Zero-emission Power Plants Proposed 737
ckbreckenridge writes "Supercompact, superfast, superpowerful turbines called ZEPPS (zero-emission power plants), designed to combat global warming, could help produce the electrical power needed to keep up with 21st century demand. They would consume methane and oxygen and produce liquid carbon dioxide, which could be sequestered underground. The current electricity grid would need to be replaced by a 'supergrid' across the USA, says Jesse H. Ausubel in The Industrial Physicist. Work on such a system should start as soon as possible, since CO2 levels leaped up 2 ppm in the past two years as global warming becomes more of a reality."
Non convincing. (Score:3, Informative)
Please study statistics. Please realize that a sample over 2 years when Earth existed for billions of years don't mean a thing. Global warming may be a reality, as it may be caused by humans, or part of a natural cycle, or part of a natural cycle human activity accelerated.
In my book, 2 ppm over 2 years, considering error and all, isn't a good reason to start producing these plants 'as soon as possible'.
Re:liquid? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Methanol Power Plants? (Score:3, Informative)
That's because ethanol takes a significant amount of energy to produce, often more than you get out when you burn it. Now, it may be possible, in areas where there's consistent sunshine, to use solar heating in ethanol production, but it will require a lot of non-ethanol energy from some souce to produce that ethanol.
It also introduces new safety problems of its own. AFAIR ethanol burns invisibly, so it's not exactly an ideal fuel to have in a crash.
Carbon sequestration (Score:5, Informative)
The problem with all of these is you have to worry about the re-emergence of the CO2. Limestone seems like a good option because you just have to keep it dry. The downside is that limestone is heavy and even though the production is exothermic, producing lime has not been worked out. Pressurizing CO2 and storing it underground works, unless it leaks out. Then you have the same problem. Liquid bubbles are good if you have a very high pressure place to store them (the ocean), but the long term effect is acidification of the ocean and exhaustion of the carrying capacity (estimated to be around 1000-1500Gtons, we produce around 3Gtons/year).
There aren't any easy answers. However long term, since coal is about 57% of current electricity in the U.S., it's not going away. What carbon sequestration will do is allow us to bridge the gap economically and technologically between high and low carbon fuel sources.
I'm a big fan of wind, but there are still lots of hurdles.
Zero Emission Power Plants Using Solid Oxide Fuel (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.netl.doe.gov/publications/proceedings /01/vision21/v211-5.PDF
Re:liquid? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:.... Duh? (Score:5, Informative)
It's nuclear power. There is no other technology available that has sufficient output, whilst not outputting CO2 that will put the Florida Quays any further underwater.
The common argument in return is saving CO2 isn't much use if you make the planet uninhabitable due to reactors melting down. Well, the Chinese, with some help from the Germans, have very kindly solved this problem for us [wired.com]. Go check the link out - it's to wired.com - they have developed a nuclear reactor that doesn't go critical when the coolant system is switched off.
We can save the planet, if we're willing to get over the Cold War era stereotypes.
unless you know... (Score:2, Informative)
Well this would be a problem if humans produced any real quantity of co2....the thing is 300 gigtons of co2 is produced a year from natural causes and humans only produce 6 gigtons...the more likely couse of increased co2 is that carbon sinks are going though a natural cycle and are currently absorbing less at this time....or it is possible that natrual production of co2 has increased.
stendec@gmail.com
Re:Will they ever learn? (Score:4, Informative)
"Warming it up" won't make it boil.
Glad you asked... (Score:4, Informative)
A friend who worked in the Hazardous Waste disposal industry lamented the ignorance of many protesters who came out to his site and harrassed the workers. They didn't know the difference between Hazardous and Toxic waste. CO2 is not toxic. In high concentrations it can be harmful (depending on the lifeform), but that is the definition of Hazardous. Toxic means it does harm even in small concentrations.
Example:
1,000 gallons of horse urine if dumped on a field would probably kill the grass, but if dilluted and spread over time it would not.
1 milligram of plutonium spread on a field would kill the grass, no matter how you dilluted it and grass wouldn't grow again for a long time.
I'm sure I didn't explain this as well as he could have, but I hope you get the gist of it.
Re:.... Duh? (Score:5, Informative)
It's pressure that makes the difference. At atmospheric pressure CO2 doesn't have a liquid phase. At higher pressures it does. In fact, the way you make dry ice (at least used to be) taking the pressure off some liquid CO2, letting some evaporate to chill the rest into a solid.
The proposed power plants operate at high pressure including the exhaust stream. So all you need to do is cool the exhaust and you have liquid CO2.
Lake Nyos in Cameroon (Score:5, Informative)
No, global warming is real (Score:5, Informative)
What a rosy view of the future!
Methane...methinks... (Score:2, Informative)
Re:unless you know... (Score:5, Informative)
NO. 300 gigatons of CO2 cycle through the environment every year. In a closed cycle.
But every year, humans add an extra 6 gigatons to that cycle that was not there the previous year. We do this by taking carbon from deep underground (in the form of oil) and burning it to release that CO2 to the atmosphere.
Natural processes do not change the global CO2 balance, at least not on the short time scales that humans are capable of changing it.
Re:Will they ever learn? (Score:2, Informative)
Yes they did, lakes with CO2 saturated water at the bottom that release it suddenly asphyxiating thousands in the area. link here [si.edu]. Pretty bizarre event.
Frozen, under the sea (Score:2, Informative)
*SMACK!*
Re:Methane source? (Score:3, Informative)
Read the article and you see it isn't about methane so much, It's about nuclear and hydrogen, and airborne pies.
Re:How is this diffrent? (Score:4, Informative)
Um
Much more hazardous on an immediate basis. (Score:5, Informative)
Much more hazardous, especially on an immediate basis.
Liquid CO2, pushed down injection wells under pressure, occasionally springs a leak. When this happens you suddenly get a giant bubble of CO2 on (and in) the ground, displacing the oxygen and killing everybody and everything (even plants if it persists in the soil long enough) for miles around.
This has happened when CO2 injection was used to pressurize oil wells to squeeze more oil out of the gound.
A similar phenomenon happens naturally (though fortunately VERY rarely) when largely CO2 volcanic gasses vent into a deep still lake (such as in a volcanic crater). The gasses disolve, carbonating the lower waters. Then suddenly something disturbs the water and some of the carbonated water comes up and starts to bubble - rapidly "turning over" and boiling out the CO2 in the rest of the lake in a matter of minutes and releasing a similar ground-hugging toxic bubble.
Think of a shaken soda can the size of Lake Tahoe.
if we continue storring all this wouldn't eventually run out of place to put it?
Nuclear, at least, takes up very little space and decays over years/centuries/millenia (depending on the isotope - generally the hotter the faster). Some of its components are also useful and can be separated out and put to work. Others can be "burned" in nuclear reactions into less hazardous and/or more useful material.
That's not to say it's safe or good stuff. Some of it is horrid. But "running out of room" isn't the problem. (Keeping it in its room until it promises to be a good little kid and MEANS it is the problem.)
Re:Glad you asked... (Score:5, Informative)
BZZZZZZZT! Nuclear bullshit warning! Nuclear bullshit warning! Nuclear bullshit warning! The previous post may have contained bullshit that could be hazardous to your health!
Sorry, to bum your high, but while plutonium is a bad thing it is by no means as toxic as everyone seems to think it is. If you read the encyclopedia entry [nationmaster.com] on plutonium you find that the toxicity has been much exaggerated. The section on oral toxicity in the excerpt below is especially informative.
Re:How is this diffrent? (Score:4, Informative)
Wheat growers in North Dakota [ndwheat.com] beg to differ.
Re:No, global warming is real (Score:3, Informative)
Some of the biology is outside my field, but the parts which I can follow (the statistical arguments) seem well done.
Some of this work has been published in Energy and Environment [multi-science.co.uk]. Interestingly, after a ``revise and resubmit'' [uoguelph.ca] at Nature, Nature turned them down, saying the subject was ``too technical''. The referee reports suggest that it may yet make it into that journal.
Canadian Alabaska reserves (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Methanol Power Plants? (Score:5, Informative)
This seems like a stunningly dangerous proposal (Score:4, Informative)
Problem is, every so often, the carbon dioxide gets out. And lots of people die. Now, there are degassing projects which release the gas from the lakes into the atmosphere in a gradual controlled process.
Degassing [umich.edu]
Re:How is this diffrent? (Score:3, Informative)
do() || ! do() && try = NULL;
Re:.... Duh? (Score:3, Informative)
A promising technology is discussed in this story [slashdot.org].
Re:How is this diffrent? (Score:3, Informative)
The thermodynamics seems bogus. (Score:4, Informative)
This guy talks about 3000 RPM as a novel, high, shaft speed. Standard power generation turbines normally run at 3600 RPM, or sometimes 1800 RPM, to synch with the power grid. Modern microturbines [microturbine.com] run up to 96,000 RPM. (Yes, at last, Capstone Turbine isn't vaporware any more. You can actually buy a 60KW generator from them. This is an option worth considering if you need backup power for your data center.) Only 24% efficient, though. General Electric's most efficient gas turbines have reached 60%. (Big turbines are more efficient than little ones.)
Turbine technology is up against materials limits. Vast amounts of effort (many billions of dollars) have been put into finding better materials for turbine blades, because this limits aircraft performance. Current blades are single crystals of metal, often with a ceramic coating. Pure ceramic blades have been made, but have tensile strength and brittleness problems. The turbine this guy is talking about requires materials way beyond anything that exists today.
If it's thermodynamically possible to build a big machine of the type this guy is talking about, it should possible to build a little one right now.
Re:Zero Emissions? (Score:3, Informative)
The other 'distillates of air' under New Jersey regulations are: He, N2, O2, Ne, Ar, Kr, and Xe.
Re:How is this diffrent? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Glad you asked... (Score:4, Informative)
I'm sure I didn't explain this as well as he could have, but I hope you get the gist of it.
Your concept is correct, but your facts are horribly incorrect and it distracts from your point.
WIkipedia [wikipedia.org] describes the myth of Pu toxicity you refer to.
A Perspective on the Dangers of Plutonium [llnl.gov] also deals in reality on the effects and dangers of Plutonium. Plutonium's danger lies in it's radioactivity and a Mg spread out over a field of grass is all but inconsequential. Junkscience.com [junkscience.com] has a short blurb about the effects of low-level radioactivity that would suprise many who have been led to beleive that radioactivity is a large and deady threat.
Toxic is a relative term, not an absolute, and there are multiple avenues of toxicity. Most laymen use the term to mean a substance's chemical toxicity.
Plutonium's chemotoxicity is less than that of caffiene, acetiminophen, and so on. It's radiotoxicity is 1/200th that of Radium, a naturally occuring substance in soil.
So basically, that horse urine is a greater threat to that field of grass than that Mg of plutonium.
Re:How is this diffrent? (Score:4, Informative)
To some degree these are valid attacks on the current Republican administration. Many people are wondering where the small-government Republicans of the '90s went.
Re:Glad you asked... (Score:3, Informative)
No it won't. Read the encyclopedia entry.
I recall that the only treatment for radiation poisoning (from PL) during the Manhattan project was immediate high amputation, if possible. And the body of the dead bastard has to be sealed in lead, because IT was now dangerous.
Well if you can't produce an actual source for this then it's bullshit. Actually though I can produce a source for this bit of misinformation, I think you got it from the story The Long Watch by Robert Heinlein. In Richard Rhodes The Making of the Atomic Bomb [amazon.com] , the definitive history of the Manhattan project, there is no mention of any of these plutonium casualties who had their limbs lopped off. A bit of information on how this is bullshit can be found on wikipedia [wikipedia.org] the relevant section is below:
Pounds of plutonium, rendered into a powdered form and allowed to disperse would render large parts of the earth downwind dangerous to live near for centuries. It's a bloody weapon. Heinlein's first story of a nuclear weapon was about AEROSOL delivery of this stuff; he didn't think the Bomb was scary enough.
OK, I love Heinlein too, but using a story he wrote in the early 1940s, Solution Unsatisfactory (and later revised) as the basis for your knowledge of nuclear physics and plutonium toxicity is just plain stupid. You might as well use Red Planet and Podkayne of Mars as your source of information about Mars and Venus.
Note also that when radiological weapons were first designed in the late 1950s it was not plutonium that was the choice for a contaminant, it was cobalt. Pu 239 just isn't very radioactive, that's why it has that long half life and why the scientists at the Manhattan project amused themselves by passing around the nickel plated core to the Trinity bomb before it was tested.
Before you post next time try getting some information from sources other than the Weekly World News and 40's science fiction stories.
Re:.... Duh? (Score:1, Informative)
No, a good bit of the CO2 we're discussing here results from combustion. The original chemicals undergoing combustion have carbon, which combines with oxygen to produce CO2.
The amount of fossil fuels is decreasing. The amount of carbon dioxide is increasing.
We are removing fossil fuels from the ground, in a state there they had been largely stable for millenia, and adding carbon dioxide in a form that we can't say with any degree of certainty is going to stay put.
Slashdot Misrepresented the Article (Score:2, Informative)
False.
A careful read of the article reveals that the author did not claim that replacing the entire grid was needed [to implement his cleaner "ZEPP" plan]. The ZEPP plant's output is electricity, whereas the misnamed "replacement grid" conveys liquid hydrogen.
Furthermore, the article said "...power companies could insert ZEPPs into densely settled regions such as eastern China without much change to the footprint of the energy system."
So we would not have to replace the whole power grid to adopt the cleaner ZEPP process. ZEPPs make electriciy, which can be used to generate hydrogen (via electrolisys). In turn, the "new relay grid" would convey liquid hydrogen, yet I doubt that we'll live to see the day that electricity is obsolete. The so-called "new grid" would be the addition of liquid hydrogen as an option, alongside electricity and natural gas.
Re:How is this diffrent? (Score:2, Informative)
"his page is protected from editing until disputes have been resolved on the discussion page." heh.
Actually, I'm not to sure about GWB himself, but the policy wonks behind him do have a specific, coherent credo.
My own interpertation of their views is : spend like crazy until something breaks, use that as an excuse to cut programs they don't like, play lip-service to the moral conservatives, while not actually doing anything of substance in return for their support.
Re:The grandparent poster made a good point (Score:3, Informative)
At that point, given enough energy, we can re-disolve the CO2 into magma - remember that there is a lot more CO2 (and other gases) dissolved in the liquid magma than all the power plants will ever produce.
You fix the problem by fixing the carbon (Score:3, Informative)
Seriously, there are industrial processors you can buy which convert hydrogen and CO2 into methanol (CO2 + 3 H2 -> CH3OH + H2O). If you have any process which can generate enough hydrogen cheaply enough, you can use it to "fix" carbon into methanol. From there you can convert it into other things, if desired; polymerizing it into heavy waxes and pumping it underground to freeze would effectively put it back where the original oil and coal came from, and in a form that's not terribly difficult to retrieve either.
Where and how do you get the hydrogen? Aye, there's the rub...
Re:How is this diffrent? (Score:1, Informative)
http://www.lp.org
neocons and paleocons (Score:2, Informative)
There are a very few paleocons left in upper government circles, most of them can be found in what is called the "liberty lobby".
This is a *rough* outline and description but it's close enough for posting purposes.
carbon sequestration papers (Score:2, Informative)
Clean Energy Systems paper [cleanenergysystems.com]
Carbon Capture and Storage from Fossil Fuel Use [mit.edu]
Capturing and sequestering carbon dioxide" [climatetechnology.gov]
the research in the field seems to be quite activeRe:Will they ever learn? (Score:3, Informative)
Thermodynamics isn't that hard, folks.
Re:How is this diffrent? (Score:1, Informative)
Although... in perusing MIT's own links, it looks like the solar books somewhat exaggerated the success.
I'm still defending my position though. I live in a 1957 ranch house in NC that has, at present, *no* insulation in the walls. We have survived winters without turning on the heat. Though we did look specifically for a house that was properly oriented.
Most houses are not properly oriented. The long dimesion of the building should run East-West and the short North-South. The sun is lower in the winter so most sun comes through the south side of the building. In summer, the sun is high, so you want your East and West walls short. Most houses are not like this.
We do not use air conditioning. Ever. Plant a tree on the south side and don't be such a wuss.
"why haven't most houses and buildings built since then (south of Boston anyway) use passive solar designs?"
Simple-- in 99+% of the cases of a house going up, the person that is going to use it is not the person designing or building it. Unless you have a custom-built home, you get whatever you can, and the price is based more on location than quality.
The economics are simple. A builder wants to invest as little as possible, so he builds crap-- as little insulation, as little thought to efficiency, as little *thought* as possible. A buyer buys for location. Then they realize they have huge heating/cooling costs. Most individuals can't or won't finance the construction of a smart home and most builders have no incentive to.
In a corporate situation, there's no reason to build a good building that will last hundreds of years and perform well because you can build a cheap tin box and write it off as it depreciates then build a new one. (or so says my architect brother-- I really have no idea how that works).
There are a few energy concious builders and apartment complexes, but most people don't know about them because they don't care and they're particularly advertised. I recommend you look for a "solar home tour" in your area. You'd be surprised what is possible. Unfortunately, except for some free-heat-and-hot-water solar college apartments I saw, most seem to be on the high end luxury homes.
p.s. Slashdot sucks, you can't draw a diagram because of the lame filter.