Business, Economics, Space

The Water Rush

21 Comments

Over at Popular Mechanics, I write about the competition for extraterrestrial water, and the relative merits of the moon versus asteroids.

[Update a few minutes later]

Here’s a related piece at the HuffPo. But this always drives me nuts:

The world’s fossil fuels are in limited reserves and are also in quick depletion.

We have enough fossil fuels to last many decades, and in the case of coal, for centuries.

21 thoughts on “The Water Rush”

  1. “The world’s fossil fuels are in limited reserves and are also in quick depletion.”

    Carbon, methane, octane, and diesel are sufficiently useful energy transport media that we’ll be -making- at least some of them, long after we’re “out”.

    Biodiesel (for all its problems affecting the -food- chain) is one case-in-point. Syngas another. Making “Biogas” from biodiesel isn’t very tough either. (Energetically not favored, so diesel may actually win in the end .:)

    1. And coal produces syngas which we already use to make methanol, and that can produce dimethyl ether, which is easily converted to almost pure octane using a zeolite. Oil prices are already above the break even point for the process, so centuries worth of coal could instead be converted to centuries worth of 100 octane motor fuel, while the current coal consumption could be switched over to nuclear and natural gas.

      1. Actually, the focus on using syngas from coal to make liquid fuel is concentrated on turning “stranded natural gas” into liquid fuel.

        I am not as familiar with the coal-to-methanol-to-ether-to-gasoline chain. The process talked about by the Chem Engineering guys at “the U” is the water gas reaction to turn coal into a mix of H2 and CO, and the conversion of that into #2 Diesel, an important commercial transportation fuel, using the Fischer-Tropsch process.

        The thing with Fischer-Tropsch is the thing with fuel cells. With enough catalyst material, we could be doing all manners of things with Fischer-Tropsch (needs cobalt and related metals) and with fuel cells (paladium and platinum). The thing is that unless you want to “burn through” a lot of strategic metal catalysts, you need your feedstocks to be as chemically pure as possible. Hence the focus on fuel cells on a “hydrogen economy” instead of using methanol or gasoline directly in fuel cells, the focus on stranded natural gas as a feedstock instead of coal.

        You see there is a lot of natural gas “out there”, often flared or simply wasted as a byproduct of oil production “out in the sticks” where there is no market or infrastructure to use the natural gas, although if the oil producers weren’t such primitives, you think by now they would have developed a native chemical industry or fertilizer industry to use all of that gas.

        The other thing is that natural gas is generally much chemically cleaner than coal, so you are going to be getting Fischer-Tropsch Diesel fuel from that gas long before it pays to get it from coal.

        With respect to catalyst, maybe if you space dudes could mine asteroids for limitless amounts of cobalt, nickel, platinum, and paladium, we would have catalyst material coming out of our ears, and there would be all manner of things we could do with fuel cells or making liquid fuels out of coal.

      2. This PDF might help some in explaining the syngas to DME conversion, and then to gasoline using the ZSM-5 zeolite catalyst. The catalyst in the first steps (syngas to DME) are just Cu, ZnO, and Al2O3, so no odd metals required. 🙂

        It would be possible to build a small scale reactor in your garage, as long as you’re comfortable with high-temperature, high-pressure welded stainless steel piping.

  2. Methane clatherates (the methane ice under the oceans) will also provide centuries of hydrocarbon energy. And before they run out we will be bring methane and ethane back from Titan.

    1. I have a friend in the “all bidness” as we say in Texas. Methane clatherates are the holy grail for the offshore guys. Figure out how to produce from tham and you will be rich, rich, rich. Alas, despite decades of work, nobody has come up with a way to produce useful amounts of gas from them that makes economic sense.

  3. I am skeptical of Peak Oil. Why? Because the dudes over at the Oil Drum seem to enjoy themselves that we are at Peak Oil — kinda like the Bible story of Jonah told to preach repentance to Ninevah and the folks in Ninevah actually repented and then Jonah’s nose was out-of-joint that Divine fire-and-brimstone didn’t rain down on Ninevah.

    I am also skeptical of Climate Change or Global Warming or whatever it is called this week. Same thing — too many people seem to derive too much joy from it being true that someone has to ask questions.

    I am also curious as to the limits regarding hydrocarbon fuels. Maybe the limit is proportional to the amount of oxygen in the atmosphere being the fossil relic of the amount of sequestered carbon in sedimentary rock. In other words, the thing about the Amazon or the ocean layers being the photosynthetic “lungs” of the Earth is just posh — the atmospheric oxygen is not in homeostatic balance with Gaia but is rather a fossil gas as much as fossil fuel. If CO2 is 300 PPM and human fossil fuel burning is 100 PPM and oxygen is 210,000 PPM, we have another 2000 centuries to go before we burn all of the carbon fuels and exhaust all of the atmospheric oxygen? 20 centuries to go if we want to consume 1% of the oxygen?

    I am also interested in the possibility that oil is not a fossil fuel, or at least doesn’t come from biogenic processes. I keep asking anyone who knows anything about chemistry about equilibrium thermodynamic processes (the Fischer-Tropsch synthetic fuel process is not equilibrium chemistry as one would expect to have in geologic formations), and it seems that the most thermodynamically plausible way that we get oil is that organic sediments are subducted into the upper mantle, and under conditions of the upper mantle, CaCO3 (limestone), FeO (an iron ore) and H2O combine to form long-chain alkanes (i.e. gasoline and #2 Diesel and everything else in sweet light crude).

    So maybe oil is not the nuclear energy of the sun mediated through plant growth but rather the nuclear energy of the radioisotopes of the Earth converting limestone, iron ore, and water, under the same temperature and pressure as diamonds are made, into Texas Tea. There was some thought experiment of sending a scientific probe to the core of the Earth by sinking some thousands of tons of molten iron to try to get something to sink that far.

    Maybe an advanced terrestrial civilization could set up a closed-loop geo-energy system of sinking blobs of iron ore and limestone into the mantle, converting them to gasoline, and getting the gasoline back to the surface somehow, and that an energy economy based on cars and gasoline could, in some distant future be plausible and I dare say sustainable?

    On the other hand, the glibness of many in the Right Blogosphere that Peak Oil or Climate Change is entirely a Left-wing plot and a product of Left-Wing fevered plans to control everybody, my thought is, whoa. We may not be in the dire crisis that the Lefties would like us to be in, but maybe there are limits, either to the supply of carbon fuels or to the ability of the environment to accept the combustion of carbon fuels.

    My engineering “Spider Sense” suggests that we are not at Peak Oil, but maybe we have only one more bust-boom cycle in Oil as we had with Directional Drilling in the 80’s and 90’s Oil Glut before we could hit it. I don’t think that the current warm weather is strong evidence of CAGW, but it doesn’t mean we can’t reach that point if we pursue pedal-to-the-metal economic growth based on using carbon fuels. I just wish these issues could be discussed without it getting into political talking points — from both sides.

  4. Is that the same limited amount of oil we were supposed to run out of by 1997, according to 1975 reports?

    Or were the oceans supposed to be dead by 1997? I can’t ever keep all that hand wringing stuff straight. I’m too busy driving to the coast for deep sea fishing trips!

    1. I remember being young in the 70’s when old timers would scoff and screw their faces up when anyone suggested we were running out of oil. I thought they were a bunch of out-of-touch cranks who refused to acknowledge the obvious, with which experts and everyone else agreed.

      But, then, I had been carefully coached to believe that, and I hadn’t enough familiarity with the vast numbers involved to imagine that a resource, while being finite, can still last a very, very long time.

      Now, I’m the old out-of-touch crank who scoffs when my heirs inform me matter-of-factly that we are running out of oil, and they roll their eyes and ruefully shake their heads in sadness at my evident decline, followed by puzzlement at the big grin on my face.

    2. The narrative they tell over at The Oil Drum is that between 1975 and 1997 the oil people invented directional drilling — that allowed them to get oil out of the same reservoirs at higher rates, simply depleting them faster, leading to a more precipitous reckoning early in the 21st Century.

      You could also say that the shale gas and now shale oil (not oil shale that is a form of kerogen mixed in with sedimentary rock, but the in-situ extraction of actual oil from “tight formations”) are the second wave to keep the Oil Age going.

      The part that scares me is that we reached a kind of Peak Oil Price in the early 1980’s, with yes, President Carter telling potential voters that waiting in lines at gas stations was necessary so that people would know that the Energy Crisis was real. I guess he didn’t get reelected. I guess a combination of things happened, that the Reagan economic boom was accompanied by falling oil prices, and the continuation of that boom into the Bush 41 and Clinton years saw oil prices fall even more.

      Where is the cycle, of the World Economic Crisis resulting in Demand Destruction, followed by plummeting oil prices as a glut of oil “comes on line” in response to energetic drilling in response to the Energy Crisis?

      Daniel Yergin, one of the prominent “anti-Peak Oil” people seemed to have a prediction that world oil production would be at the 100 billion barrels per day level by now, but we are still clunking along in the mid 80’s, with the nascent economic recovery sending oil back to prices that helped bring on the last crash.

      Maybe it is a case of dollar inflation instead of oil shortages, and if only we adopted Paul Ryan’s plan we will turn this all around and see lower oil prices and a booming economy at the same time.

      Like I said, I don’t spend any time over at The Oil Drum because it is relentless gloom and doom by people who seem to take pleasure in gloom and doom. On the other hand, I am not so sure I buy into the glib, “There are all the hydrocarbons anyone ever needs.” There are some real concerns voiced over at The Oil Drum that cannot be hand-waved away.

      1. And, those concerns will be dealt with by the people most capable of dealing with them. It is most assuredly NOT a crisis justifying a power grab by those least capable of dealing with them.

  6. Oh, but you don’t understand.. people in the 22nd century need our help now. We all need to sacrifice so these transhumanist superbeings can live on exactly the same Earth as we have now, otherwise they might, ya know, suffer.

  7. And if I don’t have a timeshare on Ceres in 20 years I’m being discriminated against. Although I might just settle for a rest of my life expense paid cruise on Norm Nixon’s Freedom Ship. He never did answer my question about where the folk manning the on board Arbys would be housed and could I apply to be a cashier.

  8. Asteroids, Luna, floor wax, dessert topping?

    Why not direct a near-Earth-orbiting comet to hit the moon, and harvest the ice that settles out afterwards?

    1. Uh… because?!

      The reaction would be predictable. It’s no longer mining, it’s a national security issue that the govt. has to take complete charge of.

      Let the clueless remain clueless. At least until a new industry gets a chance to be born.

  9. We keep finding new sources of energy too. Why is it whenever we discover more than we use in a year no one says, “If current trends continue, we will never run out.”

  10. Somewhat off topic (but a normal topic for TTM) is this post at WUWT on the projected and severe decline in the coverage and capability of US weather satellites due to tight budget constraints. Would those constraints be the SLS? It might make a good subject for an in depth article.

Comments are closed.