[EnergySpin]

I guess the academics are lagging behind on this one, no studies on this particular point, that I am aware of. But I am aware of this reference, that gives an indication of what is available out there:
"A U.S. Department of Agriculture report says more than 1.3 billion tons of dry forest material waste is available in the nation for biomass systems. If used for energy, that would be equivalent to about 30 percent of the nation’s oil usage, the report said." - http://msnbc.msn.com/id/9924889/ I'm affraid I was not able to track down the USDA report itself.

It appears that currently most of the 1.3 billion tons is burned to prevent forest fires - a tragic waste of a renewable resource.

You can also look at this Forest Service study for Minnesota: http://ncrs.fs.fed.us/pubs/gtr/gtr_nc114.pdf

I believe this number (30% of all oil usage) is based on the HHV. Convert that to ethanol and you go much lower than 30%. I may be mistaken on that though.

[Optimist]

ES,
It seems the US and EU are going in opposite directions (again!). The EU seem to be working toward a thermochemical conversion of biomass into diesel, http://www.ecotraffic.se/Synbios/Conference/main.aspx The US is mainly working on fermentation-ethanol.

Considering the high energy requirement for distillation, and the additional energy required to break-up the azeotrope, do you agree that the EU approach makes more sense? They seem to be getting pretty high conversion efficiencies (~90%), excluding drying energy requirements.

[crapattack]

Thanks for the post it makes great reading. You posted the one link about the tritium spill, I have looked into some of these myself. You might find this interesting:

http://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.com/ ... RTM0011389
http://www.eprf.ca/energyprobe/print.cfm?ContentID=92
http://www.citizen.org/cmep/energy_envi ... 2#_ednref1[quote]#
http://www.ccnr.org/CANDU_Safety.html#scoha
http://www.ccnr.org/nucaware_hydroletter.html
http://action.web.ca/home/gpc/alerts.sh ... f52fbf8268
http://www.greenpeace.ca/e/campaign/cli ... wn0605.pdf
http://www.lutins.org/nukes.html

http://www.davistownmuseum.org/cbm/Rad8a2.html and covers issues like embrittlement and steam generator degradation. I'm sure you will find it quite interesting.
here is another close call: http://www.wise-uranium.org/eftokc.html and http://www.geocities.com/m_v_ramana/nuc ... _hindu.htm and this is a good international list to start with http://core.ecu.edu/soci/juskaa/SOCI3222/nuclear.htm
and here is a story about the major Japanese accident:
http://www.atomicarchive.com/Reports/Ja ... ents.shtml

[Tanada]

I looked through the archives for an hour and couldn't find a good thread to place this in so I started a new one.

I came across the link to THIS .pdf while looking for a completely different one for another topic, but I paused to read it and learned something.

I knew that the big energy companies and the Government had been planning for Peak Oil for a long time, but this document comes from 1970!

In essence they explain how with base load Nuclear power for electricity and heating they could produce as much synthetic fuel as they wanted too for $0.40 per gallon. At the time premium gasoline was around $0.36 per gallon so it would have been a money losing endeavor, but that era has passed.

With the advances in technology over the last 40 years I expect the cost will have gone down, but in the mean time inflation has been keeping prices moving in an upward direction. Based on the US Government inflation calculator the inflation adjusted price from then to now would be $2.23.

This compares slightly unfavorably with the national retail gasoline price which the EIA says is $2.58 after all the taxes and fees are levied into it. However it would be comparable to Retail gasoline averaged at $3.00 to $3.15 a gallon in most of the USA, without the risk of importing fuel from any foreign country.

Additionally if you were to take the CaO produced as a byproduct and scatter it at sea it would absorb back the CO2 consumed in the process and sink to the sea floor making the process carbon neutral.

Personally I would pay a premium for fuel that was carbon neutral, but most people probably feel differently about it.

[SeaGypsy]

Certainly a very interesting paper Tanada! Petty amazing to stumble on near 40 years later. If modern catalytic processes were applied this could be a very worthwhile investment area to some forward thinking billionaire. If what you have asserted with regards to fissionable energy sources on other threads is correct, this looks like a possible silver bullet for peak oil. I wonder is any institutional research being done on the process described? Sure will not be long before this process will be cheaper than oil. Also your point on USA oil independence cannot be overlooked in it's importance.
No more need for bogus wars in the middle east would be one obvious benefit.

[TheDude]

1970 was pretty early in the game, good find. This is what the Limits to Growth team called "unlimited resources."

Atom splitting enthusiast Dezakin has posted about this before, here for example.

The hydrogen is not a source of energy is almost strawman. It is a fuel and chemical component for producing synthetic fuels. Hydrogen production via thermochemical and high temperature electrolysis should be developed. Mix it with CO2 over the right catalysts and you have diesel fuel. Do it with all the CO2 from limeburning from cement plants around the world and you have 10-20 million barrels per day of diesel fuel.

He also stresses that CTL will always beat out more extraction intensive sources like oil shale, which jibes with other refs I've come across. Even CTL is very expensive upfront; also demanding of resources. Heinberg in his Blackout book says the Chinese are shooting for 285 kb/d CTL by 2020 - with attendant 2.5 mb/d consumption of water. This is at the high end of estimates I've seen, perhaps these are highly inefficient designs. They're taking an awful long time to bring a quite small addition to supply online. You also have bottlenecks for increasing coal production, limits on rail transport etc.

My own WAG is that shortages will appear, grandiose schemes for unconventional supply will be proposed, and people who can't wait 5 years for non-rationed gasoline will clear the shelves/storerooms of any and all Ebikes, scooters, PHEVs, anything, so long as they have the means to purchase and the supply is there. Even a transient phenomenon like last year's price spike showed huge gains in this sector, along with MT maxing out. People aren't going to wait 5 years for a fillup. The economic fallout of this is hard to predict, to say the least. Nothing in the past presents a similar long term model to go by.

[TheDude]

EARTH Magazine: Coal-to-liquids: Can fuel made from coal replace gasoline?

In addition, CTL is water-intensive. Traditional coal-fired power plants are also very water-intensive, as they shed about a third of their energy through waste heat in cooling water. While most of that cooling water is returned to its source, these plants still consume about one-quarter to one gallon of water for every kilowatt-hour of electricity that is produced. CTL, however, requires between six and 10 barrels of water for every barrel of fuel that is produced, all of which is consumed for the chemical processes. This water usage is much higher than conventional gasoline, which consumes only about one to two and a half barrels of water per barrel of fuel, a little worse than electricity, but much better than irrigated first-generation biofuels, which are the poster child for bad water behavior because they can require more than a thousand barrels of water to produce a single barrel of fuel. Consequently, like biofuels, water scarcity can be a limiting factor for CTL production.

Furthermore, coal’s carbon footprint is at best even with conventional gasoline, and is even more carbon-intensive than coal-fired power or unconventional petroleum production, such as oil from the Canadian tar sands. It more than doubles the lifecycle greenhouse gas emissions of today’s gasoline based on energy content. In the end, CTL will never be carbon-neutral because carbon capture and storage does not work in car tailpipes. However, CTL might have similar carbon emissions as conventional petroleum if we could install carbon capture and storage at the CTL plant, which in the current regulatory environment might be the only way a CTL plant is allowed to operate.

[Tanada]

1970 was pretty early in the game, good find. This is what the Limits to Growth team called "unlimited resources."
My own WAG is that shortages will appear, grandiose schemes for unconventional supply will be proposed, and people who can't wait 5 years for non-rationed gasoline will clear the shelves/storerooms of any and all Ebikes, scooters, PHEVs, anything, so long as they have the means to purchase and the supply is there. Even a transient phenomenon like last year's price spike showed huge gains in this sector, along with MT maxing out. People aren't going to wait 5 years for a fillup. The economic fallout of this is hard to predict, to say the least. Nothing in the past presents a similar long term model to go by.

IMO what it comes down too is motivation by the Government. If they decide to build plants to do these processes with a 24/7 construction schedule and no legal or environmental challenges allowed they can build a heck of a lot of stuff in way under 5 years.

So far nobody is scared of Peak Oil and nobody is pushing stuff through as fast as it can be done. If that changes then the paradigm will shift inside of 2 years. Modular construction like they use for large ships, standardized components like the French did for their nuclear power grid system coupled with price is no barrier and 24/7 construction COULD get us off imported fuels in 3 years. We lack the political will to do so.

It would also drop world petroleum demand by 18% and cause the price to crash until depletion catches up with demand, at which point finger pointing and the blame game would ensue in a free for all.

The INTELLIGENT thing to do would be to start building these systems now and build them serial fashion, just fast enough to offset say 500,000 bbl/d of USA petroleum consumption. They would come online right about the time Mexico stops exporting petroleum. Then you build more as Alaska continues to decline to offset that. And so on and so forth. Once we hit PO you can do this to maintain the price of oil without fear that someone like Saudi Arabia will crash the price and bankrupt you when you are going online with your system.

I sure hope we have someone INTELLIGENT in charge when the world supply fails to meet world demand permanently.

[hillsidedigger]

All that nuclear power capacity would reguire a lot of concrete.

[Tanada]

All that nuclear power capacity would reguire a lot of concrete.

Funny how the Navy manages to do the same job with Steel isn't it?

[PrestonSturges]

What's the ratio of power input to fuel produced? Liquid fuel would be no problem, provided you can stomach an ROE of 3 or 4 to 1. All we need now is unlimited fusion electricity.

[lper100km]

In 1970 there was no indication that water supplies were anything but unlimited. Now, we are informed that water supplies are in crisis. This process would place enormous demands on the critical water supplies that remain both in reactor cooling and in the conversion process itself. So, do we exchange a PO problem for a PW problem? It seems to me we are on track to develop a Peak Everything problem.

[Tanada]

In 1970 there was no indication that water supplies were anything but unlimited. Now, we are informed that water supplies are in crisis. This process would place enormous demands on the critical water supplies that remain both in reactor cooling and in the conversion process itself. So, do we exchange a PO problem for a PW problem? It seems to me we are on track to develop a Peak Everything problem.

The only reason we have any potable water problem is people do not pay a realistic price for water. It actually isn't all that expensive to have desalinated water, but people, especially in the dessert southwest, are spoiled by the artificially low price of government pipeline supplied native fresh water from great distances away.

Similarly the Ogallala aquifer in the foothills of the Rockies has mostly been wasted instead of used conservatively.

[Tanada]

What's the ratio of power input to fuel produced? Liquid fuel would be no problem, provided you can stomach an ROE of 3 or 4 to 1. All we need now is unlimited fusion electricity.

The actual ratio is actually something like .4 to 1 or 2.5 in for 1 out. That being a given this system is useful as a way of storing energy in a chemical output that is familiar to most of us and commonly in use today. Presuming that the production plants would all be in one facility you eliminate the line losses from long distance electricity transmission which in and of itself helps with the balance.

How much electricity has to be produced when it is stored in a battery and then drawn back out later? IOW if you decide to use batteries instead of chemical energy storage how much electricity do you have to produce to achieve the same net travel distance?

[SeaGypsy]

The cited article gives an efficiency of only 15% for combustion use of liquid fuels; suggests hydrogen cells as a much more efficient use. Also the article suggests an approximation of 50% in/out loss for battery storage. These efficiency factors apply regardless of the original source. Of course there has been some improvement with direct injection and electronic ignition. (For those who didn't read the article).

[Tanada]

The cited article gives an efficiency of only 15% for combustion use of liquid fuels; suggests hydrogen cells as a much more efficient use. Also the article suggests an approximation of 50% in/out loss for battery storage. These efficiency factors apply regardless of the original source. Of course there has been some improvement with direct injection and electronic ignition. (For those who didn't read the article).

In the 1960's the 15% ICE efficiency would not be surprising, it is considerably better now. By a similar token if you use the system to make something akin to Propane for use in CCGT powerplants you can get an efficiency up around 70%, but it seems kind of pointless if you have enough electricity surplus to manufacture your fuel to start with

[Pretorian]

there is a 20yo movie called kin-dza-dza. It pictures an alien planet where people learned how to make fuel out of water. After the planet became one big desert , they discovered how to make water out of (leftover ) fuel. Its actually free on google video.

[Sixstrings]

Pretty interesting, Tanada. I see they predicted the use of tar sands as a post-peak option (well whattaya know, here we are usin tar sands so I guess we're post peak eh?).

The concept of creating fuel from CO2 is rather elegant.. wouldn't that mesh nicely with greenhouse gas reduction efforts? What a concept there, save the planet by driving more.

[Tanada]

Pretty interesting, Tanada. I see they predicted the use of tar sands as a post-peak option (well whattaya know, here we are usin tar sands so I guess we're post peak eh?).

The concept of creating fuel from CO2 is rather elegant.. wouldn't that mesh nicely with greenhouse gas reduction efforts? What a concept there, save the planet by driving more.

Sure, except for the driving more part Every bit of manufactured fuel used would be carbon neutral, but if it is replacing fossil carbon from one of the alternatives to conventional oil that is all to the good.

[yesplease]

My own WAG is that shortages will appear, grandiose schemes for unconventional supply will be proposed, and people who can't wait 5 years for non-rationed gasoline will clear the shelves/storerooms of any and all Ebikes, scooters, PHEVs, anything, so long as they have the means to purchase and the supply is there. Even a transient phenomenon like last year's price spike showed huge gains in this sector, along with MT maxing out. People aren't going to wait 5 years for a fillup. The economic fallout of this is hard to predict, to say the least. Nothing in the past presents a similar long term model to go by.

I think the whole late seventies to present compared to the previous forty years is a great model to go w/. High average prices lead towards greater fuel efficiency, fuel economy, and displacement by alternatives roughly proportionally to the increase in price, and also result in different production rates and reserves. Unlike last time, having a cartel like OPEC effectively put a floor on prices so I'm thinking we'll see prices fluctuate over a smaller band for the next couple decades.