Coal as an Energy Source

[boatgeek]

Today, any person in America that wants to go to college free can. ANY PERSON! Not doing so is a choice. A choice either made by the parents or by the individual themselves. Both of my children went to college for free. Now I get to spend their college savings account...

The way we arranged it with our kids was that they had a set fund of money that they could spend how they wished. If they went to a public university, they'd have money left over. If they went private, they'd have to work their butts off and take out loans. They certainly could have gone military and used the money for something else later in life (less some relatively minor penalties for not using 529 money for education). Regardless, the money was theirs. Fortunately, neither of them decided to go out and buy a muscle car.

And this thread is drifting like a rally driver!

 

[OverTheTop]

Hey, at least in Oz you don't have to pay the full freight of college.

University is basically full-fee paying now. Up till about 20 years ago it was somewhat subsidised. Fees were just starting to kick in when I finished my degree in '92.

Yeah, but that's your fault.

That's exactly what she says.

 

[OverTheTop]

Did she pay it?

We are still waiting

 

[kuririn]

We are still waiting

You took care of her when she was helpless and needed diapers, and she will take care of you when........
Never mind.

 

[Bravo52]

That's not entirely true. Some cannot do the military thing and some do not qualify for free college.

That being said, it is inexcusable that we do not prepare our youth for service.

Every state I've lived in (at least 5) had/has free scholarship programs for state universities. The local community college where I currently live is free ($15 admin fee) if you maintain the grades. All of this free stuff is predicated on putting forth the effort. Has nothing to do with demographics or the military.

Ironically, the "lottery scholarship" in my state is bolstered by the abundance of oil and gas revenue (back to the original post) that funded a $3-5B surplus in the state. Anyone in-state qualifies for free college except for the first semester. But wait, there's more. The state added a "bridge scholarship" to cover that with the surplus. All you have to do is maintain a 2.5 gpa. It's comical.

 

[Alan15578]

Today, any person in America that wants to go to college free can. ANY PERSON! Not doing so is a choice. A choice either made by the parents or by the individual themselves. Both of my children went to college for free. Now I get to spend their college savings account...

That is not always true. But since we are drifting... I paid for my own college education, but I could only afford in-state tuition at a coal fired, land grant university, forgoing a car. Sure, you could sue your parents, but that can be counter productive...

I did give full consideration to ROTC but I did know if I could tolerate the military hierarchical environment and structure for 4-6 years. I asked one honest recruiter what I would be doing for the military, e.g monitoring contractor performance in weapon design, etc. He told me that they really just wanted Lieutenants to lead squads of enlisted soldiers.

 

[BlackBrant]

I read not too long ago that the human population growth is slowing and population is likely to plateau and begin to decrease slowly. I don’t have the source, and don’t remember specific details, so feel free to be skeptical. But I think the timeframe for the plateau was well within this century, like maybe in another 30 years, and the maximum population was expected to be below 10 billion. I don’t think population is dropping to 1 or 2 billion anytime soon, but it should start coming down slowly in this century.

Population growth due to birth rate is already negative in a lot of developed countries. Some countries only grow due to immigration. I think that’s true for a lot of European countries, and it may even be true of the U.S. Negative population growth can cause demographic problems, like not enough current workers to support retired workers. It can depress GDP growth. Places like Japan that don’t welcome immigration are having some of these demographic problems. So is China where they’ve had a history of misguided population control.

Saw this a while ago:

 

[PDawg]

Well they did, with both the "pill" and another method I won't mention

It appears that was a good start, but not nearly enough. Too many are willingly having huge families and too many are having kids to enable the collection of freebies.

 

[Banzai88]

....... too many are having kids to enable the collection of freebies.

You get what you incentivise.

 

[Alan15578]

Side note about building trades. About a decade ago (man I feel old!), we took the family to Switzerland. One thing that stood out to me was that every single family home construction site had a little whirly crane on it, a little brother to the crane you see here at major construction sites. Apparently, labor in Switzerland is too expensive to be worth using humans to lift building materials into place. That's the kind of thing I'm talking about with major changes to the economic systems.

Historically, the greatest invention was the ox yoke. Prior to that time humans, often slaves, were preferred to do work. After the ox yoke, oxen and then other animals were the preferred beast of burden. They just became cheaper and more efficient with the yoke than human labor. Eventually, coal and other non renewable energy sources became cheaper and more efficient than using animals. I am not suggesting that we abandon any of the technological advances that we have made.

Indeed, we need a large enough population that we have specialization and division of labor, efficient structure for organizing people, and advancing technology. However, when population is larger than optimum, too much of our GDP gets used up in policing, wars, mutual defense, competing for housing, etc. that funding things like space exploration and fusion energy research, become more difficult.

Human population is the driving force behind the buildup of CO2 and global climate change. Coal is just the convenient target. I think there is still a place for the well regulated burning of coal in large plants, but we should never return to burning coal in homes, small businesses, and transportation systems. Natural gas is much cleaner, but it cannot be renewed, if at all, at the rates of consumption. Natural gas is clean enough burning that it can be used for home heating, while widespread burning of wood and coal in homes would be disastrous. Might it not be a good idea to burn coal in large well regulated plants today to reserve some natural gas for future home consumption?

 

[boatgeek]

Historically, the greatest invention was the ox yoke. Prior to that time humans, often slaves, were preferred to do work. After the ox yoke, oxen and then other animals were the preferred beast of burden. They just became cheaper and more efficient with the yoke than human labor. Eventually, coal and other non renewable energy sources became cheaper and more efficient than using animals. I am not suggesting that we abandon any of the technological advances that we have made.

The ox yoke freed humans from doing carrying-type work, but there's certainly other work that was economically efficient (not morally right!) to use slave labor for.

Indeed, we need a large enough population that we have specialization and division of labor, efficient structure for organizing people, and advancing technology. However, when population is larger than optimum, too much of our GDP gets used up in policing, wars, mutual defense, competing for housing, etc. that funding things like space exploration and fusion energy research, become more difficult.

Can't argue with that.

Human population is the driving force behind the buildup of CO2 and global climate change. Coal is just the convenient target. I think there is still a place for the well regulated burning of coal in large plants, but we should never return to burning coal in homes, small businesses, and transportation systems. Natural gas is much cleaner, but it cannot be renewed, if at all, at the rates of consumption. Natural gas is clean enough burning that it can be used for home heating, while widespread burning of wood and coal in homes would be disastrous. Might it not be a good idea to burn coal in large well regulated plants today to reserve some natural gas for future home consumption?

Full disclosure: my natural gas furnace is running right now. We used to run oil (most recently a biodiesel mix), but converted the furnace to NG a while back. About 10 years ago, I would have believed you. I really believed in Peak Oil then, in the sense that it was going to be hard to continue to increase oil production and it would naturally peak. Then the fracking revolution came and increasing oil (and natural gas) production is a matter of turning on the fracking machines. That won't continue forever, but it pushed the peak a long ways out. Similarly, US reserves of natural gas are nearly a century's worth of production at current rates. However, I also believe that we're going to need to leave quite a bit of fossil fuel in the ground for the time being in order to avoid other catastrophes. Like, say, Cape Canaveral being underwater at high tide by the end of the century.

 

[jderimig]

Human population is the driving force behind the buildup of CO2 and global climate change.

Actually energy consumption tracks with real global GDP growth not human population. Dramatically increased standard of living per capita drives increasing CO2 emissions. OR increasing CO2 emissions dramatically increases per capita standard of living. Refer to the Kaya Identity.

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/energy-use-per-person-vs-gdp-per-capita

 

[cls]

It appears that was a good start, but not nearly enough. Too many are willingly having huge families and too many are having kids to enable the collection of freebies.

How do you know that? Are you just projecting moral judgement on other people? Do you have any actual facts about how many families are having kids? Who gave you the authority to say how many is too many? Too many families having too many kids. Wow

 

[cls]

Natural gas is much cleaner, but it cannot be renewed, if at all, at the rates of consumption.

I'm a fan of natural gas, as you note it is very clean burning. It is mostly methane CH4 so easy enough to synthesize from CO2. SpaceX and NASA have prototyped synthesizers to use on Mars, for example.

The trouble with it is, CH4 is a powerful greenhouse gas and it lasts a long time. Ok to burn it, but we dare not leak it... And we do leak it, far too much of it. Turns out many main gas lines are very leaky.

No one knows how to fix the leaks (maintain the pipes?) so regulators want to eliminate domestic use. Wow is that wrong headed.

Industrial uses like gas turbines for electric generators are some of the highest efficiency and clean generators of all.

 

[bjphoenix]

Full disclosure: my natural gas furnace is running right now. We used to run oil (most recently a biodiesel mix), but converted the furnace to NG a while back.

I've had NG furnaces everywhere I've lived until my current house, there is no NG in my neighborhood. My house had an old electric furnace, last month we replaced the system with a heat pump. I liked the idea of a heat pump but it has its downsides. But now that I'm thinking about heatpumps I was wondering what other systems could benefit from it. I wondered if natural gas powerplants could use a heat pump to save some of the exhaust heat from the boilers and steam from the turbines to preheat water. I can't evaluate if the savings in energy would pay for the increased complexity, natural gas is a fairly cheap form of heat.

Recently I stumbled on a product that I had not seen before- clothes dryers powered by heat pump technology. It is an interesting idea to think about. The devices use less energy to run than a normal heater, and better than that they don't exhaust heated air that must be replaced with outside air that then has to be conditioned by your house A/C system. The downside is that the device is very expensive. Also I wondered if it would require more maintenance although the compressor system in a refrigerator for instance is fairly reliable.

But more to the overall discussion- there is a push to stop using fossil fuels in favor of making everything electric. I've read that to convert all current vehicles to electric would require more raw materials than the earth contains. As the population increases, and I think parts of the population will become more modernized and thus use more energy than they did before, we will run out of resources and run out of energy. If increasing technology doesn't save us then future generations will face difficulties.

So another thought that I had- all of the "green energy" push is aimed at cars, but pollution from cars only accounts for maybe 1/4 of the pollution generated. And electric cars will only decrease that 1/4 of the population by a small amount despite the cost involved. It would seem that we should consider all sources of pollution and determine which ones can be affected the easiest or for the least cost, rather than just assuming that cars are the problem.

 

[bjphoenix]

I'm a fan of natural gas, as you note it is very clean burning. It is mostly methane CH4 so easy enough to synthesize from CO2. SpaceX and NASA have prototyped synthesizers to use on Mars, for example.

That's interesting- I'd like to know more about chemistry so I would know this information. I've thought that what we need is a portable energy source that we can synthesize using electricity. Hydrogen is one such material, maybe methane is too. Either one could be a better portable energy source than Lithium batteries.

 

[boatgeek]

I've had NG furnaces everywhere I've lived until my current house, there is no NG in my neighborhood. My house had an old electric furnace, last month we replaced the system with a heat pump. I liked the idea of a heat pump but it has its downsides. But now that I'm thinking about heatpumps I was wondering what other systems could benefit from it. I wondered if natural gas powerplants could use a heat pump to save some of the exhaust heat from the boilers and steam from the turbines to preheat water. I can't evaluate if the savings in energy would pay for the increased complexity, natural gas is a fairly cheap form of heat.

Any time you have hot gas, you can recover some energy. The big questions are what to use the energy for and is the savings worth the cost of installation and maintenance. If you need heat for buildings or regasifying LNG, a small boiler in the stack is definitely a possibility. It's probably harder to get useful power generation out of the exhaust gas because of temperatures, but I'm skating to the far end of my knowledge here. On larger factory trawlers, they often install stack boilers to either generate steam for the fishmeal plant (recovers waste that would otherwise go over the side into fish oil, fish meal for pet food and/or fertilizer, and bone meal for fertilizer) or distilling plants for fresh water.

<snip of some good stuff>

So another thought that I had- all of the "green energy" push is aimed at cars, but pollution from cars only accounts for maybe 1/4 of the pollution generated. And electric cars will only decrease that 1/4 of the population by a small amount despite the cost involved. It would seem that we should consider all sources of pollution and determine which ones can be affected the easiest or for the least cost, rather than just assuming that cars are the problem.

That's what carbon markets do really well. The folks who can make the most emissions reductions for the least cost make the changes and sell the credits to polluters who would have to make more expensive mods.

 

[jderimig]

As COP28 wound down, the African Energy Chamber issued this communication.

“African producers have not and will not agree to phasing out fossil fuels. Unlike the rest of the developed world, the continent has not yet had the chance to transform its economies through oil and gas. In order to develop, grow and address concerns such as energy poverty and industrialization, oil and gas will need to remain central for years to come.”

Oil and gas will play an instrumental role in Africa’s economy for decades to come, and as such, African producers will not agree to any phase-out of these resources.

 

[dr wogz]

shouldn't we then be helping them skip this step? To get them up to our comfort level, but with newer technologies & innovations & such.

Or is oil & gas a rite of passage to development?

 

[boatgeek]

shouldn't we then be helping them skip this step? To get them up to our comfort level, but with newer technologies & innovations & such.

There's actually a really good model for this already. Much of rural Africa more or less skipped wired telephones and went straight to cell phones. And there's a moderately large market in those areas for solar power cell phone charging services where there is cell service but not reliable electrical utilities.

 

[dr wogz]

Couldn't they also be used as a trial market for some new technologies?

"Hey, we have this new power plant idea. wanna try it? Wanna help us develop it? You pay X, and we supply the rest. The power generated will be your for free / modest cost.."

 

[kuririn]

Couldn't they also be used as a trial market for some new technologies?

"Hey, we have this new power plant idea. wanna try it? Wanna help us develop it? You pay X, and we supply the rest. The power generated will be your for free / modest cost.."

Sounds like some solar companies around here..

 

[kuririn]

As COP28 wound down, the African Energy Chamber issued this communication.


Oil and gas will play an instrumental role in Africa’s economy for decades to come, and as such, African producers will not agree to any phase-out of these resources.

John, I tried finding information on the African Energy Chamber.
Their website does not specifically list who their member organizations and producers are.
It does, however solicit for memberships and donations.
Wikipedia says it was founded in 2018 by one man.
And that it is an energy advocacy group.
But since you provided the link, can you tell us:
1. Does the group speak and set policy for all African energy producers?
2. What weight does that have if governmental policy is different?
3. How much of Africa's energy is produced indigenously and how much is produced by foreign corporations?
4. If the foreign corporations have committed to transitioning to green energy (as many have done already) then how does the AEC statement have any weight?
Inquiring minds want to know.