Re: Summation of Dr Olah's interview on Methanol

On Wed, 26 Jul 2006 15:36:55 -0400, Josh Hill <usereplyto@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On 26 Jul 2006 05:28:39 GMT, B Richardson <brich@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

On Tue, 25 Jul 2006 21:50:59 -0400, Josh Hill <usereplyto@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Tue, 25 Jul 2006 16:24:51 -0400, "K. Jones" <K.
Jones@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

If you have wind power, why would you do something as silly as make hydrogen
with it?

Er, so you could take advantage of a plentiful non-polluting resource
to power non-polluting vehicles? Seems a fairly good deal to me. Even
if we were to generate 100% of our electricity from wind, which would
require storage, something like 4/5 of the wind in the United States
would remain unused. And there's a nice synergy between power
generation from wind and electrolysis, since if the cost of
electrolyzers comes down as it very likely will they can be powered by
the wind turbines during off-peak periods and periods of excess
demand. Hydrogen storage could also potentially be used to address the
intermittency problem, although it's not particularly efficient.


Say you need 67 units of energy of transportation fuel and 200
units of energy of electricity. You burn 600 units of energy
of coal to get the 200 units of electricity and have a wind
turbine producing 100 units netting your 67 units of hydrogen.

If you retire the electrolyzer you can shift the wind turbine
output to your electricity budget, and you can decrease your
coal input by 300 units. You still need 67 BTU of transportation
fuel which you can get from the 300 units of displaced coal
and still have some left for tomorrow.

So the wind turbine can give you 67 units downstream, or
decrease your upstream demand by 300 units of which you
need to use maybe 100 units to get your 67 units for
transportation.

True, but that rests on the assumption that the situation is at least
to some extent either-or. In practice, it will be at least a decade
before mass-produced fuel cell vehicles begin to hit the road, which
allows a generous amount of time to build and install turbines and
increase turbine production capacity, and I don't think there's any
reason to think that turbine demand will outstrip supply.


And while there's 38 quad worth of coal on the grid, putting
renewable sources of electricy on the grid is the best use
for it. Using a quad of wind to produce a fraction of a
quad of transportation fuel doesn't make sense when that
same quad of wind can reduce the requirement of coal by
three quad.


Also, while turbines are more capital intensive than gasification
plants, the gasification plants would have to be constructed. The same
capital could be used to build plants to produce cellulosic ethanol,
which, in the absence of practical large-scale sequestration is I
think a better choice for an interim automotive fuel. Would we be able
to continue to use the gasification plants, or would they become
obsolete because of concerns over global warming? That would make them
a very expensive investment, either from an environmental or an
economic perspective or both.


Gasification works fine on cellulose, lignin also.


--
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