181–190 of 227 posts
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I'm a serious PITA about recycling aluminum. I have this mental image of vast quantities of bauxite and energy being tossed out whenever an aluminum container (or bit of foil) is not recycled. But I don't have any firm numbers.
According to: https://www.lehighcounty.org/Departments/Solid-waste-managem... . "About 65 % of America's aluminum is currently recycled." That's pretty good. Much better than most materials.
> 0.3% of the Iron-oxide becomes nanoparticles which cannot be converted back into Iron. At that rate, 50% of the initial iron will be gone in 333 cycles of iron -> iron oxide -> iron. This a hard type of energy source to reason about: 1. It's not a pure fuel and acts like a battery most of the time, but it's also not renewable 2. Iron is extremely abundant on Earth, but it requires mining and processing to extract 3…
To a first approximation, Earth is a big ball of iron, so losing 50% of the iron in 333 cycles doesn't seem like that big a deal. Getting more iron is an energy issue rather than an availability issue. I'm also somewhat concerned about the nanoparticle's effect on living things. It is likely that it is only a question of local exposure, as in general once they get out they should still rust in some relatively short p…
This is a totally useless thing to say unless you have secret technology for core mining.
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How many posts about hydrogen being the best and only hope have you made here? I can’t recall it all now, but my understanding was that if you take the entire chain from production to storage to consumption of hydrogen, it’s pretty much an unworkable engineering problem. “The closest thing to a vacuum, other than a vacuum” was one memorable quote. Happy to be shown to be wrong.
Because it is instrumental to solving to climate change. The better question is why are people unwilling to take the problem seriously? Your understanding is the result of years of FUD against it. People really need to understand that they have been lied to repeatedly on this subject. If you have a basic grasp of engineering, you should understanding that it is literally made by running electricity through water. It…
The issue is you’re going to need distilled water in order to create hydrogen particles.
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Because it is instrumental to solving to climate change. The better question is why are people unwilling to take the problem seriously? Your understanding is the result of years of FUD against it. People really need to understand that they have been lied to repeatedly on this subject. If you have a basic grasp of engineering, you should understanding that it is literally made by running electricity through water. It…
I mean, then you’re gonna have dunces who try to run electricity through salt water. Which created a very bad gas that humans cannot breathe. The issue is you’re going to need distilled water in order to create hydrogen particles.
A membrane-based seawater electrolyser for hydrogen generation (2022)
Here we propose a direct seawater electrolysis method for hydrogen production that radically addresses the side-reaction and corrosion problems.
A demonstration system was stably operated at a current density of 250 milliamperes per square centimetre for over 3,200 hours under practical application conditions without failure.
This strategy realizes efficient, size-flexible and scalable direct seawater electrolysis in a way similar to freshwater splitting without a notable increase in operation cost, and has high potential for practical application.
This feels like a poor stop-gap that will turn into a long term solution one day instead of focussing on nuclear fusion/fission, solar, wind, beaming energy from space, etc.
I had to lookup a German word for this: Weltschmerz.
> Weltschmerz literally means 'world pain' and refers to a sense of world-weariness.
> “Places that have excess energy could make iron, and others can buy it. This way, you could commodify renewable energy so it can be globally distributed without the need for transmission lines. Metals can solve a big problem in the renewable energy transition: long-duration energy storage.” My gut feeling is that transmission lines would still be cheaper. That being said long-term storage seems to be the value prop…
> My gut feeling is that transmission lines would still be cheaper Transmission lines are great for moving electricity, but only if there's demand for that electricity _right now_. Otherwise, you have to store it - which is a problem, because battery tech right now isn't great (or rather, it's not good enough for grid-scale requirements) . This iron powder could be thought of as a "battery". It might be harder to mov…
In fact, you have to use some sort of transmission lines to get energy to those locations, otherwise you have no way to get energy to or from them. Even if they have local power generation, you still have to use transmission lines to get that power out.
Sounds like one of the least efficient energy storage ideas I've heard in a long time, I wonder how this is getting funded? Hmm, let's check to see who is behind this...the founding professor https://www.tue.nl/en/research/researchers/philip-de-goey/ is a fellow/awardee of the Combustion Institute, gets funding from ERC, etc. OK, so I guess all that European taxpayer money won't spend itself, and if you have a hammer…
“it’s more efficient to produce iron from hydrogen gas than to produce liquid hydrogen. So iron powder as fuel is more expensive than gaseous hydrogen but cheaper to produce and move across the oceans than liquid hydrogen.” He's saying liquid hydrogen , but I gotta wonder if the the real story here is an attempt to deal with moving the energy in natural gas , since the liquified natural gas story is so shitty (expens…
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Your argument is now “older people are stupid?”. The information is old and irrelevant? The article I linked was from this year. I just picked a critical engineer at random, but I can see I’m wasting my time here. You are clearly not any kind of expert. I am clearly not any kind of expert. This is just devolving into nothingness, and I’ll leave it here.
You are clearly misrepresenting my point. Your authority is not really an authority for a bunch of reasons. One of which is how he is basically a retired petroleum engineer with very little understanding of the modern state of hydrogen. And yes, this usually implies an old person, something Arthur C. Clarke noticed in one of his writings about elderly scientists. And while your link is from this year, he's been sayin…
That is terribly naive and wishful thinking, I’m afraid.
For even the smallest-scale industrial applications, hydrogen is almost invariably produced on-site, near or within the manufacturing cell consuming it. Even if Linde charged nothing at all for hydrogen, electrolysis would still win: no 10kpsi (good lord) tank, no inevitable 1% loss per month of high-pressure hydrogen, no extra insurance premium.
If you’d dealt with hydrogen in industry, you might appreciate the problems with it. The static electric discharge from fingertip to ground required to ignite hydrogen is barely perceptible, and a ridiculously low atmospheric hydrogen concentration will burn with a very hot flame invisible in daylight.
The proposition of the public driving high-pressure hydrogen tanks around is brain-damaged. If you want fuel, you should make methanol from your hydrogen - for the same reasons that, if you want hydrogen, you already produce it from water or natural gas or propane.
Hydrogen has been an excellent topic for boastful press releases by car companies, corrupt nations, and fossil fuel producers murderously determined to continue the status quo indefinitely. It’s ideal for that, because there’s no danger of practicality.
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We don't need seasonal storage. The sun still shines in the winter, unless you're in the Arctic circle. We can use over building, production diversity, interconnection and short term storage instead. Or just use natgas peakers for the last 1% and call a 99% solution good enough. If we had reasonably priced seasonal storage we'd use it, but we don't need it.
In winter cloudy conditions solar PV produces 10-15% power. Assuming some hydro storage, that's 4x overbuild. Not cost effective. Europe all gets winter at the same time. If you've got a cold snap for three weeks with low wind, the only plan is reliance on massive fossil fuel backup. The cost of keeping that capacity for only using a week a year isn't priced into solar either. The CO2-intensity of electricity generat…
Depends on the latitude and these numbers seem to be for very high ones close to the polar circles.
> Not cost effective.
Are we pricing in the societal collapse due to climate change? I’d suspect a 4x overbuild would be quite cheap against that.
OTOH, keeping some natgas capacity for when a freakish cold snap with no wind hits seems kind of OK.