On Mon, Jun 14, 2010 at 11:00 AM, "Dan Minette" <[email protected]> wrote:
> Earlier I had reported that the events in the Gulf were unprecedented, a > "black swan". Since then, folks in the oil patch are still incredulous, but > are increasingly upset with BP breaking the rules of the game. snip (excellent material) > Up until now, a replacement for fossil fuels hasn't existed. True. It's not hard to make or collect energy, it just hard to do it for a low enough cost to displace fossil fuels. >And, if the US > and Europe decided to not use oil or coal, then they'd just be blown away by > China and India, who's economy would expand while ours would shrink as costs > skyrocketed in the West and stayed the same elsewhere. So if you want to displace fossil fuels without causing an economic disaster, the cost of the new energy source has to be less current cost. That's about 2 cents per kWh for electricity and 1 cent to make synthetic hydrocarbon fuels. > The only solution is a positive black swan. It is increasingly likely (I've > changed my odds from 5% to 20%) that synthetic biology will allow the > creation of fuels from sunlight, carbon dioxide and sea water. This is the > best bet I've seen yet. Regular biology does this all the time. But starting with photosynthesis at no better than 3%, the process is woefully inefficient. But say someone did create a synthetic algae that had a truly remarkable efficiency to capture sunlight of 10% and better yet, it excreted oil into the water and nothing ate it. Figure 5kWh per day, at ten percent .5 kWh/day per square meter. There is about 40 kWh in a gallon of liquid fuel, so figure that each square meter will make 1/80 gal per day (sorry for the mixed units). A square km has a million square meter and would make about 12,500 gal per day or 312 bbl/day/km^2. The Gulf of Mexico has 1.6 million square km of area so the production would be around 500 million bbls per day. US usage is around 20 M bbl/day, world production around 80 M bbl/day. If this thing gets loose in the sea, BPs disaster would seem like nothing. Better to hope it can't be done. I had rather use higher efficiency and keep the hydrocarbons inside steel containers. Penny a kWh will make $30/bbl oil and 2 cents will make $50/bbl oil. (The chemistry, energy balance and economics are simple to figure out.) Two cent power means a capital cost of $1.6 B/GW or less. SBSP will get into that range if there is a way to get transport to GEO down into the $100 per kg or less range. It looks like there is another way as well. I will be able to talk about it sometime in August when the patents publish. Keith _______________________________________________ http://box535.bluehost.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l_mccmedia.com
