We’re sort of talking about two different but closely related things here. Something has to provide the fuel for the fuel cell - whether it’s gasoline, diesel, ethanol, methanol, hydrogen, natural gas, or even coalbed methane. Most all choices that can be produced in any quantity involve either fossil fuels or biofuels. Now, hydrogen for fuel cells (and direct hydrogen combustion, the second part of what you say) do not have to come from fossil or bio sources - they can be directly electrolyzed from water. This process, however, is subject to the serious problem of requiring large amounts of power as an input - in fact, it is not an energy creation process at this point in time, but rather a net loser of energy. All it’s doing is converting the energy into a more usable form.
I’m not entirely up on the status of research into better ways or more energy-positive ways to electrolyze water into hydrogen, but I have no impression from a general standpoint that Europe is ahead or behind of the US on that point.
I could get real cranky, reading these undisputed truths:
Tell me something I don’t already know.
One more time, and maybe this time I can get you and the rest of you folks to actually stay on topic:
1 - The instability in Iraq is supplying people and supplies to the terrorists in Saudi Arabia, who…
2- Are looking to overthrow that government, which thing they’ve been looking to do for a long time, but have been unable to do, but of course now they’re being assisted by the unintended consequences of the Iraq invasion and the subsequent screw up.
3 - This already dire situation, in which the number two country in terms of reserves has zero possibility of increasing output beyond the war-degraded capacity of 2.8 million barrels per day, in a context where 81 million barrels per day are needed, per the IEA, and where the number one is threatened by insurrection, is being exacerbated by rapidly increasing demand from China, which country has the potential to exert massive pressure on this as well as many other markets.
4 - Which means that we have the potential for a major crackup, where the amount of oil being pumped declines rapidly as a result of the above-cited instability, simultaneously with the continued increased demand from what is now the number two consumer of oil.
Biofuel is nice, wind is nice, all that stuff is nice. None of it will solve the above, which is a political and economic problem, not a technical problem as to how many BTUs can be squeezed out of some fuel or other.
To summarize simply: increasing demand is colliding with stagnant supply. That’s the current reality. The future reality features the very large probability of a rapid decrease in supply intersecting with this increasing demand, causing a major worldwide economic blowup.
Some figures:
Year over year increase in price of West Texas Intermediate: 29.88%, as of April 2004.
Year over year increase in the price of copper: 52.10%, as of April 2004. (Copper is very sensitive to the economic cycle.)
Stimulus from the Fed: As of the latest month, the Fed Funds rate was 1%, while the year over year increase in the CPI was 2.29%, meaning the Fed was supplying strong stimulus to the economy by keeping the one of the two rates it directly controls well below the rate of inflation. It should be noted that as China pegs its currency directly to the dollar, stimulus from the Fed flows right into the Chinese economy, as it is a well-known rule that if you peg your currency to someone else’s currency, you give up your monetary authority to that country. The Chinese authorities are quite literally fighting the Fed in their attempt to slow down their domestic economy.
Combine the above economic facts with the above political facts, and the potential for a huge collision is very easy to see. Just for reference, the last time the Fed kept rates below the rate of inflation for as long as has happened this time around, the price of West Texas Intermediate rose by 149.21%, or one and a half times. That was in 1979, and there was no political crisis in the ME that year, other than the usual desperate circumstances in that wacky part of the world.
The political instability combined with the price rise that’s already taken place should be enough to signal that things are very close to spiralling out of control. The above economic facts should be more than enough to signal that we’re very close to a major price explosion, if all the stars don’t align just right to prevent it.
June issue of National Geographic has a very good story on oil. Unless you subscribe to the hard copy, you’ll have to go to the library, borrow or buy a copy to read the full story. There are a couple of nice related maps online.
Well, besides the fact that they use the resource considerably more efficiently than we do, one can also look, for example, at the wind power industry in Denmark:
(An interesting fact also mentioned there that shocked me when I learned it a few years ago is that the Danes are net exporters of oil. Of course, this is due partly to keeping demand down and partly to increased supply from rigs in the North Sea.)
Yes, but they use oil more efficiently because as a whole, they drive smaller, more fuel efficient cars and their governments don’t encourage the purchase of huge, heavy SUV’s via tax credits of up to $100,000 like we do. Also wind power in Denmark has nothing to do with alternative fuel development for cars.
My point again is that if high gas prices are REALLY such a problem in Europe, then one would have expected them to have made significant progress on alternative fuels to replace oil. I wonder if part of the reason for this lack of progress on their part might be that the European governments are not prepared to risk losing the tax dollars they make from oil and aren’t sure they can apply the same level of taxes to any alternative.
It could be, but my friend, what I’ve been saying is that there could be myriad reasons why they haven’t made more progress - I’m not sure if I can disprove your point except to offer some factual reasons and opinions on why there may not be much progress to be made on some fronts - or to ask that you find some backing for your hypothesis, which is likely the more proper way to go about it anyhow.
Not to beat a dead horse here, but it is clear through observation as to what I say. AFAIK, despite high fuel costs, Europe has not produced any commercial alternative AUTO fuel solutions for the masses. Therefore, Europe’s high fuel costs are not driving it to any solutions in this area. By extension then, the price of gas in the USA could [at least] double and it would be debatable if we would move much faster on this issue also.
I’m sorry, but I think you have a logic flaw. All you can truthfully say is that Europe has not succeeded at producing alternatives. Logically, can you say that they are not driven or trying or devoting resources? By the same logic I could say that since the US has not produced fusion, we therefore are not driven to working on it - which is not true, given the hundreds of millions of dollars of research on it over many years. Do you see where you and I are not agreeing?
The mechanism here, one presumes, is the average European thinking to himself that his life is deteriorating due to high fuel costs. He needs to think of voting in someone who will fund alternative fuel research or buying a car that runs on biofuel or something. This mechanism is rather weaker than it would be in the US. European cities, for example, usually have excellent public transportation and are more compact in any case. Also, Europeans simply never got used to driving huge cars like we did after WWII. While Americans were buying 3 ton behemoths with tail fins in the 1950s, Europeans bought Minis and Fiats. As a result of these factors the political and economic pressure resulting from really high gas prices would be less intense in Europe than what we would see here.
The problem is that we’ve had nearly 100 years of the automobile being the common mode of transportation, thus our lives and our societies are structured around the freedom which that provides.
There are plenty of alternatives around, but none of them are as deeply embedded or as flexible as a fossil fuel powered vehicle. I could buy an electric car (or build one, I’ve got a book on how to do so), but I have a daily trip of nearly 100 miles, much of it after dark, when I’d have to run the lights, which shortens the range of the vehicle to the point of uselessness as far as I’m concerned. I could simply give up on going to school, but that means I’m stuck at the lower end of the wage earning scale.
It takes an event to make the alternatives viable. One of the reasons the gasoline powered car took off has to do with an outbreak of hoof and mouth disease in NYC at the beginning of the 20th Century. Horses were banned from the city, and their watering troughs were closed down (this eliminated non-condensing steam cars from consideration, since they refilled their water tanks at the horse troughs). So if you were going to get around, it was either by foot, bicycle, public transportation, or you bought a car. Many people bought cars, and the process of putting America on wheels really took off.
Gas hit’s a signifcantly higher price per gallon or someone finds a way to make current alternatives vastly less expensive (if not both), and you’ll see people switching over to those alternatives. Until then, they’ll continue to buy gas and bitch about the price.
I don’t think there are any alternatives to liquid fuels. Hydrogen is not practical, and as noted, has to come from somewhere…right not that somewhere is usually natural gas, which kind of defeats the purpose, IMO. Also hydrogen fuel cells are not cheap enough to be mass produced for 50 million vehicles a year, or however many it is.
The good news is that oil isn’t running out soon, there are something like 1 trillion barrels left of reserves…the world uses 25 billion a year. The bad news is that most of the oil is in the Middle East and that the rate of pumping it is limited. You can’t just take as much as you need now…oil fields have to be drained slowly. We are pretty much at the limit of 80 million barrels a day of supply. I think Saudi Arabia has said they will pump out 2 more million barrels a day…but that’s it. Demand has caught up with supply.
As for alternative energy, there hasn’t been anything as cheap as oil, obviously. Bio fuels are too land intensive, to replace the fuel usage of the US would require a huge amount of land…I’m not even sure it’s doable. Windmills are great too…I think the power is more expensive than coal plants…and you also need backup plants because wind is intermittent. That’s a problem because most of the cost of coal generated power is in the capital equipment, not the coal…if you need a backup power plant to supplement the wind power, then the wind power isn’t doing you much good. Also the amount of land with wind power would be prohibitive if it were to provide a large amount of power.
The good news is that coal and natural gas can be converted to oil. A South African company, Sassol, already does this. It’s costs are probably $30-$40 a barrel, cheaper for natural gas and cheaper still if provided hydrogen to work with. It’s very capital intensive however. It would take time to build the plants and companies would need a price guarantee…otherwide they would face bankruptcy if the price of oil fell below $40 by the time they finished their plant.
Right now the US uses 1 billion tons of coal per year (approx) and about 6.5 billion barrels of oil. Some of the oil is even used in electric generation, I think. I don’t have the #s in front of me but one ton of coal has about 4 barrels of oil worth of energy. There is some efficiency losses in the conversion process.
So that is one alternative. A dirty, messy one however, and it would probably worsen the “global warming” problem, if it is due to carbon dioxide. Plus the US has probably about a trillion tons of coal left, so that’s alot.
The only real, clean, cheap, long range solution is nuclear power. The US should immediate convert all its electricity to nuclear power. New nuclear power plants minimize waste and actually burn all of the fuel instead of just 1% of it…so there is much less of a “waste” problem. They can actually burn the leftover waste of previous plants (that stuff you see in the pools of water…the fuel rods). The waste is trivial when you consider the waste of a coal plant (which has infinite half lives…stuff like mercury, etc.)
Electric plants supply peak energy during the day so they have to be a certain size, the cost is really in the capital equipment, not the fuel (at least for coal and nuclear). So at night these plants could be used to generate hydrogen from water. This hydrogen could be combined in the coal->oil process, necessitating less coal.
We would take our existing coal production and create 4 billion barrels a year. In addition to our current oil production, some convervation, etc…we’d be in fat city. Plus coal is easier to clean before it’s burned than after, from what I’ve read. This is my idea anyway.
We’d also create millions of jobs here as opposed to sending petro dollars to Saudi Arabia to fund people who hate us. Sound like a plan?
The US has been against “central” planning for a long time. The soviet union kind of gave it a bad name. But that’s exactly what we need, I think. This would provide total energy security, no more crossing our fingers that Saudi Arabia isn’t overthrown.
Very little. Oil is down to like a couple percent of electricity generation. I think coal is close to 50%. Nuclear is about 20%. Natural gas is pretty close to that. And, 8% is provided by renewables (mainly hydroelectric).
Well, nuclear may be part of the solution but I don’t see it as a magic bullet. For one thing, it hasn’t panned out very well economically. Now, this is certainly in large part due to the subsidies and externalized costs for fossil fuels. On the other hand, nuclear is the second most subsidized form of energy after fossil fuels. Rather than just subsidize nuclear whole-hog, I’d like to see us get rid of the subsidies for fossil fuels and make them pay their way…And, give some incentives for clean power sources like wind and solar that still need to achieve economies of scale. (And, continue research into fusion, as well as some into new safer and more efficient fission plants.) By the way, we discussed nuclear power in more detail in this very recent thread.
Ummm…that’s not quite true. Fuels costs are roughly 70-90% of the total busbar cost of coal-produced power (depending on the plant and conditions too numerous for me to easily list). While the capital costs of new coal plants are high, there still is a very large amount of generation over the lifetime of the plant.
Correct, around 1B tons of coal were used to utility energy production. An additional large amount (I don’t have it in front of me) is used for non-utility electricity production.
Very little oil is used in electric generation in the US - between 2%-3%, depending on the year. Much of this is actually startup fuel or “emergency topping fuel”, rather than primary generation.
The energy in one ton of coal can vary widely in the US - from 10MBtu for a poor-quality lignite to 28MBtu (both HHV basis) for a metalurgical anthracite. You have to find the weighted average heat value to be able to compare with oil.
Sorta. A trillion tons of ultimate reserves, about 200-250B tons of economically recoverable reserves.
Most coal plants are baseload plants, and thus are intended to run pretty much at 75% of MCR or greater for the time they are up. There are cycling and even peaking coal plants, but they are uncommon and end up with higher O&M costs.
You have to take into account the energy intensity of the conversion process to oil.
Also, the “easier to clean before its burned” is not really true. I’ve not only done numerous studies in the industry on coal cleaning, I’m “on retainer” to a company that does coal cleaning, and the reason that only a few sparse places in the US clean their coal before combustion is because it’s generally not easier or cheaper. Now, if you remove sulfur, ash, heavy metals and so forth in a super cleaning process or as part of an oil synthesis process, you have to account for the cost of doing that, plus the disposal cost of the unwanted items. Plus, the EPA wants to classify the leftovers from coal cleaning as “hazardous waste” - that is, you can remove the mercury, lead, cadmium, arsenic, etc. from the coal before burning it - and then what do you do with it?
I think actually you had several good points and ideas in your post. I’m only nitpicking on coal ones because…well, because that’s what I do.
Say, Una, I gotta wonder if the “cleaning it before it’s burned” wasn’t the concept they were thinking of when they made the claims about the so-called “tornado in a can.” I mean, in theory, it’s pulverization process might allow for the seperation of various elements. Sort of like how if you put marbles in a container of sand, and shake the hell out of it, they’ll seperate with the marbles in one layer and the sand in another. Of course, in the case of “dirty” coal, that might involve something on the molecular layer, which would no doubt be beyond the capabilites of this device (assuming it even does work).
We had a thread about this on my Board. I didn’t see any reason why the process wouldn’t do a lot of what it says it would, but I’m uncertain how it separates out anything. I mean, it looks like it just would make a powder of all the components, good and bad, as well as devolatizing the coal and making it possibly much more difficult to burn (and losing some energy, unless they re-burn the gases).
Well you undoubtedly know much more than me…I only know what I’ve read, surmised, and heard of second hand after recently becoming interested in this.
My thinking was that coal is $30 a ton and has 20M BTU (or about 6000K kwh ) of energy…then the price is about .5 cents per KWH. I’m thinking the “full” cost of coal is something like 3-4 cents per kwh. So that would make coal a small amount of the actual cost (maybe 15%). Are my #s wrong somewhere?
Natural gas on the other hand, is $6.00 per MBTU and there are 300 KWH in a M BTU so that’s 2 cents per KWH. Am I missing some costs? Around here they were talking about building a gas plant for (as I recall) $400/ KW.
Back to coal - > oil…In a coal - > oil proces, if coal is 10M btu per ton and oil is 5.8M btu per barrel, then obviously you’d need much more coal per each barrel than my guesstimate of .25.
I don’t know how feasible coal to oil is really…I’ve heard it’s feasible at $30-$40 per barrel, but I don’t know. I’ve also heard 70% efficient…
I was thinking that the additional hydrogen from nuclear power could make the amount of coal needed per ton lower…does that sound right? If you could use the energy of the nuclear power to add “heat” energy or hydrogen (or whatever you need) then the carbon + hydrogen in the coal could be converted hydrocarbons of oil without really the loss of any (or much) mass…ie 1 ton of coal would be equal to one ton of oil.
That can’t be right as there are 42 M BTU in a barrel of oil, so if coal is only 10M per ton, then obviously alot of energy must be added…so maybe it’s not feasible exactly.
1 ton of oil is 7 barrels, so if it were true then 1 billion tons of coal would equal 7 billion barrels.
What is in coal that makes one ton give so much more energy than another?
Is it possible that even though poor quality coal is only 10M BTU / ton that breaking it down and adding hydrogen (or whatever) makes it have much more energy per ton when burned? IE it would burn more completely perhaps? If both coal and oil are hydrocarbons, why would oil have so much more energy? Does it have more hydrogen relative to coal? That’s why I would think adding hydrogen in the process would help the efficiency of the conversion process.
Do you know how capital intensive the coal-> oil process is and if existing coal plants could be converted easily?
“The $2 billion Chinese facility will able to produce 50,000 barrels a day of cleaner, low-sulfur diesel fuel and gasoline from about 13,000 tons of coal”
They didn’t say if they had other energy feedstocks other than the coal. But this process looks like it makes 50K / (7 barrels / ton) or 7K tons of oil from 13K tons of coal, so it looks pretty efficient.
If oil is 42 MBTU per ton and they’re getting .5 tons of oil out of each ton of coal, the coal must be very good quality, or maybe they have another energy source. What do you think?
Anyway 2 billion US$ per 18 M barrels a year. So if you figure out a depreciation level for the plant and add labor, etc…
If the cost of the plant in depreciation and interest is 10% of value or 200M (10% of 2 billion) a year over 18M barrels, then that’s about $11 per barrel. Plus the coal is another $8-10 per barrel or so. Labor would be pretty cheap. Hazardous disposal would be a cost, but isn’t that true with existing coal plants? Maybe maintenance is another 5% of capital equipment or $5 per barrel. Sounds do-able.
Anyway, back to those China #s. 2 billion for 18M barrels of oil per year. That means $100 Billion per billion barrels or $500 billion to make 5 billion barrels a year. A large sum, but completely do-able.
I’m wondering if existing coal plants could be converted easier than building them from scratch. Obviously alot of coal plants would be stranded if this were done on a large scale.
What I’m talking about are generation costs, not inclusive of the costs of transmission, operations, and all other things outside of the plant “island”.
If coal is $30/ton and has 20MBtu/ton, then you have to figure out a typical annual average net plant heat rate of about 12,000 Btu/kWh, and you get:
In terms of mills/kWh, this is 18 mills/kWh, which is a more industry standard term in the US. As it happens, I have analyses on a few plants which have delivered coal costs ranging from $22.25/ton to $35.10/ton handy. Generally, the generation cost (busbar cost) seems to range between 14.2 mills/kWh to 26 mills/kWh, with coal cost (including transportation) of about 63% (low) to 81% (high). This is slightly lower than my 70-90% figure on average, but then it’s only analyses for a dozen or so plants which I happen to have on-hand here.
See similar calcs as above, but assume an annual average NPHR of about 8,000 Btu/kWh for simple-cycle gas turbines to 7,000 Btu/kWh for combined cycle gas turbines (or, assume 13,000 Btu/kWh for a gas boiler…). This helps narrow the number down a bit.
Yes, oil does have more hydrogen than coal - coal has between 5% hydrogen by mass (on the very high end) to 2% hydrogen by mass (very low end) with perhaps 3.5-4% being an “average” (shudder…I hate to make generalizations about coal). Whereas fuel oil has between 10-13% hydrogen content by mass. Note as well that coal also contains a large proportion of ash (from 1% to 55%, varying wildly on type), and a large proportion of water (from 1% to 50%, varying wildly depending on type). And note too that that water content reduces the net energy substantially due to latent heat losses, so your net energy is even less.
I don’t know a great deal about coal->oil conversion efficiency and costs. It’s a topic I’ve been involved with before, but as there are many different schemes and methods I don’t really recall better info than what you’ve been finding and linking. Every other project I’ve worked on has been abandoned fairly early on, but then, they all were in the US, where the economics are very different than South Africa. (I have done a lot of coal work in SA, just not coal->oil).
Converted to burning oil? It’s possible for coal plants designed to burn bituminous coals, especially many of those East of the Mississippi. In the 1960’s there were a surprisingly large number of plans to convert coal plants to oil, many of which succeeded. There were also a large number of coal plants in the East which were designed for firing with either #6 oil or bituminous coal. Some plants I’ve been to started out as coal, converted to oil, and then back-converted to coal again. :eek:
There are a few problems with coal-> conversion - none of them showstoppers, but problems. First, you need a way to get the oil there. Now, if the plant is near a pipeline, CoE navigable river, or seaport that’s not so bad (assuming you can get environmental groups to allow you to ship several tens of millions of barrels of oil on the river…). But if the plant is not near a pipeline, you have to rail in the oil, which doesn’t sound like a big deal and yet seems to be a labour-intensive process in practice. Second, a coal furnace has to be sized for high-Btu bituminous coal in order to handle oil firing properly, otherwise the furnace heat transfer is thrown off and the unit does not operate at the efficiency or power output needed. All the units that were designed for subbituminous coals and lignites would have a bit of modification work needed - a few tens of millions of dollars per unit. Finally, emissions control equipment may not be compatible with oil firing. Scrubbers may be undersized, precipitators which are designed for dry coal ash don’t work as well with sticky oil ash, vanadium and nickel and other heavy metals sometimes cause problems…but overall, it’s possible.
I think I see where I was off…I was assuming BTU/kwh was 3413 which doesn’t account for the efficiency loss of burning the coal.
AS for converting, I’m sorry, I meant converting a coal run power plant to be a coal-> oil plant, ie no longer an electricity plant at all. The electric in the US would be from nuclear. This would strand all the coal plants, but maybe some value would be obtained from them if they could be converted. ie maybe they could be converted for cheaper than building one from scratch.
Or maybe the process of coal-> oil would be so slow that nuclear plants would come on line as old coal plants went by the wayside naturally. Coal to oil plants would be built from scratch. Do they ever phase out old coal plants or is the idea to keep them going forever?
Your info about coal composition is interesting…I’m not sure what “ash” is but it sounds like it can’t be burned. Seems like hydrogen composition is important for energy…and thus if there were “free” hydrogen around (from nuclear running at night)…then this would make the coal process more efficient. I wonder if you could take any raw “carbon” and create oil out of it by combining it with hydrogen somehow. That would eliminate the need for coal, theoretically.
