Posted: Mon Sep 03, 2007 7:12 am Post subject: Re: Think outside of the system
Olorin wrote:
Hello
I have never seen people that open, farsighted, considerate and critical in their thinking like all you folks. Hope you will be open to this one:
Don´t believe any “expert” who thinks inside the current energy system, because that´s what “they” want to keep up. Think outside of the system:
- All the hydrogen and alternative energy in the world won´t save us, if we continue operating within our current energy system. If we really want to do something against PO and GW, we have to establish a true hydrogen economy. One which is not based on hydrogen from fossil fuels (not even worth talking about) or electrolysis (too expensive and inefficient) but on hydrogen directly from biomass.
- Cut the electricity supply system, because you don´t need it anymore. Go from an electricity-based system to a heat-based system.
- Conversion of energy is not done by thermodynamic processes (which lose a lot of energy, because the heat can´t be utilised) but decentralised by electrochemical processes: Fuel cells in the homes and cars. This way you could cut your primary energy needs in half, because you use the power and the heat.
- Use the natural gas pipelines to get the hydrogen to the homes and fuel stations. It has been done before (Stadtgas, about 60% hydrogen back in the 60s in Germany) and can be done now with only minor switches in the pipelines and heating devices.
- Produce the hydrogen from biomass, dry and wet, use silage to store it. You don´t need fertiliser or pesticides because you can use everything that grows. You can have multiple harvests per year because you don´t have to wait for something to get ripe which is very inefficient. Just use the biomass and alternate the plants. You get biodiversity and soil improvement as a byproduct.
- The EU has about 5,5 Mio ha of agricultural land that produces a surplus of grain, meat and milk, or is not used so you could easily produce about 5000 PJ this way, which would be enough for the EU, considering the higher efficiency (see above).
All these things have been thought through, calculated and presented to the public. Here´s a link:
- Karl Heinz Tetzlaff, who is now retired, was the leader of the fuel cell and hydrogen division of Hoechst which is now Aventis and as such a process engineer well educated in engineering and calculating. He is a decent guy without financial interests and currently a consultant to the European Parliament.
- In the article mentioned above there are almost no footnotes. In his book “Bio Wasserstoff” there are over 140. In addition the book has a technical appendix with all the calculations for his statements but it has not been published in English I guess. His references and calculations are realistic and solid, but check for yourself.
- Still there is one major mistake in his calculations: a fuel cell stack cannot be produced for 12$/kw at the moment (instead ~73$/kw, Ballard Power Systems). But the price will come down dramatically due to lower platinum for the fuel cell stack (http://www.physorg.com/news90167618.html) and improvements in the membrane (http://technology.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn6493&print=true).
- The Fraunhofer Institut and the Max-Planck Institut, Germany´s most famous research institutes have formed an alliance to examine the process Tetzlaff proposed (steam reforming of biomass in “Wirbelschichtreaktoren”, either autotherm or allotherm). There are also working factories in Germany, Austria and other places. Also the National Institute of Renewable Energy currently examines the different versions of steam reforming.
Hard times are upon us.
All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given to us.
Hydrogen is probably the least promissing of all alternative fuels. If liquid hydrogen is produced by electrolysis and liquification and distributed as a transport fuel for use in fuel cells, barely a fifth of the original electric power will reach the wheels of the vehicle. If you are deriving the hydrogen from a heavy fossil fuel like coal, tarsands or biomass, the conversion efficiencies are such that they provide no advantages over a conventional IC engine.
This is before we get bogged down in discussion of the horrific capital costs of a hydrogen energy system.
Basicaly, the only people actively promoting hydrogen as a fuel are those that (1) Don't really understand the technology or energy issues generally and don't really know what they are talking about (left-wing, greeny, marxist-tree-hugger political types) (2) Governments that want to be seen to be doing something without investing serious money in making grass-roots changes to our way of life (3) car companies that want street-cred for investing in trendy green technologies and are happy to blow a few million in what is essentially (an often government funded) a publicity exercise. Frankly, I feel embarrased for those well meaning engineers and scientists that have to spend their lives promoting this hopeless redherring.
Hydrogen will always be the fuel of tomorrow and in years to come will probably be remembered in much the same way as the Dutch Tullip mania of the 17th century. At best it may be useful as a transitional media during the combustion of fossil fuels in solid-oxide fuel cells. As far as powering transport is concerned, it would be much more efficient to burn fossil fuels in highly efficient electricity plants (combined cycle gassification power coal plants) and deliver the electricity to vehicles from the grid using conductive transfer, through a live rail embedded within the road. This is similar to what is done on electric railways today.
Posted: Mon Sep 03, 2007 7:40 am Post subject: Re: Think outside of the system
Excellent post, Sideous.
I fully agree that hydrogen as a fuel for general use is a hype, no more.
(And, of course, there are important financial motivations behind it - besides those you cite, one of the most important is the maintenance of research groups that don’t have other competencies.)
And hydrogen, in general and massive use, would also have important long term sustainability problems:
Hydrogen escaped to the atmosphere raises and escapes the earth system, being lost forever (from our point of view).
Over a very long time frame, that raises the oxygen content of our atmosphere, and reduces the total of water available on earth.
Last edited by Ming on Mon Sep 03, 2007 7:45 am; edited 1 time in total
Posted: Mon Sep 03, 2007 8:12 am Post subject: Re: Think outside of the system
I love the nickel-metal hydride battery in my electric bike, but I have doubts about the feasibility of making all that hydrogen to send through leaky pipelines. I think that hydrides may make the best battery around.
I like the idea of everyone making some of their own power and having a grid that distributes it in a smaller area. Skip the liquid hydrogen completely. People could have the hydride batteries as energy storage in every home. They could have solar, hydro and wind feeding these microgrids, which would make a much more robust power system than the centralized one we have now.
Posted: Mon Sep 03, 2007 10:28 am Post subject: Re: Think outside of the system
Yes, decentralization is part of the powerdown solution.
If hydrogen had such a bright future, then the leading fuel cell company wouldn't be a penny stock with BLDP @ $4.48/share. _________________ A Saudi saying, "My father rode a camel. I drive a car. My son flies a jet-plane. His son will ride a camel."
Live in Arizona? Check out: http://sustainablearizona.org and read my blog.
Posted: Mon Sep 03, 2007 8:07 pm Post subject: Re: Think outside of the system
I like your title for this forum. Think outside the system. I think that hydrogen is the darling of the Bush administration because it's in the system. The idea of running cars on hydrogen and having filling stations appeals to them.
The fact is that to think outside the system requires us to scrap most of the infrastructure we have built in the past 100 years.
Richard Komp, solar energy pioneer, said yesterday that the present system of delivering electricity is already obsolete. After thinking about it I had to agree. I would add that our transportation system is also obsolete.
People may have had a sentimental attachment to horses, but their numbers still dwindled into the middle of the 20th century.
This whole mess we've made won't be worth much very soon.
We won't be able to feed the electric grid, and maintenance will be an increasingly difficult problem. Will hydrogen save us from that? I don't think so. Fuel cells might be a great way to store energy, but they don't make any.
Our cars and SUV's will be useless if gas goes much above $5 a gallon. Right now a lot of them are selling for around the scrap metal price.
The car of the future weighs around 350 pounds, and has a range of around 30 miles between electric charges. The house of the future is around 500 square feet and is oriented to the sun, for heating and cooling. The house provides at least half of it's own energy, from passive and active solar. The person of the future will use far less of everything than us. If they are lucky!
Posted: Tue Sep 04, 2007 2:32 am Post subject: Re: Think outside of the system
Revi wrote:
I like your title for this forum. Think outside the system. I think that hydrogen is the darling of the Bush administration because it's in the system. The idea of running cars on hydrogen and having filling stations appeals to them.
The fact is that to think outside the system requires us to scrap most of the infrastructure we have built in the past 100 years.
Richard Komp, solar energy pioneer, said yesterday that the present system of delivering electricity is already obsolete. After thinking about it I had to agree. I would add that our transportation system is also obsolete.
People may have had a sentimental attachment to horses, but their numbers still dwindled into the middle of the 20th century.
This whole mess we've made won't be worth much very soon.
We won't be able to feed the electric grid, and maintenance will be an increasingly difficult problem. Will hydrogen save us from that? I don't think so. Fuel cells might be a great way to store energy, but they don't make any.
Our cars and SUV's will be useless if gas goes much above $5 a gallon. Right now a lot of them are selling for around the scrap metal price.
The car of the future weighs around 350 pounds, and has a range of around 30 miles between electric charges. The house of the future is around 500 square feet and is oriented to the sun, for heating and cooling. The house provides at least half of it's own energy, from passive and active solar. The person of the future will use far less of everything than us. If they are lucky!
I'm not so sure about this idea of a 'post electric grid future'. For one thing the grid is not nearly so innefficient as many people seem to assume. Energy losses in the UK grid are around 7.5% of the total generation, a loss that is reasonably tollerable. Nor is the grid so expensive that we will not be able to maintain it following peak oil. It was built and maintained affordably during the 1930s and 1940s, at a time when GDP was a fraction what it is today.
Also, I think most people tend to underestimate the cost of small-scale renewable energy systems and over-estimate the amount of power that they produce. These backyard windmills will not produce the amount of power needed to maintain a high-tech society. Without a high-tech society we would have no way to maintain our windmills. The grid is also extremely useful in balancing the power variations that are a natural fact of life with renewable energy sytems.
My guess is that the future energy base of the UK and US for the second half of the 21st century, will be based upon grid based electricity, fed by large nuclear reactors, with minor contributions from renewable energy sources and low-grade fossil fuels. For renewable electricity to work at all, systems need to be developed on a scale that allow them to achieve massive scale economy. They also need some form of load leveling to cancel out the effects of local variability. The grid is a prerequisite for both of these conditions.
Posted: Tue Sep 04, 2007 4:57 pm Post subject: Re: Think outside of the system
Yes, on national levels, until PV prices drop some 6 to 8 times, and batteries become several times more cost-effective, distributed renewable energy will remain marginal...
In fact, the combination of large wind farms and mass storage (pumped hydro and eventually CAES), complemented by nuclear and 100% conventional hydro resource utilization, will probably guarantee that large scale production facilities and national-level grid distribution (or continent-level, in Europe and North America) will be the most efficient post-peak energy solution...
Ahead of a €940 million (US$1.4 billion) funding round for hydrogen development, the scientific project HyWays funded by the EU's 6th Framework Program has found that introducing hydrogen into the Union's energy system would reduce total oil consumption by the road transport sector by 40% between now and 2050. The study looked at 10 member states and found bio-hydrogen is preferred as the main renewable production pathway, having the largest potential even after taking into account alternative uses for biomass, such as biofuels and bioproducts; hydrogen based on biomass is also by far the most cost-effective of the non-fossil based production methods.
They are still very reluctant but they will speed up when things get really ugly.
Joined: Aug 03, 2006 Posts: 4264 Location: Graceland
Posted: Fri Feb 29, 2008 4:18 pm Post subject: Re: Think outside of the system
A techno-fix is not thinking outside the system.
Thinking outside the system is realizing that FAR less can be removed from the ecosystem without destroying the sustainability of the ecosystem.
It is not thinking outside the system to try to find another way of fueling the same lifestyle.
Thinking outside the system is realizing that a new lifestyle must be adopted before one is imposed on us.
The trouble is that a less comfortable lifestyle is rarely recognized as an improvement over a more comfortable one, even if the former is the one that is sustainable. _________________
Posted: Sat Mar 01, 2008 6:39 am Post subject: Re: Think outside of the system
I don't think we can really think outside the system, but we'll have to do it pretty soon. I have a feeling that what will actually happen will be more like the movie Brazil. The whole complicated system will slowly deteriorate. We won't be able to do much about it.
I intend to do what I can, but it seems like the rest of my culture will slowly realize that business as usual is over.
Heating oil at $5 a gallon makes it very difficult for people to heat their homes around here. People will put in wood stoves and try to keep their houses warm here in Maine, but the rest of the country can't do that.
Gas at $5 a gallon forces people to think outside of the system. Why have a car at all? Rent one when you need one. Get a bicycle or even an electric car:
Posted: Wed Mar 05, 2008 8:28 am Post subject: Re: Think outside of the system
MonteQuest wrote:
Olorin wrote:
Quote:
The only way to increase the biomass share of primary energy use in the U.S. is to decrease the fossil fuel consumption.
That would be true, if you think about biofuels which need a lot of fossil fuels to create, like ethanol.
I suggest you read those links again.
How many more lifeforms should we deny food so we can continue "happy motoring"?
as many as needed. why not. survival of the fittest. Monte you probably wish that we all crawl up in caves and die. everything is not as black as you try to paint solutions will arise where you lease expect them
Posted: Wed Mar 05, 2008 12:28 pm Post subject: Re: Think outside of the system
Mankind is heavily reliant upon other lifeforms. Further destruction of the biosphere will eventually lead to mankind's extinction.
Happy motoring is not so damaging to the planet if you remove the OIL involved in continuing it and decrease the energy associated with it to 1/5 of today. Food production is a much bigger culprit(especially factory famred meat), and war perhaps even a more substantial one(which, if oil is removed from the happy motoring equation, most wars would either lessen in severity or cease).
Think outside the system? How about destroy it and build a better one in its place? We need action on top of thinking. _________________ The unnecessary felling of a tree, perhaps the old growth of centuries, seems to me a crime little short of murder. ~Thomas Jefferson
Posted: Wed Mar 05, 2008 1:06 pm Post subject: Re: Think outside of the system
Why even produce Hydrogen out of biomass, methane would be simpler. Hydrogen still suffers from difficulties in storage, transport, and energy density. Fool cells are pointless as well since Hydrogen can be burned in an ICE anyways.
I am afraid Monte is dead on about the real volumes involved. Its not scalable.
-G _________________ All right, you primitive screw-heads, listen up!
Posted: Wed Mar 05, 2008 1:24 pm Post subject: Re: Think outside of the system
There are even fuel cells that can run on biomass like ethanol or vegetable oil... much more efficient than making H2 from the biomass. _________________ The unnecessary felling of a tree, perhaps the old growth of centuries, seems to me a crime little short of murder. ~Thomas Jefferson
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