Cool, a debate. If ANYONE in FOT objects to this we can take it off line.
Say the word.
-----Original Message-----
From: Randall Young [mailto:Ryoung@navcomtech.com]
Sent: Wednesday, January 29, 2003 8:34 AM
To: fot@autox.team.net
Subject: RE: State of the Onion speech
Bill Babcock wrote :
> A hydrogen transportation economy is actually technically sound. The
> gasoline you burn in cars is NOT oil, it's petroleum based, a
> relatively small component that is fractioned from the feedstock.
Well, OK, if you call 46% a small fraction. Plus another 33% for heating
oil, diesel and jet fuel.
http://www.eia.doe.gov/neic/infosheets/crudeproduction.htm
In other words, petroleum is converted into fuel with nearly 80%
efficiency, and lots of useful byproducts (asphalt, etc.)
--Yup, I call less than half a small fraction. I don't doubt the
efficiency or value of crude oil conversion. Nor do I think having a
partly Hydrogen economy will be replacement. All those fuels will simply
become more expensive (I suspect people will be astonished at how
expensive petroleum becomes if we stop burning it wholesale).
> The process of
> making gasoline requires a lot of energy, transportation and loss.
As compared to electricity, or hydrogen ? Power lines are quite lossy
compared to oil pipelines; and no one quite knows how to safely transport
large volumes of hydrogen yet.
Not true. Sure, you get everything out that you stuck in (almost) but it
takes a lot of energy to move it, especially viscous stuff like crude oil.
Hell, in a lot of places you have to heat it to move it. Furthermore, I
haven't seen any Hydrogen plan that considers piping it. Most call for
local generation with very limited transportation. Hydrogen power for cars
is generally modeled like electrical power for cars with more limited
locations (like gas stations VS. your garage wall socket) for recharging.
And there was a time when no one knew how to transport Butane safely. Now
you can get it at the supermarket or have it delivered in bulk. Hydrogen
is much more difficult, but do you really believe it is not commercially
solve able?
> Hydrogen can be generated from any electrical source and electrical
> generation is rarely oil-fired.
True, only 2% in 2000. Plus 19% natural gas, a related product. Coal was
#1 (at 49% in 2000) mostly because it's currently far cheaper than gas or
oil.
In other words we control the source of 98% of electricity generated
instead of relying on the kindness of the Saud family. We do NOT get
natural gas from the mideast. Not to put too fine a point on it, but most
utility economists do not consider natural gas a related product (but what
does that mean) nor is anyone as convinced anymore that natural gas comes
exclusively from the same sources as oil. There is a lot more of it, it
may even be generated by deep geological processes rather than biological,
and there is a shorter step (though perhaps not as environmentally sound)
for producing H2 from natural gas.
> Western coal is not scarce
So why did the price of coal go up by over 30% between 1990 and 1999 ?
http://www.eia.doe.gov/neic/infosheets/coalprice.htm
--I don't know, why did the price of my house go up by 500% in the same
timeframe? Price is rarely tied to scarcity, and scarcity is generally
overstated or artificial. Lots of virtuous cycles and unforeseen
circumstances.
And what will happen to coal prices and supply if we start effectively
burning it instead of petroleum ?
--It will probably go down in real terms. Just as the cost of oil will
rise greatly if we use less of it. Anyone thinking that this will punish
the oil companies or the mideast is dreaming. The idea is to not be stuck
with an unreliable source for economic growth. Or maybe more important, to
begin a transition to a broader set of choices.
> and generation plants can be mine-mouth.
Meaning it has to be transported and high tension lines are less efficient
than pipelines. There's also the little problem that no one has figured
out how to load it into a truck, or a tanker ...
--Not true and so what. Perhaps you thought I meant Hydrogen generation
plants at the mine mouth. I didn't--I meant electricity. You need to
rethink this transmission loss thing. Pumping lots of material through a
pipe is more efficient than moving electrons? The only way it looks like
less loss is if you don't include the whole system. You can deliver
electricity to any locale without last mile conversion and transport
issues (other than transformers and the capital cost of the distribution
lines), which are always expensive in energy and resource terms. But even
without that advantage a pipeline is expensive from an energy standpoint.
> We also generate (and can generate more)
> electricity from hydro, nuclear, wind, geothermal, and even
> photovoltaic. Of all those choices I prefer Nuclear
Which is also the only one of those that can be significantly expanded.
But somehow, producing nuclear waste that has to be stored for millions of
years doesn't seem a whole lot preferable to producing CO2 that is
naturally processed back into food.
http://www.nirs.org/factsheets/hlwfcst.htm
--You have well-formed opinions about all this other stuff, I can't
believe you'd resort to the half-life argument, which is completely
specious. What's the half life of lead, or arsenic, or mercury. For that
matter, the source material for nuclear fuel is natural Uranium which has
a much longer half life than the fission products. If you did a full
analysis you could conclude that nuclear plants collect dangerous natural
uranium scattered willy-nilly in the environment, use it in the only
useful way it can be consumed (other than making bombs or a nice yellow
pottery glaze) and ultimately reduce the storage time of the waste. But
that's nonsense. The real issues of waste disposal are that the government
has a very hard time with the politics. It's really not that hard. At the
end of the process the waste is present, in small quantities (relatively)
in a form in which it CAN be disposed. All other significant energy
generation (and most industrial processes) release their dangerous wastes
in an uncontrolled manner, some of which are dangerous forever. We could
debate nuclear power endlessly but I won't unless someone pays me very
well. Been there, done that, got the T shirt. It's too painful.
> It's a good direction to take, has been well analyzed, and really does
> require a national initiative by a leading power to undertake. The
> exhaust is water vapor, no greenhouse gases.
No, all burning hydrogen does is sweep the problem under a different rug.
To get the electricity that produces the hydrogen, we must either generate
nuclear waste or greenhouse gases. Stopping every breeze that blows,
trapping every wasted ray of sunlight (as if there was such a thing),
stopping every geyser and every river will not generate enough electricity
to meet even today's need.
--I agree completely. But no matter what we don't get to burn petroleum
forever. There will never be a rip-and-replace of the oil economy
infrastructure but there needs to be a viable alternative and a direction
for development to take. Electric cars and hybrids look like a seriously
limited solution. I would love to see some simple economic approaches to
reducing our dependency on foreign oil. The responsibility really does lie
with the people who use the stuff, and they love their SUVs. So tax the
heck out of them (me included). Those kinds of initiatives would be far
more effective in the short term, but are only a stopgap.
A national initiative on Hydrogen is the big, grandiose kind of effort
that national leaders can undertake. Sooner or later we will be burning H2
in cars.
And on a purely solipsistic basis, I can picture a hydrogen-powered
Ferrari, but an electric one...
>BTW, electrolysis of sea water produces sodium hydroxide (aka lye) as a
byproduct. Warm, steamy CO2 seems like a better thing to breathe to me
...
--Bah. Even Al Gore could solve that.
And as far as the supposed problem we are trying to solve ... when do we
get to grow wheat in Greenland again ? The planet is already far cooler
than it was in the past ... there is evidence that man's use of fossil
fuels is the only reason we aren't entering another Ice Age ...
--Yikes, alternative views of Global Warming (though I suspect we share a
critical view here, I think global warming is "convenient" knowledge, the
system is far too complex for all those experts to really have a clue
about the mechanisms. We can't even analyze turbulent flow in a pipe). The
evidence that we are doing great things by burning fossil fuels is crap,
and so is the evidence that we are not.
Ok, this doesn't belong on the FOT list, and I apologize. I'll put the
soap box away now, and say no more. Randall
--The best thing about this list is that there aren't many rules, and
there's a lot of interesting people with funny and intelligent ideas. If
this discussion lasted more than two days I'd say STOP!!! But what the
heck... It's our country, our world, and our group.
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