Phxkevin

You been here a year and just found me out. Try the ignore button. it should do the trick.
Guess who came up with the poster rating idea.

First a quick quibble with the details of one of the statements in the original post: "A side benefit of this path (LFTRs + coal -> synfuel + electricity) is that we reduce the CO2 output into the atmosphere by the amount of the formerly-burned imported oil." If you are burning as much synfuel using your energy dense (but still derived from fossil source (in this case coal)), the amount of CO2 emissions due to replacing imported oil burning will be roughly the same.

The problem as I mentioned in an earlier thread is that the energy density is only an advantage if one has to carry the fuel in the vehicle as well as all of the mechanisms to turn that into a propulsive force for the vehicle and its payload. That is not required at all. Consider for a moment the electric bike (http://www.electric-bikes.com/). There are many studies that indicate average city traveling speeds are in the 12-18mph range (based on end to end trip times and distances). Most mass transit systems have overall trip speeds slower than a human powered bike. If you like, use the get direction facility of Google maps to look up your common trips. You can see the distances and times for driving, and in most cases biking and mass transit. Now as for the electric bikes, most use electric motors consuming 400-1000W (or about .6 to 1.4 hp). These can achieve top speeds above the average noted above, with ranges of as much as 30 to 40 miles on a charge. An urban road system with overpasses at major intersections sufficient to carry the weight of such vehicles would produce end to end trip times no worse than today's system based on 2000 to 6000 # personal vehicles.

Note that the power requirements and range can be greatly increased using recumbent layout and a reasonable fairing. For example: http://www.wired.com/culture/lifestyle/n.... has a human powered bike achieving 80mph, although sustained rates by trained athletes are more in the 30-40 mph rate. Note that such humans can only maintain 150-200 W outputs for any reasonably sustained period. But if the 400W electric motor were to replace the human such enhancements would double the efficiency, while substantially increasing the peak speed, of the electric bikes noted in the previous paragraph.

There are still issues with cargo and emergency vehicles and the way they would interact with such light-weight personal vehicles. But those are easily solvable. Note that this is even more deployment ready technology than the LFTR option and the power here is stored in the low density batteries that as Karl notes do not have the energy density required if one desires to push around 2000 - 6000 pounds to move on average much less than 300 pounds of humans.

Further note that a system based on such light-weight vehicles would also greatly reduce all other energy requirements not just those of the energy to directly power the vehicle during movement. At https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AiH-Amyx50i4dFpTVm9hbTgwTWxwUnFkX0RaemU3Wnc&hl=en_US#gid=1 I have posted to Google docs a spreadsheet obtained in Excel from the Natural Resources Canada web site. See the AllSector2 tab. This lists total use in the transportation sector of ~30% of total Canadian energy consumption. But the actual number directly related to our transportation system is closer to 50% of the total. For example, according to other studies the energy needed to construct our vehicles (produce the steel, assemble, ...) is between 10 and 15% of the total energy consumed as fuel during use. This is buried in the mining, iron and steel and other manufacturing categories (which total 17.9%). So add another 5% for that. Much of the petroleum refining category (3.7%) goes to fuel production. More than half of the mining category (of 8.5%) goes to the tar sands and other crude generation. Significant parts of the commercial and institutional are directly related to our current car culture (e.g. car dealers, gas stations, admin services related to roads, licences, etc.). There is also a substantial amount related to road construction and maintenance which is buried in the other numbers. Net is if we could cut these numbers to 10% of today, which is possible using existing technology, we would have a system with comparable trip time performance and much better safety, other pollution reduction (e.g. even Karl's synfuel option would produce emissions which would generate smog and related health issues).

As an aside this same spreadsheet also reveals where we can reduce our requirements for energy for most other sectors. For example, light pipes / skylights for commercial/institutional lighting. Such things are starting to be deployed. Another point in which I disagree with Karl is his often made assertion that each unit of GDP has a unit of energy consumption required. The implication is that this is relatively constant. But to me he under-emphasizes the point that it is not money that is important, but what one can buy with the money. In fact, a careful analysis of this sheet reveals many opportunities for having "the same or even more of the ultimate demand (e.g. food, shelter, speed and safety of travel)" with far less consumption of energy.

Finally, what we should be going to for moving people and goods around a city would be a PRT with the following characteristics:
- truely personal
- off-grade (as with a subway or elevated train do not compete with other traffic such as pedestrians or cyclists). This should also eliminate most ROW needs.
- suspended (fail safe design for cornering and dealing with weather)
- external power storage
- extremely light weight vehicles (low energy consumption during use and for production)
- low land use requirements
- end to end trips with no stopping
- ground level, low cost, stations/stops
Shweeb (http://www.shweeb.co.nz/Shweeb/what-is-t.... demonstrates most of these principals in an operational system. In an earlier post when I brought this up someone asked about specific studies related to PRT. I did not respond because most are case studies of PRT designs that violate 1 or more of the above principals (e.g. Morgantown is not personal and like the one at Heathrow is not suspended). Further, Shweeb has satisfied the Google 10^100 reviewers to obtain money from them. Most people when I show them the Shweeb video concentrate on the human powered aspect, but just assume that the same drive were replaced with one of the 500W electric motors from the electric bikes noted above.

It is relatively easy to estimate the cost of a Shweeb type guideway including stations/stops. I came up with something substantially less than $1M/km. In consulting with the Shweeb people they indicate that is the ballpark they have determined too.

The only two things the existing Shweeb does not demonstrate that would be required for a real urban deployment are:
- a high speed switching system. A true network will need this and it should operate at speed. The Shweeb people appear to be assuming 15mph cruising speeds (which would still be competitive with the car in most urban settings as no stops are required), but one should be able to do much better. The Mister PRT design from Poland (http://www.mist-er.com/home-page.html?se.... specifies a patented switch that should work for substantially higher speeds in a suspended structure.
- the complexity and cost of station/stop structures. Again the Mister page describes a detailed solution in this area. Some PRT designs illustrate stations that operate at the level of the track. These have numerous issues, including substantial expense. As Mister notes it is far better to bring the vehicles down to street level for loading and unloading. There are lots of demonstrations of such systems at amusement parks all over the world, and these are typically using vehicles far heavier than what would exist in a proper PRT.

Gary

The other night I saw a show that kept reminding me Karl's statement (paraphrased)"everything is tied to a unit of energy". The show was "'History of the World in Two Hours". I thought I was going to watch a "history" show, but what I really saw was show that should have been titled, "Evolutionary Leaps of Mankind due to a New Energy Source".

Granted the show chronicled mankind's history, but at each stage mankind made a huge leap in advancement, it was always tied to a new, more powerful, less expensive energy source (fire, electricity...).

It got me thinking about what will be mankind's next "new" energy source that causes the next big advancement. It is not anything we have today. The ones that provide such leaps are not incremental increases, but exponential increases with very low cost. Low enough any common man can take advantage of it.

I did a Goog News search on LFTR , and other acronyms . Very few hits . hmmm , someone doesn't like this tech . Did find Flibe Energy , news alert set , also for LFTR .

Statoil web site would probably be a good place to search for data on coal gas GTL process and effeciencies . Recommend RTK ( rentech ) check as well

Coal GTL fueled the German war machine WWII

I have posted this before, think it was to late in the thread to get many views. Talk of Thorium by an eminent nuclear scientist, enjoy. - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8vywZ84mi....

I remember circa 20 years ago it being stated that the UK has 500 years worth of coal underground, most of it in deep mines. Since then nearly all of the deep coal mines have been closed and 90% of the miners made redundant.

The UK could have been energy independant for electricity generation at least using coal alone. Now we rely on imports of NG for our electricity generation, much of it coming from the middle east. All by design IMO.

We now have another option.

Here is a quote from, http://www.xerionmaterials.com/downloads....
"URBANA, Illinois ‐The University of Illinois at Urbana‐Champaign today announced it has entered into a licensing agreement with Xerion Advanced Battery Corp. under which Xerion has the exclusive right to bring the University’s StructurePore battery‐charging technology to the market.
The StructurePore technology was developed by Paul Braun, Ph. D., of the Department of Materials, Science & Engineering at the University of Illinois, who is presently also an officer and director of Xerion. Dr. Braun and his colleagues believe that the StructurePore technology has the potential to, for example, instantly charge cell phone batteries and rapidly charge laptops and electric cars, all within a matter of several minutes."

Please make note of this technology on the horizon. Imagine the possibilities of a battery that can charge slowly with solar or wind and then dump it's entire charge into a car battery bank in 5 minutes.

A barrel of oil yields a percentage of kerosene, diesel, gas, etc, etc.

If you wish to use hydrogen or NatGas for transport - Gas and diesel becomes really cheap as oil must still be refined for jet fuel, etc.

No matter how you try. If oil is to be refined to gain the use of ANY oil product, The distilled oil WILL yield other oil products such as gas and diesel.

In other words -- You cant refine a barrel of oil into JUST kerosene, OR just gasoline, OR just Diesel !! There will be a mix of products on a percentage basis from every barrel that is refined.

Thats just the way it is !

@Anderson, get back to me after you guys calculate the fraction of the earth required to be covered in solar and wind generators to produce sufficient energy for transportation needs. Sounds like a cool capacitor though.

"This is not a panacea but it provides price stability, certainty of supply, and a forward path that we can embark on. It would require a serious effort -- perhaps even a "Manhattan Project" style undertaking"

A project that would likely cost a fraction of what we spend in one year to militarily dominate oil producing regions. Of course, that domination is not just to secure the oil, it's also an attempt to geopolitically control other countries.

"How about use it to produce carbon-fiber? But since taxes on fuel
are per gallon, more gallons the better. We can't allow government revenues from
fuel sales to be cut in in half, can we? I though so."

If fuel usage would be cut in half, the government could simply double the tax per gallon, to maintain revenue. The number of carbon fiber cars would rise slowly over time, thus the tax would increase over time. Early buyers would get an advantage for a while.

Quote:

First a quick quibble with the details of one of the statements in the original post: "A side benefit of this path (LFTRs + coal -> synfuel + electricity) is that we reduce the CO2 output into the atmosphere by the amount of the formerly-burned imported oil." If you are burning as much synfuel using your energy dense (but still derived from fossil source (in this case coal)), the amount of CO2 emissions due to replacing imported oil burning will be roughly the same.

WRONG.

Today the coal AND the oil gets burned.

With LFTRs the oil does not get burned, the coal gets turned into liquid hyrocarbons, it is burned (as liquid hydrocarbons) and the remaining energy from the thorium produces the electricity we formerly produced by burning the coal.

In fact there is approximately thirteen times the thermal energy contained in the thorium that just happens to be in coal as you obtain by burning the coal in the first place.

As a consequence we not only can turn the coal into synfuel and produce the electricity we used to produce by burning the coal at the same time we do not emit the (lightly) radioactive thorium from burning the coal when we're all done, with thermodynamic losses, we still have energy remaining.

Globalist puppet. From the greedy, incompetent ****s who brought to you the Deepwater Horizon mess

Quote:

Steven E. Koonin is the Under Secretary of Energy for Science at the United States Department of Energy. He was previously Chief Scientist for BP plc, where he was responsible for guiding the company’s long-range technology strategy, particularly in alternative and renewable energy sources.

Quick, that is true, as far as it goes. However it is possible (is done actually) to adjust how much of what comes out of a barrel of oil. It is not a simple distillation process.
That's what crackers and reformers are for.
At the moment light fuels are what many refinery's are biased towards, there is no reason for it to stay that way if the demand for light fuels were to change.

Suluc, the crack is only adjusable within narrow limits.

Correct. You can adjust the split to a limited degree but it gets expensive very fast if you want to move it a lot.

Tell me if my thinking is wrong.

The right two breakthroughs will dramatically alter our energy discussion. Those two are: one, a much more efficient solar cell that does not require rare/expensive elements to produce; and two, a leap forward in battery technology that also does not use rare/expensive components.

Either one would change things greatly, the combination would go a long way toward getting us off of fossil fuels.

Now, I am sure this will get a lot of flack. The department of energy should spend a significant percentage of its money on basic research in these two areas. I'm sure there are a number of engineering/physics/materials Ph.D. students out there who would love to see their dissertation research funded. This would be totally different than trying to 'pick winner' with manufacturing firms like Solyndra. Basic research, that is what the department of energy should fund.

Quote:

The right two breakthroughs will dramatically alter our energy discussion. Those two are: one, a much more efficient solar cell that does not require rare/expensive elements to produce; and two, a leap forward in battery technology that also does not use rare/expensive components.

Not necessarily, for the simple reason that conversion efficiency is subject to physical laws. In short much of this "pursuit" is in fact not much different than those who believed in Smoky Yunick's "100mpg" carburetor (a device I tried to replicate in my teen years and FAILED; it was that failure that led me to get interested in the physical laws involved in heat engines, and from there the obvious, once you acquired that knowledge, became apparent.)

Genesis, I agree with you that thorium reactors and coal synthetic fuels are good ideas. But somewhere these things to be asked:

Exactly who are you calling on to do what? Are you calling on the Government to build these Thorium reactors? Give subsidies/grants to people or organizations that do so? Or merely make it legal? Do you want readers of your blog to build this stuff? Invest in companies that would do so? Write politicians telling them to repeal laws against it?

Also, would you consider personally building something like a Fischer-Tropsch household petroleum synthesizer? Or maybe even a Thorium engine? And posting a howto on Instructables? You have money, and technical knowledge; and there is something to be said for leading by example.

Finally, what exactly is preventing these things from being built? Are there, for example, any laws that say you're not allowed to build a thorium reactor?

Solar will never produce enough energy to have serious impact on industrial energy production required to sustain our current world population. The energy density of sunlight isn't high enough for sufficient net energy production after taking into account all the energy required for fabrication, transportation, installation, and maintenance of the devices. It's not a serious solution for anything other than off-grid applications.

Burya_rubenstein wrote..

Give subsidies/grants to people or organizations that do so? Or merely make it legal? Do you want readers of your blog to build this stuff? Invest in companies that would do so? Write politicians telling them to repeal laws against it?

Disbanding the Department of Energy and repealing all the laws it enforces and subsidies it doles out should do the trick.

Some numbers I found interesting.

http://www.silverbearcafe.com/private/11....

The main problem with gravitational storage is that it is incredibly weak compared to chemical, compressed air, or flywheel techniques (see the post on home energy storage options). For example, to get the amount of energy stored in a single AA battery, we would have to lift 100 kg (220 lb) 10 m (33 ft) to match it. To match the energy contained in a gallon of gasoline, we would have to lift 13 tons of water (3500 gallons) one kilometer high (3,280 feet). It is clear that the energy density of gravitational storage is severely disadvantaged.

Here is the next leap forward in electrical energy sources for the nerds and geeks to figure out: direct collection and storage of stray electrons (aka "static electricity" - static as in not flowing).

Currently all of the methods of "generating" electricity involves getting electrons to move from point a to point b. IMHO, "generating" electricity is a misnomer as it is merely a methodology to get the electrons to flow from pt. a to pt. b. The fundamental question for which I have never found a sufficient answer is what is the origin of the electrons that are being forced to flow? If the electrons are being moved from one place to another, new electrons have to be coming from somewhere to replace the electrons that have been moved, otherwise oxidation in the generating equipment would occur.

So what is so difficult about harnessing static electricity (loose electrons that are not flowing)? Loose electrons are everywhere in our environment. Lighting is a flow of loose electrons, the amount of energy that flows in a lighting bolt is in the GIGA amp range, that energy isn't "produced," because it is already accumulated in the form of potential energy - "static" electricity. Somebody needs to figure out how to collect and store static electricity with some new technology that doesn't require the heavy equipment used currently.

If such a technology were developed, obese people in polyester pants would generate all the electricity we need and we could supplement that with plastic shoes and synthetic fiber carpet.

Imustbenutz wrote..

The fundamental question for which I have never found a sufficient answer is what is the origin of the electrons that are being forced to flow? If the electrons are being moved from one place to another, new electrons have to be coming from somewhere to replace the electrons that have been moved, otherwise oxidation in the generating equipment would occur.

Electrons move because you apply a force to them, just like any other moving object.

The reason we arrange electrical systems into circuits is because, as you said, it's necessary to replace the electrons we move from out of the generator and into the circuit. The replacement electrons come from the circuit itself so the electrons end up flowing in a circle.

You can't use the electrons that are just lying around without applying some kind of external force to them because without this force they are all at the same potential.

The reason is very similar to why you can't use hydroelectric power in a lake unless there's somewhere lower than lake level for the water to fall to.

Okay then, perhaps my understanding is wrong. (entirely possible, as I have not made a study of refinery processes)

My understanding is that at the moment a great deal of effort goes into making gasoline out of crude oil. They use catalytic cracking, hydro cracking and coking to turn long hydrocarbon chains into short ones and they use reforming to add hydrogen to turn them into gasoline and diesel.
Through these efforts they can turn over half of every 42 gallon barrel of crude into gasoline at the best refinerys, while seventy years ago they were doing well to get 11 gallons of gasoline out of a barrel of crude. (lighter crude generally than what we have today)

If that is true then there is considerable leeway to reduce gasoline production while still producing asphalt, bunker, motor oils, diesel, jet fuel, and so on.