delta Society

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 f ..

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 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 ..

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.

CLICK TO VIEW ALL PHOTOS

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!

Economic Growth = Burning Carbon

In Copenhagen & Economic Growth - You Can't Have Both, Chris Martensen describes the incompatibilities between the current economic paradigm and reduction in carbon dioxide emissions.

"Throw away and buy new!" is the answer to our economic woes! When you think about it, throwing away and buying new is a win for everyone: the mining companies, the energy industry, the chemical industry, manufacturers, the shipping companies, retailers, and eventually the trash haulers and incinerator and landfill firms! Plus the consumer gets to be cool and have the latest product in return for a few days of work, most often at a job that they do not like!

In short, an economic system which is based upon growth (and collapses without it) and promotes consumption will destroy any attempt to reduce environmental degradation and emission of greenhouse gases.

While it may seem that nature can be subordinate to the economy simply by spouting "Global Warming is Nonsense" across the media and continuing to let the economy "grow" without bound, the resources which allow the growth to continue will continue to follow decline as they are used faster than they can be replenished.

All the wind turbines, photovolatic panels, reusable shopping bags, aluminum "NOT PLASTIC" water bottles, fluorescent spiral light bulbs, nuclear power plants, and Priuses in the world were not able to match the emission-reduction capacity of the Financial Crisis of 2007-2010.

That fact alone should be an alert that the system is broken. Trying to reduce c ..

Cooking and the Second Law of Thermodynamics

Let us assume that you are looking to cook instant noodles (ramen). So you've calculated that to bring the one-eighth of a gallon of water in the pot to boiling point and cook the ramen, you will need to apply 120 kJ of energy. However, your electric stove and microwave are both out of commission (Bummer).

You turn on the hot water faucet and allow it to get as hot as possible - 125 degrees Fahrenheit. You then calculate that in order to get 120 kJ of energy from the faucet, you will need about a third of a gallon of water.

So, you have the same amount of energy as you would using the stove. Will the hot tap water cook the ramen as well as if it were heated to boiling point on the stove? NO!

Therein lies the difficulty with renewable energy.

Fossil fuels are like the hot stove burner - ready at a moments notice to provide copious quantities of high-grade energy - boiling, baking, frying, grilling, or just simmering whatever you desire.

Renewables are like cooking your food with the hot water from the sink. Yes, your landlord may provide you with free hot water, but the temperature just isn't there. All the joules in the universe can flow from that sink and it will never boil. And when your neighbor decides to stand in the shower for two hours, all hope is lost.

What we must learn to do as a society, is to do our defrosting, simmering, and reheating using renewable energy while saving fossil fuels for the frying and broiling. In other words, use renewables to meet the need for low-grade energy (e.g. heating water and buildings) while saving fossil fuels to meet the need for high-grade energy (e.g. generating electricity).

Obscure Power Generation technologies

I recently ran into a web site discussing the use of mercury vapor as a working fluid in power plants. I felt this deserved a discussion along with an equally interesting technology - magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) generation. Both represent attempts to increase power generation efficiency long before widespread awareness of the necessity for energy resource conservation came about.

Mercury Turbines

Several commercial power plants utilizing a mercury topping cycle were built in the early 20^th century. The advantage was that it provided a higher inlet temperature to the turbines, increasing efficiency. Because of limits on boiler construction, the temperature to which steam could be made was limited as the pressure became too great. Mercury vapor at a given temperature produces less pressure than water vapor, hence the advantage.

Once the mercury was expanded in the turbine, it was cooled in a steam boiler and the steam produced powered an additional turbine in a combined-cycle configuration, leading to quite efficient power generation.

Today, metallurgical advances have made possible boilers capable of withstanding the extreme pressures of steam at high temperature, allowing inlet temperatures to the turbines of well over 500°C in some cases, negating any and all advantages of mercury.

It can only be imagined what a nightmare mercury vapor flowing through a power plant at high temperature and pressure would be. As Douglas Self of the Museum of Retro Technology states, there are good reasons that the vast majority of heat engines today utilize either air or water as their working fluids.

These appear to have been abandoned due to the fact that natural gas (or gasified coal) combined cycle with a gas turbine is cheaper and more efficient. I think we can be happy about this.

MHD

MHD (magnetohydrodynamic) methods of electricity production w ..

Gasification Experimenter's Kit

The ALL Power Labs web site contains some interesting information: A "gasification experimenter's kit", plans for various gasifier designs made from common parts and results of gasifier tests. Very interesting technology and material.

Small-scale gasification of biomass waste and coal for operating cogeneration units (gas/diesel engines connected to generators with exhaust and coolant heat recovery), vehicles, and other purposes is a technology in-line with sustainable development, localization, and decentralized control of resources. Developing countries which inefficiently use firewood for heating and cooking may gasify this wood to produce heat and electricity, getting more out of the resource and reducing deforestation.

Electricity is one of those things which tends to bring about massive increases in quality of life, enabling clean water, food preservation, lighting, etc. Problems will only begin to arise when we begin using firewood to power 52-inch screens and hot tubs in every household. That is when the world's forests are in trouble!

What the World Cares About

A report of the top searches on the Web this year has been produced by the major search engines.

AP PHOTO. WOMAN AND MICHAEL JACKSON WAX STATUE IN SUMMER 2009

Some Top Searches

Michael Jackson
facebook
lady gaga
poker face lyrics
eminem
NASCAR
World Wrestling Entertainment

On Yahoo, Britney Spears did manage to fall from four straight years on top.