Big Oil the problem, Renewables the future

And when those nukes fall into enemy hands?

 

Thorium reactors can't be weaponized, so....

 

Most of those can be synthesized from other sources since we can grow and extract oil from renewables like plants.

 

Anything radioactive can be used to make a dirty bomb.

 

Enriched thorium can be safely handled with your bare hands.

 

The desalination plants in the ME produce distilled water and gobs of cheap electricity as a bi-product.

They have gas driven and working on solar driven and I expect in the future they will have nuclear desalination.

 

Maybe, just maybe, because oil is so crucial for these other things, including mechanized agriculture, allowing us to feed the nation at an expense of only 6% of GDP, we should do our best to not blow the valuable oil on such frivolous things as driving around Hummers for recreation?

 

There is nor shortage of oil even now when Libya, Sudan and Yemen production is in the tank.

Syrian production is nil at this point.

The Saudis are going to be sending crude directly to downstream manufacturing rather than refining gasoline... and they have a huge market in China.

Why do you suppose the ppb is so low?

 

Yes, technically that's feaseable, but practically it is not. With ever growing population, we need to be growing food, and even growing plants to replace fossil fuels is a net loss of resource, as you will use fuel to create the synthetic fabric crop, etc.

When you run the numbers, the complete numbers, you will see that the Bio route does not pan out.

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Well yeah, of course!

 

You also handle a uranium pellet with your bare hands but that doesn't mean that it is safe to do so.

http://www.fukuleaks.org/web/?p=3101

 

"And cheap energy as a bi-product"? Sorry, I'm calling BS on this unless you can provide some facts to back this up. Do you have ANY idea just how much desalination costs, especially using RO technology? RO consumes HUGE, YUGE amounts of electricity, and certainly does not "yield" any cheap excess. Facts please!

 

There won't be a growing population if the existing food sources are decimated by climate change. Famines and droughts will make the entire discussion moot.

In essence we need renewables to stabilize the climate so that we can actually grow food to feed the population.

 

That is definitely not the way to go.It wastes multiples of energy more than it produces.

 

We can just feed them all Soylent Green! And please, leave "climate change" out of the conversation, just this one time please.......... Gawd!

 

It takes more energy to renew 'renewables' and therefore they are significantly less efficient.

 

The Saudis distill sea water... its not RO... and yes electricity is a desal bi-product in KSA since the late 1970s. They must have 50 desalination plants by now.

If Saudi Arabia and solar power don’t look quite right together, it’s time to shake off that 1970s oil crisis dust and take a look at the country’s recent forays into renewable energy.

The latest move is a solar powered desalination plant aimed at treating 60,000 square meters of seawater daily for the northeastern city of Al Khafji. According to the developer, this will be the world’s first utility scale, solar powered desalination plant.

We were just talking about the potential for Saudi Arabia to export its solar technology last summer, as the solar industry revs up in competition with the global market for diesel. The new desalination plant is more evidence that the country is serious about weaning itself off diesel fuel domestically as well.

According to AWT, the plant will have a 15 megawatt solar array using polycrystalline solar cells engineered by the research agency King Abdulaziz City Science and Technology.

Speaking of going to the top, Spain’s Triarena also lists the desalination plant among its projects. Energy efficiency goes hand in glove with renewable energy, so it looks like the system includes energy recovery, energy storage, and other efficiency systems to complement the solar array. Here’s a video from Triarena that spells it all out:


Seawater is becoming a critical resource as global freshwater supplies come under increasing stress, but conventional desalination is an expensive, energy-sucking process. Renewable energy offers a chance at lowering both costs and emissions, and renewable-powered desalination was a hot topic at the 2013 World Future Energy Summit in Abu Dhabi.

Well, it looks like the future is here. Yesterday, the company Abengoa announced that it has been tapped to partner in the development of the Al Khafji desalination plant by TAQNIA, Saudi Arabia’s innovation investment agency, through its newly formed company Advanced Water Technology (AWT).

If Abengoa rings a bell, you might be thinking of the world’s largest parabolic trough concentrating solar system. That’s just one among many high-profile renewable energy projects under the company’s umbrella, so it looks like Saudi Arabia went to the A-list for this project.

continued.

http://cleantechnica.com/2015/01/22/worlds-largest-solar-powered-desalination-plant-under-way/

 

Hah!

 

The military is taking renewables seriously because they are taking climate change seriously.

Are you saying that the military is wrong on both counts?

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Please explain how you "renew" wind and solar energy?

 

The Saudis have also built over 300 recharge dams to capture ground water.. They do use some RO in combination with regular desal, but RO doesn't get rid of heavy metals or some bacteria like e-coli.


Cogeneration

Cogeneration is generating excess heat and electricity generation from a single process.

Cogeneration can provide usable heat for desalination in an integrated, or "dual-purpose", facility where a power plant provides the energy for desalination. Alternatively, the facility's energy production may be dedicated to the production of potable water (a stand-alone facility), or excess energy may be produced and incorporated into the energy grid

 

Because you can recover energy from the high pressure reject stream of water. Also I do know that there are a number of projects with cleaning gray water/wastewater that can create energy using microbial fuel cells.

I've also been involved in some projects through my business for cleaning various types of wastewater that create very lucrative beneficial by-products dependent on input.

The US is very far behind in these technologies and its a great shame that you see places like the middle east leading the charge.

 

Uhh.. You understand this far better than I do.

 

Anyone that knows anything about SBIR or STTR projects with the government...particularly the DOD would know that the military is investing HUGE money in renewable technology. They've had massive projects for forward bases to use only renewable technology because the most dangerous parts of a lot of missions are when they have to go on runs to pick up food and water.

So the military is highly interested in projects for smart city/smart grid technologies which will enable them to create their own energy, their own water, and their own food without them having to restock and/or transport it.

In addition, DOE, DARPA, etc in the last two years are starting to realize that their reliability on old grid technology is dangerous. If those grids go down...whether by direct attacks or cyber attacks, the US is not prepared to logistically handle it well. So now they're looking at ways to make cities more self-sufficient. Some of the projects that I've seen are amazing...and remarkably small and transportable.

I'm not sure why anyone would think that that future is in old grid technology...it simply isn't for a number of reasons.

And by the way, if you're interested in job creation...or global leadership in technology...clean tech is the only direction we should be moving in.

 

The military is "taking renewable seriously" because the Executive Branch ORDERED them to, the same way that NASA is doing "Muslim outreach" for the same BS reasons. Psst! They don't really take renewables seriously, because the only thing they really take seriously is killing people and breaking things, which is their express mission. What you are failing to account for is that renewables are also a drain on resources, and their net positive impact is a loss, as more goes into the system then comes out. Don't argue with me, especially as I pretty well know what I'm talking about as energy is what I do for a living to a very large degree, argue with the facts and figures. Do the math. We CAN create fusion even now, but we put many times more energy into the system to achieve it than we can extract with current tech, so NO, fusion is not viable at this time. Many of the alternative energy technologies are in the same boat, and only exist with outsized govt. subsidy.

Here is some encouraging news however regarding wind turbines. I am a manufacturer of precision machined components for a variety of industries (energy, defense, civil aero, med, ag, etc.) and recently I worked on a project for a group of engineers at the Wind Power Institute at Texas Tech U. These guys were wizards with radar systems, and they have developed technology to monitor turbines in real time, with exceptionally high resolution regarding the vortexes coming off the tips of the turbine blades, which degrade downstream turbine efficiency. With the positive feedback loop and the monitoring tech they have, they have demonstrated upwards of 30% gains in EXISTING wind farm installations, and can produce even better results with new farms built to incorporate this tech from the start. What this means is that coal as a source of electricity is on the way out due to NATURAL MARKET FORCES, which is as it should be.

Liquid fuel is simply too safe and too energy dense to be properly supplanted by battery tech for the foreseeable future, so we're going to be using gas and diesel for quite some time yet, but wind power is about to make huge strides in efficiency. Here in the U.S. its the government red tape that is stymieing the utilization of this technology, but I know for fact that in the norther European countries that test installations are already under way. Try to look up info on a dude named Dr. Jerry Guynes. This is REAL, and it's happening.

Anyway, just a dose of reality for all you internet know nothings to chew upon....

 

So why did you take off after I posted two articles proving you wrong?

 

Actually you know than I do about desalination plants...but I read the industry periodicals that come out so I'm aware of some of the technology that they're either using or testing for implementation. Its amazing how fast the technology is moving. And its mostly because they don't have much choice....they know that they're going to run out of underground water very soon.