Energy!

Excess energy can be used to produce hydrogen as a storage medium. The H2 can be used to power generators later with nothing but water as the exhaust. That water can be reused to make the next batch of hydrogen.

The efficiency of electrolysis for hydrogen production was only about 50%. But I have read of processes that use catalysers that improve this significantly.

 

Interesting and certainly confirms what I have read of the energy situation in Germany. Where is your country going nuclear?

 

And you can cycle the CO2 to algae farms and with new strains of microbes produce clean diesel.

 

Any attempt ar storage always incurs "losses" both in the loading and draining process. The secret is to find the most efficient method of all and H2 is definitely one of the more interesting options. Others include quinones in flow batteries and compressed air storage.

What we do need to do is become smarter about collecting energy that we waste IMO.

If there was a generator on each axle of a train that was going downhill that could be stored in batteries to drive the electric train motors that would have a dual benefit because the generators act as brakes.

Many towns on the plains use water tanks to provide pressure. The water flowing back down could be turning generators.

While none of these are necessarily the most efficient methods that we don't exploit them is wasteful.

 

[video=youtube;IxyvVkeW7Nk]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IxyvVkeW7Nk[/video]
https://energy.gov/eere/bioenergy/algal-biofuels

http://www.nrel.gov/docs/legosti/fy98/24190.pdf

The end result was this: There were and are still are technical challenges. But the only reason this work was discontinued was that the price of oil was too low. Algae couldn't hope to compete on price at the pump. Petro-diesel was down to $1.00 a gallon, IIRC.

Ironically, if we paid the real price of petroleum in blood and treasure, we would have been using algae derived fuels long ago. But we mask that cost. In fact, we ignore it altogether. We don't even know the real price of a gallon of gas.

 

You can go to H2 fuel cells for higher efficiency but the initial cost is generally prohibitive. At scale, fuel cells are outrageously expensive. In fact, some years ago I did an application much like we are discussing. The material cost of the fuel cell option was about ten or twenty times higher than burning the H2 as fuel.

Correction, I believe it was more like 100 x more expensive. It was a real jaw-dropper to say the least!

 

Unfortunately, burning H2 as fuel is only about 25% efficient. Fuel cells are about 60% efficient.

Gasoline [internal combustion] engines are about 25% efficient. Diesels are about 35% efficient.

You can burn H2 in a modified gasoline engine.

 

Speaking of the difference between internal combustion engines I was driving a Ford hybrid gasoline vehicle and achieving about 36 mpg in mostly urban driving conditions. (If I hypermiled I could increase that to 50+ but I am talking about ordinary daily driving.) Now I am driving a larger diesel powered vehicle doing less urban and more country driving and acheiving the same 36 mpg. To be fair the Ford was smaller but weighed almost the same as the diesel vehicle because of the batteries and I think that weight plays a major factor in fuel economy. The Ford was on mostly flat terrain whereas the diesel is being driven around much more hilly areas. I was expecting the diesel to not acheive the same milage and I am pleasantly surprised to be getting as much as I am.

 

It's cool.

The DAP will make e'rything alright.

 

When EROI hits 1.5-2. we'll open the 640 million acres of land owned by the Federal Government. There's no reason to hold on to that land anymore since no one can get there to soak in the beauty without unleashing a HUGE carbon footprint on their fellow man. Might as well sell leases. BTW. This goes along with your plots of the impending disaster:

 

Let alone the fact we try and make all energy consumption backwards compatible...that is the main expense. From will it work in my 60's something Chevet, to you will make copper obsolete, and have to rely on super conductors, etc...eventually, rather then making old stuff work with new..it is cheaper and better to just upgrade in the long run.

 

Dude you are clueless when it comes to US energy reserves and policy. People have been predicting peak oil for forty years and we haven't even gotten close yet. In fact US energy reserves have risen every year since 1940. The combination of Fracking and horizontal drilling has hugely increased the amount of available petroleum reserves in the US. Hell we are just beginning to explore a whole new previously untapped oil field south of Midland, Texas. Note the same processes that create oil are still in play today. Geology is still geology.

 

The graph you show is for US oil AND GAS reserves. Mine was for DOMESTIC oil. I don't dispute that there are reserves that still have a much more favorable EROI (shale and tar sand oil are NOT among them).

In any case, care to address my point of ever diminishing oil EROI (domestic and worldwide) and what it means?

 

Diesel has 13% more energy per gallon than gasoline, which is a fact that people often forget in the comparison.

 

It's best to understand the landscape before sounding the alarm.

(1) Our Gulf Coast Refineries are capable of refining the cheapest of cheap crude oil in huge quantities;
(2) 50% of our East Coast refinery capacity has been shuttered in recent years;
(3) The Jones Act prevents the Gulf Coast refineries from shipping refined products to the NE via tanker;
(4) Mexico produces 2M bbl / day of crude oil, but has only 1M bbl / day of refinery capacity, so you will find that
--- we 'import' 1M bbl / day of crude from Mexico and 'export' 1M bbl / day of petroleum products ---
so, despite the appearance, we are a refining service provider to Mexico --- who consumes every bit of its 2M bbl production;
(5) Canada produces 4M bbl / day of crude oil, but has only 2M bbl / day of refinery capacity ---
--- we export 1M bbl / day presumably of refined product to Canada ---
--- Canada consumes less than 2.5M bbl / day of crude --- ships refined products to the US NE to make up for the refinery closures
and I presume also ships excess crude to US refineries.
(6) Remaining East Coast refineries were taking delivery from Bakken until the global prices dropped and oil from shale couldn't meet the
price collapse. They shop for the best price, limited by the quality of crude they can handle.

We could well be independent of oil imports if you had the socialist state you want with a government that owned the production and refineries. Because petroleum and petroleum products are fungible and incompetent lawmakers have made life miserable, we don't know whether we could be energy independent. However, it will always be cheaper for an east coast refiner to import oil from abroad than to ship it from Alaska ,,, and if Alaskan oil that can't be used along the west coast is better off being exported, so be it.

Don't assume you can make blanket assumptions based on your intolerance and blind hatred for people in the mainstream of political ideology. At least 80% of the time opinions based on ideology alone, aka, dogma, are wrong.

 

All you're doing is illustrating the opposite of what you're attempting. Sweet crude was the cheapest and best form of oil for our uses. Your "one sector" was THE sector that mattered most. What's left is dirtier and far more expensive to extract and even IT "has a peak".

There's no fiction. Peak oil is very real.

The sun will always shine and the wind will always blow (for the purposes of this discussion...if those things stop we have far bigger issues than energy production so let' not get stupid here)

 

The graph I showed was for domestic production ,,, you showed the Jed Clampett curve. No someone with a rifle isn't going to discover an oil well by accident. First of all, 7 Obama 'judges' and 3 Clinton 'judges' in the 4th Circuit overturned the 2nd Amendment, so Jed wouldn't have been able to own that rifle.

The government owns 640 acres of land. When that land is released, no doubt it will be cheaper to find oil.

Keep in mind that proven reserves in the US increased by 90% since 2008.

 

Yet wind farms are hell on migratory birds and current generations of solar panels are expensive NS have a very nasty (environmentally speaking) production process. Not to mention which the production of steel for the windmills them selves is also not terrible friendly from an environmental perspective. And what hapens to the land for several acres around if one of those giant salt towers takes a direct hit from a tornado.

 

Thats whats also stupid, we are shutting down our nuclear powe plans at the same time so although we have our subsidized renewables, we still have one of the highest CO2 Emmissions in Europe.

 

Yeah, the Aztecs were also very moral people. To themselves. I didn't care for their morality as I do not care for what sunni wahabi muslims consider to be morality either. As someone once said about a friend, with friends like that, you do not need enemies.

 

Natural gas is clean and falls into the environmental clean energy definition. Trump has stated he wants to use oil and coal, but use them safely and responsibly.

How do you make a statement like that. To say just because conservatives support all energy policies they must not care about th environment is crazy talk. The left has lied about the impact of fracking to push their clean energy policies. There are ways to responsibly and safely extract oil, coal, and gas.

The US has vast untapped oil supplies. More than Saudi Arabia. The problem is twofold: we are an oil exporter and we have been limited to the amounts we can get by federal law. If we choose to, we could sustain ourselves and export oil driving down the cost.

A little drama here but OK. Most republicans are all for clean energy. But in a pragmatic way. Necessity is the great provider. When alternative energies become competitive and can sustain the demand it will change. But right now wind, solar, hydro, and natural gas are not enough. Technology will improve and oil companies invest billions in research to find alternatives. As a suppliment, solar panels for homes are great. But as a stand alone they cannot provide all the power needed. Life style change is also in order. No one wants pollution and to label conservatives as a group who put profit over the environment is wrong. But let's be practical and realize we need all energy sources in this very demanding energy World.

 

Sun shine is not a gaurantee nor is the wind. Did you know that one year Hawaii had 40 consecutive days of rain. Solar panels not much good then.

 

The usual fear mongering. We have enough energy to be energy independent with oil and gas but the are global commodities so energy independence is meaningless. Also, Trump's plan is to pursue all energy unlike the previous administration. 50 years from now the energy market will not be the same as new technology comes online.

 

Interesting revelation on stocks. But, unless that CEO sells those stocks they are only valuable on paper. So, if we want US oil reserves on federal lands to work for the American people Pres Trump has a tool kit at his disposal to make that happen. The question is does he have the political will?

 

And then there us the other side... The side that says they have to force people off oil at all costs. They do not care that their alternatives cannot meet demand, or that every tax funded clean energy company started by Obama failed. They do not care about the economic hardship they cause by restricting oil and forcing the cost of gas to go up so that their alternative energies can be competitive.
There is a compromise but it has to be done iaw technologies capabilities. We can use both old and new but to sacrifice one over the other is not workable.