Trash to Gas? Move on...
For decades people seem to have tried gasification of waste. Either the economics didn't work out, the technology was finicky, or a combination of both. The failure of gasification comes as no surprise, as I looked into my kitchen trash bag this morning, seeing an incredible potpourri of materials, sizes, shapes, and consistencies.
Garbage is heterogeneous. It contains particles ranging in size from a grain of sand to a sofa. It contains materials ranging from road grit, metal, and glass with no energy value to plastics with a high energy value. The array of chemical compositions is almost endless, and some of these materials are literally nothing but water which will extinguish any hope for successful conversion pretty quickly.
What happens when the gasifier is fed a load of two dozen pumpkins, as I witnessed being unloaded at the Lancaster incinerator?
The solution to trash: mass-burn incineration with cogeneration of electricity and heat. It seems that most of the gasification proposals will be using the gas to generate electricity anyways, so why not skip the complicated gasification process?
British Airways apparently would like to convert trash into aircraft fuel - producing what they call "green airliner fuel". Good luck with that one, there's nothing more like running backwards up Mt. Second Law.
Let's let physics work in our favor - instead of burning oil and gas for space heating and making fuel from garbage, let's use trash for space heating and make fuel from oil and gas. If we want to be "green", we will let the airlines keep burning oil-derived fuel and we will heat our cities by burning garbage - NOT the other way around.
One Hyped-Up Fuel Cell
The journalists at CBS appear to have made a big stink about a little black (er...gray) box called a Bloom Box. Developed by Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, The Bloom Box is a modular fuel cell capable of producing electrical power on a small scale at high efficiency using natural gas.
The company's employees reportedly spent ten years of their lives developing this thing. I do not know what kind of innovations in materials and construction they may have developed and cannot criticize that aspect of the product. I am willing, however, to criticize the insane amount of hype which the media has generated. The articles have exploded over Web sites over the past few days, and having read some and scanned through others, some fairly outrageous claims are being made.
Essentially, they made another fuel cell - the same technology that Sir William Grove demonstrated in 1839, the same technology which Ballard Power Systems, Fuel Cell Energy, and others have been selling for decades, and the same technology in the mythical cars Honda has been advertising on TV for years now. They may have made a more robust fuel cell, cheaper fuel cell, etc. But nonetheless, it is a fuel cell.
- It does not create electricity from thin air.
- It does not necessarily use renewable resources.
- It burns NATURAL GAS, the same gas people are familiar with for heating their homes. CH4 + 2O2 -> 2H2O + CO2, the same chemical reaction which takes place in the all-familiar gas forced air furnace and gas range burner.
- There are emissions. Water and Carbon Dioxide, the same emissions that make up the majority of power plant, car, truck, and home heating exhausts. These are also the emissions of human beings, but we do not run on fossil fuels, at least not directly.
- It has the capacity of increasing efficiency through cogeneration, provided that facilities are installed for recovering the waste heat - e.g. for domestic hot water, space heating.
- It is not an energy storage device.
- It does not defy the laws of physics (specifically thermodynamics and conservation of matter/energy)
- It will not reduce "resistive" losses in energy transmission. There is resistance in gas pipes just as there is resistance in electrical wiring. It takes energy to move gas around just as it takes energy to move electricity around.
- Running the Bloom Box on methane from manure/sludge digestion, landfills, etc. is possible. So long as every last molecule of sulfur is removed beforehand, as sulfur is notorious for bringing a slow death to fuel cells and catalysts. Landfill gas will also tend to have chlorine compounds and other nastiness in it, that's why the big LFG plants use boilers and steam to generate power as it is even too harsh for diesel engines.
- Companies like eBay, Google, Walmart, etc. are willing to pay big bucks for this because using such a box to power their data centers means that they can do away with big and expensive uninterruptable power supplies and diesel generator sets required as a backup to the grid power used now.
- Using the Bloom Box to produce a "methane-like fuel" from the water and CO2 exhaust is brain dead, senseless, stupid, et. al. Turn natural gas into electricity, heat, water, and carbon dioxide, then go and reassemble it all back into natural gas. All while adhering to the Second Law of Thermo and making money at the same time? Rube Goldberg would be happy.
Currently the consumer economy requires the energy equivalent of filet mignon - electricity and liquid fuels - to survive. In my opinion, those who make the world run on 60/40 ground beef - low-grade heat and light from the sun - will be the ones who win the prize. They probably will not become rich enough however to be able to afford the $5000 office chairs of dot com fame, let alone sustain consumerism.
Wood-Fired Power Backlash
Much attention is going towards power plants which burn wood and other plant materials for the production of electricity (with, of course, the leftover heat being blown away in cooling towers). It sounds great at first. Wood IS renewable and carbon-neutral, right?
Technically, yes. But things go a little deeper. The use of firewood as fuel for electricity is far different than the use of wood for direct space heating, such as in a wood stove.
When we turn firewood into electricity, it is used far from where the trees were grown. The energy consumers never see the forests, they never handle the wood. They just flip a switch and a light comes on. The energy travels on wires for hundreds of miles to some concrete jungle where it is used to power up PlayStation and XBOX consoles, training our future generations to be soldiers to destroy and fight the resource wars of the future in Call of Duty. We get the smell of overheated electronics amongst the stream of profanity and bigotry streaming from the players' headset earpieces. (I happen to have many friends who play this game OFTEN! More power to them I guess, it is not my cup of tea...)
When we turn firewood into heat, we get an appreciation for the trees and the energy. It is known how heavy the wood is, and how much wood is required to produce a given amount of heat. We get exercise. We learn a little bit about combustion and thermodynamics and what it takes to start a fire and keep it going. We get copious amounts of soothing infrared light. We get a warm, romantic, and even entertaining display of visible light. We are disconnected from the "economy" and paper pushers on Wall Street who buy and sell coal and oil without ever being in a coal mine or on an oil rig. The aroma of various woods and wood smoke linger in the air.
See the difference?
The amounts of wood required to meet the demand for electricity are quite staggering. Upon doing these calculations, it is clear that the reason we even have any forests left is the use of fossil fuels. Had we continued to use wood as the primary source of energy while expanding the industrial society, the world's forests would have been promptly consumed with the industrial society subsequently collapsing.
Fossil fuels aren't necessarily the problem, indiscretionary consumption of high-grade energy is the problem. It can be argued that if we attempted to consume the amounts of high-grade energy that we currently consume today using only "renewable" resources such as wood that the environmental damage would be far greater than had we used fossil fuels.
The environmental and sustainability communities know that large-scale corporo-fascist renewable energy projects are likely to produce little benefit. Multimegawatt wood burners using fuel hauled in from hundreds of miles away to produce electricity at 25% efficiency which will be used hundreds of miles away are hardly a bargain, in a category similar to the corn ethanol program. Small is Beautiful and placing the task of energy production/harvesting in the hands of the energy consumers is seen as a far better path to sustainability. The allies of the corporo-fascist system call this "socialist" and disregard for the "freedoms of the individual". Hmmm...interesting. More realistically, they realize that there is no money to be made in real, decentralized renewable energy production. Make your money selling the jewels (equipment and expertise), not the joules.
The Infinite Growth Crew just doesn't get it
The right-wing web site American Thinker has posted an article down talking renewable energy and efforts to reduce consumption.
Blow off the turbine plan. Ninety-billion-dollar "bipartisan" compromises are absurd.
Instead, let's drill, baby, drill.
For the environmentalists, the answer is not really blowing in the wind. I believe their real desire is to see America use less energy -- period.
At least they've got SOMETHING right. Infinite Growth in a Finite World is falling apart as we speak. Let's see what an Infinite Economic Growth Party powered by fission and coal has to offer.
The "Conservative" Menu
Complete replacement of 12.6 million barrels per day of imported oil with electricity using nuclear and/or coal and no decrease in energy consumption.
All Costs are assumed to be inelastic, no inflation, and no interest paid on loans. Therefore, they are extremely underestimated.
- Change-out of oil-burning infrastructure. Electrified railroads, more electric cars, heat pump/resistance heat for buildings with oil heat. Cost: Unknown. Those "socialistic", European electric trains aren't going to sit well with the American right.
- $1.5+ trillion for Nuclear Power Plant construction at $4000/kW and no fuel reprocessing...OR
- $550+ billion for Coal Power Plant construction and no greenhouse gas controls...OR
- $1.1+ trillion for Coal power plant construction with greenhouse gas controls.
- Additional coal consumption of 1.6 billion tons PER YEAR on top of the current 1.0 billion tons per year.
- 1.7 CUBIC KILOMETERS of underground storage space PER YEAR to store the carbon dioxide from this 1.6 billion tons of coal burnt.
Nuclear. The oil which is imported to the United States each day (~12.6 Mbpd), when converted to electricity at 40% efficiency, would be equivalent to 8,685,580,000 kilowatt-hours. This would require about 361,899,000 kilowatts of nuclear generating capacity running at full output 24 hours per day, 7 days per week, 365 days per year. At a price of $4000/kW of installed capacity that is $1,447,596,718,000 JUST TO BUILD THE PLANTS. Nuclear fuel, reprocessing, maintenance, worker salaries, and company profits will be piled on top.
In addition, trying to replace oil with electricity will require a change-out of all of the oil-burning infrastructure, namely vehicles. Electrified rail (such as those high-speed train proposals that are being lambasted as wasteful) is really the only practical way to ship large amounts of people and product over long distances using energy from those magical nuclear power stations.
Coal. Let's say we decide to go with coal instead of nuclear. At a measly $1500/kW of installed capacity, we would need $542,848,500,000 JUST BUILD THE PLANTS and we would need to burn AND BUY 1,585,117,620 (one point six billion) more tons of coal per year assuming that the plants have an efficiency of around 35% - a reasonable number for $1500/kW. The current coal consumption of the United States is a little over 1,000,000,000 (one point zero billion) tons per year.
If we do the "right thing" and sequester the carbon dioxide from burning all this 1.6 billion tons - and ONLY this 1.6 billion tons, we will need to find, assuming that the CO2 is stored in the form of a supercritical fluid with a density of around 850 g/L, 1.7 CUBIC KILOMETERS PER YEARof space to stash this COMPRESSED LIQUID itching to turn back into a gas. Add another 1.7 cubic kilometers to get the space required to store the carbon dioxide generated from the coal we already burn to generate electricity today.
This is aside from the fact that power plants with carbon sequestration will have at least a double cost ($3000/kW) over traditional coal, and they will consume up to 30% more coal to generate the same amount of electricity.
Moving towards less consumption isn't so absurd when one realizes that no matter what energy sources we choose, it is going to be expensive and destructive to continue the Infinite Growth in a Finite World™ party.
One more reason to quit smoking
I found one of those ceramic space heaters in the apartment complex dumpster. It did not work, most likely because the power cord was damaged at the point of entry into the heater. I then ripped it apart, and clearly observed that a) this thing had been around the block...several times, and b) it was owned by a prolific cigarette smoker.
Sticky brown deposits lined the inside of heater and the fan blades, and plenty of dust cake had built up as well with a brown color and reeking odor of tobacco.
The most likely scenario is that this heater was purchased, shoved under a desk, plugged in, turned on, and forgotten about for three or four years. Also forgotten about were any and all forms of housekeeping in the apartment. When college was finished and it was time to move out, it had done its duty and was tossed. Just like the air conditioners around here which usually run from March up until mid-December (about when the landlady begins forcing people to remove them or else pay their own heat), the heater probably ran all summer long IN TANDEM with the air conditioner. As Bill Engvall of Blue Collar Comedy says, Here's your sign!