Why not attempt to just leave the stuff in the ground now? And the concentrated CO2 on the surface becomes no longer a waste product to be buried, it's the feedstock for our prefered energy form.

A known problem with wind power (and wave, tidal, solar etc) is its intermittency, we don't have a good method of storing energy (batteries, flywheels, other). A problem with us is that many of us will still want to use hydrocarbon infrastructure for a long time to come - with good reason, high energy density, relatively easy to handle, and a large installed base. Compare proposed battery or hydrogen infrastructures to the existing hydrocarbon one.

Consider these suggested CCS windmills, but modify them with a back end. Use some of the energy to capture CO2 (as per the original plan), use some to electrolyse some water to hydrogen, and then the rest to combine them to hydrocarbon fuel. Distribute spare electricity when it's being made, run a gas-turbine generator when it's not, if that turns out to be cheaper than batteries, flywheels or pumped storage.

Pros - It would make what we would like to use, the intermittency is almost irrelevant as the fuel is such an excellent store, we don't have to bury anything, and we don't have to dig anything up (which also means we don't have to go to war to "influence" the places where we can get the stuff dug up for us (coughraq)). We can start small (as long as we scale up fast) and trickle any amount of product into the existing infrastructure, there is no big switch-over, or struggling to run two different systems in parallel. And any energy source is suitable for this duty, wind, wave, tidal, nuclear, solar, hydro. Did I mention we could keep the existing infrastructure?

Cons - It ain't sexy, and it will obviously need a collosal number of generators to make as much fuel as we currently use. But hey, that's much the same problem as any other mitigation. Reducing energy demand (a MJ or a kWh saved is several grams of carbon not dug up) is a must whatever method we go for. It would be more expensive per unit than mining is now, and more expensive then pure electricty generation and worldwide distribution is now, but the future?

Unfortunately I don't see how pure market forces could transfer the saving of not mining and not burying stuff to subsidise making fuel on the ground, or crystal-ball gaze to asertain future prices.

I don't want this to spin off topic, I'd like to set the limits at the technology for CCS, and market versus regulatory forces for valuing existing infrastructure and future fuels. I don't want to go into climate change conspiracy theories or lebensraum wars for low-lying populations with sea level rise.

Steve Conner

Thu Aug 27 2009, 10:42AM

Registered Member #30 Joined: Fri Feb 03 2006, 10:52AM
Location: Glasgow, Scotland
Posts: 6706

As I argued in my thesis, energy isn't a technical problem. It's a social and political one. If you throw enough money at enough engineers, they can make anything run off anything. But the engineers are never the ones holding the purse strings, which is really just as well sometimes, as we don't necessarily want our taxes spent on colossal geek toys.

Scotland is currently getting covered in swathes of wind turbines at 1.5MW each, both onshore and off. I've seen new 132kV lines and substations getting built to plug these new wind farms into the grid.

Vehicles have a service life of about 10-20 years before they get scrapped, so it doesn't take that long to replace them all with vehicles that run off other stuff, if some politician thought that was a good idea.

Prevention of climate change is also a political issue, because it needs deliberate distortion of the free market. The Earth doesn't bill us for its life support services, so the market has no way of understanding them. Engineers are even further out of their depth here, and don't even get me started on economists of the Milton Friedman school. (This would probably be outside the scope of Dr. Slack's topic anyway.)

In the long term, hydrocarbon infrastructure is a chicken and egg thing. The infrastructure developed to take advantage of cheap oil. As oil gets scarcer and more expensive, new infrastructures will get more attractive and begin to take the place of the old ones. For instance, the price of travelling by oil-fuelled car will go up, the price of travelling by wind-farm-powered electric train will stay the same. People will change their transport patterns according to what they consider reasonable. Cities might shrink and suburbs without train stations turn into wastelands, and so on. All of this might take 100 or 200 years to happen.

aonomus

Thu Aug 27 2009, 01:43PM

Registered Member #1497 Joined: Thu May 22 2008, 05:24AM
Location: Toronto, Ontario, Canada
Posts: 801

There are plenty of ways to use energy to turn CO2 into hydrocarbons, or waste organic matter (entrails and offal) into hydrocarbons. Alternative renewable energy can power the plants required to do the conversion making fuels from CO2 already in the air so that we don't burn fuel to make fuel.

I believe that there is alot of FUD surrounding global warming. Yes, temperatures have been elevated and we've been pumping CO2 into the atmosphere like crazy and its time to start making the switch to other energy sources, whether or not they are cheaper. Oil is refined because the consumers want it, if people stopped buying gasoline, then the majority of uses would be plastics (until they found other feedstocks, some companies have develop starch based plastics). There is alot of iffy distortion of what is actually understood imo regarding global warming, so take it all with a grain of salt.

One could argue about this all day, but like Steve said, on a global scale, things take time to happen, and you can't flip a switch to magically start sucking CO2 out of the air. IMO the planet can tolerate another decade or 2 of a progressive reduction in CO2 emissions. As long as people start reducing their usage of fuels, and live sustainably, I think that is most of the change that is needed by average joe. Companies will catch on and start producing products that are sustainable, and people will live within their means.

There are all sorts of other ways to sequester carbon, each with pros and cons... (not to drag off topic, just a comparison)
- Trees
- Pro: cheap, easy, proven by many^many years of use
- Con: takes time, not instant
- CO2 ground sequestration
- Pro: gets rid of CO2
- Con: unknown sideeffects, costly, liquified CO2 could come back to haunt us
- Sea water spray
- Pro: reduces CO2 slowly, almost no cost (just need to mix sea water with air and CaCO3 starts coming out)
- Con: increased humidity could do all sorts of unknown effects, increased weather activity

Perhaps alot of people "don't get it", and burying carbon is just a short term way to make it go away... I've always advocated reducing waste and living sustainably. So I think you are right Dr Slack, the problem lies not with whats already in the air, its what is putting it there in the first place (our activities). Mother nature will fix the carbon in plants all over the planet, but only we can stop putting too much CO2 there in the first place.

Steve Conner

Thu Aug 27 2009, 01:57PM

Registered Member #30 Joined: Fri Feb 03 2006, 10:52AM
Location: Glasgow, Scotland
Posts: 6706

Nanotubes to the rescue!

But can anyone think of a way to convert CO2 and water back into hydrocarbons using electricity? This works with sunlight. We'd need something like the regenerative fuel cell, but working with organics instead of ionic electrolyte.

Would this run backwards?

aonomus

Thu Aug 27 2009, 02:13PM

Registered Member #1497 Joined: Thu May 22 2008, 05:24AM
Location: Toronto, Ontario, Canada
Posts: 801

Unfortunately I don't think there is a way to get long chain hydrocarbons from CO2 directly, but you could use electricity to power the processes that already exist until new ones are discovered.

As for the carbon fuel cell, it looks like they use molten caustic salts, the only way to get CO2 in there would be to bubble it, or force it in under pressure (because high temperatures reduce solubility).

IMO, a technology that looks viable are bioreactors that take CO2 and fix to CH4 which can be processed further if needed.

Its all moot since the idea is to reduce emissions, not find new ways to substitute hydrocarbons from the ground with hydrocarbons from the air... The only reason to go from solar/wind/electricity to hydrocarbon is for energy storage. As long as you re-use the carbon after, it is still energy inefficient, further pushing towards just getting off of carbon as a fuel.

3l3ctrici7y

Fri Aug 28 2009, 12:10AM

Registered Member #1806 Joined: Sun Nov 09 2008, 04:58AM
Location: USA
Posts: 136

Dr. Slack; I see people do this a lot;
They bring up a topic, such as this, and then ask people not to disagree with them by saying things like "I don't want to go into climate change conspiracy theories". It happened in the swine flu thread a few months ago. I could just as easily say that I do not want to hear the latest "the sky is falling" prediction of doom such as global cooling/warming, climate change.

What have we had the misfortune of having to listen to;
It was global cooling in the 70's, global warming in the 90's to today, but just like global cooling; reality isn't working out for them, so they change the name again, now it's "Climate Change". Yes, "Climate Change". We're not sure what it is, but it's not good and we need more government control and taxes to stop this, whatever it is.

Previously we've had things like hole in the ozone, SARS, mad cow, bird flu, swine flu, SIDS, mobile phone radiation, rain forest/deforestation, food shortage, over population, nuclear war... and the list goes on of things that we're all supposed to be terrified of, or the next great cataclysm that never seems to happen.

The son of one of my mother's friends was uninvited on a trip to Antarctica by his university after he mentioned that he did not "believe" in global warming. This brings up another point; notice how it's always "believe"? Well, that's all it takes. Once you "believe" in it, you can be controlled. You ARE being controlled.

Read some quotes

from the first earth day I found with a Google

search. Notice the pattern of how all the predictions of doom are just a few years off.. 40 years ago? Amazing how we're still here, and with a better quality of life today than 40 years ago. That quality of life was not accomplished through conservation, it was accomplished through great minds producing. The other sites in the search that are supporting the idiocy have quotes too, but conveniently omit the mountain of false prophecies.

Those pronouncing doom are in a tough position. On the one hand the threat needs to be close and immediate enough to motivate you, but on the other hand; not so close as to seem improbable that things could change so radically so fast. Evil minds that seek to control populations, have written extensively about how fear is an important tool to be used to control peoples.

I love how they talk about "sustainability". It's amazing how well we've "sustained" thus far despite constant predictions to the contrary. Let me give you a little example about conservation vs production. If you're running low on clean clothes; do you conserve, or go to the washer and produce more clean clothes?

In closing, I would like to say I am so sick and tired of constantly hearing about the latest way the sky is falling. Just remember; it ALWAYS comes down to higher taxes, and more government control of our daily lives; ALWAYS!

WaveRider

Fri Aug 28 2009, 08:20AM

Registered Member #29 Joined: Fri Feb 03 2006, 09:00AM
Location: Hasselt, Belgium
Posts: 500

Photosynthesis in plants is probably the best way to convert CO2 to long chain hydrocarbons (in trees and grassy plants e.g., this means long-chain polysaccherides-cellulose). Trees are then harvested to produce houses, furniture, etc. locking up carbon for decades/centuries. Or trees could be left standing. However, mature forests tend to approach a carbon-stasis after a few centuries as tree growth (sequestration) approaches decomposition rates (Co2 release), so for tree-sequestration to work, new forest needs to be continuously generated by expansion or continuous controlled tree harvesting.

This tends not to work too well for agricultural waste, since decomposition occurs on a yearly basis...unless a use can be found to convert agricultural wastes into durable materials that sequester carbon (reusable plastics/wood like materials).

Carbon sequestration uderground is a bit of a furphy.. Besides all the unknowns of pumping CO2 undergound, there is thermodynamics to contend with. It would take a tremendous amount of energy to compress the billions of tonnes of CO2 that we produce each year...energy that wasted for providing little or no practical sustainable benefit, IMHO...

EDIT: I should probably mention that sequestration and fuel production are two different goals. Fuel production can, at best, strive to be carbon neutral while sequestration actually removes carbon from the atmosphere... Cheers!

Steve Conner

Fri Aug 28 2009, 10:59AM

Registered Member #30 Joined: Fri Feb 03 2006, 10:52AM
Location: Glasgow, Scotland
Posts: 6706

3l3ctrici7y wrote ...

Just remember; it ALWAYS comes down to higher taxes, and more government control of our daily lives; ALWAYS!

Do you know what's the only thing worse than government control of our daily lives? Paranoia.

All societies are totalitarian, in so far as laws can get passed and taxes levied that you personally don't like, and if you decide to disobey them you get locked up and eventually executed.

If you have a problem with that, that's unfortunately your problem, not society's, because it's always been this way and probably always will be. See Hobbes' Leviathan for a more detailed discussion.

WaveRider

Fri Aug 28 2009, 11:33AM

Registered Member #29 Joined: Fri Feb 03 2006, 09:00AM
Location: Hasselt, Belgium
Posts: 500

Global warming or no global warming.. I think it is a moot point: the Earth is warming up. Receding glaciers at the poles and in the mountainous regions of the world and bird-migration disruption are some of the indications of that. In fact, some of the biggest rivere systems in the world are drying up or are in danger of drying up (Ganges, Yangtze, Murray-Darling).

WHere some of the argument seems to come from is whether or not this warming is a result of human activity or part of the Earth's natural long-term weather cycles.... We have been in a warming period for the last 200-300 years since the last cooling period (starting in the early 14th century CE). Since the rate of warming is far higher than in previous periods, it makes sense to attribute it to rising greenhouse-gas levels in the atmosphere.. There are more sophisticated arguments that support the hypothesis of human-induced climate-change, but this is the gist of the reasoning..

I think it would be in the spirit of enlightened self interest to reduce our impact on the ecosystems of the world, where we can. Mother Nature will not be merciful to our species should we fail to heed the warning signs....whether the consequences take 40 or 400 years to catch up to us!

MinorityCarrier

Sat Aug 29 2009, 05:47AM

Registered Member #2123 Joined: Sat May 16 2009, 03:10AM
Location: Bend, Oregon
Posts: 312

We can successfully pursue carbon sequestration, but it won't solve the 'resource management problem'. That will be solved when the root problem, the human population burden on those resources, is reduced. Any talk of "Saving the Planet" that leaves out population control is a waste of time. Read "Living Within Limits" by Garret Hardin. He lays out the issue quite eloquently (if a bit long-winded). Not a popular view right now, but it needs to be discussed publicly, taught in school, and perhaps put into national policies. I fathered two kids then got snipped, I done me part. I know other dads who did the same. They should give tax cuts to people who don't have litters of kids, they should tax large families as far as I'm concerned. To quote Mr. Hardin, "If we don't control our population, Nature will do it for us". Nature will be brutal.

The argument over the possible anthropogenic cause of the very real warming of the earths atmosphere is indeed moot. Folks either are rational enough to connect the dots or they are blinded by irrational faith and paranoia. The sky is not falling, it's just getting warmer (faster than the supercomputer models predicted).

As for not liking government taxes, then don't use the highways or streets, grow all your food using your own dung for fertilizer, pump all your own unpurified drinking water, make your own electricity, and when you get a splinter under your fingernail that gets infected and you start to die from Clostridia toxins, arrange for a Shaman to wave a chicken bone over you.

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