What are we waiting for? Huge amounts of energy right here at home

[PilotHawK]

Here is an article I found this morning. Man oh Man....what we could do for energy if Congress (con=opposite of pro therefore congress is opposite of progress).

The article is long, but definitely worth reading.

In 1943, when Germany had virtually no sources of petroleum to fuel its Luftwaffe, U-boats, and Tiger tanks, its scientists (arguably among the best in the world at that time) didn’t turn to solar and wind power. Evil does not equate to naïveté. Hitler’s technical advisers turned to another energy source to keep their Wehrmacht running steadily for several years without petroleum. They used the Fischer-Tropsch process to convert coal into diesel fuel and employed the Bergius hydrogenation (or liquefaction) process to convert coal into aviation gasoline and high-quality truck and automobile gasoline.
Coal-to-liquid Technologies

Gasoline and diesel fuel are hydrocarbons. The name gives us a clue as to how to convert coal to liquid fuel: combine hydrogen and carbon. Hydrocarbon fuels are designated by the number of carbon atoms in their molecules. For example, methane, the main constituent in natural gas, has one carbon and four hydrogen atoms. Ethane, butane, and propane are gaseous at room temperature and have two, three, and four carbon atoms respectively.

There are many hydrocarbons, and each has its own unique properties. Pentane, hexane, and heptane are liquid hydrocarbons but not desirable as fuels for internal-combustion engines as they have low ignition temperatures and cause “knocking” or premature combustion that can seriously damage an engine. Octane, with 8 carbon and 18 hydrogen atoms, is the optimum for standard engines, while cetane with 16 carbon and 34 hydrogen atoms is most desirable as a diesel engine fuel.

Nothing about the chemistry of coal has changed since WWII, and it is still possible to synthesize fuel from coal, which ranges from about 65 percent to 95 percent pure carbon. All that’s required is hydrogen, heat, and pressure. Worldwide, such production is done only in limited amounts although one country is a significant producer: South Africa. Just as the Nazis were isolated from petroleum sources during WWII, South Africa’s policy of apartheid brought about an oil boycott from most sources. To survive, they adopted the Fischer-Tropsch process to convert their substantial coal reserves into gasoline and diesel fuel. This is no pie-in-the-sky “someday” technology. The Sasol Ltd. plant in Secunda, South Africa, alone converts coal to 150,000 barrels (6.3 million gallons) of liquid fuel each day.

The question arises: “Why, if the process is relatively simple, isn’t more coal converted into oil?” For years, the answer to that question was cost. It was simply too expensive compared to pumping oil out of the ground, reported to cost the Saudis less than $1 per barrel. Robert Wright of the Department of Energy said in 2007 that coal-to-liquid technology would only be economical once oil prices were at $40 to $50 a barrel. Now that prices are well above that mark and will likely remain there, the problem has become the environmentalists who fear pollution above economic hardships brought on by high-priced motor fuels. But what if we can all have our cake and eat it too?
Taking Pollution Out of Coal

The Fischer-Tropsch coal-to-liquid (CTL) process has three reactions to yield hydrocarbon fuels. These reactions require a great deal of heat, heat derived from coal combustion. This process is referred to as Indirect Liquefaction. A major disadvantage of the technique is that the amount of coal used for heat in the coal-to-liquid process is greater than the amount converted to fuel. As a result, this process produces large amounts of ash, fly ash, sulfur dioxide, and nitrogen oxides, not to mention a waste of coal.

The Direct Liquefaction process developed by Nobel Laureate Friedrich Bergius in 1921 requires only one step where hydrogen is combined directly with pulverized coal under high pressure and temperature to produce various hydrocarbons depending on process variables. Since there are no naturally occurring sources of hydrogen like “hydrogen wells,” the H2 in existing coal-to-liquid plants (and in WWII Germany) is produced by the same chemical reactions used in the initial step of the Fischer-Tropsch process, i.e., it is obtained from heating coal with high-pressure steam producing hydrogen and carbon monoxide (C + H2O —> H2 + CO).

The bulk of pollutants created from direct liquefaction, the Bergius process, are created in the making of hydrogen for the process, but the creation of these pollutants can be largely avoided by separating the hydrogen with heat from a new generation of super-safe nuclear reactors.

While anti-nuclear activists have stymied the construction of any new power reactors in the United States for over 30 years, they have not been able to stop the development of new reactor technology, much of which has been done outside the United States. Third-generation modular reactors are designed to make meltdowns physically impossible. Among these developments is the “Pebble Bed Modular Reactor” that uses several hundred thousand baseball-sized fuel spheres, each of which contains 15,000 coated, grain-of-sand-sized fuel kernels. The pyrolytic graphite and silicon carbide layers coating the fuel kernels have melting temperatures far above that of the maximum equilibrium temperature of the reactor, making a meltdown impossible.

In traditional nuclear power plants (which are already extremely safe), water is used as a “moderator” to slow down neutrons so the nuclear reaction can occur, and also as a coolant and heat-transfer medium. In a Pebble Bed Modular Reactor, cooling is accomplished by piping helium through the pebble bed, with the spaces between fuel spheres serving as “pipes.” The pyrolytic graphite coating of the fuel kernels serves as the moderator. Since the helium is not made radioactive by the neutron flux in the reactor, it can be sent directly though a turbine generator to produce electricity or, in this case, used to provide ample heat for the Bergius process.
Posma Puts the Pieces Together

Bonne Posma, a successful Canadian businessman who owned a mining technology company and a company specializing in electronics for mining and who previously worked for the South African Council for Scientific and Industrial Research, expanded his company to the United States in 1983. He eventually moved to Ft. Myers, Florida, and became a U.S. citizen. He recently sold the electronics side of his business but maintains a controlling interest in Saminco Electric Traction Drives, devices to power equipment for underground mining applications and public-transit vehicles. A dedicated believer in the free market, Posma’s passion is to see an America free of OPEC extortions and all the dangers that financing its terrorist members represents.

Posma and his Liquid Coal Inc. (Liquid Coal Inc) appear to have a common-sense plan to unleash American engineering and capital and to cause a sea change in our current dependence on unfriendly foreign energy suppliers: that plan consists of using third-generation nuclear power to provide the heat to create oil from coal. Remarkably, this is a technology that even most of those fearful of human-caused global warming could support, having a smaller “carbon footprint” than even electric cars. This holds true because the overall efficiency of a coal-fired power plant (where most electric energy is derived for electric cars) is limited by thermodynamic laws to about 35 percent, while use of a reactor for heat to run the Bergius coal-to-liquid process is nearly 100-percent efficient. Hence, in the CTL process, the carbon from coal is used only for producing fuel that is converted to propulsive energy. Conversely, only one-third of the “carbon footprint” of an electric car powered by the output of a coal-fired plant is for propulsion, with the remainder lost as waste heat.

The process works like this. One hundred and fifty 100-ton rail cars bring the coal feedstock for the conversion process each day. This is about 50 percent more coal per day than used in a typical 1,000 MW power generating plant. The feedstock is fed into the coal-to-liquid processor where the crushed coal is liquefied by heat derived from a Pebble Bed Modular Reactor.* Additional reactor heat is used to generate hydrogen from water. The hydrogen and coal react to produce a variety of hydrocarbon fuels based on the process temperatures and pressures, with diesel fuel being the most desirable according to Posma.

Diesel fuel, which has the highest specific energy of the hydrocarbon fuels, provides “gas mileage” twice that of ethanol and 40 percent higher than gasoline. And this isn’t the “dirty diesel” of years gone by. For those of you accustomed to the smell of exhaust from diesel fuel containing 500 parts per million (ppm) of sulfur, times are a’changing. Low-sulfur fuel now on the market has only 15 ppm. Diesel derived from the CTL process has 5 ppm and is virtually odorless.

Liquid Coal’s projections indicate that it would require 200 CTL plants to produce 10 million barrels of oil per day, reducing our dependence on current imports of 12 million barrels per day by 83 percent. While this may seem like a huge number of CTL plants, energy industry sources report between 132 and 137 major coal-fired power plants currently under construction.
Why Not?

Of course there are obstacles standing in the way of the building of such plants to wrest transportation fuels from coal using methods that are both economical and have little impact on the environment — even satisfying most of the global-warming crowd. Tax disincentives and costly regulatory penalties for projects are high on the list of hurdles to overcome.

An example of the above is the current cost of licensing each reactor, regardless of whether it is an exact clone of an earlier design: $60 million to $100 million, even though, according to Posma, the Nuclear Regulatory Committee’s attitude toward new applications has become more reasonable. Besides the regulatory cost disincentives, which in reality would end up getting passed on to consumers through higher energy costs, the big collar and chain holding back nuclear power’s freedom are litigation and the bureaucratic licensing process. Posma elaborates:

To streamline the approval process, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) has recently introduced the COL concept (Combined Operating License), which grants a combined construction and operating license to applicants meeting the NRC’s COL requirements. Trouble is, not all of these regulations have been finalized, so the utilities still take somewhat of a financial gamble because past practice mandated issuing a nuclear operating license only after a reactor is constructed — and this is a beautiful opportunity for enemies of energy to start tedious litigation to bankrupt the plant. This is what happened with the Shoreham nuclear power plant. But there is progress: on April 8 this year, the NRC granted our country’s first COL for Georgia Power’s Vogtle 2 and 3 nuclear power sites by considering the existing draft regulations as sufficiently complete to be used as a basis. If all goes well, this COL alone will allow 2,300 MW of electric power to come on line in 2015. Eight more COL approvals should follow shortly.

While ever ready to put up roadblocks to proven sources of reliable energy, environmentalist influences in our government are quick to use tax dollars to subsidize expensive, unreliable wind and solar projects. The subsidy for wind generation is 1.9 cents per kWh alone — more than the cost of nuclear power production, including operations, fuel, depreciation, decommissioning, and spent-fuel storage. Solar-generation subsidies appear purposely unfathomable, but likely off the chart. Both these technologies, being intermittent power sources because of changes in wind speeds and things like cloudiness, night, and precipitation, need to be backed up by conventional power plants that must be kept constantly running (spinning reserves) so as to be able to produce power when needed.†

There are other significant hurdles to overcome before beginning the building of these plants, obstacles that fall under the category of general “environmental concerns,” such as the dangers from nuclear power-plant wastes. Besides the fact that the dangers from plant wastes are greatly exaggerated (see “Nuclear Waste: Not a Problem” in our February 18 issue), such concerns should be weighed against other, larger environmental concerns. For instance, what could be a bigger “environmental concern” than for the United States to go through an oil drought that would destroy industries, jobs, families — indeed the entire economy of our nation? Do we want to be faced with having to use force to acquire producing oil fields around the world or see a depression and misery as we have never known as a country? My vote is “no” to that scenario and “yes” to the coal-to-liquid process. How say you?

* Alternate technologies such as the General Atomics GT-MHR reactors are also able to supply process heat in the 700- to 1,000°-C range, far above the 300° C temperatures current pressurized- or boiling-water power reactors can provide. High process heat temperatures are critical to the production of hydrogen for CTL technology. Heat from the process can be “scavenged” to produce steam for electrical generation.

† On February 29, 2008, the West Texas grid that has the largest percentage of wind turbine power in the United States suddenly dropped from 1,700 MW to 300 MW. Grid operators brought on available “spinning reserves” only to find they were insufficient to compensate for the sudden loss. Similarly, electrical feeds from other sources could not provide sufficient energy. To avoid “brownouts” or rolling blackouts, major electrical users were forced to discontinue operation.




The “Saudi Arabia of Coal”

With 27 percent of global reserves, the United States is far and away the leader in coal resources. Using current mining techniques, some 275 billion tons are considered to be recoverable out of a demonstrated reserve base of 491 billion tons. With an annual production rate of 1.2 billion tons, nearly 250 years of use is currently available. This, however, could be greatly extended by generating electric power with plentiful nuclear fuel instead of using 86 percent of coal production for that purpose.

Commercial coal mines operate in 26 states, with 1,331 mines east of the Mississippi and 93 west of the river. Most eastern mines are underground while western mines are almost entirely high-production surface mines allowing the West to “outstrip” the East by 672 million tons to 490 million tons per year.


http://www.thenewamerican.com/node/8229

[weasel]

It's all balled up right in our courts and government, of which will do nothing, until nothing can be done.

Imagine trying to start a motor, after, it's blown all to hell.

[Gene]

Excellent article PilotHawk.

I'm passing that along to my kooky sister-in-law who has two airplanes, a million dollar house in Malibu, millions in the bank and insists that if we just carpooled and charged $9.00 per gallon our problems would be solved.

Elitist idiot. She should dump her stuff and move into high density housing and ride the bus.

[trojan]

The problems with the CTL proposal is that it still produces nuclear waste which we have no reasonable means of disposal as yet and it is still carbon positive.

carbon neutral petroleum

[Odyknuck]

There is currently plans to build a coal to liquid fuel plant in Wellsville Ohio. Some of the offroad riding land I use has allready been sold for this plant. Currently the plans are to break ground sometime in 2010.

[Gene]

Regarding carbon nuetral technology, first you have to be a believer that GHG is the significant issue it is claimed to be, that the cause is mostly human, that the cause is mostly usng petroleum based fuels.

A counter argument is that we are contributing, that the earth itself is the major contributor (volcanoes, etc) and that you can't control the weather.

That being said pollution controls are good and every country should have controls in place. Problem is the unfair advantage the first industrial nations have by being first and now China, India and the other massive polluters would need to install controls and slow their growth. What will cause them to do that? The United Nations and a global carbon trading tax? Asking "pretty please with sugar on it"? Nonsense!

On disposing nuclear material there are two camps: "Nuclear nothings" and the "We can deal with its". That's not the exact title of each group but you know what I'm talking about. I belong to the latter group. It's here, it's now and we gotta deal with it whether liked or not so let's figure it out. In fact, let's figure it out and use the snot out of it.

Here's a small piece of the linked carbon nuetral article:

"The closest that LS9 has come to mass production is a 1,000-litre fermenting machine, which looks like a large stainless-steel jar, next to a wardrobe-sized computer connected by a tangle of cables and tubes. It has not yet been plugged in. The machine produces the equivalent of one barrel a week and takes up 40 sq ft of floor space.

GENE COMMENT: It uses bio mass. All your yard waste could go there . . . a great big stailess kettle about 10 miles in diameter and as tall as the moon. We just need to plug it in . . .

"However, to substitute America’s weekly oil consumption of 143 million barrels, you would need a facility that covered about 205 square miles, an area roughly the size of Chicago."

GENE COMMENT: So big deal, this is a big country and who needs Chicago anyway? We could have the largest manmade structure and show off our skills and flip the bird to the Middle East and make it a tourist destination too!

"That is the main problem: although LS9 can produce its bug fuel in laboratory beakers, it has no idea whether it will be able produce the same results on a nationwide or even global scale."

GENE COMMENT: You don't say! Seriously my friends, the point is that people are working on solutions. A solution that is available right now presents itself again and again in these threads: Drill some holes in the ground now, make gas to liquides now, convert shale now and make coal to liquids someday along with other budding technologies that don't destroy food stock.

Hey! My brother is an entreprenuer (read slick con man)looking to strike it rich on one of these ideas. He was involved with a bio diesel venture using some "mouses milk" technology.

My brother made up the shiny flyer describing how the company would turn bio mass like algea (which has a huge oil content) into diesel. The facility would have other potential green sources as well. Some small town in Central Valley CA even committed land to the deal.

The proprietary technology was "invented" by a chemical engineer who worked for a major oil company and of course he claimed it scalable, just like the carbon nuetral article above.

Funny that a major oil company did not pick up this amazing technology before the company went tits up. Maybe that's because it was BS!

. . . uh oh - conpiracy theorists (kooks) move to the left. Non conspiracy theorists move to the right. That pretty much describes the political landscape in the US IMO.

Not sure about your neck of the woods.

[PilotHawK]

Trojan I guess you missed this part of the article.

There are other significant hurdles to overcome before beginning the building of these plants, obstacles that fall under the category of general “environmental concerns,” such as the dangers from nuclear power-plant wastes. Besides the fact that the dangers from plant wastes are greatly exaggerated (see “Nuclear Waste: Not a Problem” in our February 18 issue), such concerns should be weighed against other, larger environmental concerns. For instance, what could be a bigger “environmental concern” than for the United States to go through an oil drought that would destroy industries, jobs, families — indeed the entire economy of our nation? Do we want to be faced with having to use force to acquire producing oil fields around the world or see a depression and misery as we have never known as a country? My vote is “no” to that scenario and “yes” to the coal-to-liquid process. How say you?

How many people are going to be burning firewood this year instead heating oil because it is too expensive for them? Burning firewood is probably the least efficient form of energy to provide heat, plus when burned it releases more "carbon" per usable BTU than anything else.

I would much rather see programs like this work than face the alternative collapse of the economy because of the cost of energy. But programs like this will never happen if people as close minded as you keep griping about the solution.

[trojan]

No I got it.
I don't accept it's so black and white. ie: either CTL or oil raping. If there were no other option then I would support it, but the idea that there is no other option is ridiculous. If any of those other options are carbon neutral, all the better. We get to keep on sacrificing hydrocarbons in homage to the Gods of Horse Power and the eco-mentalists are happy. Every body wins in the short term AND if it turns out that they are right about the global warming boogy man, then we all win in the long run too. Here's an idea, rather than spend govt money subsidising corn farming or paying coal companies to research ways to pump carbon dioxide under ground, spend it on sustainable systems and then we wont have to go through the next hypothetical "coal crisis" How about some solar tech that works (at least a bit) at night as well?

[bdkw1]

Originally Posted by trojan

How about some solar tech that works (at least a bit) at night as well?

Ever read any Aurther Clarke? Giant orbiting space mirrors that reflect the sunlight to solar panels at night.......

[trojan]

Mr Burns will keep us all awake

Schlaich Bergermann und Partner Solar Chimney - Principle