World energy question

[TURBO2GO]

I'm wondering about something maybe someone knows more about this than I do.

The world is always looking for a source of energy. Oil, nuclear, coal, wind, solar, etc.

But we are sitting right on top of an enormous amount of energy just under the earth's crust. More than we would ever need. Why is it that man doesn't put too much effort into utilizing this? Is it that technologically difficult? Nuclear fusion is used to build heat, create steam, turn turbines, generate electricity. We sit on top of heat so hot it contains molten metal. Why can't we harness this?

 

[Ultraman]

I have a similar question, on natrual gas. We have tons of this stuff but why can't we do something to utilize it as a more important energy source?

 

[jond]

I have a similar question, on ocean motion.
Sounds funny, but there is so much force in the movement of the ocean.
It's free energy. Why don't they harness it?

 

[docjohn]

I have a question about psychic energy.we have so many crazy people on earth...why can't we harness that?

 

[CL65 Captain]

I have a question about psychic energy.we have so many crazy people on earth...why can't we harness that?

LOL :biggrin: We have. The Kardashians are on their 6th season.

 

[gleibig]

I have a question about psychic energy.we have so many crazy people on earth...why can't we harness that?

 

[docjohn]

^^^^^^^that pic above is disturbing ^^^^^^

 

[Vega$ NSX]

I have a similar question, on ocean motion.
Sounds funny, but there is so much force in the movement of the ocean.
It's free energy. Why don't they harness it?

Because contrary to popular belief, it really is about the size of the boat, and not the motion of the ocean.

 

[Vega$ NSX]

I'm wondering about something maybe someone knows more about this than I do.

The world is always looking for a source of energy. Oil, nuclear, coal, wind, solar, etc.

But we are sitting right on top of an enormous amount of energy just under the earth's crust. More than we would ever need. Why is it that man doesn't put too much effort into utilizing this? Is it that technologically difficult? Nuclear fusion is used to build heat, create steam, turn turbines, generate electricity. We sit on top of heat so hot it contains molten metal. Why can't we harness this?

Because it isn't practical from an engineering standpoint. You'd have to drill down pretty far (miles) to get to a spot where you could get enough usable heat to actually utilize for any practical purposes. However, the amount of energy it would take to move a working fluid (such as water) would be greater than the amount of energy/heat gained in the process. In other words, it would take more energy to actually pump a working fluid, like water, down to the depth it would take to get heat and back up again.

I have a similar question, on natrual gas. We have tons of this stuff but why can't we do something to utilize it as a more important energy source?

They are. Fleet vehicles, cars, trucks, buses, plants, etc. Natural gas is being recognized as a fantastic energy source. However, here are the two problems that are going to limit it as a fuel source.

1) Since it is a gas it's not very energy dense. In other words, it takes up a lot of space for the actual amount of energy it provides. That means moving it, transferring it, and setting up an infrastructure to deliver it with always be limited. Like your house may have a 1/2" line with around 5 psi of gas pressure to handle heating. However, if you actually needed to size that line to provide full electricity, you'd have increase the size and pressure significantly (my guess would be about x10). And to run an actual power plant, you'd need a train of tankers to feed the amount of gas needed to keep that thing running.

2) While we have more gas than we know what to do with, it's also because our usage is minimal relatively speaking. If there was a way to all of a sudden flip a switch and convert every car, house and building to natural gas powered, we would find ourselves in similar situation as we are with petroleum because natural gas and petroleum are loosely tied to each other.

I have a similar question, on ocean motion.
Sounds funny, but there is so much force in the movement of the ocean.
It's free energy. Why don't they harness it?

It's been done (research tidal power or tide mills), however overall as an energy source, it has very low energy production. Like wind power, it takes a massive amount of resources to create something that can harness that power. Secondly, the problem with that power source is that it is very low in intensity but spread out across a large distance. Lastly, there is a lot of losses (friction, etc) and maintenance required (salt water is aggressively corrosive) to sustain the energy harnessing equipment. The amount of costs and energy it takes to capture and maintain a tidal power system doesn't pencil out as well as other systems.

I have a question about psychic energy.we have so many crazy people on earth...why can't we harness that?

Because all these crazy people also come with emotional baggage. And as we know, unless you fly Southwest, checked baggage comes with additional fees. These fees end up costing more than the actual psychic energy produced.

 

[liftnot]

I have a similar question, on natrual gas. We have tons of this stuff but why can't we do something to utilize it as a more important energy source?

I see city buses and state vehicles running NG around in SD daily...even some UPS/FedEx sometimes. Its perfect for those kind of transportation as the tank needs to be quite large. The distribution infrastructure is a lot mature than say solar, Hydrogen, electric....and its a lot cheaper and cleaner as you know. Its great IMO.

Westport Innovations(WPRT) has the know how turing diesel to run on NG. the have a JV with Cummins (CMI) to build NG engines for medium-duty vehicles (think garbage and delivery trucks and buses). Westport also recently announced plans to de- velop natural gas engine technology for light motor vehicles, working with General Motors.

In the past two years, the company has added two more global alliances: a partnership with Volvo in Europe and a joint venture with China’s Weichai Power, the largest maker of diesel truck engines in the world. It recently announced a co-marketing program agreement between it and Royal Dutch Shell.

To fully realize its potential, Westport will need the trucking industry to make a cultural shift toward natural gas. If the NATGAS Act fails, it could affect the risks surrounding the long-term opportunity here. I think its the most promising clean energy source we have. If wasn't for the huge tank it needs, I thought about converting my NSX to run on NG....:biggrin:

Another data point. A good buddy of mine who owns a machine shop down in New Orleans and has been making industrial valves for oil/gas refinery for over 35yrs. I thought its just a dinky shop but I finally saw the building....it took up the whole block and pre-Katrina(2006) he was running 1shift or sometimes 2shifts. Since then, its been 24/7....not only that, he is now building a bigger shop so he can keep up with the demands of the gas valves.
He is doing extremely well and he is my rock star. If he was in CA, I would work for him. He loves and race sports cars especially British cars...he has a man cave similar to Alan Wilzig, recently he bought an orange McLaren MP4-12C to add to his staple of cars.

 

[docjohn]

as always Vegas you have answered all questions succinctly , however I'm sure Dave will find a few holes:wink: in your explanations.

 

[RSO 34]

as always Vegas you have answered all questions succinctly , however I'm sure Dave will find a few holes:wink: in your explanations.

But then we will be treated to a new poll by Dave asking what position he should take.....

 

[sahtt]

I'll provide a good response to this later. Vegas already made several good points.

 

[Vega$ NSX]

as always Vegas you have answered all questions succinctly , however I'm sure Dave will find a few holes:wink: in your explanations.

Well probably with good cause because I'm actually just a dog pawing at the keyboard spouting out random gibberish. :smile: This is especially true in the Forced Induction Section threads! :smile:

 

[Ultraman]

Vegas and Liftnot - thanks for spending time to answer the question.

Honda has a version of Civic running on natrual gas, as far as I'm aware it's the only company that offers such option to the consumer. However at $26K not sure the cost/benefit of owning one.

 

[Tom239]

1) Since it is a gas it's not very energy dense. In other words, it takes up a lot of space for the actual amount of energy it provides. That means moving it, transferring it, and setting up an infrastructure to deliver it with always be limited. Like your house may have a 1/2" line with around 5 psi of gas pressure to handle heating. However, if you actually needed to size that line to provide full electricity, you'd have increase the size and pressure significantly (my guess would be about x10). And to run an actual power plant, you'd need a train of tankers to feed the amount of gas needed to keep that thing running.

To some extent, we already site power plants near energy supplies
because electric power transmission is often less costly than shipping
the fuel.

Liquified, the energy density is not bad. The fleet cars you mentioned
store gas in pressurized tanks in liquid form. But yes I agree with you
that infrastructure would have to be developed.

2) While we have more gas than we know what to do with, it's also because our usage is minimal relatively speaking.

What I'd like to know is why retail propane prices haven't come down.
Everyone says natural gas production is up, yet propane is a byproduct
of natural gas and the price I pay for propane hasn't dropped.

 

[kookoo4nsx]

I worked a major convention in Tampa last month with a few thousand guests. There were diesel busses and a few nat gas busses. The nat gas busses held about 1/2 the passangers of the full size buss AND they had to go to the filling station before lunch and in the late afternoon. The driver told me it took about 20 minutes to fill the nat gas each time and the filling station was about a 45 minute round drip from his route.

I love the idea of natural gas but with a range under 200 miles it is not practical. LA has had natural gas cabs for nearly 15 years.

In a perfect world we would all pull up the the "gas station" and have FOUR CHOICES at the pump.

Gasoline
Diesel
Natural Gas
Quick Charge


I'm not a fan of E85 since you get worse mileage even factoring for the lower price and you are stupid using a food source to power your car.

 

[Tom239]

I worked a major convention in Tampa last month with a few thousand guests. There were diesel busses and a few nat gas busses. The nat gas busses held about 1/2 the passangers of the full size buss AND they had to go to the filling station before lunch and in the late afternoon. The driver told me it took about 20 minutes to fill the nat gas each time and the filling station was about a 45 minute round drip from his route.

That reflects the size of the tank in that bus and the location of his
filling source, and has little to do with the inherent practicality.

I almost bought a pickup truck converted to propane a few years ago.
It had a 75 gallon tank -- more range than any gasoline car I've ever had.
I wouldn't even have to go to filling stations; the propane company
comes to my door.

 

[Vega$ NSX]

What I'd like to know is why retail propane prices haven't come down.
Everyone says natural gas production is up, yet propane is a byproduct
of natural gas and the price I pay for propane hasn't dropped.

That's a good question and had me interested as well (since I work with gas utilities on occasion). Talked to a few gas folks and did a bit of research and basically there are a multitude of reasons. However, in a very basic nutshell part of the issue is that they are two totally different market structures. With natural gas, you have a distribution network and pipeline as well as a more predictable demand. With propane you have a completely different distribution network (trucks vs. pipe) and payment is on usage.

In other words, if you have an entire city piped on NG, then you know you will get a certain amount of gas usage. You can account for the drop off in summertime usage by subsidizing the costs because you know you will make it back in the winter. Distributing the gas is easy because it only gets routed to the areas that use it.

Propane on the other hand is only used when someone buys it. There is no guarantee that a certain amount of propane will be used and little ability to subsidize costs because nobody is tied to the usage (unlike NG). Also, because it has to be delivered, and not piped, there are costs associated to where it is distributed. If I send tanks and tanks to a city where little is used that year, then the gas will "sit on a shelf" which costs money. And in a thin margin market, idle time is a killer. So these costs are rolled into the price of the gas as well.

 

[jond]

It seems to me the most obvious answer is solar.
1. If most people had solar on the roofs of their homes
2. If said solar generated 130% of what their home needs

Then:
- Everyone would buy electric cars because they can drive them for 'free'
- The energy grid would be back-filled with 'free' energy so the remaining people would have super cheap power

The ONLY thing stopping this is the current cost of the technology....
Drop it by a factor of 10, and our energy worries are over.

 

[sahtt]

I'm wondering about something maybe someone knows more about this than I do.

The world is always looking for a source of energy. Oil, nuclear, coal, wind, solar, etc.

But we are sitting right on top of an enormous amount of energy just under the earth's crust. More than we would ever need. Why is it that man doesn't put too much effort into utilizing this? Is it that technologically difficult? Nuclear fusion is used to build heat, create steam, turn turbines, generate electricity. We sit on top of heat so hot it contains molten metal. Why can't we harness this?

Geothermal is utilized globally; the U.S. is a major producer believe it or not. This type of energy, however, is not easy to harness. Geothermal needs tectonic activity nearby. Many if not most geothermal sites suffer from land slides, earth quakes, and harsh terrain. They are often far from population areas (California is a good counter example) and infrastructure is cost prohibitive. We cannot actually drill into the mantle for energy, we need it to push through the crust (40-100km's) near the surface.

In addition, although there are many types of geothermal systems for producing electricity, most deal with extremely caustic/acidic solutions. Pumping the solution (it's not just water) erodes the drilling apparatus, wears out the turbines, and eats away at piping. For example, drilling for oil is 10-100x more profitable against similar drilling costs and oil/natural gas (even hydraulic fracturing fluids) are less caustic to the machinery. I am in the process of gathering a set of speakers for the advanced geothermal energy panel at the largest student led energy conferences in the world here at Univ of Texas Austin next February. If you are local you should check it out.

Lastly, while geothermal is certainly underutilized, it is not technically renewable from a geosciences point of view. It's also not necessarily all that environmentally friendly. Extracting the hot fluids, converting them to steam to spin a turbine, and putting the cooled fluids back into the reservoir decreases its potential. Most commercial reservoirs have life spans of 25-100 years but it is not renewable with today's technology. Geothermal energy to heat individual homes/businesses, however, is proven and a great resource we currently ignore. Turning it into usable electricity on a wide scale is difficult.

 

[bigbadberry]

Are we talking about geothermal? It's readily available for new houses. Heavy upfront cost, but almost infinite free energy after.

 

[sahtt]

I have a similar question, on natrual gas. We have tons of this stuff but why can't we do something to utilize it as a more important energy source?

We do have massive reserves of natural gas. In fact, the figures are almost mind blowing with the full extent of hydraulic fracturing on all known shale reserves (most are not even active yet) taken into consideration. To put it into perspective, just the two largest shale plays in the U.S. have BOE (barrel of oil energy equivalents) proportional to Saudi Arabia's total oil reserves. It is quite likely we'll be a hydrocarbon exporter by 2025. This also ignores recent developments in enhanced oil recovery (EOR), much of which are proven technologies that simply have not had a chance to be applied to older reservoirs we are extremely confident will produce economic amounts of oil/gas. I am working with a professor on a grant from the DOE to determine the true capacity of the Permian Basin in west texas/south new mexico. My preliminary estimates are 15-30 billion barrel of oil equivalent of remaining resources with basic EOR tactics. Keep in mind this area of Texas has been producing for 40+ years already and has already produced tens of billions of barrels of oil.

The problem is not geology or drilling technology - it is policy and economics. Think of the basic steps needed to form natural gas infrastructure. A) Fleet of cars that can run on it and a B) refueling system. No company covers these two areas. This would be like Exxon developing a natural gas car or GM drilling for shale gas in South Texas - they aren't going to do it. Like ethanol (which I despise economically), we'd need some sort of mandate so that both sides of the commercial opportunity come together and are willing to risk billions. Boone Pickens has developed realistic starting points - build natural gas infrastructure on a couple main highways to support long range trucking. 18 wheelers produce an inordinate amount of pollution, especially particle pollution which gives kids and the elderly emphysema among a host of other conditions/diseases, and follow predictable routes. Switching a significant portion of our trucking fleet to natural gas could be done in ~5 years. Passenger cars will take much longer and I don't think the switch is actually necessary.

The better way to switch to a natural gas economy is to systemically retire coal plants and expand combined cycle natural gas power plants. This transition is already occurring albeit at a moderate, not rapid, pace. Due to Jimmy Carter's policies, our energy composition is artificially coal based. Fortunately, those power plants are now at the end of their life cycles (50 years). The most efficient way (which is != as the most efficient way from an engineering/scientific standpoint) is to expand electric car usage and power them from natural gas plants. I've studied the impact on the grid (a good friend is doing his thesis on it) and it's surprisingly manageable given realistic electric car adoption rates.

 

[sahtt]

I have a similar question, on ocean motion.
Sounds funny, but there is so much force in the movement of the ocean.
It's free energy. Why don't they harness it?

There are several problems although several countries, primarily Nordic ones, do utilize it. First, salt water corrodes everything. Second, you have to transmit the power back to the grid and then to population centers. One thing it has going for it is many population centers are coastal (NYC, Shanghai, Houston, Singapore, etc.).

When you do the math on the construction costs ($$$), maintenance costs ($$), and transmission costs ($$$$), it simply cannot compete with hydrocarbons. With the right tax incentives or new technology it certainly could (and can in some areas).

 

[sahtt]

It seems to me the most obvious answer is solar.
1. If most people had solar on the roofs of their homes
2. If said solar generated 130% of what their home needs

Then:
- Everyone would buy electric cars because they can drive them for 'free'
- The energy grid would be back-filled with 'free' energy so the remaining people would have super cheap power

The ONLY thing stopping this is the current cost of the technology....
Drop it by a factor of 10, and our energy worries are over.

What we energy engineers/geoscientists call 'distributed solar' is indeed exciting. The reason is it's almost economical - we are not a factor of 10 off anymore, closer to 1.33-2x. Many companies (NRG is an example) are aggressively pursuing a way to make it work. I spoke with the ex CEO of NRG on this exact topic about 6 months ago when the prices were about 10% higher than they are now. My somewhat educated guess is solar panels are going to be sold primarily through lease agreements. A large company buys 100,000 panels at 60-66% retail cost. It also bags whatever 'green' incentives are on the table. The corporation gets all the tax advantages of acquiring capital assets etc. It then approaches middle to higher income households and asks if they want to immediately save $$ on their utilities. No big up front cost, no installation cost, no warranty issues, no maintenance, no bull shit, just save money or break even on your electric bill through solar installation. They lease the panels with full warranty (panels come with a 25 yr warranty anyways) and maintenance package (clean a few times a year, install rolled into the cost, and in snowy areas they'll need to clean them off several times during the winter) for immediate savings.

With today's interest rates this particular market structure is already profitable. Surveys and market data suggest even if they spend an extra 20% on their "utilities" by having solar instead of buying it from a coal plant, consumers are satisfied. If you can actually amortize the cost below the amount they would have spend on electricity costs, they are ecstatic. Once a couple homes in a neighborhood realize this 'arbitrage' and their neighbors see their panels, current saturation rates are >50% of households in the neighborhood have panels within 24 months. That's actual statistics compiled from several test cases in Austin. Someone is going to get obscenely rich when they develop a regional (much less national) distributed solar scheme that works from the get go without significant up front costs. I give it <36 months before we hear of the name of the company; hopefully we recognize it and invest accordingly.