I have commenters who refuse to start their own blogs, so I’ll have to create my own guest-blog posts for them. Here’s Carl Pham:
I wouldn’t say I’m enthusiastic about sequestration, aside from the aesthetic pleasure I get from acres of active sequesterers, particular those in genus Sequoia, but it sure beats the hell out of (1) deindustrialization and refeudalization (I know who wants to be my feudal lord), or (2) flinging irrecoverable resources down the rabbit hole of “alternative energy” sources.
I mean, it amazes me that people think because it’s possible to formulate a sentence like we must search for alternative energy sources that they must exist, whereas a few moments informed thought would tell you this is a sentence like we must search for Atlantis or we must search for a new element with stable isotopes, and coming perilously close to we must search for a perpetual motion machine.
The way I see it, there are four forces. Gravity gives us waterfalls and windpower, tech known since the 8th century, thoroughly exploited. The strong force gives us fission and fusion, also well understood. Fission has been ruled out because we’re stupid. Fusion is tough because of that staggering activation barrier, the size of the match you need to light the fire. The weak force gives us radioactivity, but if you’re going to use that you might as well use fission, so that’s that.
What’s left? The EM force, which gives us solar energy and chemistry. Direct solar power is futile, because the power density at the Earth’s surface is too low, so you’ve got to have some collection and storage system, which inevitably brings us to chemistry, that being the way you store electromagnetic energy (barring the invention of stupendous capacitors).
Problem is, the Earth is a closed system, and it’s had 4 billion years to come to equilibrium. There aren’t many chemical reactions left that (1) have plentiful fuel lying around, but (2) magically enough, have failed to already run sometime over the past million millenia.
Except for one. That would be combustion. And the reason is simple, because we live in a giant photosynthesizing hothouse, a mad biosphere that soaks up gigartons of CO2, reduces it to carbohydrates for storage and transport, and then oxidizes it again for energy and movement. It’s a nice, neat, closed cycle, and has been running stably for millions of years. Humble logic suggests the obvious thing to do is tap into this cycle for our own needs, peel off 0.1% of the carbon for our own purposes.
Which we do — but only on the oxidation side. So logic suggests, once again, that we enlist our chlorophylled neighbors to help us out there by reducing the carbon we so merrily oxidize, balancing the books. And, amazingly enough, just as we’re aware of the problem, we discover the tools necessary: our ability to directly manipulate the genome, so that we can tailor plants and bugs to reduce CO2 just the way we want.
I mean, heck, if only combustion and the carbon cycle had just been discovered, it would be the coolest, most clever, greenest tech, and Obama would be wanting to pour billions into it. But, you know, since the tech is as old as pencils, we sit around thinking No, that can’t make sense. Make marks with a piece of charcoal encased in wood? They did that in the 16th century, back when people were stupid and uneducated. There MUST be a better way.
Bio-char is part of this solution and yes, some on the Left are pushing for it. Sequester CO2 by making biochar and enrich soil productivity at the same time, thereby reducing the need for petroleum produced fertilizers.
After all, too much of the world’s petroleum is controlled by bad people.
Also, thorium nuclear power is gaining traction because it ingests plutonium (a proliferation risk) and thorium and excretes energy plus palladium and rhodium (the South Asians are working on that).
PS — traditional light water fission plants are stupid. Thorium plants however could offer a much better approach.
Wind and hydro power are solar too Carl.
Tidal power plants work by mining the Moon’s momentum.
Which is kinda cool, IMHO.
Hydro is solar? Go visit Niagara Mohawk’s visitor center, if they’re still giving tours these days. Carl’s got the right of it that useful hydro power is gravitational.
PPS – Algae that secrete diesel fuel fit Carl’s proposal perfectly and they can run the carbon cycle without digging up carbon that has been buried for millions and millions of years.
The whole point of electric power is the ability to use as much as you want at the time you want to use it, not when someone tells you to use it.
Yeah, demand management, they have that in Baghdad — there are only certain hours you get power and the rest of the time you use a gasoline generator or you sweat.
Tell me about demand management. The power company up by my Dad’s place is offering peak/off-peak pricing. It’s a scam — you get a slim savings for usage at night, and you really get stuck for usage during the day. Almost any realistic pattern of usage will increase your bill unless you switch to living at night and sleeping during the day with all the lights and A/C off.
The only thing that is cheap enough and flexible enough and clean enough to produce large amounts of power on demand is natural gas combustion in gas turbines. Even if we ramped up nuclear, where would that last, Econ 101 “marginal” kilowatt come from? That’s right, natural gas.
There was some deal on CNN Money interviewing entrepeneurs about the Next Big Green Thing, and one idea was carbon sequestration by generating carbonate rock instead of CO2 gas. Now that is an idea. If one can think of an exothermic oxidation reaction in carbon that starts with gaseous, liquid, or solid fuel (gas, oil, or coal) and ends up with a solid instead of a gaseous exhaust (CaCO3 or whatever instead of CO2). Of course instead of releasing CO2 and H2O vapor up a smoke stack, one would generate big piles of carbonate rocks that one would have to stick back into some hole in the ground (reverse mining?)
I think the “hydro=solar” comes from the fact that solar energy is required to evaporate the water and carry it “uphill” in the air so that it can be deposited at higher elevations, whereupon gravity then converts the potential energy into kinetic.
“Hydro is solar? Go visit Niagara Mohawk’s visitor center, if they’re still giving tours these days. Carl’s got the right of it that useful hydro power is gravitational.”
Uhhh…no…..something has to move the water upgradient. Guess what adds the energy to accomplish this movement against gravity?
As someone who worked 13 years in stream morphology in a previous life, let me be the first to say that you are as wrong as a dog and cat fornicating.
What lifts the water up-gradient? Underwear gnomes or the hydrologic cycle?
The sun is the engine that drives the hydrologic cycle. The sun cause evaporation, evap forms condensation, clouds for those from rio linda. Clods from percipitation. Water flows from higher gradient to lower gradient.
It is like a kids slide excepth is is the sun and not a parent that puts the kid at the top of the slide of potential energy.
In this case, gravity is a spring and the sun is what puts energy in the spring.
http://nasascience.nasa.gov/earth-science/oceanography/ocean-earth-system/ocean-water-cycle
Also, as far as Thorium goes, Kirk Sorenson and Charles Barton, Jr. have been banging the Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactor drum for a number of years now, and I have yet to see anyone refute them with a valid argument why it wouldn’t work–heck, to Paul’s point, they think it can be dialed up and down fast enough to follow loads like a gas turbine.
And, of course, there’s always the chance that Bussard will have the last laugh after all, and the luddites would just go absolutely nuts if we had cheap fusion.
“If one can think of an exothermic oxidation reaction in carbon that starts with gaseous, liquid, or solid fuel (gas, oil, or coal) and ends up with a solid instead of a gaseous exhaust (CaCO3 or whatever instead of CO2). Of course instead of releasing CO2 and H2O vapor up a smoke stack, one would generate big piles of carbonate rocks that one would have to stick back into some hole in the ground (reverse mining?)”
Coal-fired Powerplants already make Calcium Sulfate aka Gypsum from the limestone in the scrubber and the sulfur in the coal. This is commercialy processed into wallboards.
The question is where are you going to get the free calcium that wasn’t extracted from carbonate rocks to react into calcium carbonate?
I suppose you could make bicarbonate of soda but it takes energy to liberate the sodium. The things that react to make carbonates are generally metals like calcium, sodium and magnesium that do not like to hang around in a reduced state waiting to be introduced to a nice, clean CO2 molecule so it generally grabs the first slutty oxygen molecule it can hook up with.
When you think about it, combustion (with modern scrubbers, etc.) is damn near a panacea.
You’re taking a toxic waste that is carcinogenic, mutagenic, tetrogenic, hazardous to plants and animals, and a blight wherever it spill and converting it into plant food and water.
If only we could figure out some way to use the plant food and water.
Mike: I stand corrected. I’m not sure if Niagara specifically is above sea-level, but even if that one is not then other waterfalls certainly are. Thank you.
I’ve seen a website that claimed that based on the work done in the 1950s on nuclear gas turbines(jet engines) it is possible to build fission powered peak load electrical generators that can be dialed up and down fairly quickly.
Just another example of how lack of engineering development has handicapped nuclear power.
Traditional light water nukes are stupid exactly why? They produce electricity and the fuel can be recycled. Ask the French. The waste can be burned up in Gen 4 reactors. Yeah I’m still hoping the Bussard device works.
Two more real alternative energy sources that both ALREADY work and one of them at least had a pilot plant built in the 1930s: OTEC and wave power. Both of these are effectively solar energy, too.
OTEC also has the potentially useful side effect of bringing up nutrient-rich water from a long way down, thus enhancing phytoplankton growth and thus sequestrating carbon by that means. Used in sufficient quantity it might also reduce the severity of hurricanes, but there would have to be a hell of a lot of plants for this to get significant.
Wave power also has the useful side effect of reducing coastal erosion.
The trouble is that both of these work, and work reliably and all the time, and thus annoy two sets of people; those with large amounts of money invested in conventional energy, and the watermelon Greens.
And may I insert here the obligatory drum-banging for SSP? Also for some more useful sources that are certainly not going to be all that significant but may have other uses – such as thermal depolymerisation, which creates stuff that can be poured straight into a diesel engine – and slightly less well-proven tech such as culture of oil-rich bluegreen algae, which is a rather nice low-tech form of solar.
NO, NO, NO!!! You you people don’t understand! WE are the problem, get rid of us and the world will be fine. Didn’t you people see The Matrix?
Kidding aside, How do you plan to convert to alt energy electricity on a scale large enough to displace coal? Devil’s in the details. I mean convert in a private investment sort of way.
Bio-fuels are solar too. Plants just convert solar energy to chemical energy. They are not particularly efficient at this, although there are certain cost and aesthetic advantages to the process if chemicals (like diesel) are the goal. For large electrical generation you still run in to the problem of low power density.
Coal and oil (assuming they originate in an organic process) work well because they accumulate and concentrate energy over long periods of time; Much longer than the time to consume.
“I’ve seen a website that claimed that based on the work done in the 1950s on nuclear gas turbines(jet engines) it is possible to build fission powered peak load electrical generators that can be dialed up and down fairly quickly.”
Why would anyone want to do this? If you build a nuclear reactor then it makes sense to keep it running at full capacity as much as possible. The marginal cost of generation is negligible compared to anything else.
Pebble bed reactors (PBRs) are also a good choice. The Chinese have built several and S Africa is building some. It has numerous features such as no expensive containment dome, design of the pebbles makes it meltdown proof (the Chinese demonstrated that by turning the power off to the reactor), uses inert gas to run turbines, very little proliferation threat, and storage of spent fuel is greatly simplified as the design of the fuel balls greatly limits reaction.
Some say it can scale down as small as car sized units. In light of this design light water reactors really are a stupid design choice.
Karl: Because electricity generated must be consumed somewhere else within milliseconds. If it isn’t consumed, then it starts heating patches of ground around safety systems designed to keep excess power from wrecking the system. That’s a very wasteful way to use fuel, which may be cheap on the margin, but isn’t cheap if you’re talking about wasting GWhs every day–even with nuclear fuel.
Thus, power companies as a whole must work together to follow demand as it moves about during the day. Most of the demand swings slowly enough that they can do things like put boilers online and offline to accommodate it; that’s base power. The rest, however, is hard to predict and you have to be able to add or take away GWs with a few minutes’ notice. I don’t think that LWRs are great at that, although the Navy has certainly adapted them to that end.
My understanding is that both LFTR and Polywell would be so responsive to throttling that either actually *could* be used to replace peaker plants, while still being powerful enough and cheap enough that (unlike gas turbines) they outperform everything else as base power. To my thinking, LFTR is a potentially “disruptive” technology, and Polywell potentially “highly disruptive”.
Yep. That’s why there are “peaking” power plants being built all over the place, to provide the power during demand spikes yet not run when their output isn’t needed.
There’s one along the border of the county I live in and the one just west of it, that generated controversy among its neighbors because most of the people living near it aren’t in the county the plant was actually built in.
I agree we’re going to need boatloads of nuclear energy down the road. I also agree with Carl that plant-based sequestration of carbon is one viable alternative.
Now that you’ve picked yourself up off of the floor, the problem with alternative energy in general (and I’ll include sequestration and nuclear in that category) is upfront costs. Doing things the way we’re currently doing them is cheap – much of the costs are sunk. Change requires building new stuff.
The more variability in energy costs, the higher risks of any “alt energy” scheme. That’s what a carbon tax is supposed to accomplish – raise the price of certain types of energy, thus reducing the risk / cost of other types of energy.
Chris Gerrib,
A carbon tax will certainly raise the price of certain types of energy. It will certainly not reduce the risk or cost of other types. That will remain the same and overall energy prices will rise and we’ll all be poorer.
Mike:
We will only be poorer if the cost of adding more CO2 to the atmosphere is zero. The argument for a carbon tax is that the cost of continuing to increase the concentration of atmospheric CO2 is not zero, and in fact it is much greater than the cost of not doing so.
The argument for a carbon tax is that the cost of continuing to increase the concentration of atmospheric CO2 is not zero, and in fact it is much greater than the cost of not doing so.
That’s not an argument, or if it is, it’s never well supported by either science or economics. It’s merely an assertion.
Mike Borgelt – we’re discussing different kinds of risk. Carbon taxes do not decrease technical risk, AKA “the risk that this scheme won’t work.” They do decrease financial risk, AKA “the risk we’ll be priced out of the market.”
Rand – That’s not an argument, or if it is, it’s never well supported by either science or economics. Depends on which set of scientific data you’re looking at.
That’s not an argument, or if it is, it’s never well supported by either science or economics. It’s merely an assertion.
Which part, the “not zero”, or the “much greater than the cost of not doing so”?
The consensus seems to be that if we do not put a price on CO2 emissions, the atmospheric concentration will exceed 500ppm in this century. Do you think there is no cost to doing so? A small cost? A small probability of a large cost?
Which part, the “not zero”, or the “much greater than the cost of not doing so”?
The latter.
The consensus seems to be that if we do not put a price on CO2 emissions, the atmospheric concentration will exceed 500ppm in this century.
There is no consensus.
Do you think there is no cost to doing so? A small cost? A small probability of a large cost?
I think that the cost of preventing it (at least by the means proposed so far) would vastly exceed the costs of doing it. When people disagree, one of the reasons is that they don’t understand the concept of discount rates. The other is that they have other agendas, and are just using this as a scare tactic to implement them. Bjorn Lomberg has analyzed this extensively.
I appreciate going back to basics, but somehow the “four forces” analysis missed one of the largest sources of available energy: geothermal. There is enough geothermal energy in the first few miles of crust to power civilization for tens of thousands of years — in stark contrast to uranium, just to pick a random example. Of course, as many have already pointed out, the devil is in the details. And not all of that “available” energy is practically available — most of the land in the U.S. already has something sitting on it!
But I would urge everyone to observe that the fundamentals problems here are not physical, or even technological, but rather, economic and political. Sure, we could move to 100% solar and wind power if we were willing to pay 100 times as much for our electricity (at the margin). Because the marginal cost at full capacity for these sources is so high, the political system — even the dictatorial regime envisioned by Obamaites — cannot reasonably mandate these changes. Nor should they! The best way for the economic system to work is to let the free market find the best solution(s).
BBB
> The consensus seems to be that if we do not put a price on CO2 emissions, the atmospheric concentration will exceed 500ppm in this century. Do you think there is no cost to doing so? A small cost? A small probability of a large cost?
The relevant international report concluded that the cost of mitigation later was less than the cost of action now. The way that they used that to conclude “take action now” conclusion was that they used a negative discount rate.
Does Jim really believe that we’re currently at the peak of our abilities?
Note that global warming seems to have stopped even though CO2 continues to rise. And, the deep oceans, which have vastly more heat capacity than the atmosphere, seem to be cooling.
The “runaway” argument assumes that global climate had been very close to said tipping point essentially forever. Heck, it had even been on the other side. (We’ve also had higher CO2.) Yet, this time it is going to happen.
Digital watches are unprecedented, but very little else is.
There is no consensus.
Really? Who thinks that CO2 concentrations are going to level off without governments putting a price on CO2 emissions?
Note that global warming seems to have stopped even though CO2 continues to rise.
Global warming does not predict that every year or even decade will be warmer than the one before, any more than the statement “summer is warmer than winter in the Northern Hemisphere” implies that every day or week between 3/21 and 6/21 will be warmer than the one before.
We’ve also had higher CO2
Not if the “we” in the sentence includes humans. When our animal friends had 500ppm CO2 there was no ice on the surface of the planet.
There is enough geothermal energy in the first few miles of crust to power civilization for tens of thousands of years — in stark contrast to uranium, just to pick a random example.
The contrast is indeed stark. The uranium in the first few miles of the crust would power civilization for much longer than that. Indeed, at current rates of primary energy consumption, even if all that energy were from uranium fission, the Earth’s oceans would be boiled by the slowly brightening sun before the uranium ran out.
(This is assuming use in breeder reactors.)
Rand, what is the discounted cost of turning Earth, in 30 or 40 years’ time, into a copy of Venus?
The odds that we won’t irretrievably damage the ecosystem despite not doing anything to stop it are actually rather good. I don’t like the size of the pot.
Rand, what is the discounted cost of turning Earth, in 30 or 40 years’ time, into a copy of Venus?
When you multiply by the probability to get the expected value, zero.
The odds that we won’t irretrievably damage the ecosystem despite not doing anything to stop it are actually rather good.
What does “damage the ecosystem” mean? What is the perfect ecosystem? Whence your conceit that we live in it now? The ecosystem has been changing since the dawn of humanity (not to mention the dawn of life).
What does “damage the ecosystem” mean?
One example would be: cause the greatest extinction event in the last 65 million years. Extinction happens all the time, of course, but as you are fond of saying, quantity has a quality all its own.
“Global warming does not predict that every year or even decade will be warmer than the one before,”
And yet, the only confirmation that carbon dioxide is the cause is the infamous hockey stick. A flawed plot of global average temperature overlaying observed carbon dioxide with an excellent agreement. At least, it had a good agreement when it was published. When no one knew Mann was overly relying on a conveniently edited set of data from bristlecone pines in the west.
With updated bristlecones and temperature and carbon dioxide brought up to date, alignment is now atrocious. Mann was sufficiently hounded by the question “But is it robust to the removal of this one proxy?” that he added an instrumental compilation by Lutbacher. Now he makes the claim “Pure proxies gives excellent agreement!”, then he shuffles the bristlecones out and Lutbacher into the mix and claims “And I get the same curve removing the troublesome pines!” (Duh, you put an instrumental record in there.)
Paul wrote: “The uranium in the first few miles of the crust would power civilization for much longer than that.”
Not a chance. A uranium-based economy would be good for a few hundred years at best. Try googling “global exergy resource” and clicking on some of the links. Here’s an MIT study that goes into great detail about U.S. geothermal resources and the technology to recover it:
http://geothermal.inel.gov/publications/future_of_geothermal_energy.pdf
Even the “conservative” scenario (where only 2% of the geothermal resource is exploited) provides about 300,000 EJ (exajoules)… about 3000 years’ worth at the current annual consumption of 100 EJ.
Here’s a presentation with a nice chart (slide 9) that summarizes all the known reservoirs of exergy:
http://www.kaust.edu.sa/pdf/speaches/Orr.pdf
In this case, if you add up every single atom of uranium in the oceans you get about 360,000,000 EJ (360 YJ). Stored thermal energy in the crust dwarfs this, however, providing 15.000 YJ=1.5E10 EJ. Note these numbers are for the entire planet, while the MIT report was for the U.S. only. Also the MIT numbers are for 2% utilization, while the Orr numbers are the total resource.
So… your mileage may vary. 😉
BBB
Not a chance. A uranium-based economy would be good for a few hundred years at best.
You clipped out the part where I said I was assuming breeder reactors. With breeding, your average piece of crustal rock has as much energy content as the combustion energy in 20 times its mass of coal. At this rate, it becomes economical to mine uranium (and thorium) all the way down to the crustal average concentrations. Sure, the uranium/thorium become far more expensive than now (absent future advances in technology over the next thousands of millenia), but you get far more energy out, so it’s affordable.