it sounds good on paper, i don’t have any facts on hand as to the amount of available capacity were the electrical generating plants to go full tilt 24/7, but i can guess things like; they’re running above 50% right now and/or maintenance is sacrificed…but the main issue is that these plants convert primary energy sources, mostly fossil sources. so we would be using these precious resources inefficiently with this scheme.

As for the transportation of hydrogen, no one is proposing that. Shell’s hydrogen stations produce it on site.

only at night presumably, so we’re talking storage tanks. and the cars btw, also need to transport hydrogen. did you read Sione’s lengthy description of the problem with hydrogen? the only advantage to hydrogen is that Chevron gets to sell it to you (rather than plugging your car into the wall and charging your own battery.) (also a losing proposition, btw)

here’s the bottom line: imagine a future without your own car. everyone driving around in their own car is a ridiculous evolutionary branch, it will fall off forthwith.

Coal has a clean burning technology called fluid bed combustion that produces no pollutants at all except CO2.

and lord knows there’s nothing wrong with a little CO2!
but yep, there seems no way of stopping the coming coal train, ramping up coal production is not going to be pretty. it’s been staying in the ground this long for a reason.

If you’re correct, and I doubt you are, then the current amount of energy spent on electrical production equals the amount spent on transportation. But that’s with the current pattern of producing electricity during the day and idling plants at night. Why wouldn’t we be able to produce at night the same amount of electricity we produce in the day?

As for the transportation of hydrogen, no one is proposing that. Shell’s hydrogen stations produce it on site.

Coal has a clean burning technology called fluid bed combustion that produces no pollutants at all except CO2.

to clarify, the number of joules expended on transport vs the amount of electrical energy produced.

the important point is that the cost goes up by several times compared to just burning the petrol right in the cylinder.

we haven’t even touched on the fact that NG is on the same finite track as oil, and coal is a very messy source that is also finite…start using it in lieu of oil and you’ll just be trading for a stinkier peak. the writing is on the wall, the easy-motoring lifestyle is going into the dustbin of history within our lifetimes and the easy-everything of the US lifestyle is part and parcel.

life will be better i think. way too much cancer and stress in the current cycle.

No f’n way. beside the fact of hydrogen being so problematic for transportation, and despite the staggering capital investment you’re suggesting were it a viable fuel, you just can’t extract that much energy from existing idle hours. _maybe_ you could generate it by devoting 100% of existing electrical generation to the task, (they are roughly the same number of joules at present). i think you’d get a better bang for your buck by charging conventional batteries.

absolutely. first of all, the “big find” was NOT in an unexpected place. that whole lower tertiary region is long known to be a productive zone. the surprise, beyond media hype, is that they were able to successfully drill that deep.

second, even if you use the upper extreme estimated oil in that area, (and we’re talking several more very expensive successes beyond just this one exploratory well), it will not affect the nation’s reserves in any curve-busting way.

this play emphasizes my point more than counters it. they are playing these extremes for one simple reason, the easy stuff has already been found.

In short, hydrogen would be great–if we can ever get those tokamak fusion reactors to work like we want them to.

Basically, it is a microscopic concept: A peace garden entails one person or family unit digging a trench about the size of a door ( 6 foot by 3 foot, say, and about 2 foot deep). Then fill the trench with organic rubbish. Anyhting will do – old newspapers, cow manure, whatever. Cover with soil and plant seeds: tomatoes, pumpkins, squashes, beans, whatever is available and suited to the region. It is small enough to water by hand daily by its owner.

ON a purely economic level, it is iondeed stupid for someone such as I ( a professional middle-income earner with very little leisure time) to grow my own vegetables in this manner: I cant possibly grow anything for less outlay than what I could just pay for better, brighter veggies from the shops – particularly if I was to add my own personal labour cost to the equation, on an opportunity cost basis. Those would be extremely expensive vegetables! However, to the extent that I might get a hobbyist’s pleasure out of it, it may indeed be worthwhile for other reasons – stress relief, leisure. ( I think it was Adam Smith who once observed that the pursuits that men once had to do for rude survival later become pursuits of leisure when they no longer are compelled to do them out of necessity – hunting, fishing and the like for example, and this clearly applies in modern times to extreme physical exertion on stationary bicycles in airconditioned gyms). IN my case, I dont take pleasure in this, and hence I dont grow vegetables – that’s not my point here.

This does not mean that the ‘peace garden’ is a worthless concept.

An unemployed destitute in absolute poverty who has no income, no job, and no prospects, is time-rich and capital-poor. For him, the ( opportunity) cost of digging a small trench and tending a few straggly plants is far smaller than the cost of the same activity undertaken by me.
For the individual in these fourth-world circumstances, it represents a small thing that he can do for himself within the resources at his disposal, to make his life just a tiny little bit better than it was. And having done that , he can find some other small thing that is within his compass. To the extent that his neighbours also do it and grow different things in their trenches, the scope for trading surplus beans for squashes open up, and the scope for pooling efforts likewise, to co-operatively generate efficiencies across multiple ‘trenches’ and scaling up incrementally. Thats capital formation in a nutshell!

Within these small measures, (taken by individuals whose only other alternative is to sit around wondering when the government is going to come along and rescue them from their misery), lie the seeds of self-reliance and responsibility: independent effort, and co-operation and trade, that are wholly in keeping with the spirit of the free market and personal responsibility.

Bearing in mind that this is Africa we are talking about – large groups of people whose societies that have been ravaged by decades of despotism, war and famine, people whose very humanity and freedom has been denied them by their rulers for so long that they have forgotten that they are able to exercise choices and can do something for themselves.

The starry-eyed do-gooders who try to disseminate the ‘peace garden’ message among those who have no thing and no hope, might be hopelessly naieve about food self-sufficiency being achievable, and indeed wrong-headed about it being ‘desirable’ at any level of social aggregation, but to the extent that their message gets taken up by people who would otherwise be doing nothing and starving, is not a bad thing by any means. I have long had a soft spot for them and happily cut them some slack.

No doubt, though the highest use for that announcement is as a pean to “Big OIL”.

You would, no doubt, find the Oil discoveries in the U.S. states of Utah and Nevada, of interest, as well.

Remember, Petroleum E&D involves alot of boring technology.

Sione

You still on board with this take: “…rather than dismissing them all by saying that there’s some infintesimal chance that a big field will be found in a very unlikely place (that is, if anyone was stupid enough to drill there)…” ?

with this: “If “the World” was really running out of “Oil”, there would be more Futures contracts available to delivery against.”, I was unclear.

I was meaning that there would be Contracts for other types–beyond merely Brent(North Sea), and Light Sweet(the old WTI)–like Saudi Light, Venezuelan Heavy, Canadian “Tar” Oil, “Coal” Oil, et al, etc., ad infi…

I think that take is accurate. Til we get those types of contracts, we are nowhere near the “real” foreseeable end of our beloved “Texas Tea”.

Had you considered that much of the content of the sites you quoted is govt funded? It is being researched by persons bought, sold and paid for. Good fun work if you can get it but really the context is so alien to reality that it’s little more than that; hobby stuff. Looks to be boondoggle activity being undertaken at boondoggle institutions.

Naaah!

Sione

i think i see your mistake; “the world” in the sense of “planet earth” is not “running out” of oil. this “notion” is different than the graph(s) indicating likely discovery/production/demand et al, which do indeed suggest no impact on the current futures market. we’re looking at a decades-long slope, though i’ve heard a figure of some 5 years before demand exceeds available production. (that would be a nice thing to time.)

we’re at peak baby! it doesnt get better than this:>

After extracting crude oil from underground, refining it and distributing the resulting fuel products you still end up with energy available. There is more than enough energy available in crude oil to consume a portion of it in the processes of extraction, refining and transportation. You still end up with plenty of energy left over for use in all sorts of applications.

Hydrogen manufactured by electrolysis of water stores less energy than the process of electrolysis takes to produce it in the first place. So, NO, it is not an energy source. It is analogous to a battery. In this case it is a store of energy only.

Hydrogen manufactured by thermal catalytic decomposition of natural gas (which is mostly methane and CO2) consumes a substantial portion of the energy available in the methane (or other hydrocarbon) component of the gas. As stated previously you’d be better off using the natural gas directly. More energy would be available with direct use approaches (no need to consume a portion of it in an un-necessary “refining” process). In other words you should be scrubbing the CO2 and then burning the CH4 rather than wasting time refining CH4 to extract its H2 component. Why waste the energy?

Hydrogen is not a good fuel. It has poor properties. It is difficult to burn in a controlled manner in an internal combustion engine. It tends to pre-ignite or detonate violently. The wide flammability limits and poor octane rating render it a fuel not well suited to conventional piston engines. There are methods to alleviate this such as direct fuel injection (similar to the way a diesel engine operates). Still these are not ideal and they are expensive. In-service applications still remain less satisfactory than normal hydrocarbon fuels. Range and performance issues remain. Reliability is still an open question.

Fuel cells are all very well, in the lab. In the real world they are a problem. A proton exchange membrane fuel cell can’t tolerate any hydrocarbons, CO2 or CO in its incoming air supply. It needs precision temperature and humidity control. It does not load follow very well so a supplementary battery is often required. Expensive catalysts are necessary. A lot of complicated ancillary equipment is required for any fuel cell to operate properly.

There are other types of fuel cell such as molten carbonate and solid oxide types (the best really) but these have issues with materials life span, cost, control and load following as well. Start-up time is minutes… The advantage of these systems is that they can operate with hydrocarbon fuels. They do not need hydrogen (unlike the proton exchange membrane that relies on hydrogen exclusively to operate). They feature higher efficiency and can be used in conjunction with gas expansion devices such as piston engines or turbines for bottoming cycle energy extraction. So far steady state operation appears to be the rule. Forget about automotive applications. These things are large and heavy. A steam engine would be an easier technology to commercialise for cars. I’d say the installed efficiency of a methane fueled piston engine would be competitive with a fuel cell (although they have a higher theoretical efficiency, they generally do not exhibit this in service). Certainly using methane in a cogen plant would beat fuel cells in the electricity generation business presently. As for cost…

I understand that it is possible to use carbohydrate sources to obtain energy. Aside from cost and scalability issues, why bother with hydrogen? Anaerobic bio-digesters can produce methane. Methane is a superior fuel for engines and far easier to store and handle than hydrogen. It also stores more energy than H2 and can be used for a wide variety of industrial uses as a feedstock. It has very high octane.

And now we come to the really bad news about H2. It is very, very difficult to store. There are three methods presently under investigation or test. They are:
1/. High pressure gas storage.
2/. Cryogenic liquid storage
3/. Chemical storage means.

Hydrogen can be compressed to high pressure are with any other gas. It can be stored at many thousands of psi. This needs to be done because at atmospheric pressure hydrogen takes a lot of volume for very little energy storage. To get anywhere near practical a lot of it needs to be stored in a small volume. The trouble with hydrogen is that even at high pressure it stores only modest amounts of energy compared to other substances. Hydrogen also has the nasty habit of leaking. It has small molecular size and therefore any cavity or crevice or crack is going to be exploited. This stuff escapes! Hydrogen embrittles many materials that it comes into contact with (such as most metals). Hydrogen embrittlement is dangerous for pressure vessels. I recommend you visit your local industrial gas supplier and ask them to describe to you what an exploding gas cylinder can achieve. With hydrogen it can occur without warning.

OK so let’s liquefy hydrogen instead and pump it like a liquid. Getting hydrogen cold enough to liquefy is a difficult job. It takes a lot of energy to achieve it. Then you have to store it. Over time gas boils off. So you are losing energy all the time. I once filled a thermos flask with the stuff and left it in a dark, ventilated place. All the hydrogen was gone in five days. Make sure the area is ventilated or you are risking an explosion when you open the door and turn on the light. Safe indeed.

Pumping liquid hydrogen is not something one undertakes casually. Can you imagine pumping this stuff at the bowser. There are problems such as keeping the delivery pipes cold (takes energy) and keeping air out (otherwise when air hits the oncoming hydrogen it forms a solid slug in the pipe that the liquid hydrogen can’t get past). An accident with this stuff is non-trivial. Talk about freezer burns! You’d be better off playing with high test peroxide- really!

There is talk of storing hydrogen in hydride tanks or locking it up in chemical compounds of various sorts. Then, when required, the hydrogen can be extracted. All these ideas turn out about the same: heavy, expensive, requiring precision control/care and they still suffer from low component life-time, low energy and power density, safety issues, nasty failure modes, poor energy efficiency…

You have to consider the amazing infrastructure that needs to be brought into existence for all of this hydrogen distribution. Have you any idea the magnitude of this task? By comparison a national PRT (personal rapid transit) system installation would be easier. Look up PRT. It’s interesting. Kind of clever, kind of silly.

While I am the last person who is worried about oil running out, I am very much in favour of innovation and new technology. I support the quest for energy sources of all sorts. But I do not see much of a serious future in H2 presently. I think that the idea of having the likes of Whetu Kara splashing liquid hydrogen around a fuel station forecourt while puffing away on his marijuana should be enough to give even hydrogen romantics pause for thought.

What we are really seeking is something the customer will use since it meets his specific requirements. Complicated laboratory technology aint the go, clever though it may well be. Whatever is distributed to people can’t be less useful than what they enjoy currently and it certainly must not be more complex for them to use.

Sione

Have you seen MRI technolgy applied, to the Earth, in the search for Oil?

There’s alot of Oil/Gas, still, in traditional fields/fields to be.

The current trendline has little to do with “Reality”, in any proper definition of the term. If “the World” was really running out of “Oil”, there would be more Futures contracts available to delivery against. There aren’t…

Til’ then, grease up,…