Florida: Total Eclipse

[don]

Re: Florida: Total Eclipse

Or covers for them. The suspicion that BP never wanted to cap the well but rather reap as much of the oil as possible seems on the rise. That would dovetail nicely with Obama's misdirection plays on stock dividends and compensation set-asides. And to hell with the Gulf Coast and Florida..... That scenario could quickly become the story, regardless of what the real story is.

[Roughneck]

Re: Florida: Total Eclipse

since the thread has already been hijacked..... as population expands you can either build out or up. I for one would not want to live in a 20 story hi rise apartment aka Tokyo. Also, most inner cities are beset with crime and violence and poor school systems. Can you blame people for wanting to live in an area with good schools and safety for their children? As gas prices rise people will carpool and buy more fuel efficient cars.By doing just those things you can reduce fuel consumption by roughly 75%. As fuel prices rise electric,electric hybrid and fuel cell vehicles will be developed. It won't be the end of the world.

The suspicion that BP never wanted to cap the well but rather reap as much of the oil as possible seems on the rise.

If you believe that I really don't know what to say. The idea that they actually want millions of gallons leaking into the gulf and the massive damages that they will be liable for to mount so they could recover the oil...utter bullshit.

[don]

Re: Florida: Total Eclipse

My point was that with the way things have 'progressed', at the site and in Washington, people outside of the petroleum industry are increasingly susceptible to believing, rightly or wrong, the worst. Our general backdrop of deceit- bankster bailouts, crumbling economy, government happy talk, and much more- feed into that increasing skepticism.

[snakela]

Re: Florida: Total Eclipse

Welcome to costco, I love you.

I'm currently in the keys and there is lots of talk about Bp. likely by folks who flew down here on a jet and then rented a car.

[hayekvindicated]

Re: Florida: Total Eclipse

Thanks for the link. Much as I love Top Gear I was annoyed that he didn't address where the hydrogen comes from. I believe at present it's mostly from natural gas, so that car's not as green as it appears.

And why don't we just use the NG? Then you barely have to do anything: infrastructure's in place already; our internal combustion engines can quite easily be converted to burn it etc etc.

There are probably good arguments for not going this route - I believe Matt Simmons thinks its insane to use NG for transport as it's the only thing that can effectively be used for heating - but I don't see any logic provided for the hydrogen car that isn't bested by the NG alternative.

If you address this by producing the hydrogen without resorting to a fossil fuel source I'd love it. Absent that it's just more green-washing.

Currently the Hydrogen is derived from Natural Gas. But it can also be derived from water - economically, with time. The reason this beats using NG is that we will never run out of hydrogen. All we need is a way to produce and store it cheaply (from water preferably).

NG will run out. The supply of NG will peak within a decade of peak oil (if not sooner). That isn't a solution and it will only buy us some more time. The longer term solution has to involve an energy "carrier" that won't get burned off in a decade or two.

For those reasons, I do believe that the Clarity is a technological development of enormous significance.

[Rajiv]

Re: Florida: Total Eclipse

Where does the energy to produce the hydrogen come from? and How much hydrogen can you compress into a tank without loosing it?

The Hydrogen Economy - Energy and Economic Black Hole

The energy-literate scoff at perpetual motion, free energy, and cold fusion, but what about the hydrogen economy? Before we invest trillions of dollars, let's take a hydrogen car out for a spin. You will discover that hydrogen is the least likely of all the alternative energies to solve our transportation problems. Hydrogen uses more energy than you get out of it. The only winners in the hydrogen scam are large auto companies receiving billions of dollars via the FreedomCAR Initiative to build hydrogen vehicles. And most importantly, the real problem that needs to be solved is how to build hydrogen trucks, so we can plant, harvest, and deliver food and other goods.

Making it

Hydrogen isn’t an energy source – it’s an energy carrier, like a battery. You have to make it and put energy into it, both of which take energy. Hydrogen has been used commercially for decades, so at least we don't have to figure out how to do this, or what the cheapest, most efficient method is.

Ninety-six percent of hydrogen is made from fossil fuels, mainly to refine oil and hydrogenate vegetable oil--the kind that gives you heart attacks (1). In the United States, ninety percent of hydrogen is made from natural gas, with an efficiency of 72% (2). Efficiency is how much energy you get back compared with how much energy you started out with. So an efficiency of seventy-two percent means you've lost 28% of the energy contained in the natural gas to make hydrogen. And that doesn’t count the energy it took to extract and deliver the natural gas to the hydrogen plant.

Only four percent of hydrogen is made from water. This is done with electricity, in a process called electrolysis. Hydrogen is only made from water when the hydrogen must be extremely pure. Most electricity is generated from fossil fuel driven plants that are, on average, 30% efficient. Where does the other seventy percent of the energy go? Most is lost as heat, and some as it travels through the power grid.

Electrolysis is 70% efficient. To calculate the overall efficiency of making hydrogen from water, the standard equation is to multiply the efficiency of each step. In this case you would multiply the 30% efficient power plant times the 70% efficient electrolysis to get an overall efficiency of 20%. This means you have used four units of energy to create one unit of hydrogen energy (3).

Obtaining hydrogen from fossil fuels as a feedstock or an energy source is a bit perverse, since the whole point is to avoid using fossil fuels. The goal is to use renewable energy to make hydrogen from water via electrolysis.

Current wind turbines can generate electricity at 30-40% efficiency, producing hydrogen at an overall 25% efficiency (.35 wind electricity * .70 electrolysis of water), or 3 units of wind energy to get 1 unit of hydrogen energy. When the wind is blowing, that is.

The best solar cells available on a large scale have an efficiency of ten percent when the sun is shining, or nine units of energy to get 1 hydrogen unit of energy (.10 * .70). But that’s not bad compared to biological hydrogen. If you use algae that make hydrogen as a byproduct, the efficiency is about .1%, or more than 99 units of energy to get one hydrogen unit of energy (4).

No matter how you look at it, producing hydrogen from water is an energy sink. If you don't understand this concept, please mail me ten dollars and I'll send you back a dollar.

Hydrogen can be made from biomass, but then these problems arise (5):

* Biomass is very seasonal
* Contains a lot of moisture, requiring energy to store and then dry it before gasification
* There are limited supplies
* The quantities are not large or consistent enough for large-scale hydrogen production.
* A huge amount of land would be required, since even cultivated biomass in good soil has a low yield -- 10 tons of biomass per 2.4 acres
* The soil will be degraded from erosion and loss of fertility if stripped of biomass
* Any energy put into the land to grow the biomass, such as fertilizers, planting, and harvesting will add to the energy costs
* Energy and costs to deliver biomass to the central power plant
* It’s not suitable for pure hydrogen production

One of the main reasons for switching to hydrogen is to prevent the global warming caused by fossil fuels. When hydrogen is made from natural gas, nitrogen oxides are released, which are 58 times more effective in trapping heat than carbon dioxide (6). Coal releases large amounts of CO2 and mercury. Oil is too powerful and useful to waste on hydrogen–it’s concentrated sunshine brewed over hundreds of millions of years. A gallon of gas represents about 196,000 pounds of fossil plants, the amount in 40 acres of wheat (7).

Natural gas is too valuable to make hydrogen with. One use of natural gas is to create fertilizer (as both feedstock and energy source). This has led to a many-fold increase in crop production, allowing an additional 4 billion people to exist who otherwise wouldn’t be here (8, 9).

We also don’t have enough natural gas left to make a hydrogen economy happen. Extraction of natural gas is declining in North America (10). It will take at least a decade to even begin replacing natural gas with imported LNG (liquified natural gas). Making LNG is so energy intensive that it would be economically and environmentally insane to use natural gas as a source of hydrogen (3).

Putting energy into hydrogen

No matter how it’s been made, hydrogen has no energy in it. Hydrogen is the lowest energy dense fuel on earth (5).
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[ThePythonicCow]

Re: Florida: Total Eclipse

Where does the energy to produce the hydrogen come from? and How much hydrogen can you compress into a tank without loosing it?

Yes, hydrogen is just a "better battery" in this application. But that is half of what we need.

Oil has two advantages in fueling transportation: it's dense and it's a source of already stored up energy. Essentially all energy we have on earth comes from either the the nuclear fusion in the sun, or from nuclear fusion and fission we do ourselves on earth from minerals that came with this planet.

Petro is not a primary source of energy. However it is both a "great battery" (portable and dense and reasonably convenient to handle) energy store, and has saved up a great store of energy from the past. It's obvious downside is that we're running out of cheaply obtained oil.

Likely this means we will have to split the problem of providing energy for transportation into two parts: use the best available various sources of energy (which are likely less portable or dense) to charge up the best available "batteries" that will carry that energy around on our vehicles.

Liquid hydrogen, combined with oxygen in the air, may well be, from what I see of this car, the preferred "battery."

Sure, gaseous hydrogen, by itself, has very low energy density (though our sun does a pretty good job of extracting energy from it, fusing it into helium.) But that's irrelevant. What matters is whether it can be used as part of a system, such compressed to a liquid then combined with oxygen in fuel cells, that will provide a high ratio of driving time to refueling time, in a system suitable for widespread deployment in automobiles.

[Roughneck]

Re: Florida: Total Eclipse

My point was that with the way things have 'progressed', at the site and in Washington, people outside of the petroleum industry are increasingly susceptible to believing, rightly or wrong, the worst.

BP could have or should have said at the outset that the only way to stop this thing is with a relief well in 3-4 months. That would have been the truth. But people don't want to or can't handle the truth. The out cry would have been deafening. So now everyone thinks they are liars and incompetent because they haven't stopped the leak.I'm not saying they haven't tried to down play the size of the leak or have not lied about how much clean up they are doing. BP does not have the most sterling reputation in the industry in the base case. But they are in a damned if you do damned if you don't spot.

PS I wasn't necessarily venting at you in particular. I just get tired of hearing all the BS that's flying around.

[Rajiv]

Re: Florida: Total Eclipse

that will provide a high ratio of driving time to refueling time, in a system suitable for widespread deployment in automobiles.

Probably not - From the above quoted article

The more you compress hydrogen, the smaller the tank can be. But as you increase the pressure, you also have to increase the thickness of the steel wall, and hence the weight of the tank. Cost increases with pressure. At 2000 psi, it’s $400 per kg. At 8000 psi, it’s $2100 per kg (5). And the tank will be huge -- at 5000 psi, the tank could take up ten times the volume of a gasoline tank containing the same energy content.

That’s why it would be nice to use liquid hydrogen, which allows you to have a much smaller container. But these storage tanks get cold enough to cause plugged valves and other problems. If you add insulation to prevent this, you will increase the weight of an already very heavy storage tank. There are additional components to control the liquid hydrogen which add extra costs and weight (11).

Here’s how a hydrogen tank stacks up against a gas tank in a Honda Accord.



According to the National Highway Safety Traffic Administration (NHTSA), "Vehicle weight reduction is probably the most powerful technique for improving fuel economy. Each 10 percent reduction in weight improves the fuel economy of a new vehicle design by approximately eight percent”.

Fuel cells are also heavy: "A metal hydride storage system that can hold 5 kg of hydrogen, including the alloy, container, and heat exchangers, would weigh approximately 300 kg (661 lbs), which would lower the fuel efficiency of the vehicle," according to Rosa Young, a physicist and vice president of advanced materials development at Energy Conversion Devices in Troy, Michigan (12).

[ThePythonicCow]

Re: Florida: Total Eclipse

Probably not - From the above quoted article

That Honda FCX Clarity that hayekvindicated linked to above would seem to demonstrate that one can get suitable driving distance (200+ miles) with suitably quick refueling times (2 or 3 minutes) in a usable passenger car. Therefore I find NHTSA claims that the driving range is only 55 miles in a usable passenger car to be unpersuasive.

[flintlock]

Re: Florida: Total Eclipse

On a more positive note, this may be the future of Transport.

One can only hope that this replaces the internal cumbustion engine.

Thanks for posting this link. I find it very interesting, but I know, like with all these new technologies, there is almost always a catch.

[lomaxzoltor]

Re: Florida: Total Eclipse

On a more positive note, this may be the future of Transport.

One can only hope that this replaces the internal cumbustion engine.

I think this was the link you were actually looking for.

http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3256/...1518227a67.jpg

The video is a nice bit of advertising for Honda, but FC vehicles only shift where the problem is instead of solving it. The real problem is that Americans live too far from work and want to be able to move 3000 pounds when they really only need to move 150 (or 250 depending on who you're talking about). Hydrogen is not easy to produce and creating it via every known method is horribly inefficient.. It would be much easier and cheaper to use the "source" energy directly instead of using hydrogen (NG for example). Hydrogen is also horribly unsafe and since it combines nicely with oxygen (which we luckily have plenty of in the air) with explosive results, hydrogen vehicles must have additional reinforcement weight added to reduce the chance of explosion during collision. Ultimately, I think the real solution will need to be lighter more efficient vehicles, more efficient batteries (like the new lithium ions that various techniques to improve their efficiency and lifetime, and people willing to give up the McMansion medieval baron exurban dream and live closer to work and shops.

[ThePythonicCow]

Re: Florida: Total Eclipse

The idea that they actually want millions of gallons leaking into the gulf and the massive damages that they will be liable for to mount so they could recover the oil...utter bullshit.

However ... something else could be going on here which would appear similar to us uninformed onlookers.

Perhaps what's going on is that there is damage to the well below the sea floor, such that they want to minimize applying further pressure inside the hole, so as to minimize further such damage. In that case, they'd cut off any restricting bent pipes above the sear floor and let the oil flow out the BOP with minimum restriction. Then the best they could do, given that decision, would be to capture as much as they could of the flow.

Given that BP and the U.S. government are controlling public information fairly carefully in this situation, there is no way, short of presuming or lacking trust in BP executives, for us outsiders to know what the highest priorities are for those BP executives. The end result is the same -- let it flow for now and capture what you can.

[ThePythonicCow]

Re: Florida: Total Eclipse

The real problem is that Americans live too far from work

This is not an either-or situation. There is not a single "real" problem. There are multiple issues, spanning various geographic and temporal scales.

It has taken America a half century to build the infrastructure and layout the vast expanse of roads, utilities, residences, stores and other such. We will adapt over time, hopefully in a sensible fashion, but we cannot simply replace such an infrastructure with the dense urban areas of yesteryear.

[oddlots]

Re: Florida: Total Eclipse

I accept all your points HV, but I still hate the "mission accomplished" manner in which the technology is presented when it's obvious that we're nowhere near there yet. (There being commercially produced hydrogen from renewable sources.) It's like the way people are clamoring for electric cars without thinking about where the electricity is going to come from to run them. It drives me crazy.