Most Important Greenhouse Gases

[NinerSevenTango]

Originally Posted by jhowelb Don't stop looking at the first Dr you find and check them all out really close. Get right up in the Dr,'s face and ask how much experience at this he's had and his success rate AND ask for references! After all, they are your eyes!

That much, you can count on!

--97T--

[NinerSevenTango]

About thermal depolymerization:

There is a lot more information in the Wiki on the subject than at that fact-free website.

Turns out a few lesser-known facts come to light. The feedstock is turkey offal and pig fat. The plant puts out high quality oil and nets an energy surplus if you don't count the energy that goes into the feedstock. Economic performance suffers some because measures have to be taken to contain the awful stink. So far, it only makes money when heavily subsidized with tax dollars.

It's interesting technology and it might make sense for garbage processing when energy costs are high, but only if they are high compared to the capital costs of the plant itself (which high energy costs will affect; energy costs make up the cost of everything else).

But it can never scale up enough to make a dent for our transportation needs. Animal fat and other offal are solar power from grains and grasses, concentrated by the animal over time. So ultimately, the output from the plant is concentrated solar power. You can get it cheaper by using garbage, but there just isn't enough land area to devote to the slow concentration of solar power to produce enough energy to use for transportation.

So it is yet another tax and stock swindle, as all low density forms of energy are destined to be. If it ever turns out to make an honest profit (honest being defined as not consuming money taken from others at the point of a gun), it will still be a piddling amount of energy, limited by the cost and quantity of the feedstocks available. What must be considered, if we are to accept that it is morally justifiable to steal the product of one man's labor to benefit another for some lofty goal, is the energy equivalence of the dollars you can extract from willing slaves, versus the energy content of the man himself. Since society is deemed to exercise ownership over a man, then if the energy content of the man exceeds the value that can be extracted out of the fruits of his labor, then it follows that they could grind up humans to power such a plant, and the other humans using the energy therefrom would derive some benefit while simultaneously decreasing the demand for energy from all other sources. As long as you were in the group having the guns and getting the energy, rather than being the group to be sacrificed at the altar of environmentalism, this would be an ideal final solution.

--97T--

[NinerSevenTango]

On biodiesel from algae:

I was surprised and disappointed to see such a rambling, disjointed article on a university website. At least the author acknowledges that hydrogen is an energy carrier and not a fuel, and a bad energy carrier at that, but I didn't think that belonged in the article.

But ignoring that, it seems that if you could get 5,000 gallons per acre/year of biodiesel from an algae pond, you could have true energy independence. That is, if you could afford to own an acre of land, you could make your own diesel fuel. That would be independence!

But alas, mother nature intervenes to degrade efficiencies along the way and foil all of our plans. Not counted is the cost of the water, the cost of maintaining salinity, the cost of the nutrients, the cost of the ethanol and conversion process, storage, the cost of labor to operate the whole deal, the risk cost of problems with fouling or die-off, bad weather events, and a host of other things. The ideal organism hasn't been found yet, all of the organisms only grow within a certain temperature range, and open ponds are not feasible for a large number of reasons. So one of the problems to consider is the cost of an acre of glass or plastic. Plus the cost to keep the glass clean, and the cost to stir the water, etc. Also, if they develop a hardy strain that is ideal, we need to consider what happens if it becomes an invasive species.

Instead of a demonstration on how the scheme could make money, it is a plea for more money for research. If there is money in it, and there would be if it could compete with existing fuels, lots of people will be all over this. Without tax money. If the efficiencies are there, it will spring up on small scales all over the place, not needing a huge plant in the Sonoran desert to get started. (But that would be a good place to start -- on a small scale, maybe -- the water is already saline and the insolation is the best you can get. But the water supply is limited in deserts.)

As an exercise on whether this approach overcomes the scaling problem, it shines a ray of hope, but the problems scale up with the size of the operation. It would be interesting to see a small operation, one acre in size, pay for itself.

To get an idea into the energy, labor, capital, and risk challenges involved with this scheme, see the wiki on Algaculture, which is much more informative. The good news is that private companies are working on it; that means that there might be a chance for it to succeed someday.

Too bad we have to continually ignore the fact that we sit on huge reserves of oil, enough to give us energy independence, but we are locked away from it while our economy and our freedoms slide into the toilet.

--97T--

[fizzissist]

Originally Posted by NinerSevenTango On biodiesel from algae: I was surprised and disappointed to see such a rambling, disjointed article on a university website. --97T--

Sorry to break it to many of our kind readers, but that's what universities do. They get paid good money to do it too.

Again, No Problem, No Funding.

[handlewanker]

Hi 97T and others who spell the end of the world so blandly.
Did it ever occur to you that the real solution to our problems is to reduce the population level?
It didn't?

Where have you got your head buried, can't see the wood for the trees no doubt.

I've read the foregoing rambles by so called "eggspurts" in the worldly events, and not one of you will acknowledge that YOU as a species are making a rod for your own backs?

By that it must be obvious to even some of the morons who can't see the real issue, but keep hammering away at solutions that at very best are just band aids on a corpse.

You are not going to solve the problem of global warming, or cooling, or for that matter of rampant inflation.

Many people have gotten rich by writing books pointing out the situation but this is just a matter of overstating the obvious.

In the end some of you will die young from malnutrition and others will die young from obesity, while others will die just trying to make sure others have a better life style and there are others who just couldn't give a rats arrrrs whether the sun rises tomorrow as long as today is just tolerable.

You doomwatch merchants are so far up your crevaces that if by some miracle the world population halved itself overnight, which would mean everyone would have twice as much as they have now,( do the sums), do you honestly think all your problems would be solved?

No, not by any stretch of the imagination.
Why???? Because you have placed your destiny in the hands of a few people that by their estimation are the best thing since sliced bread and are determind to get and stay rich at the expense of the mob.

Which is just another way of saying that the human race as a whole does not know what time of day it is without some technical expert being employed at consultancy levels to inform them, and that information is subject to government approval for only a very few.

You humans will never "get it right", not while you've got a hole in your arrrrs.
Ian.

[NinerSevenTango]

Handlewanker,

You should re-read my post on depolymerization, above.

I already anticipated your final solution. The "man as alien" crowd has been advocating genocide ever since their previous poster children, the poor and downtrodden workers, cast them off and told them to go rescue someone else, and so they had to adopt the environment as a victim to rescue from property rights, since the environment can't talk back. Except when the world doesn't end, and temperatures drop instead of rising.

Oh, and as long as there is a debt-based fiat currency system in place, a continually expanding market has to exist just for it to stay afloat. At the end of the game, the banks and the government end up with all the money and title to all the property.

Have a nice day,

--97T--

[fizzissist]

"You humans will never "get it right", not while you've got a hole in your arrrrs."
--Ian.

Us humans kneel in your presence, oh great and wise alien who has spawned few offspring.

[NinerSevenTango]

The Final Solution advocated above is being put into practice.

See my post about it here:

http://www.cnczone.com/forums/showth...334#post445334

--97T--