Re: Why BioDiesel and Not Hydrogen Cars...
From: Charles Edmondson (edmondson_at_ieee.org)
Date: 08/10/04
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Date: Tue, 10 Aug 2004 09:05:50 -0700
Anthony Matonak wrote:
> justme wrote:
>
>>> Well this sounds fascinating. I wonder why we don't get right on it?
>>>
>>> 1 acre is 4000 square meters or so. One square meter in sunny S.
>>> Arizona probably gets 2500 kwh of sunlight per year or 10M kwh per
>>> acre. 20,000 gallons of oil is about 750,000 kwh of energy. So
>>> overall efficiency is 7.5%. That could be I guess.
>>>
>>> How exactly would this work? Would you dig a big canal to bring salt
>>> water into the desert? If it were just a pipe bringing water in would
>>> you be worried that as water evaporated the salinity of the marsh
>>> would rise until it was all salt?
>
>
> I believe the canals to bring salt water into the desert was exactly
> the plan. Lots of deserts. Lots of oceans. Lots of algae that will
> grow in salt water. Yes, the salinity and other mineral content would
> have to be dealt with. I don't know exactly how they planned on doing
> this but I imagine some kind of desalinating system of some sort would
> be needed. Likely a combination of reverse osmosis and evaporating pans.
> They could sell the resulting minerals as sea salt.
Actually, the original proposals were to do this at the Salton Sea, a
landlocked lake at the lower end of the Coachella valley. It is already
more than salty enough, and has a problem with agricultural runoff
slowly raising the level of the lake, as well as providing salts and
fertilizers that cause massive algae blooms that kill off the fish. The
idea is to use that runoff to grow algae on purpose to generate fuels,
while at the same time regulating the amount that goes into the sea
proper. Environmentalism and energy independence interlinked...
-- Charlie -- Edmondson Engineering Unique Solutions to Unusual Problems
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