[ExI] Oil will never run out

[hkhenson]

At 12:59 PM 6/27/2008, Bryan Bishop wrote:
>On Friday 27 June 2008, Kevin Freels wrote:

snip

I wish that the knowledge of first semester thermodynamics and high 
school chemistry were universal on this list.

It's not a big deal to make hydrocarbons out of biomass or even to 
use CO2 pulled out of the air.  All it takes is industrial plant and 
*lots* of energy.  On an industrial scale, you can make gasoline for 
about a dollar a gallon from electric power at a penny a kWh, or ten 
dollar a gallon gasoline out of 10 cents a kWh power.  Do a bit of 
research on Wikipedia or Google.  Read

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_monoxide

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boudouard_reaction

http://www.doitpoms.ac.uk/tlplib/ellingham_diagrams/index.php

Click on The interactive Ellingham diagram, click on oxide, click on 
carbon, click on "see"

I.e., if you have carbon and carbon dioxide you can make carbon 
monoxide if the conditions are hot enough.  You can also directly 
react C02 and hydrogen.

You need to know that the reaction of steam and carbon is endothermic 
(absorbs energy) so this is a place where low cost electrical energy 
could be fed into a synthetic fuels process.

     H2O + C -->> H2 + CO
     Delta H = 131 kJ/mol

You should read up on:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fischer-Tropsch

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methanol

Which are about how to convert syngas to liquid fuels.  There are 
other ways as well; some people are proposing to feed syngas to 
bacteria that convert it to ethanol.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gasification

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plasma_arc_gasification

http://www.plascoenergygroup.com/

A 400 ton/day plant is being scaled up from a 100 ton per day 
demonstration plant.  Any readers in Canada, they are looking for a 
bunch of people to staff the new operation Ottawa, Ontario.

There are a number of difficult problems with processing trash.  It's 
really variable.  It has chlorinated stuff in it like PVC 
plastics.  (That's where the salt comes from, I suspect they add 
sodium carbonate to wash out the HCl.)

Now as an exercise, figure out how much synthetic gasoline per day 
could be made using the syngas from this operation?

Keith