Corn based fuels a really bad idea?

I'm inclined to think we can do better than that.

But then, if you'd suggested, in the '60s, that there wouldn't be a manned Mars mission before the end of the millenium, nobody would have believed you.

Maybe that's part of the issue: Given fusion, the solar system becomes accessible. Colonies aren't going to pay taxes to Washington for very long. Nothing for the politicos to gain by giving people an alternative.

 

??? The unbelievers would have been right, because there wasn't a manned mission to Mars by the end of the millenium.

But I'd move to a tax-free colony in a minute!!

 

Which is why you're not going to see any government putting money into making colonies possible.

 

You'd move to another planet (one without Ferraris) just to avoid paying taxes? After the cost of the move you might not end up saving as much as you think. Just fowarding your mail will cost a fortune.

 

It looks like the general feeling is shifting toward biofuels probably do more harm than good.

http://www.cnn.com/2008/TECH/science/01/23/biofuels.fears.ap/index.html

 

I think that there is also a grudging realization that this is really a massive public subsidy for certain agri-conglomerates. These companies have taken massive amounts of government aid for decades now under the guise of "save the family farm" arguments. In reality, they are rapidly encroaching on the last of the real family farms.

If you really think about it, petroleum is also a "bio-fuel". It has just been in the ground longer.

 

I heard something on NPR this morning that made me LOL that is somewhat related.

Apparently Australia is in there worst draught the continent has seen in 1000 years the best they can tell and all the costal cities are building or planning to build desalination plants to cope with it. OK so far.

They believe it’s related to global climate change, still ok I guess since 1000 years ago the world was warmer than it is now so they may very well be right.

Now here’s the part I found funny, they said the desalination plants will not be energy inefficient like normal plants because they will be powered by green sources like wind, wave solar at an additional cost of about $150 per person. No mention of the fact that the reason the green sources cost an extra $150 per person is because of the extra energy that goes into building and maintaining them….so like bio-fuel they probably do more harm than good and you get to pay extra for it.

 

I was reading the paper today and noticed a front page article on ethanol. Now apparently water is becoming an large issue. Seems it takes 3-5 gallons of water per gallon of ethanol to manufacture. The plant in Granite Falls pulled so much water it brought down the aquifer and they had to start pulling water off the Minnesota River. The city almost lost water. We currently have 17 plants with 10 more in various stages following on.

So not only are we raping the Wyoming landscape for coal to burn to make it out of food we could feed starving people of the world, but were depleting our water too??? How do you get a PHD again, send in box tops from Cap'n Crunch?

 

It's "science & engineering" by emotion. It makes these people feel good. So while quasi cultist environmentalists (not all of them) continue to try and cram square facts into the logic of their arguments it's still full of round holes. Politicians survive by making people feel good. What else can you expect?

Can you imagine what would happen to the electrical grid if everyone got a reasonably efficient electric car?

Like burning coal for electricity then transporting the energy hundreds to thousands of miles and charging batteries is somehow more efficient. I have to wonder if it could even be any cleaner unless we got very serious about nuclear power.

What about a serious drive to increase the number of nuclear plants for the purpose of producing hydrogen that we could burn in internal combustion engines?
What is so crazy about that?
In Iceland they're doing that but with hydrothermal.

Bob S.

 

Speaking of Australia. Have you heard about the thermal chimney plant their proposing?

Read here http://www.brynmawr.edu/geology/206/gruenstein2.htm

Bob S.

 

Sounds like a brand new environmental disaster in the making. They expect it to reduce rainfall in the desert and possible cause additional desertification.

It's also very expensive. They say $500M and 200 MW, so $2500/kw to build. The last numbers I saw for a conventional plant were around $300/kw, so this is over 8 times the price which translates into a lot of fuel burned somewhere else to make the parts. There is no fuel to operate it, so maybe it works out a net positive, but there are on numbers given to let me do any calculation.

 

You take a big energy hit making , storing, and transporting hydrogen. It's better to just use the electricity as electricity if you can.

 

But we already have the infrastructure in a sense for doing that. By that I mean distribution companies etc. Obviously the equipment changes. And ... we have engines that can be adpated.
Contrast that with all those batteries, massive upgrade of the electrical grid and electric cars that still don't work. HYbrid yes but you still have to burn something. It's a lot more sustainable than
what we're doing now which is about as stupid as it gets. We won't drill for our own oil but we will deal with very dangerous suppliers.

Bob S.

 

With or without including the water it takes to grow the corn in the first place?

 

Without. There are only refering to the water used at the processing plant. I would imagine if you added in the water for irrigation it would be quite substantial.

How much water is needed to produce hydrogen? And how much electric power to make a gallon??

 

I don’t think we do. The stations would need to be very very different. I'm not sure it would be safe to bury a high pressure tank so there needs to be a safe place on site which means 99% of all service stations would not be able to adapt. I don’t know that “self service” would be an option either since the is under pretty high pressure.

Hybrid is an option to use more fuel, not less when you account for all the extra stuff you put in the car and battery replacements.

Electric....I don't know how to make them practical short of some kind of inductive power buried in the roads or at least the highways to feed them.

We should be converting our coal, but traditionally oil has been cheaper the lets face it, money talks.

 

oh man, that would mean doing math to answer

Hydrogen is made commercially from natural gas and water at about 70% efficiency and is by far the best way to make it.

When you do it using electricity, you can in theory hit 83% efficiency, but in any practical system you end up closer to 60%. If you make the electricity by burning fuel, the best you can do is about 60% in a modern plant, then 10% transition losses and 60% at the hydrogen plant and you are down to 32%. When you have electricity you should use it as electricity.

 

I'm beginning to see this entire topic is universally like cancer. Anything and everything causes cancer. Anything and everything will cause harm to the planet.

I'm not sure why, but I'm craving some meat products all of the sudden. Preferrably deer.

 

Winner!

The problem is that there are WAY WAY WAY to many people on the earth to not be harming the plant and until that is solved, everything else is a Band-Aid.

 

See J. Swift's "Modest Proposal"?

 

I guess that would do it.

I was thinking more along the lines of education, free condoms and such. If each and every woman who can have children had 2 on average the population would start to drop pretty quickly after a couple generations.

Population reduction is really is the only solution that can be guaranteed to work.....but we're not suppose to say it out loud.

 

Or the Unabomber Manifesto...crazy as old filthy Ted was, he was not far off from some of the green tree Luddites. Except for the letter bombs, but they have their fringes around the edges too.

 

A few ideas I have had, mostly whilst daydreaming.

1) Urban Sprawl. I don't remember who was talking about it, but a gentleman from Alexandria mentioned how traffic just sits at idle around the DC-Metro area. Much of this is due to the fact that some 80% (a made up guess) of the people are all heading in the same direction each morning, and again in the evening at an opposite direction from the morning. Perhaps the answer lies in ridding ourselves of the "downtown" districts and interspersing housing, business, and parkland all over so the road system is no longer a funnel to a central location.

2) Curtail the over use of lighting. Why in the world are all of our streets lit up like Christmas all night? In the rain it makes it hard to see, and the electricity used must be phenomenal!

3) Huge tax breaks for telecommuting. With teleconferencing, telephones, VOIP, etc, why do we all need to be in the office everyday? Think of how many cars we could get off the road if companies encouraged people to work from home.

4) Increase parkland in urban areas. I'm not completely sold on the so-called causes of global warming, but I do know what a thermal is! Ever see a thermal imaging map of the US, and the huge heat plumes each city creates? If anything is effecting the weather, this has to be it!

Anyway, just a few ideas...

Shiny Side Up!
Bill

 

I've always felt any tax solution should be the other way around. Tax what you're trying to stop, don't give tax break to everybody who doesn't do it. LA has smog becasue there are too many cars, tax the snot out of driving a car in LA and the problem will go away. Not enough water somewhere else, water use tax since everyone shouldn't be paying to bring water to where you live when they have water where they live. There shouldn't be tax credits for childern, childeren should be taxed and the population problem goes away.

oh, and all that tax money should be sent to me becasue it was my idea

 

The difficulty with taxing what you intend to stop is that the taxing entity becomes addicted to the revenue generated by the tax and hence becomes complicit in the marketing and sale of said item.

Shiny Side Up!
Bill