[Chichis]

Ahh I really meant hydrogen in general, not just in fuel cells.

[MrPC]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('kenbathrhume', 'Y')amaha should give himself credit for having alot of common sense.

The basic idea is that oil prices will be so high they will ruin the economy and no one will be able to buy oil of course. So if there's still 80% of the oil there was before (say 5 years after peak say) and no one is buying it....doesn't that mean the price would come down?

As for substitution; of course there is substitution. Auto lines can't be switched from making SUVs into other lines? Really? An SUV made must be driven 15,000 miles per year or whatever even if it's sitting in a lot somewhere? If gas prices are high enough then no one will drive an SUV. No one will buy. They'll be melted down for scrap steel. It would be cheaper than running them. People can't carpool? Of couse they can and no that wouldn't "ruin" the economy. The US survived the Great Depression intact didn't it?

How about substitutes for oil? There are NONE?? Really? Nuclear and wind can make hydrogen. Carbon is obtained from the air (CO2 which is in short supply of course) or coal.

The problems I have with Matt's notes from his book on his site is there is no mention made of numbers.

IE how much does it cost to convert coal into oil? (China does it for $20 a barrel). How much coal does the US use per year and how much oil would it generate if 1/2 were converted over? The US uses 1 billion tons of coal per year (of its resources of 250 billion tons)...1/2 a billion tons a year with added hydrogen would make 3.5 billion barrels, or 1/2 of what the US uses.

How much oil does the US produce now? About 7 million barrels per day or 35% of what we use. How far has this fallen? In the early 1970s we made something like 12 million barrels per day. So it's fallen 50% in 35 years.

There won't be any way to build factories to make coal to oil because there WON'T BE ANY OIL!! Again nonsense. The oil won't fall 50% overnight. It won't even fall 50% in 20 years most likely. Since you can use oil made from coal and hydrogen (or just from coal if you want) to create a factory to make more oil from coal...

As for all the Chinese and Indians wanting to buy oil, who cares? That is an arguement for why prices and product for existing oil won't stay where it is. IF prices are $40 then demand will expand. However if prices are $80 then the demand may not go up at all. Maybe their economies won't "grow" or maybe they'll grow without using as much oil. And at $80 substitues come into play.

You can't have it both ways...saying oil will go up so high in price because everyone is buying it which will ruin the economy so that no one is buying it.

No oil for fertilizer!! Fertilizer is made mostly with natural gas which is used for its hydrogen content. Hydrogen made directly from wind could substitute for this. At the price natural gas is now, hydrogen from wind is almost competitive.

No oil for trucking!!! Again there will always be "some" oil whether produced from the ground, from coal...the price may go up but so what? Oil prices went up 10 fold from the early 1960s to the mid 1970s. Did the economy collapse? How many people starved?

[Falconoffury]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'T')he problems I have with Matt's notes from his book on his site is there is no mention made of numbers.

[kenbathrhume]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('MrPC', '')$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('kenbathrhume', 'Y')amaha should give himself credit for having alot of common sense.

collapse? How many people starved?

[Soft_Landing]

I really like the discussion here usually, but sometimes people do tend to misunderstand one another...

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Drew', 'K')en, you should read the article in Scientific American before commenting. The authors go to great lengths explaining energy densities and production costs of a variety of fuels. In using hydrogen as a motor fuel between 70 and 90% of the energy is lost, depending on feedstock, ie: methane, electrolysis, steam reforming from coal. The storage and transportation hurdles are far greater than you claim.

[kenbathrhume]

Massive Quote Snipped for length<See Above>

Yes coal is used to generate 50% of our electricity, so reducing it by half takes away 25%. Nuclear could be doubled. Or you could have more conservation.

And, no, I don't believe that nuclear takes "years" to pay back it's energy investment. There is more energy in a kg of uranium than in 10 tons of coal. The mining isn't that much harder and the plant isn't that much more expensive. Are you saying coal plants are really oil plants in disguise? IE burning coal is really just burning oil on the installment plan? Then why is coal power so much cheaper than oil?

Hydrogen only requires liquification if it is to be transported as such. It can be left as a gas just like natural gas. Natural gas is put through pipelines. It's only liquified for transport accross oceans. Wind plants would be very close to coal hydrogenation plants so they transport would be minimal.

I'm not sure about wind taking "years" to pay back its investment either. Especially as the cost keeps going down. Again numbers are important. If it takes $1 / peak watt for wind then a 1MW wind machine makes 2.2M kwh of electricity (at 25% capacity). If 10% of the cost was oil, then that is an equivalent of investing 3.5M kwh of energy to get back 2.2M kwh of electricity per year. It's a little apples to oranges as the construction costs are largely liquid fuels and the output is electricity, but the point is the same. The 10% figure is a guess..that's about what cars cost in energy terms supposedly.

As for trucking, people want to eat. So they will pay high prices. So oil for transport of food would be the last thing to be sacrificed. It's a non-sequiter. Trucking companies couldn't run b/c of the high price of oil. OK, so no one eats? Won't people be willing to pay those high costs when they get hungry? Perhaps cancelling the cable TV or something? Wouldn't people give up their big SUV and its high gas costs before giving up on food? No?

As for the 1970s, no one here starved. Times were tough. And oil prices went up 10 fold. The Saudis are saying that they want lower prices because they want to forestall alternatives NOW. IE they think alternatives will come on line with $40 / barrel oil. Why would they say that? Are they lying? So if oil prices go up 10 fold...wouldn't that mean that alternatives will become even more economical? Again given that they have a positive EROEI?

[MattSavinar]

Ken,

Do you live in a medium to large sized city?

If so, I want you to attempt to get bike lines installed in the major streets. You're going to need to convince the city council, the planning committees, local business interests, average voters etc. . . .

If you're lucky, you might - just might - succed by the year 2020.

Now much more difficult do you think it is going to be to retrofit large portions of our industrial infrastructure?

You can sit at your computer and theorize about, "Hey coal to gas this and retooling SUV's that and hey I ran the numbers, it's doable," but get out into the real world and attempt to make a minor change like getting bike lines and you'll quickly realize complex systems resist even minor change.

Mulitply the bike line example by about 100,000,000 and that is the size of the task at hand.

Worry about your local farmer's market. That is what might save you, not some giant retrofitting project.

Matt

[Leanan]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'A')nd oil prices went up 10 fold.

[MattSavinar]

Ken,

I bet you a free copy of the second edition of my book that I can prove in one sentence (with one citation/link) that you have never read The Limits to Growth.

Do you want to accept my challenge and be shamed or do you want to admit right now that you never read it and have absolutely no idea what you are talking about?

Matt

[drew]

I must say I could have arranged my argument a little better, but in my defense, I did address Ken's claims on the production of liquid fuels and the impracticality of such ventures. Whether one uses hydrogen for a car or a stationary generating station, or for a building block in chemistry, the storage, transportation, and production costs make this source untenable The storage and transportation hurdles are far greater than you claim. Liquid propane-room temperature storage under pressure; liquid hydrogen-320 deg below zero storage. As a gas in a high pressure pipeline hydrogen has one seventh the energy of natural gas at the same pressure. Fuel cells are old news, the problem is the fuel supply chain.
You are talking about non existent fanciful chemical processes as well, such as taking hydrogen and coal to make oil. Chemistry is complex, it requires energy and ideal conditions to break and form chemical bonds and thus substances. Creating hydrogen gas is horribly inefficient, and wasteful in its own right, and the further reactions you claim would only add your 'synthetic' oil's cost.
Anyway, as Plato would say, this is my apology.
Drew(who thinks you are all too vicious, using ad hominems and such!!)

[Mower]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('drew', 'T')he folks with money will do fine, they will live like the super rich do in latin america. It is the rest of the world I am worried about.

[MrPC]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('kenbathrhume', 'N')o one starved in 1974, nor did our economy collapse, not in the US anyway.

[kenbathrhume]

Regarding other points:

There is no "need" in oil usage. There is price. If people "need" oil for agriculture, then they will be willing to pay a high price for it. There is no "we used 7 billion last year and this year we can only scrounge 6 billion so I guess no one eats". Doesn't work that way. Price goes up and up until the demand goes DOWN.

Given that people like to eat and will pay whatever they have to pay (but will possibly avoid some more oil intensive foods such as meat) then agricultural usage will still probably be high. Again the price will go up until demand is knocked down. Higher oil usage food will cost more, thus people will demand less of it.

As for plants that convert coal to oil. Firstly coal is cheap. On a per barrel of energy basis it's $10 a barrel. So you can't tell me that it's really "oil". If so wouldn't it be $40 a barrel equivalent? Of course.

You could use carbon dioxide pulled from the air. It would be more expensive, but as long as less constructed energy inputs go into getting the energy in air and the hydrogen then come out you have an energy machine. "But doesn't that violate energy conservation?". Well, no, not if you're using energy from wind which is free.

Again you have to invest energy in the wind machine but if you invest much less energy than you get out (because wind energy itself is free; it is not your investment) then it makes sense. If you invest much less energy in the nuclear plant for example, than you get out, then it makes sense to make energy from it. All in all if there are less liquid energy inputs then liquid energy outputs equivalents, then it has a positive EROEI.

As for the pessimist-nutjob "Limits to Growth" poster's point about how "we can't build plants when all production is being used for SUVs and whatnot- there will be none left OVER!!!". Again, he is an idiot. Prices go up. The plants make MORE economic sense as the price goes higher and higher. This is because they have a positive EROEI.

The plants themselves are not energy "sources", but they can take energy sources such as radioactive materials, wind, coal and make liquid fuels out of them. You get less energy out than input, but since most of the energy input is wind or nuclear or coal that is not a problem. If a kg of uranium costs $40 and has more energy as almost 20 tons of coal (about 60 barrels of oil) then you can't say the uranium to oil is un-economic as long as a) the plant isn't incredibly oil intensive and b) the process is at least somewhat efficient.

As for the process itself, it takes energy to break down the coal somewhat and then hydrogen is added either through steam or directly. I'm not a chemical engineer, but the fact that China can get 3 barrels of oil out of 1 ton of coal says that energy to energy the process is very efficient. I've read that using raw coal (without added hydrogen) it's 70%+.

As for "can they gear up in time", it depends how fast the oil runs out. If they have years to build plants, then yes. If oil declines by 50% in a few years then it would be a struggle. South Africa had all its liquid fuels from coal and one of the leaders is the South African company Sasol. This was due to the embargo.

As for the nuclear plant, assume that 10% of the construction costs is oil. 1 billion for the physical plant of a 1000MW plant. So $100M for the plant's capital which is 2.5 million barrels of oil. This is heat energy of 4 billion kwh. Energy output for the plant would be 8 billion kwh run at about 90% capacity. Now you lose energy going from hydrogen into liquid fuels but just on a raw energy basis it's investing 1 to get 2. The fuel has an energy cost too, of course, but it's pretty cheap (about .1c / kwh or $8M for 8 billion kwh. If that whole $8M is oil, then it's 20,000 barrels of oil per year for fuel, which is 340M kwh.

So if 10% of the cost of the physical plant is oil, and 100% of the fuel is the cost of uranium in oil, then it's a 4 billion kwh of oil (heating value) invested and 340 million kwh per year to get 8 billion kwh per year of electrical energy.








The people bidding for coal to oil plants will OUTBID people who want fuel to go on vacation or whatever. We have a MARKET economy. If we didn't, and had a planned economy, it would be even easier, the gov't would just give people ration cards for gas like in WWII. (Did that experience ruin the country? How many millions starved here?).

[drew]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Mower', '')$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('drew', 'T')he folks with money will do fine, they will live like the super rich do in latin america. It is the rest of the world I am worried about.

[Aaron]

Can we stop quoting entire posts please.

I know it's easier to just quote the whole thing, but it makes the thread a pain to read.

Thanks

[smiley]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'W')e have a MARKET economy. If we didn't, and had a planned economy, it would be even easier,

[drew]

The market is a scary place. Businesses, and often people, go for the lowest common denominator. If it was freezing and I was broke I'd use coal. Business would use coal because it is not concerned with issues like safety and health (seriously, only when it negatively affects the bottom line whether presently or potentially), only profit and market share. Regulation has no place in the free market mindset . Canada's environmental problems are not going to get better soon, especially with coal taking the place of oil. A year ago, I was in Windsor (across the river from Detroit) and drove east for almost an hour before my eyes stopped stinging. Detroit has several steel mills and coal generating stations. When the crunch hits, protecting the environment is going to be the last thing on anybody's mind. Aside from our coal station at Nanticoke (biggest polluter in the country) most of our air pollution comes from George Dubya's land. Oh well, guess I'll move north.
Drew(who may live in an igloo one day)

[kenbathrhume]

Yes, I'd expect to a return of nuclear in a big way.

It doesn't really take 10-15 years to build a nuclear plant. They have streamlined liscensing. It used to be that you needed a plan then a liscense to build and then another liscense to operate.

In between building and operating the environmentalists would stall the thing forever. Now they have one liscense which is good for building and operating. You don't break ground until you know the thing will be going through.

There's a team of many big companies (including France's power company) working on submitting a liscense in 2007 or 2008 just to see if it will work. If it does they will start building a new nuke by 2010.

Based on how long construciton of a nuclear plant takes in France, I'd expect it to be a couple of years.

Also the plants are standardized. The designs are pre-approved (already have been) based on Westinghouse or GE model xxx. Much of the building is done off-site...they're kind of "modular". They're not custom built like they used to be.

[Falconoffury]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'Y')es coal is used to generate 50% of our electricity, so reducing it by half takes away 25%. Nuclear could be doubled. Or you could have more conservation.

[kenbathrhume]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Falconoffury', '{')long quote snipped to make thread readable - see above}