Green Group discussion

During his State of the Union address, President Obama called for action against climate change.

At the same time, he spoke about energy dependence, ranging from clean energies to more oil drilling and natural gas extraction.

What do you think about the President's comments on climate change and energy independence?

I agree with the all options policy. I urge everyone in this group to contact their two senators and one representative to urge support for efforts to combat climate change. Voices need to be heard. Urge others as well.

Jimmy wrote: "I agree with the all options policy. I urge everyone in this group to contact their two senators and one representative to urge support for efforts to combat climate change. Voices need to be heard..."

Both of my Senators support climate change legislation, but agree - it's always good to let them know that you support government legislation on climate change.

I think that an all options approach is good in the short term, but there s/b a plan to slowly but surely reduce oil and natural gas and drastically increase clean energy alternatives with each passing year.

And the President definitely needs to say 'no' to the Keystone Pipeline. That's a climate change nightmare.

He's going to find big pressure from union workers that want to work on the pipeline. So he has to figure out a way to solve that problem. So far he has stood against it as far as I know.

Jimmy wrote: "He's going to find big pressure from union workers that want to work on the pipeline. So he has to figure out a way to solve that problem. So far he has stood against it as far as I know."

That's because the company has exaggerated the number of jobs. I can't remember the true number, but it's not much.

Let's see if we can find more about that. That's an interesting point.

Here's an article about it from last year:

http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-505123_16...

Bringing this up to date and opening it more generally.

Permission to open a new coal mine in Britain was denied, in large part because of the impact emissions from the coal would have on climate change.
https://www.ecowatch.com/coal-mine-re...

While New England's wind power held up well during the severe weather of 2018.
https://www.ecowatch.com/wind-power-b...

Clare wrote: "Bringing this up to date and opening it more generally.

Permission to open a new coal mine in Britain was denied, in large part because of the impact emissions from the coal would have on climate..."

If I hear one more disingenuous proponent praise the benefits of "clean coal" here in the U.S., I'm going to gag. Kind of like praising "clean dirt": huh? :-(

That might be maligning dirt. Ironically the cheap oil and natural gas prices are putting the coal business out of business. If the price of oil and natural gas had not been manipulated for the last 50 years, maybe coal would have disappeared a lot sooner.

I can across this TEDx talk, about the fourth or fifth credible environmentalist / climate scientist I've seen make a similar argument about the need to reconsider nuclear energy to reduce reliance on fossil fuels.

Why I changed my mind about nuclear power

I confess I still remember being freaked out by the release of the film The China Syndrome and the almost concurrent news reports around Three Mile Island when I was a kid. Chernobyl seemed like a terrifying worst-case scenario. But these "Generation III Reactor" designs are making me rethink my prejudice against nuclear energy.

What do others think about this? I'd be very interested in perspectives from members of the group who may be better informed on the pros and cons!

I am not totally opposed to nuclear power, but I grant my lack of necessary knowledge.

It's real simple. The profits from the sale of the new units will be used to clean up the mess from the current and previous reactors.

The mess is not restricted to Chernobyl and Fukushima. It also includes all the spent fuel rods and decommissioned reactor parts that are stockpiled in unsuitable places.

That will never happen. The new world business model emphasizes the complete disconnection between the new industry and the old industry that it replaces. That way there is no responsibility for any problems created by the old industry that made the emergence of the new industry possible in the first place.

The cell phone is not called a wireless telephone so it is immune from the 100 years of legislation that went into making the old telecommunications industry an industry responsible for representing the public's best interests.

I see there is a United Nations University.
I just watched a film about training geologists from countries with geothermal activity, how to run geothermal plants. The film is set in Iceland and comes across as something of a tourism ad... but notice how clean the skies are.
Sulphur dioxide emissions can be a problem with these plants, but we see a research geologist discussing how he has decided to bring along bacteria to eat this substance.
The film is over 11 minutes, well worth a look.

An introduction to the United Nations University:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cCWKJ...

Thanks! Based in Japan which is probably why I had not heard of it.

Also once these groups get initials and officaldom they tend to think everyone knows about them, or should. In 2011 I met a young lady who was with Eco-UNESCO. I'd never heard of it, the eco part that is. She seemed surprised. Nobody had ever told me about it, and I am a tree surgeon.

A nice little video from Gizmodo about Amsterdam's smart homes generating their own power.
https://gizmodo.com/this-house-is-a-l...

Yesterday my husband and I went out to the back garden and produced paper bricks from the last few months' worth of newspapers. All it takes is paper, water and a handy brick maker which I bought from The Irish Times years ago.
The bricks will dry in the strong sun we're getting now, and maybe next week we'll make some more. The fuel lights easily, burns nicely and leaves a small bit of residual wood ash which goes on the garden. We'll use a couple of bricks per night as well as wood when we're lighting fires over winter.

Brian wrote: "I can across this TEDx talk, about the fourth or fifth credible environmentalist / climate scientist I've seen make a similar argument about the need to reconsider nuclear energy to reduce reliance..."

Brian wrote: "I can across this TEDx talk, about the fourth or fifth credible environmentalist / climate scientist I've seen make a similar argument about the need to reconsider nuclear energy to reduce reliance..."

My largest concern is not design per se, although that is part of it. I find I am not interested in any thing bigger than 50 or 100MWe. First, the designs ar esized are in the .79 to 1.39 GWe range. Type II's, ganged together in the 3.2 to 3.5GWe need something on the order of 231 million gallons of water per day, and release it back into nature a full 20 degrees hotter than the rest of water. I suspect that disrupts the local river ecology.


The other problem with large reactors is that while most of them retire with no problems, when they do have problems, they tend to be large. Neither Fukijima or Chernobyl have been fully contained.


IF we choose to go to nuclear, I would argue that we look at small, nuclear reactors, such as are used by submarines. We know the reactor on the USS Scorpio is intact. That after taking a 24 knot/hour crash on the ocean floor, and a possible explosion (pv/nrt) if the reactor room was flooded last, and the atmosphere caught fire), and lastly the reactor impacted at least a 45 degree tilt. That design can apparently take a licking, and not breach.

"while most of them retire with no problems," the problem is disposing of all the radioactive waste they generated over their lifetimes. The contaminated material when the plant is taken down is also not something that can be thrown on a junk pile. A whole bunch of smaller plants still has the same disposal problem as a smaller number of larger plants. The only clean nuclear energy is fusion, not fission. And none of this handles the question of who is going to be responsible when the next tsunami, earthquake, or superstorm that can disrupt everything in a moments notice quite handily. The old and the new industries have to be tied together and then there will be no profits for the new industry. Will the new nuclear industry say it's not our responsibility? Will they still want to erect more fission plants if it is only being done for the purpose of serving the community?

"231 million gallons of water per day, and release it back into nature a full 20 degrees hotter than the rest of water."

District heating uses this water to advantage - mainly in Scandinavia and Canada. I've attended a talk on it in the Royal Dublin Society. Basically you dig up the roads and lay pipes and run the hot water all around the district, piping its heat into businesses and apartment blocks. These buildings then save on their internal heat generation.
IIRC, the figures were around 50% of energy from the power plant is used to generate electricity, 40% wasted in hot water, 10% goes up the most efficient smoke stacks. With district heating, the only wasted energy is that which goes up the smoke stack. This is called district heating with combined heat and power (CHPDH).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distric...

This is about the 6th credible source I've seen that points out the need to reconsider nuclear energy as a way to stop burning fossil fuels. I'm seriously trying to look at this option with fresh eyes.

Want to Stop Climate Change? Then It's Time to Fall Back in Love With Nuclear Energy

One reason why it can't work is because no one who wants to revive the nuclear industry is willing to do anything about the waste that has piled up over the years.

In Japan they are generating low grade nuclear waste everyday from an accident a few years ago and have no idea what to do with it, except dump it in the ocean. Doesn't even make the news anymore. They hope we forget about it. Waste and fallout exists from low intensity natural alternative power sources but they are mild compared to radioactive waste from ordinary use or accidents.

One way to do it is to take the profits from the new nuclear industry and use them to clean up the problems of the old nuclear industry. As soon as this is mentioned the rooms empty out as everyone rushes for the nearest exit because no one is going to do it for altruistic reasons. No profit no interest. Meanwhile the nuclear waste from active plants continues to pile up.

There is a real problem with solar energy. With the new storms overriding building standards from the past the solar panels can be damaged requiring replacement. The panels don't generate power when the sun isn't shining. Wind power generators can also be knocked down. Instead of no wind conditions it is probably going to be the increasing high wind conditions that will cause problems. All roofs should be solar shingled, powering the grid. When the roof breaks, you should be able to get it repaired for free.

Huge power storage units are needed to fill in the gaps. They don't exist yet. Everyday alternative energy is wasted because it can't be saved. It's like always having open files on your computer because you can never save them. It doesn't work in a computer and it doesn't work in the power industry.

Even the power grid that is operated today with fossil fuels that can constantly supply power needs constant adjustments made to the flow of power. Once that problem is fixed, and should be the first problem to solve, than any kind of alternative power can be used to diminish the reliance on petroleum fuels in an orderly or haphazard fashion. Building power storage grids would insure that no alternative energy power would be lost so it's use could be used to stop building new petro powered plants and eventually replacing them.

Once touted as a clean natural alternative, it has now been seen that putting up hydroelectric plants all over the place create more problems than they solve. It does have the capability of storing power by pumping the water up hill when power is plentiful and letting it run down hill to run generators when power generation falls off. The water reservoirs are located below ground so as to have little interference with the land. It also doesn't block streams or change irrigation or utility uses, something conventional hydro electric power completely destroys.

Anything that is done has to be looked on as being done on a massive scale. Now serving 8 billion people has considerably changed the wear and tear on the biozone we live in. Damage shows up immediately, unlike a thousand years ago when it was only half a billion people and you could just walk away and let nature restore the land over time. Just look at the palm oil fiasco. Seemed like a good idea but like hydro power as it spreads out it diminishes the life around it.

Until a practical way to handle radioactive waste is found nuclear power is an incomplete solution that is a non starter. It could be shipped into space, that would give it a cost so we would know exactly how much it cost to run a nuclear plant.

Sending it into the sun probably wouldn't work easily, it could get blown apart and blow back in the solar wind that the planet is hit by from time to time. Maybe it could be timed by orbiting the garbage ship until the wind was blowing the other way. That way it could bother some other place in the solar system we aren't planing on visiting.

Here is an article from the New York Review of Books written by Bill McKibben where he discusses a future without fossil fuels:

https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2019...

Interesting and thorough article, made no mention of nuclear energy.

This is a very complicated issue. What I'm realizing, the more I study the challenges and options, is that there is no perfect solution. Different energy sources each have their strengths and weaknesses. Even wind and solar have downsides, such as disposal challenges for obsolete solar panels and rare bird species impacts for wind turbines, as well as the general environmental impacts of applying wind and solar at "industrial scale." Not a no-brainer, by any means.

Here's another excellent TED talk featuring a UK physicist who introduces some hard mathematics around renewable energy sources:

A reality check on renewables - David MacKay

And yet another TEDx talk by Michael Shellenberger on the same topic:

Why renewables can’t save the planet

And -- to Tom's point above about size, scale, and decentralization -- here are the Wikipedia articles on the latest "Generation III" and "Generation "IV" reactor designs and smaller-scale, more distributed approaches:

Generation IV reactor

Generation III reactor

I admit, I've long been prejudiced personally against nuclear energy. I remember Three Mile Island and Chernobyl, and I still get a cold chill when I recall key scenes from The China Syndrome. But the benefits of nuclear power vs. fossil fuels, including natural gas, do seem to be compelling. And -- at least for the foreseeable future -- wind and solar alone aren't going to solve our energy problems.

Interested in what others think about this. I'm struggling, I admit, to figure out the right answer here.

I think the day will come when this all comes crashing down. All natural resources are limited. At some point, they won't be available any more in the quantities we need as far as I can tell. Sorry, but that is how I would honestly answer the question.

I hope someone can show me how wrong I am.

Anyone who talks about saving the planet is deluding themselves. We are trying to save our way of life as it is without making any real sacrifices. The planet has plenty of life that is unlike us to restock the empty spaces.

I'm not impressed with the new engineering techniques. Most of them are based on shortcuts. The sheer damaging capabilities of the nuclear industry insures that after all precautions and safeguards have been taken, there is nothing left for profit. Only the most public spirited efforts would accept that situation. You will not find that on this planet.

People say that we need less people on this planet. That's only true if we don't change our ways. It all starts with education. As long as we have a pay to play education system there will never be any long term progress. The pay to play system excludes more people from getting a good education than it delivers to. The educated vs the not so well educated pyramid looks exactly like the pyramid with the 1 percenters on top. That's no accident.

We need everyone to be educated otherwise we will never learn that everyone needs to be treated equally because not everyone is created equal. No one knows who will get the ideas put into motion that will start solving our problems in a sustainable manner. It's a pretty good bet it won't be the well off who are going to lead the way.

The Myth Of Sustainability

I believe there weren't enough people to dent the natural replenishment of the natural world we daily turn into cinders until recently, say the past 500-1,000 years. Perhaps 500 million to a billion people compared to the 8 billion and counting we have now. Until that time we continually took more than we put back, or rather, allowed to be put back. It is just as important for the fishing industry to replace all the different kinds of fish we take out of the world as it is for the wood industry and the land development industries to replace all the biodiversified forest land that is destroyed every year. Forests that are not biodiversified are dysfunctional carbon sinks. There are no large scale forested areas with the biodiversification that was present 10,000 years ago. All those different animals from the giant to the tiny, insect to mammal, formed huge networks where they all had jobs to in the forests which kept them and the forests and their offspring alive. We removed all those animals and networks but didn't bother to do the jobs those animals and insects did. Like a big building where all the utility services are not being done and now if the tenants want things to work, like hot water, they better learn how to supply, maintain, and repair those utility services.

Over the past couple of thousand years we have moved a lot of the places where trees need to be to places that are convenient for civilization, the same way the original populations of colonized mineral rich areas were moved to places more convenient for the colonizers. At the beginning of human civilization there were 6 trillion trees, now there are around 3 trillion, and we are still taking out more than we plant, even if it is only dysfunctional forests or even worse mono culture tree plantations. There has never been a hint of sustainability in anything we do. We are running a net deficient of around 10 billion trees a year. Against 3 trillion, it seems trivial. There are places where there are more trees now than there were 100 years ago, which makes things seem to look good. Same way the violently cold weather outbursts allow people to believe global warming is a big hoax.

The fish in the ocean have also not seen any signs of sustainability. People like to use percentages instead of actual numbers. For example, take the fish populations in the oceans. Ten percent increase of the original 100 percent is 10 percent, a real increase. Ten percent of the remaining 10 percent is 1 percent of the original 100 percent. And yet that kind of progress is thought to be a sign of it being okay to continue a supposedly sustainable effort to continue harvesting the fish. It's really very simple, we drew off the capital of the natural world instead of the interest, never replacing any of it, and now a huge balloon payment is due. Mother Nature doesn't take cash or credit. Ironically she believes in rapid drastic changes and practices those procedures quite rigorously.

Interesting on article on Chernobyl today.

https://www.care2.com/causes/chernoby...

The wildlife is thriving purely because animals reproduce quickly, at a young age, before the tumours from radiation catch up to them and kill them. This isn't made clear.
Also not mentioned is that radiation forces mutation so the young may not be viable at some point.

" Chernobyl is making us question more than the impact of radiation on wildlife. In 2015, two forest fires within the exclusion zone re-aerosolized radioactive particles in their smoke — which doused parts of Europe in radiation at the level of a medical X-ray. "

This isn't the only area with radioactivity at large, so any look at nuclear has to bear very long term impacts in mind.

It would also be helpful if profits from nuclear go towards existing cleanup operations instead of shareholders or private parties.

Yes, Robert, but a Chinese firm would ask why they should have to clean up damage caused by a French firm, for instance.

Nuclear fallout once it happens can not be contained and does go away by itself. It is very hard to clean up. The responsibilities of it's operation are extremely expensive and can not be passed onto the consumer as a simple tax like non nuclear industrial practices use. The nuclear mess has to be cleaned up. The US while seemingly clean is sitting on a big pile of nuclear waste that literally ins't going anywhere and has to go somewhere. If it isn't buried here, it will be shipped somewhere else. It is one thing to play musical chairs with plastic and industrial waste products, but it can't be done with nuclear products. The only way to insure that the new nuclear industry doesn't run aground and walk away from or ignore problems is to have the entire industry operating on a single page. Too many plants are in areas once considered safe are no longer safe locations because of the changing weather patterns. Population numbers around any plant has grown to the point, and will continue growing, that evacuation is not an option. If a problem happens it's not like a forest fire where it burns a bunch of stuff, well, there is always tomorrow and fresh start. The cost is too much to be shouldered by consumers so the industry has to be operated as a single effort, and it has to handle what has happened in the past as well as anything that can happen in the future. Will that ever happen, the answer is no. What will happen is that another piece of real estate will become unusable and will require a maintenance program that will operate at a large loss and the background radiation will go up another notch on the supposedly harmless scale.

These plants are often located on the edge of a large body of water, for cooling. Seas are rising and lakes are shrinking.

Japan has no solution for the Fukushima contaminated water.
This is why nuclear power has a long way to go. Even if the new setups are mini size, supposedly safe, and can't melt down, there are still all the accidents that need to be taken care of. Japan apparently is out of space for storing contaminated water and has to dump the tanks. The plan is to dilute the water. Diluting it won't change anything it is still going to accumulate in the oceans currents and dead spots the same way anything else does.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-ja...

Three Mile Island's melted core is back in the news after 40 years. It is just being stored until it can be determined how to dispose of it, if it even is possible to do so.

https://abcnews.go.com/Technology/wir...

France to give more people iodine tablets after expanding nuclear security cordon

https://www.euronews.com/2019/09/17/f...

Even though China has the largest renewable energy system in place, it's emission rates are going to continue to accelerate over the next 25 - 30 years.

One reason that more isn't being done is because we have no practical method of storing the extra power generated but not used by renewable sources.

https://e360.yale.edu/features/why-ch...

Storing potential energy by lifting concrete blocks instead of pumping hydro.

https://singularityhub.com/2019/10/13...?

A floating solar farm on the sea could produce ethanol from the seawater.

https://www.ecowatch.com/floating-sol...

The blocks look interesting. There is also some work being done on massive flywheels.

Please, no more ethanol, we need food products, auto fuel is for vehicles, not people.

Well, if I were running the project, the ethanol from the seawater would go to vehicles and rapeseed could then be used as a food and animal feed crop.

A new, very promising method of fusion, works without raising the temperature millions of degrees and no huge magnets that are the size of a large house and still aren't powerful enough.

The laser technology is only a year old but is based on laser experiments from 1998.

The fuel is abundant and safe - Boron 11 is easily available in open-pit mines and is not radioactive.

The reaction is safe - the HB11 reaction is aneutronic, meaning it does not produce neutrons responsible for the safety issues associated with most nuclear reactions.
​
No radioactive waste

Reactor cannot melt down.

Continuous power generation so it can be power grids of any size, no power storage needed.

Scalable - Direct electricity generation bypasses the need for steam turbines to operate a generator. Ships, remote areas, factories; or larger plants to provide power for a city.

HB11 Energy will realize electricity generation with the fusion of hydrogen and boron-11 (HB11) using lasers.

It will create an unlimited source of clean, safe and reliable energy using fuels that are abundant in nature using a reaction that does not produce radioactive waste.

Conceived of by pioneering physicist and Founder Prof Heinrich Hora, HB11 Energy’s technology differs radically from all other fusion approaches as it does not require fuels to be heated. Other fusion approaches require temperatures of tens or hundreds of millions of degrees C, a technical hurdle that has held all back from practical energy generation for decades.The Web Site For the company


https://www.hb11.energy/


Here is the technical page
https://m.physics.unsw.edu.au/sites/d...

30 years on and Chernobyl is still stirring up some radioactive dust, though at considerably lower levels than it was originally doing.

The plants and frees have pulled some of the radioactive substances out of the soil which gets stored in the plants and trees while they are alive and after they decompose.

There is logging of the pine forests that surround the area. Some of the wood is mildly radioactive. It is not suitable for human buildings. That is old news. There are also the occasional brush and forest fires that put radioactive smoke into the air. There are currently some heavy duty fires happening right now. People are sheltering inside because of the coronas virus outbreak, so exposure is minimal. Again this is from material the plants and trees have pulled out of the soil.

The average half life of the radioactive substances is around 30 years, which means half of the stuff with a 30 year half life or less is gone now. But there are other substances with longer half lives and some of the 30 year stuff can turn into something that still has a few more years to go before it disappears.

These are NY Times articles that are not free, or you can read 10 a month for free. I just google the subject until I find an article that doesn't directly link to The NY Times and has enough information in it to answer any questions I might have.

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/24/wo...

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/11/wo...

I think it is well worth paying the $10 a month to keep organizations like the NY Times alive.

Thanks for these articles. For me, it shows once again the need for good government with qualified people. That is always a struggle to maintain, but we must keep up the struggle.

I'm signed up for NYT, but you can't be signed up for everything and not everyone covers everything.

Thinking it over. the whole online news format is probably the completely wrong format for surviving the inevitable crush of the internet as it continues to dissolve all sense of insulation.

Perhaps the news reporters could concentrate on local stories and special informative stories and it all gets put on one site where each news reporting service/ publication/ paper/ and independent reporters get credit from the amount of traffic that their stories generate. Part goes to the individual, part to the paper's dept or group, part to the paper or organization, and the advertisers money gets split up.

You can pay extra to get a single publication's work all neatly organized, or for a choice of topics from areas you pick. Or just wade through it yourself and see what you can find.

The bottom line is that the restriction of information decreases the overall life expectancy of everyone. It's a technological world based on the flow of information which has become the same as breathing. Where not knowing seemingly abstract facts can cause a decline in one's health in any number of ways and the faster we go, the less time it takes to get there.

Freaky weather can damage alternative power sources, because being local and small makes them more vulnerable. See Martha Wells' blog post here on GR about a freak hailstorm that damaged her roof and solar panel.

https://www.goodreads.com/author_blog...

I'm hoping insurance will cover these issues. But if you claim your premium rises....

Depending on the size of the hail, it can break car windows. Not too much you can do when that happens. Have to wait and see what happens to the size of hail as the storms get bigger. As the storms increase in size not all the features follow suit. Hopefully hail doesn't get any larger or heavier hails become more frequent.

Nitrous oxide pollution from firms making nylon in China.

"Stepping off the plane near Pingdingshan, Perilloux recalls the air pollution in central China being so thick he could not see from one end of the airport terminal to the other. ...

"In meetings, Shenma officials spoke about the climate benefits of the abatement technology Invista was licensing to the company. Perilloux said he figures it was simply a business deal for the more senior company officials but felt he sensed some environmental idealism among the younger employees.

For Perilloux it was both. "I thought it was obviously such a good thing to do," he said.

At the time, China's emissions were growing at a staggering pace. The country overtook the United States as the largest emitter of carbon dioxide in 2006 as it built a fleet of new coal-fired power plants at an astonishing rate of one every 10 days.

Since then, China has turned a corner, driving wind and solar development and projecting itself as a global leader in addressing climate change. ...."

CDM is a programme to pay firms reducing pollution for carbon credits from other firms.

"While China stepped up its climate action on some fronts in the 2010s, the country's efforts to control nitrous oxide from adipic acid likely collapsed. The adipic acid projects and the larger Clean Development Mechanism became a victim of their own success.

The 2010 Stockholm Environment Institute report that concluded adipic acid abatement projects would pay for themselves in just 19 days suggested the high value of CDM credits may have distorted the global adipic acid market.

Shenma and Liaoyang were making so much money from their side hustle, the sale of CDM credits, they were able to flood the market with adipic acid at prices other producers couldn't compete with.

The CDM program may have been partly to blame for adipic acid plant closures elsewhere in the world that were already abating the vast majority of their emissions. Before the CDM program began, Invista was the largest adipic acid producer in the world. But between 2009 and 2015, four of the company's five adipic acid plants, including its plant in Orange, Texas, shut down."

A good in-depth article about what is happening now.

https://insideclimatenews.org/news/04...

The new face of Hydrogen Fuel: Blue Ammonia

Saudi Arabia shipped "blue ammonia" to Japan so it can be tested as a way of producing and using electricity without any harmful emissions.

Is this a practical example of cold water fusion power? It's nowhere near as exciting, but room temperature fusion for the foreseeable future might only be herding massive amounts of hydrogen atoms around, no real fusion, just the generation of electricity and this certainly seems to do the trick.

Ammonia is rich in hydrogen and has no carbon in it. Three atoms of hydrogen tethered by one nitrogen atom. It couldn't be simpler. To make it work as a clean fuel, its use has to be made cheaper or we have to start paying more for energy so that it can be used as a replacement for oil. As fertilizer, ammonia is cheap, but processed as a fuel for fuel cells it goes for 10 times the price it gets as fertilizer. Probably industrial grade versus high purity contaminant free grade. Ideally it should not see such a difference in cost if it is to be used as a global fuel source. If the price can't be cut down and it works as a method of easily transporting large quantities of hydrogen, then the price of energy has to go up. The dream of free energy might only be a pipe dream even if it is generated by renewable naturally generated power.

It is called blue ammonia, which is made using renewable energy sources, to distinguish it from regular ammonia produced the old fashion way, which is very dirty and not very efficient. The old way of making ammonia, which is created in enormous quantities as fertilizer for the global agricultural industry, creates a lot of pollution. Ammonia production consumes about 2% of the world's energy and generates 1% of its CO2.

Blue ammonia is used to create green hydrogen which is a fuel for fuel cells. Japan is still making a determined effort to use fuel cells instead of electrical batteries for powering cars. The rest of the world is looking towards rechargeable batteries which are already generating a specter of pollution, a trail of hard to treat industrial waste from manufacture, use, and disposal of the batteries and fallout from the sources of electricity powering the batteries. Undoubtedly some electric cars are being recharged by electricity generated by coal fired plants and other sources of not so clean energy. Even natural gas, once the darling of the green world as a safe fuel, has fallen on bad times.

The push for rechargeable batteries based on the need for speed and ease of use could be reminiscent of the way gasoline powered engines completely demolished the competing steam and electrical powered vehicles 120 years ago.

The article gives a good description of what is happening in the newly emerging ammonia fuel based industry. Ammonia is a far simpler way of transporting, handling, storing and using hydrogen than any other method being used. I can imagine it being created and transported in the same vein that Arthur C Clarke imagined giant spaceship fuel tankers would travel out to the big gas planets, fill up, and then scoot back to Earth.

The blue ammonia is made by running a fuel cell in reverse. The fuel cell running in reverse is powered by renewable energy, the clean energy that currently can't be stored without converting it to electricity where it has to be stored in a battery as it can't just be pumped into the power grid. The fuel cell running in reverse produces ammonia, with no pollution, which is far easier to store than electricity. It can stored without refrigeration in the same tanks that store oil and LPG. Right now, when an engine burns clean, the only thing coming out of the tail pipe is water.

While it would be nice that everything could be powered by electricity coming straight out of the air, that is only possible for small amounts of electricity. One of the main stumbling blocks of renewable energy is the instant need for enormous amounts of power that is required to power the world's use of energy. To solve this, the energy is currently stored as a petroleum product as a liquid (oil, other fuels) or a gas (propane, methane, etc.) because you can easily store and convert the petroleum product into instant energy. While we can control the release of the energy (a gallon of gasoline is like a stick of dynamite), we can not control the resulting deterioration of the environment from the excessive use of petroleum products as a fuel.

It is very interesting to note that Saudi Arabia, one of the largest producers of petroleum, is making the blue ammonia that makes the green hydrogen. It doesn't matter to them if the massive ships are shipping petroleum products or ammonia. Either way a vast amount of product that can be used as an instant fuel needs to shipped around the world to fill the needs of everything that requires energy on a global scale.

The actual process is not described in too much depth. No mention of how Saudi Arabia produced the blue ammonia except to say that is was made by converting hydrocarbons into ammonia. The actual ammonia production plant powered by a renewable energy power plant is a 5 billion dollar project not yet built.

How practical is this as a future source of hydrogen?

One question not answered is hot much ammonia does it take to power a large city. Would these ammonia storage tanks be a couple of hundred feet in diameter like the oil storage tanks, but unlike the old oil tanks, which ended at ground level, would the ammonia tanks go a thousand feet deep into the ground?

The fuel cell running in reverse project that is producing ammonia, while actually existing, is still in the design being changed every month to increase the efficiency. It has gone from 1 percent to 70 percent but the output has suffered greatly in the process.

Imagine a car that when the fuel cell engine is run in reverse it producers its own fuel by just adding water to it, plus some nitrogen that is carried in a small spare tank, powered by a solar cell roof, or plugged into an electric outlet.

Other ways of producing the ammonia using processes that are cleaner than the current hundred year old process are being developed. Most still use a lot of energy. One ultimate design envisions tanker size ships parked off the coast, powered by electric cables coming off the land, taking in sea water and taking hydrogen out of the sea water, and adding it to nitrogen being taken out of the air and producing ammonia.

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/...