Thread: No free lunch!!!

Tweet

bob lots to digest , lots of good points, one thought for the capital needed for whatever: oil companies should be developing the alternative fuels it would be to their advantage to keep things going and stay profitable. One other thought
should anyone out there be of a scientific mind , is science fiction all fiction , remember jules verne wrote of a power source with the energy of the sun. yes there is an answer nothing is impossible

Good point on the AFs, and i think that it would also make sense for the companies to begin making plants for depolomorazation too. That way, they dont have to buy of other nations. They make the oil and claim 100% of the profit! Or would that make too much sense?

Well nobody picked up on the syn-fuel idea. Dept. of Energy researchers have been working on this for many years and the technology is known. South Africa developed the "Sasol" technology which is an improvement on the old German methods using Ni and Fe calalysts to make liquid fuels from "baked coal" gas. If you heat coal in the absense of oxygen and spray water into the hot carbon you get "water gas" which is a mixture of hydrogen and carbon monoxide. That gas can be sent through special zeolite catalysts such as the famous ZMS5 which is a special form of aluminum oxide with special porous holes and "Shazam" out comes methanol, ethanol, propanol, etc., ie alcohols which are liquid fuels. When the price of gas gets up to what they pay in Europe you need to write to your Congressman and tell them to support building a "Sasol" pilot plant in the U.S. and get ready to switch over to coal as a fossil fuel which can be converted to liquid fuels. Perhaps you do not know there is an extreme rat race for science researchers to get federal grant money AND then when those researchers discover something practical, the U.S. Gov. owns the patent rights and that there is an agency whose sole job is to distribute those new processes to various companies. Do you see any potential for insider trading there? Anyway the North American continent is set with lots of coal but the U.S. needs to set up large scale pilot plants for conversion of coal to liquid fuels in the near future as well as open up the Alaskan oil fields.

Don Shillady
Retired Chemist/teenage rodder

glenn, the oil industry is in fact doing quite a bit in the developement of alternative fuels. As you point out, they see the implications to their long term survival. If you notice some of the current ads from BP, & Exxon/Mobil, they both talk about their working in that area. In doing some research on Don's comments about the Sasol process I see where Chevron has partnered with Sasol. And I'm sure there are others. I suspect that their priority is in liquid fuels since they already have a storage, and distribution system in place which would make the outcomes more practical.

Don, part of the point of this thread is for others, such as you've done here, to bring up other concepts and technologies. But as the thread title extolls, to each of these technologies there is cost and, in some cases, impediments to developement. Also, you cause me to do research into less familiar areas which I enjoy. Based on what I've read about Sasol's process it's fairly expensive comparitively. They have stated objectives of figuring out ways to lower the processing costs to be more competitive. The biggest bugaboo they point to recently (obviously prior to the current upswing in crude prices) was the low cost of crude. I didn't dig deep enough to find where the price of crude needs to reach to make their current configuration competitive, but maybe we're near that point. Two situations that need to be kept in mind though. It appears that natural gas is needed in their feed stream in addition to coal. Plus they need to produce oxygen. While technically feasible, all of these extra steps increase the production cost of the finished product. And we've already talked about our domestic limitations on natural gas supplies. Which in turn means their plants need to be where the gas is, which means more transportation cost for the finished product. Also, it seems that 80% of the output of their process is diesel fuel. Albeit high quality, low sulphur diesel fuel, but, at current market conditions, not our highest priority.

Now that's not necessarily a bad thing. It contributes to part of the message I've tried to get across by starting this thread. There is no silver bullet. No single process, no magic potion that will instantly cure our needs. Very likely our future energy requirements will be satisfied by a variety of these alternatives, used as a mix to meet market demand. Most likely costs will be higher because the technology to produce these alternatives is higher by a variety of multiples than the traditional crude processing mechanisms. As many of the sites I visited indicated, the Sasol process, for example though not alone, so far, hasn't been competive cost wise on a large scale. They too have operated with government subsidy. And that's still the key. There can be an infinite number of wonderful and creative solutions, but will they be cost competitive?