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| Petroleum: THE Clean, Renewable Fuel For The Future |
| 11.21.05 (6:12 pm) |
By Mike Johnston
After spending the last 10 odd years studying alternative energy and promoting same it might seem strange that I would come to the conclusion that petroleum was our best hope for the future. But I like be honest and after considering all the available options I think that hydrocarbons can be our most valuable energy storage medium for the foreseeable future. In this story I would like to outline my reasons for coming to this conclusion and will keep it simple and hotlink to more in-depth information on each relevant point.
I think that we can all agree that any source of energy that is developed now must meet certain requirements. The most important of these are as follows:
1) Clean, with either very little or no pollution
2) Renewable, it must be able to be grown or produced from recyclable materials
3) Storage, it must be at least as easy to store as present energy methods
4) Distribution, it must be easy to distribute and safe to handle and use
5) Cost, it must be affordable to the average person or why even bother
In order to make hydrocarbons fit all of the above requirements we will have to modify how we produce and use them. First off we are approaching the point where we can no longer produce enough naturally occurring petroleum to meet demand. This fact is coupled with the possibility that we have eacheda peak in production and availability.
Hydrocarbons are no different from any other chemical. We tend to think of crude oil as something like water or dirt, natural and abundant and not something you can just "make",but that is the wrong way to think. Oil is a compound of hydrogen and carbon which can be artifically produced using the Fischer Tropsch process.
This method has been known since WW II and pilot plants were set up in the United States. It was almost (but not quite) as cheap to produce oil this way as to produce it from crude. But since it was slightly more expensive it was commercially abandoned. The use of solar and wind might offset some of this cost though. Also recent developments have potentially reduced the overall cost of this process substantially. Perhaps making it eventually cheaper to produce gasoline this way than to extract it from the ground.
The process requires energy in the form of heat and pressure to work. But that is true of any energy storage medium, you need energy to store energy and there are unavoidable losses in the process. In the case of producing oil this energy could come from the sun and wind. Either of these sources are so abundant that it has been estimated that they could take care of all of the world's energy needs for the forseeable future.
Problem is we use a great deal of our energy to run automobiles, trains and heavy trucks and we can't yet use the sun or wind directly for this purpose. So we have to convert that energy into the stored chemical energy of hydrocarbons. Solar could be used to produce the necessary heat and pressre for the combinining of hydrogen and carbon. Companies like the Solar Hydrogen Energy Corporation already make solar concentrators which can create heat of around 6000 degrees Fahrenheit from the rays of the sun. Think about lighting scraps of paper on fire with a magnifying glass and you get the idea. They developed these devices to split water into hydrogen and oxygen thermally but I see no reason why a similar device couldn't produce the heat (and with heat expansion in a closed container which would provide the pressure) necessary for this process as well.
The carbon necessary could come from cheap, abundant coal. The hydrogen could be produced on site, as needed from water also using either solar or wind energy as mentioned above or by electrolysis. So here we have the two raw materials needed. The next step is storage and distribution and then finally how to make them renewable and non-polluting.
Storage, transportation and distribution of the resulting hydrocarbons could obviously be carried out simply by using the existing infrastructure which is already in place and has been serving us rather well for a long time now.
The crucial part of this process is going to be making this non polluting. To do that we will have to find a way to strip the hydrogen atoms off of the carbon atoms in our artificial hydrocarbons and combine that hydrogen with oxygen while leaving the carbon intact. Is this possible? I believe it is. In normal internal
combustion engines you can sometimes see a buildup of CARBON in various spots. Where does this pure carbon come from? From incomplete combustion of hydrocarbons. The hydrogen is stripped off the carbon, combined with oxygen and the carbon is left behind. This is precisely the effect that is needed.
Fuel cells have been designed which can utilize diesel or kerosene as their source of hydrogen and an ideally designed fuel cell for this process would work the same way. The hydrogen atoms would have to be stripped of carbon atoms and the nucleus passed through the PEM while the electron passes through the wire. Is this possible? It would seem so. In fuel cells that utilize hydrocarbon fuels there is a problem of carbon deposits forming on the electrodes which is a buildup of pure carbon on the electrodes which inhibits their performance. This is just what would be desired though. All that has to be done is to engineer a cell which intends to have this left behind carbon and has a way to collect it.
Click on the above picture to watch a video of how fuel cells work, provided by the Department of Energy
The carbon would then be sent back to the production plant to be re-combined with hydrogen. Since the exhaust byproduct of this energy system would be water vapor ( 2H2 + O2 = 2H2O ) our end products are water and solid carbon. No pollution. At the production plant our raw materials are water and carbon so hydrocarbons in this way are transformed into a totally clean, environmentally friendly and endlessly renewable energy source. What
is amazing is that the technology to achieve this exists now and only needs to be pursued and developed.
The end result will be that independent producers small and large will spring up everywhere and the monopoly of big oil will come to an end. All the new competition and the limitless availability of the resource will drive energy prices to lows that haven't been seen in years and millions of new jobs will be created worldwide. There would even be the potential for personal sized production units for homes or larger units for businesses like trucking companies. For all these reasons I think that, while many different energy sources will undoubtedly contribute to our overall needs in the future, hydrocarbons are our best overall choice for the future of transportation.
Tags:Alternative Energy
Hydrogen
Peak Oil
Oil
Energy Future
Fuel Cell
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