Re: World's Energy Infrastructure and how to change it.

hhc314@xxxxxxxxx wrote:
On May 11, 3:51 pm, Williamknowsbest <William.M...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
The world consumes energy at a rate of about 17 trillion watts. This
is produced by the burning of

28.8 billion barrels of crude oil products
5.5 billion tons of coal
1.1 billion tons of natural gas

and results in over 40 billion tons of carbon-dioxide production each
year. This fuel costs over $4 trillion per year and over $20 trillion
in assets are organized to produce it.

Since hydrogen burns under much the same conditions as any of the
fuels described above the production of 3.34 billion tons of hydrogen
each year and burning hydrogen gas could replace all these fuels and
eliminate all carbon emissions.

Decomposing 30 billion tons of water into 3.34 billion tons of
hydrogen and 26.66 billion tons of oxygen each year using 183,700
trillion watt hours of DC electricity made with 108 trillion watts of
solar panels covering 600,000 sq km of sunny land at a cost of less
than $8 trillion ends our reliance on a diminishing resource, ends
carbon dioxide production from this source and reduces overall costs.

This implies a cost of less than $0.07 per peak watt including all
balance of system costs for solar panels. Conventional solar panels
cost over $4 per peak watt with companies like nanosolar claiming $1
per peak watt possible. I have perfected a technology to produce
solar panels - including all balance of system costs - for $0.07 per
peak watt. These panels produce hydrogen in response to sunlight -
not electricity. That's how I keep prices low.

You may read more at

http://www.usoal.com

To get started we don't need to convert everything to hydrogen. We
use hydrogen to make hydrocarbon fuels at low cost, and then, use the
profits from that sale, to install the needed hydrogen infrastructure
at our leisure, while undoing oil.

Here's how that works.

We can replace all stationary uses of hydrogen with a hydrogen
pipeline and a hydrogen burner. So, changing out a natural gas fired
generator and a coal fired generator ends our reliance on these fuels,
and makes them available for other uses. Natural gas is made easily
into low cost plastics. Coal is made easily into liquid fuels.

So, going back to our numbers

28.8 billion barrels of crude oil
5.5 billion tons fo coal
1.1 billion tons of natural gas

So, the heat value of coal varies, but a typical value is 23 GJ per
ton. Hydrogen gas has 141.8 GJ per ton. So, 6.2 tons of coal has the
same heat value as a ton of hydrogen. A ton of natural gas contains
55.1 GJ - so 2.57 tons of natural gas equals one ton of hydrogen -
therefore, we can do the following as an interim step

28.8 billion barrels of crude oil
0.887 billion tons of hydrogen in converted coal plants
0.428 billion tons of hydrogen in converted natural gas plants

This is 1.315 billion tons of hydrogen - 39.4% the size of the system
described above.

But that's not all. We can take a ton of hydrogen, and convert 10
tons of coal into 72 barrels of synthetic liquid fuels. Here's how;

First, we take the coal and apply hydrogen at high temperature and
pressure. This produces the following

Methane
Syncrude
Char

Then, we take the methane and partially oxidize it with the oxygen
from the electrolysis of water, to produce methanol. We also take the
char and partially oxidize it to produce carbon-monoxidie. We take
the carbon-monoxide and add hydrogen to produce methanol again. We
then take both sources of methanol and dehydrate it to form iso-
octane. We mix the isooctane and blend it with the syncrude to create
'suncrude' - which is lightened with the octane isomers. This takes 1
ton of hydrogen, 8 tons of oxygen and 10 tons of coal to produce 72
barrels of suncrude.

So, the 5.5 billion tons of coal is converted in this way to 39.6
billion barrels of suncrude each year by the application of an
additional 0.55 billion tons of hydrogen gas and 4.4 billion tons of
oxygen gas. This increases total hydrogen demand to meet the world's
energy needs to 1.865 billion tons of hydrogen gas, which is 55.8% of
the hydrogen economy described at the outset. Since 39.6 billion
barrels of suncrude are produced by this process, we can see that by
building this infrastructure we have a means to undercut the high cost
of crude oil in the world's market, and end the dominance of oil, by
making oil at the outset and dominating existing energy markets.

Price has a lot to do with supply and demand. Adding 39.6 billion
barrels to 28.8 billion barrels is 68.4 billion barrels per year.
Giving supply and demand relations we can see that we can reduce the
cost of oil to $52 per barrel as we support 12 years of 7% growth rate
- while prices moderate. Throughout this period we offer hydrogen on
a heat value basis for less cost than the cost of hydro-carbon fuels
to promote their use - and by the time world demand exceeds what can
be done with today's carbon budget, we will have introduced hydrogen
powered automobiles, hydrogen powered airliners and hydrogen powered
ships to displace hydrocarbon fuels.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen_carhttp://history.nasa.gov/SP-4404/ch6-4.htmhttp://www.lerc.nasa.gov/WWW/RT/2003/2000/2400berton.htmlhttp://www.enn.com/energy/article/29805

I am sponsoring 8 coal-to-liquid projects around the world. I am
offering 10,000 barrels of suncrude on forward delivery for $250,000
paid today and $500,000 paid upon delivery 60 months after purchase.
The price of oil today make these contracts worth $1,250,000 - so, in
five years these contracts will return $750,000 on the $250,000
investment (unless you take delivery of the fuel) providing a 24.5%
compounded annualized rate of return. Each of the facilities produce
200,000 b/d - so 20 contracts are avaiable per day for each facility.
The money is used to support construction of the facilities.

Some facilities have refining capacity attached. These produce
refined fuel products. Forward contracts are available at $0.25 per
gallon to take delivery at half the price for these fuels at the date
of delivery in 60 months. These are avaialble in 500,000 gallon lots
per day at a cost of $125,000 and when delivered, half the market rate
for these fuels is paid less the deposit.

So, for example, an airline buys a new passenger jet for $65 million
and take delivery in 5 years. They also elect to pay $13 million over
the five year period to buy 65 million gallons of fuel over a 60 month
period following delivery. Today jet fuel sells for $3.56 per
gallon. In 60 months DOE estimates $4.12 per gallon. The aircraft
when delivered burns 700,000 gallons per month, 1,083,333 gallons per
month is purchased for half the going price less $0.25 - that's $1.81
per gallon. That's $1.96 million per month for this jet.

As mentioned the jet burns 700,000 gallons per month in normal
operation, so the extra 383,333 gallons is sold. In practice ALL the
fuel is sold where convenient, and the revenue used to buy fuel where
convenient for the operator. The selling price is $4.12 per gallon -
so that earns an additional $1.58 million per month leaving a balance
of $381,000 per month. Dividing this by the 700,000 gallons used by
the aircraft this is less than $0.55 per gallon - giving the airline a
large competitive advantage.

Major airline manufacturers sell a total of 1,000 airliners per year.
This sort of program applied to all of them generates $13 billion per
year for solar jet fuel production and supports infrastructure that
produces of 142 million gallons per day of jet fuel and provides
entree' these markets that result eventually in the sale of hydrogen
fuels to power hydrogen fueled jets.

Another program is to acquire an oil marketer and make of it an
integrated oil company using solar derived hydrocarbon fuels. For
example, Sunoco makes only a small margin on the fuels it sells since
it buys oil on the open market for the most part. In 2007 Sunoco
spent $68 per barrel for oil that it made $2 per barrel profit on
after refining it. Prices today are double. As a result, Sunoco's
value has dropped from $9.2 billion in 2007 to $6.1 billion today.
Acquiring this company along with an appropriately sized and situated
coal company, and merging the two, by adding solar assisted coal
conversion to the mix, reduces oil costs to less than $9 per barrel,
allowing $100 per barrel to be added to the bottom line. This
increases market capitalization 40x to $240 billion - as the company
comes to be valued as an integrated domsetically sources oil company.
The increased value is used to expand production, and distribution -
and add hydrogen pumps at all stations - to promote the sale of
hydrogen fuel for hydrogen cars. The pipelines that deliver hydrogen
gas to the stations, also provide hydrogen gas to stationary power
users, as well as homes and industry for heating and electricity
generation - using microturbines and fuel cells. displacing both coal
and natural gas at the same time.

So, this is the way for solar hydrogen to compete effectively with
oil, and take the next big step - by leveraging the market for fuels.

My friend, you neglected to mention the increasing role of nuclear
energy, which I point out is the ONLY new source of energy discovered
during the past century. Still, anyone educated in science already
knows this. Most already realize that hydrogen is never an energy
source, but in fact is an energy sink.

Regarding the price of confentional fuels, I'm old enough to remember
the solution that was imposed during WWII, way back in the days when
dinosaurs still roamed the earth (the 1940s). In your hardly
enlightened ramblings, you seemed to forget this wonderful solution.
It was called RATIONING. It provided sufficient surplus fuel to power
WWII.

Quite simply described, rationing assigned fuel to those who actually
needed it, not simply wanted it. Depending on your fuel need, you had
a little sticker that was attached to you windshield that defined and
limitied how much fuel you would receive during a particular period of
time. The system worked very well, and as I recall fuel prices even
during the war never exceeded 30-cents a gallon, except on the "Black
Market".

Perhaps it's time that we returned to gas rationing, at least until a
nuclear energy distribution infrastructue is better evolved.

Outside of rationing, perhaps a federally enforced cap of $2.00/gallon
for automotive fuels, aviation fuels, and home heating oil would be a
wise intermediate move. You simply turn off the pump when the supply
is exhausted. As with rationing, that way the demand will shrink to
the level of supply. Not exactly rocket science, but I have to assume
that the legislators during WWII were far brighter and less influenced
by the lobbys that are those we have today. (Damn, just take a look at
the presidential candidates! Can't we do better than these? Don't we
deserve better?)

Harry C.










Harry,
You are mostly correct in your technical analyses you employ. However here you have flopped. The reason for rationing was that we were desperately short of rubber for tires. Save for some imports from Brazil and a much smaller import from Africa, we had to depend on recycling and a not too satisfactory synthetic rubber supply. The way to conserve rubber was to ration gasoline. Luckily the huge masses of people in the biggest cities didn't own automobiles and so that was a head start in the process.
Another problem was that of transportation. Petroleum products from places like Texas were usually shipped by tanker (we did not have transcontinental pipelines at that time.) The east coast of the USA was a feeding ground for German U boats. Tankers would hug the coast but even the dimmed lights of the cities would outline them for targeting U boats. The railroads were too stressed to transport petroleum by tank cars. This led to a shortage of gasoline in the high population density northeastern USA. It was generally more available in other parts of the country. But it seemed to the powers that be that allowing them more generous access to fuel compared to the NE would arouse great resentment and political divisiveness. Hence rationing. Food rationing was another problem that was more complex in nature. People did not want for adequate food during WWII but the availability of transportation lead to inequality of access to certain foods and so to avoid hard feelings that also led to rationing of things like fats, oils, butter, etc.
FK
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