3 ms·

Yes, but given the huge demand for energy everywhere there is absolutely no point wasting so much energy converting it except in locations where/when transporti

Yes, but given the huge demand for energy everywhere there is absolutely no point wasting so much energy converting it except in locations where/when transporting a energy-dense medium to is difficult but highly valuable. IE The middle of the ocean during a war.

dredmorbius 12y ago
The cost for this energy is $3-$6/gallon according to the US Navy's estimate. I get about $9/gallon if you include the costs of solar power provisioning. Or $126 - $378/bbl. That's not cheap, but it's a damned sight better than pretty much any biofuel alternative, which runs about $1000/bbl. And fuel is essential for transportation. Some transport can be liberated -- you can run passenger cars on batteries (for a price). Within cities, buses and even delivery vehicles can be electrified (possibly with on-board batteries for short off-grid excursions). Rail absolutely can be electrified. But a lot of uses cannot be. It's difficult to run power cords across oceans (though you might be able to electrify some barge and river traffic). Especially if you want to tap into them at sea. An electrified marine cargo business isn't an option. Your primary alternatives are sail power, biofuel (including possibly pelletized wood ships, an existing proposal), or electrically-generated synfuels as here. Airplanes handle electric cords even worse than boats do. There are numerous airline industry initiatives looking at biofuels, but Boeing's "biggest breakthrough there is" bet really doesn't pan out. Unless you want to cover _all_ of Oklahoma and Kansas, as well as parts of Louisiana, Texas, New Mexico, Colorado, Nebraska, and Missouri, just to supply fuel to the aviation industry. Worldwide, shipping and aviation account for about 5% each of total petroleum consumption. Or you could create the fuel. Yes, shipping prices, airfares, and air cargo rates would increase. But you'd still have them.
- anigbrowl 12y ago
  And while that's expensive by the standards of fossil fuel extraction (with oil at an unusually low price of ~$75/bbl right now), the cost of solar generation keeps falling and seemingly has further to fall, whereas the costs of fossil fuel extraction seem set to keep rising - both because of the increasing difficulties of access and because of increasing pressure to account for externalities, whether at the point of production (like wastewater injection) or consumption (CO2 and soot pollution). We should probably be looking at $126/bbl (at $3/gal) for fossil fuel so as to include the refining costs that would be obviated by this technology (and which have unaccounted-for externalities of their own). I don't see what's not to like here. You could even use relatively inefficient solar harvester arrays anchored offshore to do most of the processing, and in the event of a spill it would still be substantially cleaner and easier to manage than crude.
  - dredmorbius 12y ago
    I'm generally pessimistic about the future. This is among the most interesting and positive things I've run across in years. There are still limitations, as I noted. Solar costs are falling, but if you look at total installed system costs remain high. EROEI and other metrics of net positive energy are perilously close to minimums necessary to sustain civilization. I'm not a fan of marine-based installations just based on weathering and corrosion. But a number of industrially-large plants would work. For the U.S., a single facility 4.5 km x 4.5 km x 10 m high would suffice based on USNRL's scaling factors. Split that among a number of regional facilities and you've got distributed capacity at a large industrial scale. It's the solar collection that's the big and pricey part of this.
    - anigbrowl 12y ago
      Thanks for your very interesting analysis here and above - I will certainly dig through your Reddit posts on the subject as I want to learn more about where the manufacturing barriers would be and what sort of private partnerships the Navy would enter into over the projected 7-10 year deployment timeframe, not least because I'm struck by the fact that the basic technology must be unencumbered by patents to the extent that it originates with the government. While agreeing that solar collection is no slamdunk (see for example this story about the SoCal Ivanpah plant running at only half the hoped-for capacity at present: http://www.mercurynews.com/business/ci_26954832/huge-mojave-solar-plant-lags-energy-production http://www.mercurynews.com/business/ci_26954832/huge-mojave-...) I'm personally OK with nuclear, geothermal and hydroelectric dams as potential power sources notwithstanding their own externalities.
      - dredmorbius 12y ago
        The part that's likely not to be unencumbered is the CO2 extraction itself. But otherwise, yes, much of this is public-domain tech. I'm on the fence regarding nuclear for at least two main reasons: safety (particularly the hard-to-quantify-of-guarantee long-term safety), and fuel availability. The picture on both strikes me as less than clear. Near term, perhaps useful as a bridge fuel. Geothermal is actually pretty awesome, but much more profoundly limited than most people suspect (tide and wave power are also overestimated -- the San Francisco Bay, for example, represents less total tidal power than the bay region uses in electricity, and only a small fraction of that potential could be extracted). Enhanced geothermal (basically, injection wells) have proven expensive and low-benefit, see Australia's Habanero project and its challenges. Hot, wet-field geo though is proven, and a high-yield resource in Iceland, Japan, the Philippines, Kenya, New Zealand, the US, and a few other regions. In developing regions (particularly Kenya) it could dramatically increase total electrical generation capacity. Hydro is largely built out and has environmental issues, though it also works quite well. It's a sticky problem.

dredmorbius 12y ago

The cost for this energy is $3-$6/gallon according to the US Navy's estimate. I get about $9/gallon if you include the costs of solar power provisioning. Or $126 - $378/bbl. That's not cheap, but it's a damned sight better than pretty much any biofuel alternative, which runs about $1000/bbl. And fuel is essential for transportation. Some transport can be liberated -- you can run passenger cars on batteries (for a price). Within cities, buses and even delivery vehicles can be electrified (possibly with on-board batteries for short off-grid excursions). Rail absolutely can be electrified. But a lot of uses cannot be. It's difficult to run power cords across oceans (though you might be able to electrify some barge and river traffic). Especially if you want to tap into them at sea. An electrified marine cargo business isn't an option. Your primary alternatives are sail power, biofuel (including possibly pelletized wood ships, an existing proposal), or electrically-generated synfuels as here. Airplanes handle electric cords even worse than boats do. There are numerous airline industry initiatives looking at biofuels, but Boeing's "biggest breakthrough there is" bet really doesn't pan out. Unless you want to cover _all_ of Oklahoma and Kansas, as well as parts of Louisiana, Texas, New Mexico, Colorado, Nebraska, and Missouri, just to supply fuel to the aviation industry. Worldwide, shipping and aviation account for about 5% each of total petroleum consumption. Or you could create the fuel. Yes, shipping prices, airfares, and air cargo rates would increase. But you'd still have them.

anigbrowl 12y ago
And while that's expensive by the standards of fossil fuel extraction (with oil at an unusually low price of ~$75/bbl right now), the cost of solar generation keeps falling and seemingly has further to fall, whereas the costs of fossil fuel extraction seem set to keep rising - both because of the increasing difficulties of access and because of increasing pressure to account for externalities, whether at the point of production (like wastewater injection) or consumption (CO2 and soot pollution). We should probably be looking at $126/bbl (at $3/gal) for fossil fuel so as to include the refining costs that would be obviated by this technology (and which have unaccounted-for externalities of their own). I don't see what's not to like here. You could even use relatively inefficient solar harvester arrays anchored offshore to do most of the processing, and in the event of a spill it would still be substantially cleaner and easier to manage than crude.
- dredmorbius 12y ago
  I'm generally pessimistic about the future. This is among the most interesting and positive things I've run across in years. There are still limitations, as I noted. Solar costs are falling, but if you look at total installed system costs remain high. EROEI and other metrics of net positive energy are perilously close to minimums necessary to sustain civilization. I'm not a fan of marine-based installations just based on weathering and corrosion. But a number of industrially-large plants would work. For the U.S., a single facility 4.5 km x 4.5 km x 10 m high would suffice based on USNRL's scaling factors. Split that among a number of regional facilities and you've got distributed capacity at a large industrial scale. It's the solar collection that's the big and pricey part of this.
  - anigbrowl 12y ago
    Thanks for your very interesting analysis here and above - I will certainly dig through your Reddit posts on the subject as I want to learn more about where the manufacturing barriers would be and what sort of private partnerships the Navy would enter into over the projected 7-10 year deployment timeframe, not least because I'm struck by the fact that the basic technology must be unencumbered by patents to the extent that it originates with the government. While agreeing that solar collection is no slamdunk (see for example this story about the SoCal Ivanpah plant running at only half the hoped-for capacity at present: http://www.mercurynews.com/business/ci_26954832/huge-mojave-solar-plant-lags-energy-production http://www.mercurynews.com/business/ci_26954832/huge-mojave-...) I'm personally OK with nuclear, geothermal and hydroelectric dams as potential power sources notwithstanding their own externalities.
    - dredmorbius 12y ago
      The part that's likely not to be unencumbered is the CO2 extraction itself. But otherwise, yes, much of this is public-domain tech. I'm on the fence regarding nuclear for at least two main reasons: safety (particularly the hard-to-quantify-of-guarantee long-term safety), and fuel availability. The picture on both strikes me as less than clear. Near term, perhaps useful as a bridge fuel. Geothermal is actually pretty awesome, but much more profoundly limited than most people suspect (tide and wave power are also overestimated -- the San Francisco Bay, for example, represents less total tidal power than the bay region uses in electricity, and only a small fraction of that potential could be extracted). Enhanced geothermal (basically, injection wells) have proven expensive and low-benefit, see Australia's Habanero project and its challenges. Hot, wet-field geo though is proven, and a high-yield resource in Iceland, Japan, the Philippines, Kenya, New Zealand, the US, and a few other regions. In developing regions (particularly Kenya) it could dramatically increase total electrical generation capacity. Hydro is largely built out and has environmental issues, though it also works quite well. It's a sticky problem.