[ExI] Whining

[Keith Henson]

I worked for decades on power satellites. Made some progress, for example,
designed a low-pressure, low-temperature plastic radiator with a mass of
only a little over a kg/kW. But it was not enough to close the economic
case. I had previously worked on StratoSolar, a project to put solar PV
above the clouds.

In both of these projects, we were aware that some of the electrical energy
had to be used to make hydrocarbons. They are too useful and too hard to
replace with electrical power in some cases.

While I worked on power satellites, I kept an eye on ground solar because
cheap enough and had low enough storage cost, it competed with power from
space. Eventually, such power got down to 1.35 cents per kWh. With two
cents per kWh storage, that undercuts my best efforts (3 cents/kWh) from
power satellites. Even at this low cost, I could not make a case for liquid
fuels. There were two major problems: the cost of hydrogen due partly to
the power consumption of 50 MWh/ton and the cost of the full of platinum
electrolytic cells. The energy cost of CO2 was not too bad, using an MIT
design, but for any significant-sized synthetic oil plant, you had to sort
through cubic km of air to get the CO2 feed.

About ten years ago, I gave up on power satellites after trying to get the
lift cost down via "Beamed Energy Bootstrapping"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VEkZkINrJaA but I still maintained an
interest in liquid fuels. It turns out that there is electric (or other
renewable) power part of the time for less than nothing. This is only
useful if you can figure out some inexpensive way to use it for the same
reasons against making hydrogen, the high cost of the electrolytic cells.

Converting electric power to heat is relatively inexpensive. It is not done
that often because electric power is expensive relative to a gas flame, but
if the power is going to be curtailed and wasted anyway, might as well use
it for heat. You have to reach back into history, but there is a use for
intermittent heat. For 100 years, people ran gasworks that made carbon
monoxide and hydrogen (also known as syngas) by blowing air into coal until
it got white hot, shutting off the air, and blowing steam into the hot coal
and collecting the gas. The gas was stored at low pressure in gasholders,
tanks that floated up and down as the gas was made and used. There were
still a number of them that had not been torn down when I was a child. Some
may have been in use because I seem to remember they went up and down.

Eventually, it dawned on me that you could use electrical heat to drive the
carbon and steam reaction. It takes 3 MWh/ton to combine steam and carbon,
plus another MWh/ton to make the .1.5 tons of steam per ton of carbon. The
Victorians used coal, but any source of carbon will do. Municipal Solid
Waste (MSW), trash is 40% carbon, the collection is already paid for, the
landfills have a relatively short life, and new locations are hard to find
and approve. Plus, they leak methane, a powerful greenhouse gas. The syngas
can be stored and burned later, displacing natural gas or fed to a plant
similar to the 34,000 bbl/day Sasol plant in Qatar that makes diesel. It is
not a small amount; LA trash converted to jet fuel would be enough to
supply LAX.

Sounds like a win, win, win, and I should have waste companies, utilities,
and oil companies beating on my door. Hah! When I have posted about this on
LinkedIn, as many as 10,000 executives have read the account. Not a single
expression of interest so far.
The nature of the chemistry is such that you need to convert half the CO
into hydrogen using the water gas shift reaction. That gives you a stream
of CO2 to sequester deep underground or in old oil fields. If you feed the
gasifiers on biomass, you pull a ton of carbon out of the atmosphere for
every ton of carbon in fuel. You might think this would interest the people
who are worried about climate, but that is not the case; there is no
interest from any of them, not even an acknowledgement from places like the
Gates Foundation. I have to conclude that they want to whine about the
problem rather than consider solutions.
Pardon me for whining about it myself.

I have decided to try one last attempt, crowdfund a video, and hope the
video goes viral if indeed the crowdfunding succeeds. I have written the
video script if anyone wants to see it.

Best wishes,

Keith
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