Kyle R. Mcallister wrote:
Hello all,
First off, I must say I hate the term "alternative energy." Why?
Alternative has a sort of 'its not the greatest but its something to
fall back on' kind of attachment to it. I think this stuff is more
like "advanced" energy, but thats just my $0.75 (inflation, no longer
$0.02)
I've heard of the possibilities of running engines on compressed or
liquefied methane gas. Quite powerful, low pollution, much easier on
the inner works of the engine, valves in particular. I have also read
Zubrin's books on exploration schemes for Mars, in particular the
bits about in-situ fuel generation, that is, making methane with
resources available on the Martian surface.
Now my only problem with this, and why I prefer hydrogen over this,
is you still get CO2 from burning the methane. Supposedly there is
too much CO2 in the air. Well.... can't we just manufacture CH4 fuel
from H2O we get from seawater (or whatever logical source) and CO2
from the atmosphere? Granted the atmosphere of Mars is primarily CO2,
but it is also at a far far lower pressure. I would think there is
plenty of CO2 available in our atmosphere to be used to produce
automotive fuel (or gas for heating homes, cooking, etc.)
But, is there an efficient mechanism which can be used to push the reaction
2*H2O + CO2 <-> CH4 + 2*O2
backwards up the energy hill?
Plants do something like this, of course, but they end up with sugar
rather than methane. I haven't heard of an industrial process which
does it (aside from the industrial process called "farming").
If this were practical it might be a sensible alternative to Jones's
notion of making liquid air using floating windmills. Surely the energy
density of LNG is higher than LAIR. For an application like that, of
course, you'd most likely rather make propane or butane rather than
methane, since either one liquifies a lot more easily than methane ...
but I kind of suspect that all three are difficult to make just using
air, water, and electricity.
We would
then not be adding any CO2 back to the air, simply recycling what we
have already there. The energy to do this could be obtained by wind
farms or solar collectors.
As for the problem of transmitting all the energy from distant
facilities to consumers not near the power plants, why can we not use
the energy to make some high energy liquid or gas (CH4, LH2, etc.)
and literally pipeline our energy to distant points, at no loss?
Except of course whatever is involved in conversion/reconversion and
moving it from A to B.
Is there actually enough useable (as in, we can actually really
harness it) wind around the US to power all this? Solar?
Last I heard the offshore wind available around the US was enormous.
Kansas would be too far from the ocean to profit from it, of course, but
I hear rumors of some fairly reliable breezes out there in flatland, too
(tornadoes aside).
--Kyle
