This is the long version, 64 pages complete with research notes embedded in the text so you can check out what I read for yourself. I hope you read Part 1 first; I deleted a lot of the duplication between the two, and you’ll want the introduction that is the first half of part one.
AND all of my lovely images were removed. I had permission to use them. Honest. Oh well….
Here is What We Do about Climate Change.
Shortened version begun 3/27/19
© Copyright 2019 Crowboy
IPCC Special Report 15 (SR15) of Oct. 8 2018, and the Fourth National Climate Assessment released Nov. 23rd make it very clear that we are out of time: we need to get busy mitigating climate change right now, or our children and grandchildren are going to lead miserable lives on their way to war and famine and disease and homelessness and possibly extinction. The IPCC press release at https://www.ipcc.ch/news_and_events/pr_181008_P48_spm.shtml says that sea level will rise 10 cm less by 2100 with global warming limited to 1.5°C instead of 2°C. , and we will lose 70 to 90 percent of the world’s coral reefs instead of 99 percent. Think about that. The loss of 70 to 90 percent of the world’s coral reefs, along with thousands of species that can live nowhere else, and most of our food fish, is acceptable? Knocking a whopping four inches off the top of three to 15 feet (and eventually 250 feet) of sea level rise is a big whoopty do? Stopping at 1.5°C. isn’t going to cut it, even if we could--we will overshoot. We will overshoot 2°C. I get climate scientist James Hansen’s emails: a recent post said that if we stay where we are right now, 407 ppm atmospheric CO2, the temperature will eventually rise 3.5°C. The last time Earth was this warm, the Eemian period (~120k yag), sea level was 20-30 feet higher. It won’t be enough to entirely stop adding fossil carbon to the atmosphere afap; we are going to have to take a bunch of it back out, the sooner the better, and hope we are in time. Fortunately there are ways to do that; some of them are ready now, need cost little, and are things we need to do anyway. https://thinkprogress.org/science-stunner-on-our-current-emissions-path-co2-levels-in-2100-will-hit-levels-last-seen-when-the-494580182716/
It alarms me that I see nothing in SR15 that says the IPCC is even considering “slow feedbacks,” like the tipping point to a methane “burp.” A methane excursion appears to have been the proximate cause of the End Permian mass extinction, the world’s worst; 90 percent of everything died out when the planet warmed ~5°C. 352 myago, over thousands of years, and then another 5° almost overnight. We are adding CO2 to the atmosphere about 50 times as fast as the Siberian Traps did, pouring CO2 into the atmosphere until the planet warmed enough to trigger that methane belch. Methane captures ~100 times as much heat initially as CO2, then ~86 times over 20 years, ~32 times over a century, while it decays into CO2 that will stick around trapping heat for centuries. We’re also emitting megatons of nitrous oxides, 265 times as bad as CO2 (or 320 x, depending on whom you read), refrigerants that can be 32,000 times as bad, and a bunch of other greenhouse gasses as we use the air we breathe as a sewer. Arctic permafrost is already melting, rotting, and releasing methane, and the seas off parts of Siberia boil with destabilized methane clathrates. That is a self-reinforcing feedback loop; warmer = more methane, more methane = warmer. Self-reinforcing feedback loops tend to grow exponentially. And that itty bitty superscript 2 terrifies me. https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/prehistoric-world/permian-extinction/ Fireball Earth: The Permian Extinction - History Documentary https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rdGesZVBDO8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y6ig6zKiNTc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KbnM1QpuwWI
As to how fast this could happen, the 1300-year-long Younger Dryas cold snap ended abruptly ~11,800 yago, when the planet warmed 8 or 10° in only 40 or 50 years; parts of Greenland may’ve warmed 10° in a decade. The most likely cause of warming that fast is a massive methane excursion. If we trigger one that big, there won’t be any way to stop it, and there won’t be any adapting to it. And if it ends in a hydrogen sulfide event, as the End Permian might have, a really good one could sterilize the planet.
We need to make major changes. Huge. Right now. A moon-shot/WWII effort. Unfortunately it might be two more years before we can flush out the sewers (forget draining the swamp) and begin to turn this unparalleled disaster around—and those might be the last two years we have to avoid calamity. Our federal government isn’t going to do it; this administration is determined to make it as bad as possible as fast as possible. So for now it’s up to you and me, our states and cities and those corporations run by people smart enough to understand and decent enough to care. The up side will be the trillions saved not having to rebuild cities/towns/military bases after hurricanes, floods and wildfire, or moving half our population away from rising seas and sacrificing all of that infrastructure; an awful lot of lives saved and misery and famine avoided, a lot of good-paying jobs, a much more durable rebuilt infrastructure that sequesters carbon instead of releasing it, and a cleaner healthier planet better able to feed, clothe and shelter four then five times too many people--unless we get the overpopulation train wreck under control, too. So why should you listen to me?
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I started working in energy conservation more than 40 years ago, insulating water heaters. I worked way too many years as a carpenter, so I understand how most buildings go together and how to make them tighter and better insulated, and I taught home weatherization workshops as a State University Extension Service Master Conserver. I studied Energy Management Technician, which included the basic physics behind chemistry, electromagnetism, and nuclear physics, and worked a while as an energy auditor, the guy/gal who comes to your home or business and figures out how you use and waste energy and how you can save some. I love passive solar home design—there is no Seasonal Affective Disorder in a passive solar home, you live in any sunshine there is all winter—I’ve studied structural design, and I’m an SHP, a Sustainable Housing Professional, which means I know a bit about Passive House, the world’s most energy efficient building standard. All of this, a pathological curiosity and (help me!) 24-7 access to the internet, gives me a basic-to-middlin’ understanding of energy producing and using technologies from fire to fusion. And I’m a journalist with, I’ve been told, good research skills. And a fascination with paleontology and paleoclimatology and everything science. And the internet. Help.
And as a result of all that obsessive-compulsive research, Climate Change scares the crap out of me.
Let me say at the outset that I am encouraged by the sustainable technologies being developed, and the dedicated people developing them; discouraged by the politics of deliberate ignorance and selfish greed and the bureaucratic rigor mortis that stand in the way. We need to further educate the public, because doing enough fast enough will require a WWII level of commitment and funding. But the benefits will be incalculable, like the boom of the 1950s after WWII; lots of good-paying jobs, a cleaner, healthier, sustainable future—and we can’t not. Inaction is not an option. Rep. Ocasio-Cortez’ H.R. 109, the Green New Deal resolution, points out that by 2100, climate change will cost our us half a trillion dollars a year, we will lose trillions of dollars of coastal real estate/infrastructure to sea level rise, lots of people will die in wildfires and hurricanes and floods and polar vortex events—and that’s on the way to massive homelessness and misery and famine and war and possible extinction. We have no other choice.
Well-intentioned Jimmy Carter made a mistake during the energy crisis of 1979, throwing money at every crackpot energy scheme out there. We taxpayers can’t afford that again; we have to choose the soonest-ready, best-bang-for-the-buck technologies to invest in first. Yep. Taxpayer funds—but I want a return on investment, this time. Yes, I’m talking a little command in the economy, some public investment. The (un)free market got us into this mess; It will not get us out. And its loudest proponents are making it worse as fast as they can. This is Daily Kos, so I can say this: unless you are of the one percent, in which case you are the finger, Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” has a finger up your ass.
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Here is what we do about climate change, beginning with what society can do.
Unfortunately it starts with politics. We do not stand a chance of saving the species as long as selfish libertarian oligarchs can outvote millions of us just by writing a check. We need an end—with prejudice--to the Electoral College, Citizens United, corporate personhood, and big-money politics, and the Filibuster. We the people also need to be able to recall judges and justices appointed by presidents and senates that have the oligarchy’s best interests, and not ours, at heart. We need proportional representation so that all good ideas are heard; we need the right to declare “no confidence” in an administration and call for the re-election of anybody or everybody. And we need to be able to indict sitting presidents. No one is above the law!
Those will mean a constitutional amendment or three, and to have a hope of that we need a blue wave across the Senate and Presidency, and to pick up any more House seats we can, in 2020; and we need those people to be progressives who understand climate change and the urgency of dealing with it. It is a problem that climate change was not even on Nancy Pelosi’s agenda until Sunrise Movement occupied her office, and only when Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez stopped by did that even make the news. Wall-Street/fossil-fuel-industry (hereinafter just, “the fossils”) compromised old-guard Dems do not get it. We need a strategic energy plan, we need to choose the technologies that will get us out of this mess, and avoid technologies that will make it worse. We need the next blue wave to be Justice Democrats, and we need climate change and the Green New Deal to be the first item on their agenda. Check out the Sunrise Movement Plan at https://drive.google.com/file/d/1lcpb6Tuyh4-mEjGV7aO8b8Hq9zkQ782w/view AOC and friends’ Green New Deal is just an outline, so far, but it is a good one. https://www.congress.gov/bill/116th-congress/house-resolution/109/text . And google up Justice Democrats.
I think we need something else, both to save the future for our children and to leave them a real democracy that works for everyone, not just the rich: direct democracy, the national citizen’s initiative. I hope for enough progressives in the new blue green wave to kick climate change’ ass, but we can’t leave it to congress to fix climate change: congress is too broken, too bought, too corrupt, we might not get enough uncorrupted newbies in congress, we are talking about the survival of the species, and we are out of time. We the people have every right to make our own laws; we only need the mechanism. And, I suppose, that, too, will require an amendment to the Constitution. This will require a revolution: hopefully a peaceful one. Unfortunately we’re a long way from that and we need it now.
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We need to stop building coal- and fossil gas-fired power plants right now, and we need to demand that operators of existing plants add equipment to capture and sequester all of the carbon possible from their exhausts. Fortunately, despite the kakistocracy running the country just now, coal is simply unprofitable. As far as I can tell from an evening of web surfing, no new coal plants are planned in the United States, and many are being shut down. Unfortunately the main reason for that is that fracked gas is cheap, and a lot of utilities are building or planning gas-fired plants. New generation capacity is expected to be ~57 percent renewables over the next few years, but ~41 percent gas. Gas plants last 40-60 years. That will lock the next two or three generations into burning a fossil fuel, or force them to pay for useless stranded assets. https://www.turbomachinerymag.com/u-s-power-industry-outlook-2019/ Gas only produces half as much CO2 as coal when burned, but it is a far more potent greenhouse gas, the gas companies lose half of it getting it from ground to power plant, and Trump just backed off on the regulations that force the frackers to fix the leaks. Gas is not a “bridge to the future.” On the whole it is as bad as coal, and the utilities know how much of it they lose to atmosphere. They are lying to us again.
Wind power is now less expensive than gas https://theconversation.com/heres-why-trumps-new-strategy-to-keep-ailing-coal-and-nuclear-plants-open-makes-no-sense-97816 and solar is competitive. New nuclear is the most expensive power of all. Despite all this, and against the wishes of some of the utilities that want to retire them, Trump wants to subsidize failing coal and nuclear power plants to keep them open. So much for the “free” market. One wonders what leverage Don Blankenship has over him.
Do we have to “nationalize” the fossils to stop them exporting gas/oil/coal, make them use carbon capture and storage while their plants are still operating, reinvest their assets in clean energy, and phase out fossil fuels afap? They should do it themselves but won’t. Most fossil fuels come from public lands, so we already own them; and they pay us 1/8 of the actual value by law which they wrote. We’ve subsidized them to the tune of $70 billion/year while they were gluttonously profitable, gouging us, and lying to us about climate change while they sold off our future. We bought them out long ago.
Carbon Tax
Exxon supports a carbon tax because they think it won’t hurt their profits; they believe they will be allowed to pass it on to consumers, they think they can continue to buy congress for a small fraction of the taxpayer subsidies they get in return, and without tax credits and other help conserving, and new clean technologies, the poor and working class will be able to do little to curb their consumption; likely it will hurt Exxon’s sales little if at all.
But once we have grown-ups in charge of our government again, we can think about carbon taxes. By themselves I don’t believe they will do any good; it is typically simplistic politician-think to try to tax your way out of any problem, to see any crisis as an excuse to raise taxes. Carbon taxes will help if we spend the money developing alternatives to fossil carbon. But there is something government must do first, or I will take a carbon tax as intolerable tyranny.
The first step is to take all of the subsidies—still $70 billion a year?—back from the fossils, charge them the full value—not 12 cents on the dollar—of the resources they extract from public lands, and put that money into a remediation pool. Stop all exports of oil/gas/coal, at the same time we institute price controls so they can’t take it out on consumers; at the same time we investigate and try them for crimes against humanity. Some of them knew this would happen more than 40 years ago; google What Exxon knew and when, and be prepared to be disgusted. Check InsideClimate News, and here https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/22/opinion/exxon-climate-change-.html?_r=0 and here http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/aa815f
If the fossils had done the decent thing 40 yag we would be much farther along doing something about climate change now; if they’d invested in renewables then, those renewables would be on line now and the fossils would still be ridiculously rich. To put the future of the species at risk to go from filthy rich to filthier deserves Nuremberg trials and Nuremberg punishment—including the seizure of the fossils and their assets, to be phased out and shut down as fast as we can bring conservation and renewables on line to replace them; and forfeiture of all personal and family wealth of those convicted, and the placement of that money into the remediation pool.
Government conspiring with capital to fleece the people is one aspect of fascism. That is how I will count it if government takes money out of my pocket for burning fossil carbon, and turns around and gives that money to the fossils by continuing their subsidies. Once we end all subsidies to the fossils and have a fair carbon tax, I do want it to be a fee-and-dividend, progressive tax and rebate so it does not harm the poor and the ever-farther-behind working class yet again. But I do not want all of that money back; some of it, too, needs to go into the remediation pool. So what do we do with this pool?
The second thing government has to do before I will submit to a carbon tax is afford me alternatives. Tax me to change my behavior when I’ve already done all I can to conserve, and I have no alternatives to fossil energy? Uh-uh.
So we reinstate the energy conservation tax credits the Republicons otherwise toss in the trash in 2021—they want you lining the Fossils’ pockets, and to hell with the future of the species. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/13/climate/cafe-emissions-rollback-oil-industry.html We don’t just give people tax credits for making their homes and businesses as energy efficient as possible: we give them loans at easy, forgiving terms, and the poor, grants, to help them save energy and so carbon. It will save us money in the long run. We get busy upgrading our building stock, make Passive House our building code standard, now, not in 12 years, and we replace old inefficient appliances with clean and efficient heat, hot water and refrigeration.
Apparently anaerobic digesters (AD) are big in Europe, where government subsidies and high disposal fees help make them profitable; our Republican congress removed AD from the Federal Renewable Energy Investment Tax Credit, no doubt on command from the fossils, in 2016, and for some asinine reason The Food Safety Modernization Act of 2011 made getting food waste to livestock more difficult despite the EPA’s support for doing so. https://wasteadvantagemag.com/food-to-fuel-it-is-not-as-easy-as-it-seems/ But Vanguard Renewables, Wellesley, Massachusetts, at least, is making money cleaning up food and animal wastes on farms, with AD, here in the U.S. https://www.wastedive.com/news/vanguard-renewables-northeast-food-recycling-farms/547047/ https://www.biocycle.net/2019/01/04/digester-developer-finds-sweet-spots/
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How we (should) deal with food waste. Methane production should slot in between Feed Animals and Industrial Uses. https://www.epa.gov/sustainable-management-food/food-recovery-hierarchy
We give farmers and towns and cities incentives/mandates and favorable loans out of the remediation fund—if it’s taxpayer money, the taxpayers will make a little interest, for a change--to install AD to make methane cleaning up animal wastes, sewage, food wastes that we can’t get to hungry people or to livestock, and lots of farming and urban lawn and garden residues—you want a 30:1 carbon:nitrogen ratio, and that means adding lots of vegetable matter. The methane offsets fossil gas for use where it is efficient; burning methane in a reciprocating engine or microturbine to make electricity, for a bad example, is maybe 25 percent efficient, so you waste ¾ of the energy you pay for. Combined-cycle gas-turbine power plants are <60 percent efficient; a common single-stage coal plant might run 40 percent on a good day, and either will lose another ten percent to line losses from induction, getting the power to you. Big waste of a precious resource. Burned in a modern 95 percent-plus-efficient gas furnace or water heater, the exhaust is cool enough that the “chimney” is plastic pipe, and so clean I’m thinking of plumbing mine into a greenhouse. You produce ½ the CO2 staying warm, compared to electric resistance heat and gas power plants. Saves you money, too.
If those manures and food wastes just rot, that methane and other GHGs end up in the atmosphere anyway, while we take more fossil gas out of the ground and lose half of it in the process. We waste vast energies because we don’t think, and in the process we are wasting our only planet. Anaerobic digesters are old, well-understood technology used affordably all over the world. If we charge the gas utilities a carbon tax on fossil gas and lend them money to switch to biogas, it will happen. And then we only use biogas where it is efficient—and that is not generating electricity.
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Farming
According to Inside Climate News, Farming contributes ~25 percent to global greenhouse gasses.
That’s huge; only power generation, at about 30 percent, is worse. It’s also the greatest opportunity to mitigate climate change; farmers can not only stop most of their emissions, they can sequester lots of carbon, be carbon-negative, a big part of saving the future. Heroes. Unfortunately most farmers are extremely “conservative,” and climate change deniers, and their lobbies, particularly the Farm Bureau, which long ago aligned itself with the fossils and opposes any and all mitigation measures--even cap-and-trade, from which some farmers might make money--align exactly with the Trump administration on climate change. They are afraid of carbon taxes and regulations costing them money, and taxpayer-subsidized crop insurance insulates them from the effects of bad decisions. And that’s tragic, because if we do this right farmers could make more money while saving the future for their grandchildren—and ours. Here’s one way we could do it.
Helping farmers clean up animal wastes with anaerobic digesters is its own reward. This is a mature, inexpensive technology that’s been around at least since 1939, and records hint that people might have used it 3500 years ago. Manures produce ~86 million tons of methane and nitrous oxides per year, in the United States alone. If a livestock operation stinks, it’s emitting greenhouse gasses—CO2, methane, ammonia, nitrous oxides (N2O is 320 times worse than CO2), and lots of other nasties, and the nutrient-rich runoff eutrophies groundwater streams lakes rivers all the way out into the oceans, where it causes dead zones and red tides that further reduce the world’s food supply just as we’re about to get hungry. er. We avoid all of that, and fossil gas, just by properly disposing of noxious wastes. And it could give farmers another commodity to sell, or at least offset their gas/propane bills. How smart would that be? https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/04/150402132800.htm http://www.fluid-biogas.com/?page_id=197&lang=en
China, and India, and much of Europe, especially Denmark and Germany, are all far ahead of the U.S. in biogas production and utilization. China alone has installed six million digesters. There’s a $300 brick- dome gas plant for third-world farmers, that cleans up manures and stench and makes their lives more sanitary, provides gas for cooking, so they don’t die of wood smoke-related lung diseases, and produces clean, sterile fertilizer; passing that through earthworms makes it an even better soil amendment. India, Pakistan, and Nepal provide subsidies for large and small biogas plants and training for installers. The Appropriate Rural Technology Institute, ARTI, of Prune, India, has developed bioreactors that look to start at about 100 gallons in volume, that produce all the gas a family needs for cooking from their food wastes, which contain about four times the energy of manures. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BGSl72xZHNk The “User’s Manual” is interesting, too. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tRnwPe7paPY
There are three waste products from a methane digester; CO2 (about half the gas produced; advanced techniques can reduce that to ten or 20 percent), still-nutrient-rich water, and solids reduced ~tenfold, now mostly the anaerobic bacteria that did the dirty work, all sterile and safe and non-stinky. All of that is good fertilizer for algae, which we are going to want to grow wherever we efficiently can, for biodiesel, clean non-toxic ocean-safe plastics (if we demand that of the chemical companies going in), health food, livestock feed, fish feed, alcohol and much more than we can do with petroleum now, all clean and biodegradable and carbon neutral. Instead of creating environmental problems with our energy systems, we solve them. Could Homo “sapiens” actually be that smart?
Some want to use biogas as automotive fuel, where it is less than 30 percent efficient. That would not be smart. Part of solving this pattern is using everything where it is most efficient. Inefficiency is waste. Composting requires energy, if not a lot, and puts greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere, if less than uncontrolled anaerobic fermentation; digesting wastes for gas and using the wastes from that to grow algae produces carbon-neutral energy and cleans up all of that pollution, and you still end up with a good soil amendment.
Cover crops, no-till farming, choosing the right crops--there are a number of measures farmers can use to keep carbon in the soil, and most improve the soil and yields. Using just enough fertilizer helps. I would say talk to your local Extension agent, but in some conservative parts of the country you might not yet get the best advice.
It will be important to recycle all of the soil/crop nutrients possible, especially phosphorous; the world will run out of phosphorous within a few decades, and if we want to eat we’d better figure out that crisis, too. Recycling the solid remnants of both methane and algae production into the soil will help. But there is another use for algae that could solve another climate change problem: cow burps.
Methane from Livestock
Ruminants’ rumens host bacteria that digest cellulose and make methane. Lots of it. Cows sheep goats bison are supposed to be responsible for five or six percent of all greenhouse gasses, roughly the same as ground transportation, or Portland cement, and almost as much as steel. Vegans would simply have us stop raising livestock, let cattle go extinct; most people around the world vote no with their stomachs, and if those of us in the first world eat five or six times too much meat, people in poor countries get half enough. There’s another way to avoid that methane, at least until “clean meat” (cell-cultured meat) becomes affordable:
There is a macro-alga, a seaweed, that grows off Australia, which fed to cows at just two percent of diet, might reduce their methane production as much as 99 percent—and they grow 15 percent faster on the same feed because they’re not losing the energy bacteria in their stomach consume making methane. Getting Asparagopsis taxiformis to the world’s livestock would be a major new industry that would burn a lot of fuel moving a low-value bulk good long distances. But we’re going to grow microalgae for biodiesel etc. wherever there are wastes to clean up fertilizing it, water and sunshine; you can grow algae with reasonable efficiency clear up into central Canada, and the University of Alaska, Fairbanks is experimenting with it. Grow some clean for cattle feed (after the oil is extracted to run tractors/trucks), find the gene in Asparagopsis that produces bromoform, the chemical that stops cow burps, and transplant it into the fuel/feed algae. And solve a major greenhouse gas problem with the wastes of solving another, grown in the wastes of solving yet a third, produced near where it will be used. Elegant. And another pattern solved.
Bison----------------------404 grams CO2 equivalent of methane emitted per gram of protein produced
Beef-----------------------295
Cow Milk------------------87
Pork------------------------55
Chicken-------------------35
Turkey should be similar to chicken. Too bad the American poultry industry bred all of the flavor out of the most delicious (wild or heritage domestic) meat there is. Was. Butterball? Cotton ball…. So eating more poultry and pork and less bison beef lamb goat should help, depending perhaps upon how the chicken feed was produced and how their manures are disposed of.
https://insideclimatenews.org/news/24092018/infographic-farm-soil-carbon-cycle-climate-change-solution-agriculture
This energy cascade mimics nature (biomimicry): one “tropic level” in the food chain often feeds on the wastes of the next, efficiently recycling nutrients and extracting more energy from an initial food source. We need to copy this efficiency if we’re going to meet the needs of four times more people than nature designed this itty bitty planet to accommodate, then five…. It is also good design. When solving one problem solves others, without creating yet more, designers call it “solving for pattern,” and an “elegant solution.” A solution that creates other problems, like pressurized-water fission creating high-level radioactive wastes, or dams that generate electricity but destroy fish runs, is neither a good solution nor a good pattern nor elegant. AS WITH ALL untried solutions, there are problems to be explored and avoided: bromoform in the atmosphere might damage the ozone layer; it might be a carcinogen, although so far only in mice at ridiculously high doses; and if it passes through into the animals’ manures it may inhibit methane production from those wastes in anaerobic digesters. Solving issues before production is why Gaia created scientists and engineers.
Used wrong, livestock can degrade, destroy and desertify lands; but used correctly, cattle/sheep/goats etc. can remove invasives, can bring deserts back to productivity, can maintain carbon-sequestering grasslands in a healthy condition, precisely like mowing a lawn, precisely like lions keeping wildebeests moving across the Serengeti. And in doing so they can produce protein on lands that otherwise would not feed humans. Confinement feeding operations are little man-made hells on Earth, and as currently managed most produce huge water pollution and GHGs. Well-managed free-range livestock, moved from one pasture to the next at the proper time—that’s all there is to it—and fed a little Asparagopsis-hybridized algae cake every day could actually help sequester carbon.
https://www.ted.com/talks/allan_savory_how_to_green_the_world_s_deserts_and_reverse_climate_change/up-next?language=en
https://newatlas.com/csiro-seaweed-cow-methane-emissions/46021/
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/people-and-culture/food/the-plate/2016/11/seaweed-may-be-the-solution-for-burping-cows/
https://www.stuff.co.nz/business/farming/88009884/nz-scientists-say-seaweed-cure-for-methane-emissions-comes-up-short
https://theconversation.com/seaweed-could-hold-the-key-to-cutting-methane-emissions-from-cow-burps-66498
Sequestering carbon while improving the soil while making biofuels
Incorporating char(coal) into the soil stores, sequesters, that carbon, out of the atmosphere, for centuries, maybe millennia. Char stores water and nutrients for plants, and provides a home for beneficial bacteria. It can triple the productivity of depleted soils (google Terra Preta), and we are strip mining both farm and forest soils; we need to start taking care of them, if we want our children to eat. Another two birds with one stone. Four, actually--
--We get the char by pyrolyzing (gasifying) wood wastes, farm and garden wastes, and condensing/ catalyzing the synthesis gas produced into pyrolysis oils that can replace fuel oil. They contain too much oxygen to make good motor fuels, though new processes using electron beam “cold plasmas,” and less heat energy might help. But that excess oxygen seems to be what makes bioplastics biodegradable? Any biochemists reading? You also get wood vinegar, a clean green replacement for some herbicides and pesticides. The char left is best “popped” or “activated”—add water while it’s still hot, to steam open the cells and make it more porous. Soak it full of plant nutrients like compost tea and minerals that particular soil needs, add crushed silicates (see below) and ‘till it into farm/forest soils.
There are already pyrolysis-process units on the market, designed to pull out to woods or farm behind a truck—we could be doing this right now. The crew running one would sell environmental services, sequestering carbon and enhancing soils (so plants/trees grow faster and sequester even more carbon while creating more food/fiber/wood products for too many people) and avoiding a lot of nasty air pollution from slash burning while they produce carbon-neutral fuel. And jobs. Some of the wages could come from people buying carbon credits, if selling pyrolysis oils and enhancing soils and yields for, say, Weyerhaeuser, doesn’t pay for itself. And we lend them the money to buy the pyrolysis units out of the Remediation Fund. “ Alternatively, "thermo-catalytic depolymerization", which utilizes microwaves, has recently been used to efficiently convert organic matter to biochar on an industrial scale, producing ~50 percent char….” And a fuel or plastics or…. Maybe we could do that with urban yard/garden debris to make char for urban gardens? I’d love to add char to mine. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biochar http://www.biogreen-energy.com/pyrolysis-biomass/ ; www.nettenergy.com
Marshall Medoff of Xyleco has figured out a way to use electron beams and enzymes to break cellulose down into sugars—a holy grail of biofuels researchers--that can be used to make alcohol, gasoline, jet fuel, self-disintegrating plastic, and low-calorie edible sugar that doesn’t rot your teeth. –60 Minutes, 1/6/19 https://www.xyleco.com/
Or this. Team converts wet biological waste to diesel-compatible fuel https://techxplore.com/news/2018-12-team-biological-diesel-compatible-fuel.html
I heard on the news this evening, 2/7/19, that British Petroleum is turning garbage into jet fuel. Googled it up: BP has invested with and agreed to buy fuel from Fulcrum BioEnergy, Pleasanton, CA, which is building a pilot plant near Reno, on line 2020, that will turn 175,000 tons of municipal garbage a year into 11 million gallons of fuel. (They say that’s enough for 180 round-trip flights London to New York. That’s 61,111 gallons per flight!? We really need a much more efficient engine for air travel.) Jet A sells for ~$5.20/gallon, and apparently Fulcrum’s biojet is competitive. They claim 80 percent less carbon emissions than petro jet; I hope they are working on 100 percent less, but this is big. The DoD gave Fulcrum a $70 million development grant, United Airlines and Cathay Pacific are signed up as customers, and Fulcrum is planning plants in Chicago, Houston, Seattle, Gary Indiana ($600 million, 700,000 tons of garbage into 33 million gallons of jet fuel/ year beginning 2022—I wonder how many jobs?), and the U.K. Fuel from waste, efficient, large scale, and coming on line right now. Cool. https://www.bp.com/en_us/bp-us/who-we-are/possibilities-everywhere/waste-to-fuel.html https://www.wastedive.com/news/fulcrum-bioenergy-waste-to-fuel-gary-indiana/544401/
Unfortunately much of what we need is new, and not yet fully understood. Here’s an article by a Dr. Mae-Wan Ho, BEWARE THE BIOCHAR INITIATIVE, in Permaculture Research Institute’s newsletter, in which she warns that biochar doesn’t always improve all soils, and can speed the release of carbon by decomposition in some. She also warns that the supply of oxygen in the atmosphere is finite, and that all this sequestering of carbon dioxide will deplete Earth’s O2—every molecule of CO2 contains two atoms of oxygen. To which I would say, that’s why it’s important to sequester carbon, not CO2, and biochar should work better for that than some other carbon capture and storage schemes. We need to learn to do this right, but we need to get started and learn by doing it. And that’s going to mean lots of jobs for scientists and technicians and foresters and…. https://permaculturenews.org/2010/11/18/beware-the-biochar-initiative/#comment-57363
And if some of our processes take oxygen out of the atmosphere, new, clean processes for refining metals (see farther on) will put a lot back. We have to watch this, but there’s room for hope.
Enhanced weathering essentially for free is as simple as using the right crushed rock to sweeten acid soils. Add crushed basalt or other silicate rock, possibly already-crushed mining wastes, chosen for their plant nutrient profile and without toxic heavy metals, instead of carbon-positive crushed limestone, and as it adjusts the soil pH and loosens compacted soils it pulls carbon out of the atmosphere. Lots of it. Along with adding char to soils and using the right concretes, enhanced weathering has the potential to sequester more carbon than anything else we can do, once we stop adding fossil carbon. And if we spread the stuff on farm/forest/garden/urban soils, it will end up in the water and in the oceans, where it will help reverse ocean acidification, too. That’s, what, three birds with one stone? Four? And another pattern solved? https://qz.com/1416481/the-ultimate-guide-to-negative-emission-technologies/
Ignoring the oceans, soil holds 70 percent of the world’s carbon, four times as much as all biomass and three times as much as the atmosphere. But since the start of the industrial revolution, unsustainable farming, deforestation, and draining of bogs—apparently loss of peat lands contributes as much to climate change as automobiles!? And when they’re gone it seems impossible to bring them back—has already released half to ¾ of what the soil once held. Caring for the soil is the base of the pyramid that keeps us all alive. Too few farmers and foresters get that. https://www.dw.com/en/when-nature-harms-itself-five-scary-climate-feedback-loops/a-43649814
A rock called peridotite, on the surface in Oman (most of the world’s supply), Northern California, Papua New Guinea, Albania and other places, reacts with air and water to form a carbonate. Potential to store huge qtys of carbon out of the atmosphere; and if it’s “like a giant battery with a lot of chemical potential,” maybe there’s a way to extract electrical energy while we’re sequestering carbon? https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/04/26/climate/oman-rocks.html
One carbon sequestration scheme, bioenergy with carbon capture and storage, (BECCS) is a very bad idea. We want to produce energy from all wastes possible, and find more uses for the remnants, and sequester any carbon we can capture; and solids are easier to handle than gasses. What we do not want to do with three, four, soon five times too many people on the planet, and a quarter of them us already hungry, is to waste arable land growing dedicated energy crops. Dick Cheney visited Mexico just after we started adding ethanol to gasoline, and the world price of corn went up by half overnight; poor people whose staple food cost just went through the roof pelted him with tortillas. Too bad it wasn’t with…never mind.
So you grow a tree, cut it—releasing carbon from the soil around it—and burn it for energy. Long term, that’s better than coal/gas/oil, because the carbon came out of the atmosphere in the first place. But you are still dumping all that carbon back into the atmosphere at once, and it will stay there trapping heat for the 60 or 80 or 100 years it takes to grow another tree and re-absorb it all—and then you are going to cut that tree and burn it again? Only with expensive carbon capture and storage (CCS) does this actually help reduce GHGs and climate change, and you are still taking arable land from food, fiber and timber production. People get an idea in their heads, fall in love with it, then don’t think it through, examine it from all sides and acknowledge the potential problems, or they choose to ignore some of the consequences. There are ways to get energy from all of society’s wastes. Many of those methods leave behind char to sequester, and CCS could make some of those sources truly carbon negative. But dedicated energy crops do not help, short term, and take food out of someone’s mouth. And that is as psychopathically uncaring and unsustainable as is putting food in gas tanks in a hungry world.
Here is an article about a teenager, Ethan Novek, who has figured out a way, with the help of a science lab and professor at Yale University, to capture the CO2 from exhaust gasses for maybe $10 per tonne*, ~85 percent less than industry standard. He uses ammonia and salts, instead of expensive amines and lots of heat energy. That’s huge. It’s also dangerous. It might lend the gas/coal companies the excuse that if they can capture and sequester the carbon in their exhausts, problem solved, and we can keep burning fossils until they run dry. But fossil-fuel electricity produces a huge amount of CO2, 30 percent of world greenhouse gasses; and they’re going to inject most of that deep underground? a) Where? b) It won’t all stay there; and on the way back up it will drag poisons into aquifers; and c) they’ll want to make/sell fuels with it, so the carbon ends up in the atmosphere anyway. Like using algae to capture smokestack carbon (which only captures about 40 percent of it), it could be a ruse to keep burning fossils. Or we could outlaw the building of any new fossil-fueled power plants today, and require technology like this to capture the CO2 exhaust of those already built, as we continue to use them only until we can replace them with renewables. https://qz.com/1132303/the-teenager-inventor-who-could-change-the-way-the-world-fights-climate-change/
*BTW, for the mathematically disinclined, or those who haven’t taken a science or math class in some years, a ton is 2000 pounds; a tonne/metric ton is 1000 kilograms, or 2204 pounds.
If Ethan Novek’s technology could be adapted to pull CO2 out of atmosphere instead of more-concentrated exhaust gasses, he might get together with Canadian company Carbon Engineering, which has been working with Harvard to develop a way to make gasoline, diesel, and jet fuel using carbon drawn directly out of the atmosphere. I think we should stop building inefficient gasoline engines today, next week, last year. But we have a huge stock of them already on the road, and the way to get full use out of the “embodied” energy and carbon that went into making them, and avoid the energy/carbon that would go into making replacements, is to drive them into the ground, but on carbon-neutral /negative biofuels and—aerofuels? https://news.nationalgeographic.com/2018/06/carbon-engineering-liquid-fuel-carbon-capture-neutral-science/
Carbon Engineering’s technology combines CO2 with hydrogen, which they are currently getting via electrolysis (which is only carbon neutral because they use hydropower). There is a minimum 20 percent energy penalty going from electricity to hydrogen, one reason this tech is still expensive; the other is that their method of extracting CO2 costs ~$100/ton. Get together with Ethan, guys; then get goin’. I would pay extra for gasoline that I knew was carbon neutral, while I use up a ’94 Toyota pickup that’s scarcely halfway to the moon, yet. I expect it to go there and back. Durability fights climate change. Planned obsolescence makes it worse. And when Anastasios Melis of U.C. Berkeley (or anyone else, anywhere else) makes the altered algae that produce more hydrogen from sunlight, that he is working on, successful, switch to that source. Or hydrogen produced by denying algae sulfur and oxygen. We need Model Ts, technologies using what we know and can do, now; we can tweak them for greater efficiency as we gain experience and continue research. https://www.technologyreview.com/s/408745/hydrogen-from-algae/ https://oilprice.com/Alternative-Energy/Biofuels/Biofuel-Breakthrough-Uses-Algae-To-Create-Hydrogen.html http://www.plantphysiol.org/content/127/3/740
I was an old hydrogen fuels believer until I saw the ultraviolet light. Hydrogen is attractive because when burnt, all it produces is water vapor and a very hot flame. But most of the 53 million tonnes the world consumed in 2004, or ten million tonnes in the U.S. in 2018, was reformed from fossil gas with steam, and the CO2 waste dumped into the atmosphere. Electrolysis wastes 20 percent of the electricity used (maximum energy conversion efficiency 80 percent) to make hydrogen, while Li-ion batteries average ~99 percent efficient. And if a still-prohibitively-expensive fuel cell is 60 percent efficient, 60 percent x 80 percent is 48 percent, and now we’re only as efficient as a good turbodiesel. The right batteries (read on) are a far more efficient, less expensive way to do electric vehicles.
H2 (two hydrogen atoms joined at the hip, the way you find it in nature) is the smallest of all molecules; under pressure it wriggles its way out through steel, aluminum, polymers, pretty much anything you might use to contain it. And the way it drags electrons around as it escapes makes metals brittle, so that eventually they shatter. Its low density makes it difficult to store enough to drive very far without heavy chemical storage schemes that get hot as they release hydrogen. Liquid fuels that are compatible with our existing technologies and infrastructure make a lot more sense than this—distraction—one reason the oil companies seem to love hydrogen. It makes a lot more sense to bind H2 from algae to CO to make short-chain liquid hydrocarbons (octane, cetane (diesel)), as long as the CO2 (reformed to CO) came out of atmosphere in the first place. In the short term, at least, money spent researching hydrogen and fuel cells would be better spent on algal biodiesel and fusion and the next generation of batteries.
Reforestation and Afforestation (planting forests where there were none), might be a great way to sequester lots of carbon, while producing more wood and fiber for the too many people of the future, especially if we enhance those soils by sequestering carbon and adding silicates before we plant—but planting the wrong trees in the wrong place might do more harm than good. Here is a well-reasoned argument that says it works better in the tropics than at higher latitudes https://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/20/opinion/to-save-the-planet-dont-plant-trees.html . And another https://thinkprogress.org/planting-trees-climate-change-solution-3e5b6979561f/ .
As for planting the right forests, Bamboo is incredibly useful, and sends up so many new shoots each spring that you can harvest some for food while maintaining a vigorous forest; some varieties of timber bamboo grow to 75 feet in a summer, though they take a few years to “harden off” and become useful. That’s three, five, seven years to timber, instead of maybe 40 for pine, 60 for fir, and decades longer for some hardwoods. And ‘boo replants itself. Some bamboo is as strong as mild steel--~45,000 psi tensile strength—and can and should replace steel rebar for residential/light construction. But let’s talk about that when we talk about concrete. Meanwhile, it is vital that we protect swamps, bogs, peat bogs, mangroves and other wetlands, too. Besides being centers of biodiversity, they sequester vast amounts of carbon which their destruction releases to atmosphere, and once they are gone it is nigh impossible to bring them back. https://www.dw.com/en/when-nature-harms-itself-five-scary-climate-feedback-loops/a-43649814
It is ridiculous, and due largely to the greed and hatreds of a single man, William Randolph Hearst, that industrial hemp was illegal. Hemp makes much better paper than wood fiber, and Hearst owned forests and paper mills and hated Latinos and Poncho Villa. http://www.drugwarrant.com/articles/why-is-marijuana-illegal/
Hemp might be the most useful of cultivars. The seeds are a superfood (30 percent protein, vitamins, minerals, antioxidants), 30 to 50 percent (healthy, or fuel) oils, and can be used to make lactose-free milk; rope/cordage, canvas/cloth/clothing (it’s far easier on the soil than cotton, which needs 14 times as much water), shoes, soap, sunscreen, paper, beer—tastes skunky in a good way--hempcrete, diapers, plastics (the body of BMW’s Renew sports car; Henry Ford made a car with hemp in 1941), ethanol, methanol, and biodiesel; insulation; affordable supercapacitors; a number of potential medicines besides CBD, which among other things like pain relief, muscle relaxation, and a sleeping aid, can put crippling epilepsy into remission; paints, moisturizing creams, bird seed, bedding, mulch, litter, hemp-leaf juice…. Growing hemp can remove excess nutrients and pollutants, even radioisotopes, from water and soil. It makes a weed-smothering cover crop that can help avoid herbicides, prep the soil for a crop of, say, wheat, and give the farmer a paycheck doing so. The government finally woke from that part of this 90-year nightmare; hemp is a commodity, not a controlled substance, as of the end of 2018. Now we have 90 years of deferred research into this miraculous plant to catch up on.
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The clean, abundant electricity of the future
ALSO out of the Remediation Fund (time to start capitalizing that) we make sure that all credible entities researching algae, advanced photovoltaics, advanced batteries, molten salt fission, and fusion have sufficient funds and expertise to bring their technologies on line afa humanly p. We can do a lot with solar PV (photovoltaics) and wind, now that both are less expensive than coal, and Ambri (Liquid Metal Battery Company) and others have grid-level storage nearly ready. I just watched a YouTube on Sunyee flexible solar panels: a few ounces, durable looking, ~6 square feet, 6.2 amps at 20.8 volts for <$100AU. I’m thinking of buying a few to plug an electric vehicle in to, when I buy an electric vehicle; looks like there are similar panels available on eBay for <$120 U.S. But if we are going to electrify much of our transportation sector, steel production, and most everything else, we are going to need lots of clean, fossil-fuel free electricity, probably more than we can do with wind and solar. It does no good to plug an electric car into a coal/gas-fired power plant.
The several kinds of pressurized-water nuclear fission reactors (PWRs) are all steam or hydrogen explosions waiting to happen, as at Three Mile Island and Chernobyl. The water in the primary coolant loop, the one directly through the reactor core, must remain liquid (there are boiling-water reactors (Fukushima Daiichi), that are even less efficient and seem even more dangerous), and the critical temperature of water, above which no amount of pressure can keep it liquid, is only 374°C., at 218 atmospheres (~3205 psi). For safety temperatures are held a bit below that, around 315-325°/150 atm, and at such low temperatures a steam turbine is even more miserably inefficient than a gasoline engine, somewhere in the high teens or the low 20 percentile range. A PWR only burns a tiny fraction of its fuel –four percent?--before the fuel rods need to be reprocessed, and we don’t reprocess spent fuel in the U.S., to avoid nuclear weapons proliferation and to maximize uranium miners’ profits, so 96 percent of the very expensive fuel is lost in the tons of high-level radioactive waste created.
Molten salt reactors (MSRs) can continuously reprocess their fuel, recycling it through the reactor until it is all burned up, making the process far more fuel efficient than a PWR. They operate at two to three times the temperature of a PWR and so are much more thermally efficient, too, so the reactor can be smaller and less expensive for the same power output. Yet because they operate at atmospheric pressures, they aren’t any kind of explosion waiting to happen. MSRs can burn wastes from PWRs, and we should use them to reduce those hazardous wastes—by about 96 percent.
LFTRs (Liquid fluoride thorium reactors) are MSRs that run on thorium. Thorium 232 (LFTRs actually irradiate the thorium, which transmutes to uranium 233, which fuels the reactor) is about 4,000 times more abundant on Earth than fissile U235. It is much safer to handle; with a half-life of 14.05 billion years, about the age of the universe, it is just barely radioactive (something non-radioactive has a half-life of forever) and we already have enough for thousands of years stockpiled; no need—or excuse--to dig up Grand Staircase-Escalante or Bears Ears National Monuments for uranium. In fact we have so much stored that regulations based on much more dangerous high-level radioactive wastes keeps U.S. production of our own rare earths, utterly necessary to modern technology, unprofitable—rare-earth ores apparently always contain thorium, too--so that most of our rare earths come from China, often in the form of things we would rather manufacture here, including military equipment. https://necessaryandpropergovt.wordpress.com/2015/07/21/rare-earth-elements-how-the-u-s-shoots-itself-in-the-foot/
Eighty-three percent of the waste products of a LFTR are stable after just ten years, and some of them, including xenon and neodymium, barium and krypton, are useful, saleable elements; some are useful in nuclear medicine; the rest apparently decay to safety after ~300 years. Flibe Energy, among others, is developing LFTRs. http://www.thoriumenergyalliance.com/downloads/TEAC3percent20presentations/TEAC3_Sorensen_Kirk.pdf
Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) successfully ran a MSR from 1965 through 1969. At the end of that time Alvin Weinberg, then head of ORNL, handed Richard Nixon a report; Nixon fired him for his trouble, because he wanted the nuclear power industry to begin in his home state, California, not Tennessee, and because fast-breeder PWRs make plutonium for nuclear weapons and MSRs don’t. Like the fossil fuel industry, the pressurized water nuclear power and uranium mining industries have way too much money and way too many lobbyists, and they care more for their bottom line than they do the well-being of the country, the planet, or their own grandchildren. ORNL’s MSR worked. We know how to do this; politics and regulations are in the way. Twenty-three countries are experimenting with this technology; at least ten companies in the U.S. alone, and of course the government is in the way more than it is helping, though ORNL is trying to help those companies. Meanwhile Holland recently fired up the first LFTR in 40 years. And China, not the U.S., is currently leading global research, has 700 scientists working on it? and hopes to have reactors ready about 2025. How much of those hopes were based on cooperation with TerraPower (read on), I’m not sure. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/B9780081011263000270 https://www.ornl.gov/news/ornl-s-qualls-tapped-key-new-reactor-development-position When Will We Have a Working Molten Salt Reactor? https://www.nanalyze.com/2017/02/molten-salt-reactor-when/
You can, unfortunately, make nuclear weapons with uranium 233, the fissile element thorium 232 becomes when irradiated, and the actual reactor fuel. It also contains a little U-232, which has a short half-life and is fiendishly radioactive. It would fry any terrorist making a dirty bomb with LFTR fuel, but a jihadist looking for martyrdom might not care. ThorCon wants to reprocess used fuel off-site. Bad idea; they’d be trucking radioactive stuff, including U-232, around, where it would be vulnerable to accidental spills and theft, and diversion into terrorist weapons. It might be more expensive, but reprocessing on-site is hugely safer, and more secure, and the ability to do that is part of what makes molten salt fission so attractive. And the law that prevents us reprocessing spent fuels is in the way, and needs to be altered.
ThorCon Power is actually a shipbuilding company that wants to build the same design ORNL used in its MSR design; they say the engineering is already done, and they are ready to build a prototype. They want to use shipbuilding techniques to build reactors in modules too large to move by rail or truck, so they could only deploy them up big rivers, or in a harbor, where they could desalinate seawater and “mine the brine” with waste heat but are vulnerable to storm surge, tsunami, or sea-level rise. ThorCon should talk to Aeroscraft, whose Very Large Lifters (giant lighter-than-air craft, dirigibles, see under Planes, Trains, and Automobiles) might not only be able to deliver components anywhere, but act as the hover crane to lower them exactly in place.
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https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=8318707 http://thorconpower.com/docs/domsr.pdf https://www.nanalyze.com/2015/10/6-nuclear-energy-companies-building-molten-salt-reactors/
NRC safety regulations designed to try to keep PWRs safe make licensing, even of experimental reactors, slow and costly. While I am all in favor of regulations designed to keep nuclear power safe, climate change is a clear and present danger, and carefully, thoughtfully altering regulations to fit promising experimental reactors could help bring them to market sooner while maintaining adequate safeguards. Unfortunately we’re talking congress and bureaucrats--another reason we need direct democracy. If you’d learn a little about direct democracy, google up NI4D, or twitter @ni4d.
Bill Gates’ TerraPower was working on a “travelling wave reactor,” TWR, that uses molten sodium as the primary cooling fluid, can burn plentiful U-238—again, enough for thousands of years already mined—or PWR nuclear waste. But molten sodium is problematic; for one thing, it’s violently flammable, and burns better—explosively, in fact--in water than it does in air. TerraPower is also developing a MCFR, molten chloride fast reactor, that uses chloride salts instead of fluoride, and should be as safe. They were going to build a TWR in/with China, but Trump’s tariffs and China’s technology theft stopped that. The head of the U.S. DOE is urging Gates to develop MSRs in the U.S. Meanwhile NRC regs are in the way. I wonder if the NRC has been captured by the PWR industry?
There are other advanced, hopefully safer and more efficient, “generation four” fission schemes under development. Some use super-critical CO2, and helium-cooled reactors seem high-temperature and so very efficient. If we’re gonna do fission, which I’ve always thought of as playing with the fires of hell, do safe, efficient, waste-burning Gen 4 reactors please. No more PWRs.
FUSION is a whole ’nother ball o’ beeswax. Fission splits large, unstable atoms; fusion joins light atoms into heavier, an act of creation instead of destruction. A fusion reactor cannot run away—stop the flow of fuel and the reaction stops—explode, or melt-down. The reaction itself is several times as powerful as fission, the fuels (except tritium) are non-radioactive, and there are no high-level radioactive wastes, though the reactor vessel itself will eventually become “hot,” and require careful disposal, if deuterium-tritium (D-T) is the fuel.
D-T-fueled reactors are the focus of most fusion research because D-T needs far lower temperatures (~100 million degrees), densities, and pressures to fuse than other fuels. Unfortunately while D-T is “low-hanging fruit” that way, it is toxic fruit: 80 percent of the energy is carried away by neutrons at 14.1 MeV, mega-electron volts, of energy, and 14.1 MeV equates to 52,000 km/second, or 164 billion degrees. Don’t want to get in the way of that, even if you’re made outa steel. Titanium. Unobtanium. This is one of the problems with the NIF, National Ignition Facility, the laser-confinement fusion lab run by Lawrence Livermore; the other is that there is no possible way what they do could ever become an economical fusion power source, and it is apparently really mostly a back-door way, at taxpayer expense, of testing nuclear weapons without actually testing nukes in violation of test-ban treaties.
ITER, the gargantuan tokamak being built in Saint-Paul-lès-Durance, France, is still 30 or 35 years out. We and the 35 nations collaborating on it have already spent billions, and will spend $22 billion—but it will be $50 billion—before it’s done. And it is already obsolete. Advances in superconductors (like REBCO, rare earth barium copper oxide) tapes and the magnetic fields they can create already mean that it could be half its size for the same power, but they are “building the plan,” even though the plan is already decades out-of-date. I call this knowingly persisting in error…. The neutrons produced by the D-T reaction will eventually destroy the reactor vessel, which will be radioactive and difficult/dangerous/ expensive to remove and replace. ITER is a major international science experiment with a lot of participants, of which I might otherwise approve: but it is obsolete before it is even built, it sucks up the lion’s share of the U.S.’ fusion research money—I believe that is deliberate, a distraction by fossil-fuel shills pretending to be congressmen and Christians, like science-illiterate chair of the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology Lamar Smith (He quit end of 2018. Yaaaaay! Wonder which oil company he will go on salary with?)—and there are more than 24 fusion start-ups (Bloombeg 11/2018) exploring more likely avenues to useful fusion power, some of which go begging for funds.
One of those start-ups, General Fusion, Burnaby, B.C., has an unusual “steam punk” approach, which may result in a D-T reactor that doesn’t destroy itself with high-energy neutrons. It surrounds the fusion chamber with a spinning wall of molten lithium and lead, that forms a vortex down the middle. They shoot a plasmoid into the center; then 200 steam pistons slam into targets surrounding the reaction chamber, instantly transferring their momentum to the lithium-lead, which crushes the D-T plasmoids, they hope, fast enough to fuse them. The lithium absorbs the neutrons before they can damage the reactor, splitting into tritium, which is half of the fuel, and helium, and releasing more energy in the process. The lithium-lead transfers heat to water or another working fluid, to run a turbine and generator.
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k3zcmPMW6dE&feature=youtu.be https://www.ted.com/talks/michel_laberge_how_synchronized_hammer_strikes_could_generate_nuclear_fusion?language=en https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-LCfx9v4YQ
General Fusion hopes to have a demonstration “Gobsmacker” (my suggested name for it—got a laugh out of Michel Laberge) ready ~2024-ish. They project “a few hundred megawatts” in size, and costs comparable to coal and renewables. Like right-size molten salt fission reactors, I wonder if they might make a drop-in replacement for a coal boiler? Keep and use the turbines and generators and such. That could save ratepayers money and take fossils off-line faster.
The Canadian government—with 1/10 our population and financial resources—just (26 Oct. ’18) invested $49.3 million in General Fusion, out of its Strategic Innovation Fund. That would be a good name for what I’ve been calling the Remediation Fund. Congratulations to Canada for having a (mostly, most of the time) grown-up, forward-thinking, science-literate government.
Aneutronic fusion fuels either do not produce high speed neutrons, or the few they produce aren’t so energetic--2.9 MeV-ish (only 10,000 km/s)--and so are far easier to stop. Helium-3, He 3, is very interesting, but it may be the rarest isotope on earth, and we don’t even have enough to experiment with--the backside of the moon may have recoverable if trace amounts—except that Helion Energy’s very simple-looking semi-trailer size, 50 MW (40,000-50,000 homes; they project $0.04-.06/kwh) reactor is supposed to make its own He-3. They’d like to have a prototype by 2021, and be building commercial systems by 2024, but it all depends, they say, upon funding. They only need a couple three hundred million dollars more….
We need a BIG remediation fund.
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Click on image and drag this corner to enlarge. Helion Energy’s reactor. GOOGLE them for more detail, but don’t expect much; they keep it sketchy and simplistic.
Proton-Boron 11 (usually written p-11B) fusion uses plentiful fuels, and outside of a few low-energy neutrons produced by proton-proton and other side reactions, is aneutronic. It takes ten times the heat needed to fuse D-T (6.6 billion degrees Celsius), 45 times the density—density greater than solid matter--and 500 times the pressure (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aneutronic_fusion), so tokamaks will never work with p-11B, or any fusion fuels other than D-T. But Tri Alpha Energy, HB11 Energy (Australia (lasers)) Lawrenceville Plasma Physics (LPP) and others around the world are working on different p-11B fusion schemes: eight countries are investigating the dense plasma focus, DPF, for fusion and for a dozen other applications of this versatile—well, it's a plasma beam gun.
There is a YouTube showing how a dense plasma focus works at https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=99&v=jVif4hUAJ8c and see
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e4WJdkHmq64 and the rest of The New Fusion Race series. Some of the organizations researching aneutronic fusion are funded by some very wealthy people, and a few of them get some government money, even if most of that is wasted on the NIF and ITER. Some of them open-source everything they learn, to help advance the field, and those folks explain their methodologies pretty well; others are more secretive, so it’s harder to speculate whether their approaches have merit. But I really hope that LPP can “pull it off.” If LPP (and/or two groups in Poland working on p-11B in DPFs) can do what they hope, ~ 5 MW reactors (~5000 homes) about six feet in diameter for ~$500k, they’ll be a big chunk of saving the species. Do the math; that’s $100 per household to own the thing. You could drop one by helicopter into the middle of Antarctica or a remote African village, and with a little help from maybe the World Bank, that African village could afford one. P-B11 DPFs will use direct energy conversion—200 pulses of charged (alpha) particles per second through coils will directly output electricity--so you need no expensive steam turbines-generators-condensers, and they think they can make power for ½ cent per kWh. Safe, put as many as you need at any substation; and inexpensive. And with a lot of these scattered everywhere the grid would become way more robust and reliable.
5MW LPP DPFs everywhere, Helion Energy reactors where 50 mW makes more sense, 250-500-ish mW General Fusion “gobsmackers” and molten salt fission reactors replacing coal and gas boilers at existing fossil fuel plants, with the MSRs burning up spent PWR reactor fuel and so, over time, reducing our high-level radioactive-waste storage problem. Wind and solar and batteries where they make more sense, and we can likely electrify everything that it makes sense to electrify. The next five or ten years age going to be very exciting. Keep your fingers eyes crossed….
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Illustrated explanation of how a DPF works here: https://www.ialtenergy.com/dpf.html
If LPP can make this work, they think they can get to scientific proof, net energy, in another five years, and for another $1 million or so; then they have to attract big money, $100 million, to engineer the device for mass production. They get no help from government, but solicit investors through Wefunder on occasion; I bought a few shares, last time they fundraised. Wish I had invested in Microsoft or Apple when they were just getting started: maybe my $1,000 investment in LPP will put all my grandnieces and nephews through college. https://wefunder.com/lppfusion https://lppfusion.com/ LPP chief scientist Eric Lerner says they are a very small team (four people?), and more money and help would speed them up. And we need these guys on line afap. Just sayin… https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QYzD0xetEv4
BTW: it takes ~7MW, 7 mega/million watts, to keep a Boeing 737 in the air. LPP DPFs are small and light enough that two of them could power a good-size electric plane, or one a smaller (DC-9 size?) airliner, and that old dream of an aircraft that can stay aloft indefinitely has a chance. Aviation is 2 ½ or 3 percent of greenhouse gasses, and that is enough to deserve a concerted attack; jet engines are not energy efficient. Making air travel carbon neutral would be huge. LPP DPF reactors might just do it.
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Wind and Solar PV (photovoltaics, solar-electric cells/panels) are now supposed to be as affordable as coal, but they are intermittent. PV/solar cells get more efficient every year. There are several kinds, with efficiencies ranging from 11 percent into the high 20s; the best, at a whopping 46 percent, are (expensive!) Multi-Junction cells. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KBKuH-4dnKc Battery storage helps, and some people around the world are using some pretty expensive batteries to level the loads; but so far battery systems store energy for a few hours, not days. Professor of materials chemistry Donald R. Sadoway (TED Talks: The Missing link to Renewable Energy), his crew of merry pranksters at MIT, and their start-up Ambri, are developing molten-metal batteries using the most abundant, least expensive materials available--”If you want something dirt cheap, make it out of dirt.”—that don’t lose capacity over time, and store a lot of power in a small space. They hope to be in production by 2020. http://www.ambri.com/ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pDxegcZqx_8 and https://www.ted.com/talks/donald_sadoway_the_missing_link_to_renewable_energy/up-next?language=en
Iron-saltwater batteries are another interesting option that don’t experience power fade; they’re not as energy dense, but the materials are dirt cheap, completely recyclable, and non-toxic. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HmtI8Wat7rY
There are also energy storage technologies that don’t rely on batteries. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DydH3UUwR90
We need clean electricity right now, and at best, if we had a sane government trying to help it happen, we are two or five or ten years out on any of this, another reason we need to prosecute the fossils for lying to us for 40 years, seize their assets, and invest the money in green technologies. It worries me that both the fossils and the pressurized-water nuclear power industry will no doubt do everything they can to squelch such a world-changing technology as fusion; it will put both of them out of business, because they are not smart enough to re-invest in tomorrow’s technologies that we need today. They have lots of money and lots of lobbyists; most corporations act as if they are run by psychopaths for very good reason, and the fossils have already shown us that they are psychos. We need to watch for any more attempts to block or delay clean technologies and to prosecute such attempts as crimes against humanity, because they are.
The Kochs spend millions fighting mass transit so you and I have to drive everywhere and buy more gasoline; and the oil company psychopaths, not the auto mfrs, prompted D.elirium T.remens to roll back energy efficiency standards for automobiles. These psychos put their next yacht above the survival of the species. (Betsy DeVos’ family, which makes its millions ripping off taxpayers via private education/charter schools and private prisons, owns 10 boats, two helicopters, and a $40 million yacht registered in the Cayman Islands to avoid U.S. taxes.) If that isn’t a crime against humanity, Hitler was a humanitarian. I’m sure he thought so…. When are we going to stop letting our lives being run/ruined by psychopaths/oligarchs/ libertarians/Republicans? https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/19/climate/koch-brothers-public-transit.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/13/climate/cafe-emissions-rollback-oil-industry.html https://thehill.com/policy/transportation/393275-koch-backed-group-fighting-public-transit-projects-across-us .
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Let’s talk about Planes, Trains, and Automobiles.
An article on the United Nations Climate Change website, https://unfccc.int/news/ethanol-and-transport-it-s-role-in-climate-action , says that transportation is the second largest source of GHGs in the world, at 20 percent. If power generation is first at ~34 percent, and farming second at 25, that would make transportation third. Doesn’t matter. It’s huge. Every 6.3 pound gallon of gasoline burned becomes 19.64 pounds of CO2, or 171.68 cubic feet of pure CO2 at atmospheric pressure and 70°F. Diesel produces 22.38 pounds of CO2/gallon, but it’s heavier and more energy dense so you burn less per mile. http://www.uigi.com/co2_quantity_convert.html Spread that out to 407 parts per million and it’s a whole lot of cubic feet…. There are graphics at https://scied.ucar.edu/carbon-dioxide-400-ppm-diagrams that will help you visualize that.
Commercial airliners consume 63 million gallons of Jet A every day over the U.S. alone; 320 million gallons worldwide. MIT Technology Review (A powerful new battery could give us electric planes that don’t pollute) says air travel is responsible for two percent of global CO2 emissions (four percent according to the British Sustainable Development Commission). Jet fuel weighs 6.8 lbs. per gallon, but becomes 21 lbs. of CO2, and lots of water vapor, a potent GHG, when it burns. That’s 6 billion, 720 million pounds of CO2, 3,360,000 tons each day! https://www.popsci.com/technology/article/2012-04/big-fill
Surprisingly, a fully-loaded Boeing 737 does better per passenger mile than a Toyota Prius—if there is only one person in the Prius. Fill the Prius (four?), and it does a lot better. LA to SF, 392 miles, the jet burns five gallons per passenger, the Prius two plus per seat, so eight gallons total? And a big tour bus, just one gallon of diesel per passenger. https://paullaherty.com/2012/05/25/boeing-737-vs-toyota-prius-this-might-surprise-you/
An Israeli company called Eviation Aircraft intends to debut a nine-passenger regional commuter electric airplane at the Paris airshow in June of this year (2019), and be selling them by 2021. Eviation claims that the 14,000 lb “Alice” will cruise at 276 MPH, have a 625 mile range—Portland to San Francisco, with 90 miles reserve--recharge its batteries in three hours, and cost 1/10 as much to keep in the air as a bizjet. https://www.dw.com/en/how-soon-till-we-all-fly-in-electric-planes/a-43473916 https://climatecrocks.com/2018/12/26/eviation-electrics-will-take-to-the-sky-in-2019/
Alice’ batteries will be 60-65 percent of its 14,000 Lb. weight. I gather that there is a “sweet spot” of 400 Wh/kg battery energy density at which moderate-range electric aviation becomes worthwhile. I don’t know what Eviation is using, but a Donald Sadoway/MIT “spinout” called SolidEnergy is now in limited production of SAFE lithium metal batteries that do 400 to 500 Wh/kg—more power in half the size and weight of current Li-ions. I hope these guys are talking to each other….
Euro carrier Easy Jet is also working on an electric airliner with a 335 mile range, that should cover 20 percent of its flights. There are all kinds of people working on electric aircraft; some of them claim to be only a year or two from production, and short- and mid-range air travel could all be electric in the near future. The gold rush to develop better batteries will only make this tech more viable. As for larger long-range aircraft, if LPP’s dense plasma focus fusion power plant (see above) works out, it should be small and light enough to power large aircraft—with unlimited range. And a new generation of axial flux electric motors should help; 9kW/kg. That’s about 5 ½ horsepower per pound of motor. Compare that to the insanely powerful 193 Hp engine of the BMW S1000RR superbike, at 2.4 kW/kg. Magnax claims that its motors are infinitely scalable, and thin and light enough that they just might make hub motors, a holy grail of electric vehicle designers, finally feasible; the world has been working on hub motors since the 1920s. Equipmake motors seem to have an even better continuous-to-peak power ratio than Magnax. https://newatlas.com/magnax-axial-flux-electric-motor/54821/
WHILE IT WAS FUN to catch a flight in Peoria at 6 a.m., stop over an hour in Denver, and be in Portland in time for a late lunch, I really don’t need to go anywhere at 550 mph. If slower aircraft with any kind of engine were far more efficient and low-carbon—reciprocating engines are more efficient than turboprops which are more efficient than jets--the ticket would cost less—fuel is a big chunk of the cost of flight—and a lot of people like me might prefer that service. You’d be in the air longer; the seats would have to be wider, and you’d need a place to stand and stretch and move around. And better food and movies. All more affordable if fuel costs less, and if we reduce fuel use enough we can fly on biofuels. https://aviation.stackexchange.com/questions/29588/are-turboprops-more-efficient-than-piston-engines-thrust-per-fuel-consumption
As for slower aircraft, seeing the country from the tiny window of an airliner was always the best part of flying, for me; I always asked for the window seat. Lower slower flight would make for an even better cross-country sight-seeing experience. If it were available, I might take the airship! Zeppelin is running tourist trips on 12 routes across Germany and Switzerland, and eying China (2017). UK-based Hybrid Air Vehicles is working with a prototype dirigible; SkyCat is solar powered (if these things are electric, it would be foolish not to use that huge surface to gather solar energy and increase range) will come in a range of sizes up to gargantuan, and can land on water. They’re going to be nice and quiet, too. https://youtu.be/eGSATf531wA VariaLift (GB) is building a 50-tonne prototype, envisions a 250 tonne model, and says 3000 tonnes is possible; they claim 80-90 percent less fuel use and purchase price than conventional aircraft, and shipping costs on airships comparable to truck and rail. And Lockheed-Martin and Aeroscraft are both working on 250o and 500 ton, multi-hulled heavy lifters that should be able to deliver cargo anywhere on the planet.
The huge components of wind turbines are difficult to deliver by rail or truck; turbine mfrs (manufacturers) are talking to airship mfrs about that. https://www.windpowermonthly.com/article/1454731/turbine-makers-look-airship-solutions
BTW: if you eat pineapple, or rock-hard cardboard-flavored winter peaches from Peru (why!?), or a bunch of other fruits and vegetables during the off season, they were flown to you leaving a big cloud of CO2 in their wake. I like pineapple too, but I don’t eat one very often, like, never. Carbon neutral transport could change that.
Another BTW: One or two 5 MW Lawrenceville Plasma Physics dense plasma focuses—foci?—will be a great powerplant for a big lifter, too. If you could gather rainwater you wouldn’t have to land until you ran out of food.
Lighter-than-air craft don’t do well in high winds. But we can reliably predict the weather a week out, now; soon, I heard recently on PBS, ten days. You fly around bad weather, dodge it, make deliveries in the other direction, or put the airship in a hangar. You ride jet streams and trade winds to save fuel and time. More like sail on the ocean. Way cool.
Helium is one of the rarest elements on Earth, and that could pose a future problem; but a recently-discovered gas field in Tanzania should supply the world for several decades. Too bad fossil methane comes with it…. Fusion will create helium, but not much; still, it might be worth gathering. Electric dirigibles should be able to haul cargo and sightseeing travelers long distances very inexpensively, on very little fuel and carbon. Lighter-than-air’s time has finally come. I hope.
Rail is supposed to be ten times as efficient as air travel or an ordinary car, about four times as efficient as a long-haul tractor-trailer, for moving freight. I’m disappointed in the numbers I see for passenger rail. You can move a ton of freight around 471 miles on one gallon of diesel. Make that biodiesel and build the train with clean steel (more later) and this could be an even cleaner green mode of transport. And here’s a reference that says 190.5 passenger miles per gallon equivalent for freight. The same writer equates one passenger to two tons of freight—maybe the volume required?—and says passenger trains average 71.6 pmpg, not quite as good as the average motorcycle.
I ride. Motorcycles are not—remotely--aerodynamically efficient, especially at freeway speeds, and get fuel efficiency equal to a very small hybrid car only because they weigh 1/6 as much (Prius 3050lb, ~50 mpg, Suzuki V-Strom 650cc 480lb, ~52mpg—and the V-Strom is supposed to be an “efficient” motorcycle, which is why I own one. 71.6 mpg would be a pretty small bike—or one with a Rotax engine). So, bicycle if you can, take the bus when it will do, the train when it won’t, use an electric bike/car IF you can plug it into clean electricity, don’t fly unless you have to—I’m sorry about your vacation in Bali, but I don’t fly and I gave up my beloved road trips years ago; leaving the future a future is more important, and we will have clean air travel again soon--and pack that Prius! I try to combine errands, drive as little as possible, and use a small (250cc Kawasaki Super Sherpa) motorcycle with a big cargo crate whenever it will do. And I still feel guilty about burning gasoline.
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So we (will) have clean electricity from wind and solar and those molten salt fission and fusion reactors. Now we need clean cars. I will be able to buy my next vehicle in a few months; it will be all electric, or I won’t bother. I don’t want to plug it into coal, so I hope to buy enough PV panels to recharge it, at least when the sun is out, at the same time. Unfortunately Detroit doesn’t make anything yet that I want. A tiny, short-range, around-town shopping cart will not do; neither will a “mild hybrid”; Toyota’s Rav-4 hybrid gets a whopping eight MPG better than the gasoline-only version? Why bother? Climate change isn’t a mild hybrid sort of problem.
I can’t afford a Tesla, I have no use for a sedan anyway, and I like to get off the grid or drive a long ways without stopping. We need to electrify every type of motor vehicle on the market. No one makes an EV I want. Give me a two-tiered welded tubular alloy truss “skateboard” frame, with room to slide four or six one-man-carryable, owner-serviceable batteries in between the frame tiers to a central buss bar from either side; a welded roll cage, and a sustainable-polymer body which can be anything you want; make mine the size and shape of a Ford Transport-Connect microvan but hundreds of pounds lighter. I need 4WD—easy with multiple electric motors (axial flux motors produce 5 1/2 HP per pound)—and I want the batteries to be SolidEnergy lithium-metal cells, more power in ½ the size and weight of Li-ion. Cover the vehicle with PV cells not paint. It will pick up a useful amount of charge parked in the sun all day.
SolidEnergy is in limited production of “Hermes” lithium-metal batteries for aerial drones and say they’ll have cells called Apollo ready for electric vehicles in 2020. Half the size and weight of lithium-ion, and manufacturable on existing Li-ion assembly lines. A Tesla Model S weighs ~4900 lb (way too much, Elon, and I don’t need 779 bhp or 920 ft-lbs torque! (Wikipedia)), 1200 lb of which is its 100 kwh, 250-300 mile battery. I want a 3,000 lb (or less) vehicle, and with a range extender I wouldn’t need more than 200 miles plug-in range; 400 lbs of rechargeable Apollo batteries might do. I want it to work without a range-extender battery installed. At the start of a trip out-of-town I would pull into a fueling station, buy a 250, 500, or 1000 mile air-Al battery, slide it into place, connect hoses and wires, fill tanks with electrolyte and oil, and in five minutes be ready to drive Portland to Denver before I need to trade it in for a fresh battery. Now all we need is clean electricity to reduce the Al-O2 sludge back into aluminum plates, and an auto mfr that cares enough about the future to build it. Until the next generation of batteries….
Another MIT/Donald Sadoway spinoff has solved the problem with aluminum-air batteries continuing to discharge after the electrolyte is removed, by flooding the cells with oil between uses. I want those for range extenders; but I want to remove and replace the entire battery, not just its aluminum plates, as Nissan intends, when it is discharged, and I want the vehicle to run just fine on its rechargeables without an Al-air on board. This tech is available now—get busy, Ford. I will plug mine into several $125, ~6.2 amp ~20.8 volt thin-film PV panels, ganged together to produce the right voltage, so I want the vehicle to charge on DC as well as 120 or 240 VAC, and to fast charge, please. http://news.mit.edu/2018/metal-air-batteries-extending-life-1108 https://www.designnews.com/electronics-test/solution-aluminum-air-battery-issue/171999835659812
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HISTORICAL THICKNESS AND PERFORMANCE OF LITHIUM CHEMISTRY BATTERIES. CREDIT: SOLIDENERGY SYSTEMS.
http://www.solidenergysystems.com/
http://news.mit.edu/2016/lithium-metal-batteries-double-power-consumer-electronics-0817
https://www.designnews.com/electronics-test/battery-revolutions-are-predicted-weekly-one-might-be-real/60231533858372
There is huge research into battery technology right now; at least a dozen entities around the world are working on Al-air alone. http://www.digitaljournal.com/pr/3650098 Better energy storage makes wind, solar, tidal, and other intermittent renewables work, improves electronics, and makes electric vehicles either lighter, or gives them longer range, or both. And it will make electric aviation viable.
Tesla and Nikola Motor are both working on electric trucks. Nikola’s 1000 kWh option should go 400 miles on a charge. Drivers need a break every six hours (or less) anyway, for the safety of everyone on the road. Nikola is also working on fuel-cell-powered trucks for long haul trucking: 1200 mile range. I suppose that makes sense with a two-driver team. Fuel cells are still very expensive, we do not yet have a clean source of hydrogen, and there are other problems with both: hydrogen and fuel cells are not going to come on line soon enough, if ever. I wonder if Al-air batteries might not be a better option, or SolidEnergy’s lithium-metal batteries? Or biodiesel….
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Gasoline engines strain to make 29 percent efficiency; many are less than 25 percent efficient, meaning they waste >70 percent of the energy in the fuel you buy. (Mercedes makes one that is better than 50 percent efficient, the F1 1.6-litre V6 Turbo, but it’s a Formula One race engine and the street car they intend to wrap around it will cost ~$3 million.) Toyota makes a 2.8-liter diesel, the 1GD-FTV, that is supposed to be the most efficient in the world (of its size) at 44percent. That’s half again as efficient as gasoline, and some large turbodiesel ship’s engines claim up to 51.6 percent thermal efficiency. I have long thought that the gasoline engine should be relegated to the scrap heap of history, but here’s an article from 2009 https://phys.org/news/2009-08-gasoline-diesel-cocktail-potent-recipe-cleaner.html#nRlv claiming that separately injecting gas and diesel into an engine designed for that can produce a thermal efficiency of 53 percent, and much cleaner emissions. Here’s another about an engine that separately injects diesel and ethanol for 39 percent less CO2 and less soot. https://phys.org/news/2018-10-bioethanol-diesel-contribution-sustainability.html
More efficient fossil-fueled engines are no answer, but more efficient engines means we’d need less carbon-neutral or -negative biofuels to power them, for use where electric vehicles won’t do, and that helps make biofuels a more viable alternative—if they’re done right. Ethanol for gasahol is not done right; it’s yet another large, unnecessary source of atmospheric CO2. More farther on.
Current production automotive engines are not significantly more efficient than they were 35 years ago when I studied energy management. It’s about time engines got more efficient—but the oldest of the articles above was written nine years ago. Where’s that engine? And the Achates Power opposed-piston diesel is supposed to be very clean and 30percent more efficient than conventional diesels; apparently a gasoline version works, and is also more efficient. Where’s that one? Point is, diesels are efficient and powerful and some that should soon be available will be more so. Gasoline, not so much. And I gather that biogasoline is much harder to make than biodiesel, at least from algae. But there is that pesky Canadian company, Carbon Engineering , claiming they can make it out of thin air. And these guys claim they can turn manures and food wastes into diesel. https://techxplore.com/news/2018-12-team-biological-diesel-compatible-fuel.html . Cycling carbon in and out of the atmosphere is part of the solution, not the problem, especially if we can capture and sequester a portion of it in the process.
Start-up KiOR, working with Netherlands’ BIOeCON, claimed to be able to turn biomass into crude oil. They crashed and burned; it’s an anti-legend in the biomass industry. There have been a lot of disappointments and wasted money on biomass-to-motorfuels schemes; it’s doable (Germany did it with coal for WWII; google Fischer-Tropsch), but not yet cost competitive with petro. But sooner or later someone is going to make this work, or we’re going to charge ourselves the true cost of fossil fuels, and so make biofuels competitive. Several of the technologies I explored researching this sound like they might enhance each other. I hope that all the right people are talking to each other. Cooperation will get us out of this mess faster than competition.
Despite VW’s cheating, diesels produce less CO2 per passenger mile than gasoline engines; the bigger problem is soot, tiny particles of it that carry carcinogens deep into your lungs. Diesel particulate filters can clean up 95 percent of the particulates, while catalytic converters split nasty nitrous oxides back into clean nitrogen and oxygen. Some engines inject urea into the exhaust to burn up NOx emissions. Modern diesels are very clean, soon-available ones should be even cleaner, and they should be much cleaner run on biodiesel, which is the only reason I would consider owning a diesel hybrid. So I would stop making conventional gasoline engines now, but continue developing advanced diesel and two-fuel engines to spin hybrids with carbon-neutral biofuels.
Our current vehicle fleet is a huge infrastructure, a lot of embodied energy, that we can’t afford to simply trash. But we could, soon, run it on carbon-neutral biofuels until it dies a natural death and can be recycled. More investment in the technologies of the future, please, and less on tar-sands pipelines.
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Algae for biofuels
I really hope we find use for Algal Biodiesel, because of all the other things we can do with algae besides make fuels for long-range transport where batteries won’t do. We can use it, along with anaerobic digesters, to clean up wastes and polluted water, make use of those nutrients instead of allowing them to pump methane, ammonia, and nitrous oxides, all greenhouse gasses, into the atmosphere, and pollute fresh waters all the way to the oceans, where they fertilize algal blooms that create dead zones, reducing our protein supply. If we choose/breed/engineer the right algae and grow them clean, the remnant after we press out the oils can be health food—and with three times too many people on the planet, soon to be four times, and ~five by 2100, we’re going to eat lots of algae or go hungry. There is a macroalga, Dulse, that is supposed to taste like bacon. Hope they breed that in. That same remnant will make great livestock feed, freeing up crop lands now used to grow feed to grow food for hungry people. And as I said under Farming, if we find the gene in seaweed Asparagopsis taxiformis that produces bromoform, which inhibits methane in cow burps, and insert it into the biodiesel algae that we will also grow for cattle feed, we might mitigate the large contribution to GHGs--five or six percent?--that is enteric fermentation in ruminants. Wonder if we can grow enough algae to spread it on the Serengeti for the wildebeesties?
We can make fibers and plastics from algal oils--or starches, leaving the oils for fuel (or cooking oil!)-- grown near where we need them, and 3-D print those plastics into whatever we need very near where we need it. Saving much of the energy that’s used to transport widgets around the world by producing things/food/feed/building materials as near where we need them as possible will help. And, hey, Spirulina starch works to make plastics, and Spirulina is health food. https://www.fastcompany.com/90154210/the-creators-of-this-algae-plastic-want-to-start-a-maker-revolution
Plastic is mostly carbon. Using algae to take carbon out of the atmosphere and make durable goods sequesters that carbon, at least for a while; even if we eventually burn them, as long as we are continuously making new plastic widgets we’re still cycling carbon out of the atmosphere. It would help to make durable goods durable. Think about everything you use every day that is or could be made out of the right polymers—including much of your car. Formulate them so they are either easily recyclable, or cleanly burnable for energy, at the end of their useful life; and formulate single-use plastics so they biodegrade in soil and water, and photodegrade, to harmless compounds long before they can strangle sea turtles and albatross chicks and absorb and introduce carcinogens back into our food chain. And get toxicologists involved at the beginning of the process, and don’t even mess with anything toxic/carcinogenic/mutagenic/teratogenic or otherwise nastygenic. Don’t even.
The expensive and slowly-disappearing—and I would think very threatened by warming, acidic oceans—salmon we eat for their omega-3 fatty acids don’t produce those essential nutrients; they eat smaller creatures that eat the algae that actually make those molecules. But we can eat the algae, too, and more affordably get the benefits of those nutrients to everyone. Multiple companies offer algal-based omega-3 supplements; some are growing high-omega-3 algae to feed to farmed salmon, and one, Omega3Beef, is feeding algae to cattle; you can get your omega-3s from a T-bone. You can make food colorings from algae, and the colorants in plants are antioxidants that help you live longer. Many algae produce their own antibiotics, to stave off predatory microbes. Criminally irresponsible livestock producers feeding antibiotics to animals too closely confined are ruining the effectiveness of our current, lifesaving antibiotics. We will need new ones, and algae may become an important source. Nutraceuticals, pharmaceuticals, vitamins and minerals—and oh, yeah, you can extract and ferment the starches for ethanol; transestrifying bio oils into diesel requires an alcohol, and ethanol works better than the cheaper methanol usually used. And who knows. Maybe it’ll make good hooch. Bacon flavored, if we add some dulse.
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While we’re there—here—the Ethanol industry, especially that humongous part of it that goes to gasohol, contributes far more greenhouse gasses to climate change than it saves. https://www.climatecentral.org/news/ethanol-backfiring-for-climate-change-20760#400-ppm-carbon-dioxide-spiral-20748 https://foe.org/2010-05-how-does-ethanol-contribute-to-global-warming/
The U.N. Climate Change website and USDA disagree, say that ethanol production is getting cleaner as the industry adopts greener practices, and claim some pretty hard-to-believe numbers for GHG reduction, like 43 percent, from adding ethanol to gasoline; for one thing, they don’t count the ethanol portion of gasohol as producing GHGs, which is ridiculous--they ignore that farmers burn gas or diesel plowing, planting, spraying (with nastygenic pesticides), and harvesting “Roundup© Ready” corn, which takes lots of fertilizer made from fossil gas in a process that releases CO2, methane (CH4), and nitrous oxides (NOx). Soil bacteria release more NOx metabolizing the fertilizer, and nitrous oxides are 320 times as bad as CO2. It takes heat, usually made by burning something that creates CO2, to distill the low-yield (12 percent? Six percent?) alcohol from the mash. And the waste product of fermentation is CO2, gobs and gobs of it.
Ethanol is hygroscopic--it attracts water--that rusts out tanks and pipelines and spoils gas that sits for long—I’ve heard one month? Motorcyclists know to add StaBil to the fuel tank of a bike stored for the winter to prevent that. Ethanol precludes the need for even nastier additives, and makes the gasoline burn a little cleaner. Otherwise the only people on the planet that it helps are farmers and the rest of the farming industry from tractors to irrigation equipment to fertilizer to trucking, Monsanto/ADM, and the ethanol industry itself, all at taxpayer expense. It increases world hunger, contributes lots of pollutants besides CO2--ethanol in gasoline evaporates and contributes to ground-level ozone and smog that don’t do lungs any good—and as always we taxpayers are on the hook for something not in our best interest.
While this insanity continues, distillers could probably warm the fermentation tanks and do the distilling with solar heat or waste heat from some other process, and the CO2 coming out of the fermentation tanks should be easily captured. If they don’t want to pay to sequester it, maybe they could get together with Carbon Engineering and Ethan Novek and Anastasios Melis (see above) and make “aero” gasoline out of it; it would be less carbon-intensive than the petro stuff.
But the real solution is to stop making gasoline engines. Once we stop burning petroleum—and we must, asap—we will have no need of the inefficient, noisy, smelly things anymore. Or ever again.
And BTW, I am tired of seeing biofuels detractors conflate all biofuels with ethanol. Ethanol doesn’t work as advertised, unless you are tropical Brazil, and palm oil for fuel only works if you don’t mind massive deforestation with accompanying CO2 release, and making orangutans extinct. Biogas, algal biofuels, pyrolysis oils, and fuels from wastes are very different processes, with their own problems and rewards. They need to be judged on their own merits, and not all painted with a very broad brush dipped in ethanol.
* * *
Growing cannabis indoors doesn’t help with climate change, either. This is Oregon, so I can talk about it without Jeff Sessions’ permission. I asked an expert: no, I will not name names, even under torture: A four-foot eight-lamp T-5 fluorescent grow light is rated at 432 watts; if you run it 18 hours a day for 30 days at $0.141/kwh, it will cost you 233.28 KWh = $32.89/month, and if your utility burns coal you’ll make about 476 pounds (at 2.041 lbs/kwh; some references say 2.85-ish) of CO2. https://carbonfund.org/how-we-calculate/ You can start several dozen plants under one fixture, but by the time you are ready to move from vegetation (veg) to bloom (three months, maybe four from seed/cutting), and your plants are 3 ½ feet tall or so, you’ll need one fixture for two plants. Say you have a medical card and patients and you grow 12; you’ll need roughly one fixture for the first month, four the second, and six the third. (1x233 KWh + 4x233 + 6x233) = 2563 kwh; 5231 pounds—2 -5/8 tons—of CO2; and about $361.
THEN you’re going to put your girls under 600 or 1000 watt high-pressure sodium lamps, one per customer, for 12 hours a day for eight or ten weeks. One kwh x 12 fixtures x 12 hours x 70 days = 10,080 kwh, 20,573 lbs CO2—10 ¼ tons—and $1421.28.
The rule of thumb is one pound/kw, under lights, but most growers don’t do that well; so your efforts and money plus all those “nutes”—nutrients—a few hundred bucks worth? --might give you 12 pounds, probably a good bit less. Say 10 ¼ pounds. That’s a ton of CO2 per pound, 1 ¼ tons including veg. Move good outdoor varieties out into the sun in mid-May, and around PDX you might get three to seven pounds/plant, if the bud rot doesn’t getchya; move to Grant’s Pass, and you might get 10 or 12 pounds/plant. You probably won’t have to deal with The Borg—two-spotted spider mites don’t do well outdoors; if you get caterpillars, BT (Bacillus thuringiensis) will do ‘em without poisoning you. You’ll be able to use compost and manures and other organic goodies without stinkin’ up the house. Vegging, in the spring, in a greenhouse with supplemental light only early morning and late evening, might save you half the energy/carbon/money you’d spend vegging entirely indoors; finishing outdoors will save you all of the energy/carbon/money you’d spend finishing under lights. It’s huge, especially the carbon. Please grow outdoors and buy sun grown.
And lawmakers, national legalization will kill the black market—especially if you don’t get greedy with the taxes--and cross-border smuggling, and give growers far less incentive to grow hidden, indoors, under lights.
BTW; Growing food under lights isn’t going to be any more efficient. Photosynthesis uses just a few percent of the energy that falls on the plant, maybe eight percent for very-efficient sugar cane? Less than one percent for some plants? Start with a 40 percent efficient coal plant, and line losses, and you’re just short of abysmal. When we have plenty of carbon free electricity and it is fairly priced, go for it, for all that it doesn’t make sense. Until then, vertical and indoor gardens that require artificial lights have huge carbon footprints. Bad idea.
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CONCRETE AND STEEL and Aluminum
Construction is the world’s largest industry; steel and concrete, parts of it, are second and third. Portland cement is responsible for five to ten percent of global greenhouse gas production; Steel , twice as much per ton. Manufacturing Portland cement (OPC, ordinary/original Portland cement) puts about a ton of CO2 into the atmosphere for every ton of cement produced (the world produces ~2.5 billion tons of the stuff every year, and rapidly-modernizing India and China will use 40 times as much as the U.S. next year), and dioxins and furans and hydrocarbons and acids and lead, mercury, cadmium, and chromium, and requires tremendous, dirty energy that the mfrs buy at 1/10 to 1/20 what it costs you and me, amounting to a huge subsidy for yet another profitable industry that is destroying the future, doubling the insult. UNTIL WE CAN REPLACE IT, we need to make—excuse me. Incentivize--its mfrs capture and sequester all of the carbon and the rest of the nasties in their exhausts. There are ways they can do that, but it might be more affordable to simply make better cements.
Cements that do not rely on calcium carbonate as the key ingredient can produce from 40 to 90 percent less CO2 during mfr; some of them—magnesium oxide cements, lime cements, fly ash cements, others--can pull CO2 out of the atmosphere as they cure. Blending gypsum and pozzolanas (coal fly ash, some volcanic ashes/crushed pumice, rice husk ash, Silica fume), with Portland cement reduces the amount of OPC used, and so its environmental impact. These are called PPC, Portland Pozzolana Cements. Blast furnace slag can also be used in cements, or mixed with OPC up to 95 percent. Fly ash and slag contain toxic metals and are difficult to dispose of, and we have millions of tons of the stuff just piling up; Inside Climate News says coal ash contaminates the groundwater in at least 22 states. Apparently turning these pollutants into concrete safely sequesters or neutralizes those toxins, and is an environmentally sound, safe way to dispose of vast quantities of nasties. And if those cements sequester carbon, too, they are a simple way to clean up multiple waste streams, and another pattern solved.
We need to repair and replace a huge amount of our infrastructure that was built with the wrong cement, OPC, which cracks and admits water that rusts its rebar; rust expands three times and breaks the concrete it is supposed to reinforce. The superintendent on a big-box, “tilt-up” warehouse store I helped build 20 yag told me that it wasn’t expected to last more than 40 years. We built modern civilization with the wrong technology. https://theconversation.com/the-problem-with-reinforced-concrete-56078 Rebuilding it, however, gives us a great opportunity: if we choose cements that last and that sequester carbon, we might absorb a huge amount of it. We have to repair/replace these roads and bridges anyway. Doing it right would help huge. Using the wrong cement will make climate change worse, and our kids will have to pay to rebuild it all again in their lifetimes. It will bankrupt them.
Energy needs and CO2 emissions for 1 tonne of Portland cement and Rock-based Geopolymer cement.
|
Energy needs (MJ/tonne)
|
Calcination
|
Crushing
|
Silicate Sol.
|
Total
|
Reduction
|
Portland Cement
|
4270
|
430
|
0
|
4700
|
0
|
GP-cement, slag by-product
|
1200
|
390
|
375
|
1965
|
59percent
|
GP-cement, slag manufacture
|
1950
|
390
|
375
|
2715
|
43percent
|
CO2 emissions (tonne)
|
|
|
|
|
|
Portland Cement
|
1.000
|
0.020
|
|
1.020
|
0
|
GP-cement, slag by-product
|
0.140
|
0,018
|
0.050
|
0.208
|
80percent
|
GP-cement, slag manufacture
|
0.240
|
0.018
|
0.050
|
0.308
|
70percent
|
https://theconversation.com/eco-cement-the-cheapest-carbon-sequestration-on-the-planet-10978 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geopolymer_cement
Geopolymer cements (GPC) consist of a reactive aluminosilicate (metakaolin clay, natural pozzolanas (volcanic ash), coal fly ash, granulated blast furnace slags), and an alkaline activator. You have to know the chemical analysis of the ingredients and mix them in the right proportions for best results. Mixed and placed correctly GPC has higher compressive, tensile, and flexural strength than OPC, and if you can cure it warm it gets stronger much faster. It’s slower to crack, largely because it shrinks less upon drying, partly because it needs less water. It is fire resistant; OPC spalls apart with little steam explosions when heated, failing rapidly in a fire. GPC is more water resistant, resists chemical attack better, and bonds better to rebar. It’s less expensive to produce, but if it’s not made locally shipping costs can make it non-competitive, if cost is your only criteria. You have to handle the caustic alkaline activator carefully. These make it more complicated to use than OPC, but the environmental benefits make the diligence required worthwhile. If you use magnesium oxides (MO) and fly ash, as in John Harrison’s Eco Cement (New Zealand, unfortunately, but I’ll bet he’d license the process), in porous concrete products, you can eventually suck up and store a lot of carbon. MIT has developed low-carbon bricks (Eco-BLAC bricks) made of ash and alkaline activator. They’re being used in India and made in Australia, but not here. Yet.
There may be a way to bind carbon to fly ash under heat and pressure, so there’s already a bunch of it in the mix when you add MO and an alkali like sodium hydroxide. Instant sequestration. More reading….
Solidia Technologies, CarbonCure (Halifax, Canada), Carbicrete, also in Canada, make concrete products cured in a high-pressure CO2 atmosphere, which makes them stronger as they suck up and store carbon. Unfortunately I think they use power-plant exhaust, and CarbonCure uses OPC. It’s a start….
Pyrament® is another blast-furnace-slag-based geopolymer. Adding crushed volcanic tuff, fly ash, and/or certain mine tailings can improve slag-based cements. This is a safe way to dispose of these noxious wastes, and volcanic ash is dirt. “If you want something dirt cheap, make it out of dirt.” –MIT prof Donald Sadoway. Now if they can just be made to sequester carbon….
Ferro-sialate geopolymer cement, made with steel mill waste high in iron oxide, is rusty-colored, and is supposed to suck lots of CO2 out of the atmosphere as it cures. RecoCement. CeraTech Ekkomaxx are made from recycled materials: fly ash, slag, gypsum, kiln dust. Using waste products that require no additional carbon to mfr, and that absorb and sequester carbon, to make the cements with which we rebuild civilization might be the biggest single thing we can do to bring atmospheric CO2 back down to sustainable levels.
Blue World Crete is a hybrid of geo-polymer and nano-ceramic cements; the key ingredient is extracted from seawater by algae. A transportable production plant is supposed to cost 1/10 to 1/20th what an OPC plant costs to build. BWC has 1/10 the carbon footprint of OPC, is fireproof, sets a little faster, reaches maximum strength earlier than OPC and has twice the compressive and three times the tensile strength. And Blue World claims that it insulates—very well, in fact, R17.5/inch. If so, that’s huge. The best of modern foam plastic insulations, polyisocyanurate, is R7/in or less. OPC concrete is a highly-conductive heat sink, and when you build with it you have to add insulation, a wall inside a wall, that’s usually framed with steel studs and covered with gypsum board. Concrete that super-insulates will change the world. And in a recent phone conversation, one of Blue World’s principles told me they finally got funding, and BWC should soon be available in the big-box building-stuff store near you. No doubt it will be expensive, at first; the price will come down when there are plants making it wherever the raw materials are locally available, and it doesn’t have to be shipped far. And that, too, will save a lot of carbon. The video at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bHn0SdEBSpM says that it does bond well with, essentially fossilizes, and protects cellulose, and that with vegetable reinforcing it can make a tough, strong, superinsulating substitute for wood that can be worked with woodworking tools.
Would someone in Portland invest in a BWC plant, please? I want to build a house with it, and bamboo and burlap…. http://www.blueworldcrete.com/ https://www.greenlodgingnews.com/blue-world-crete-develops-sustainable-concrete-product/
Magnesium Oxide (MGO) cements are really interesting. Most MGO cements are stronger than OPC; mixed with clays and cellulose they can form water-vapor permeable concretes that “breathe,” helping prevent mold, mildew and rot. Think of the dogawful mildew stench in a damp, poorly-ventilated OPC concrete basement? Noneathat. MOP bonds with vegetable fiber insulation/ reinforcement like straw, bamboo, wood chips or hemp hurds (the short-fiber core of the stem; hemp hurds make an insulating, breathable concrete—12 inches is about R 31.6)—and prevents that cellulose rotting. OPC does not bond to cellulose; it will adhere to it—there’s a big difference-- if you carefully wash/boil all of the sugars and acids out first, or neutralize them chemically.
MGO phosphate cements (MOP) have been used for centuries;The Great Wall of China was built with MOPs, and Ancient Egypt used them. Ceramicrete, Novacem, Grancrete are modern iterations. Ceramicrete is used to encapsulate nuclear wastes. Magnesium Oxide Cements (MOCs) are safer to handle than OPC; alkaline OPC is bad for lungs and skin. Best, MOCs pull CO2 out of the atmosphere as they set and harden, so that a ton of MOC might sequester up to .75 ton of CO2. Using the right cements is a better way to sequester megatons of carbon, as a side benefit of repairing our crumbling infrastructure, than any amount of carbon capture and storage, it will cost far less, and we gotta do it anyway! Unfortunately MGO Phosphate cements are not the answer.
https://theconversation.com/eco-cement-the-cheapest-carbon-sequestration-on-the-planet-10978 http://geoswan.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2010/10/MgO-GENERAL.pdf http://www.tececo.com/
Here’s a blog that says China is using mostly MGO cements these days? As fast as they are growing their economy and infrastructure, that will help. As long as they are not using phosphates….
Phosphates are an essential nutrient for all living things, and the world is running out of them (google phosphate crisis). Sometime in the next century or three, the world will run out of new sources of this vital mineral. We conserve it or we go hungry. Or you will: I’m old. I’ll be dead.
Morocco has 70 percent of the world’s rock phosphate reserves, China five percent, and the U.S., two percent (Wikipedia). As the world runs out, that will either make Morocco the wealthiest country on the planet--for a while, at least--or the victim of neocolonial war, or both. Phosphorous is apparently only 0.1 ppm in seawater; that doesn’t sound like enough to extract. It might be a very good idea to conserve phosphates for agriculture and stop using them in construction. Magnesium chlorate/carbonate cements don’t use phosphates, are not as water resistant but should be fine indoors, and look like marble.
Novacem (UK) developed an interesting MgO cement based on magnesium oxide and hydrated magnesium carbonates. Apparently not as strong as some other MgO cements, it’s good enough for masonry products like concrete block; such porous products allow air to seep in, and the MgO absorbs CO2 from it, strengthening the cement and sequestering the carbon. It would have been a fairly green product. Unfortunately Novacem tried to go public during the 2008 recession, could not raise the needed funds, went under, and sold its intellectual property to Australian Calix. While most of the development of green cements has been done or is well underway, between the difficulty of raising capital for new technologies, even “new” tech thousands of years old, and the dug-in recalcitrance of the Portland Cement lobby, these alternative cements are not available yet, most places, or shipping costs make them non-competitive. Climate change is the greatest failure of the free market, in large part because the market becomes unfree as soon as it is captured by vested interests. Is the “free” market a suicide pact, or will we add just enough “command” to the economy to get us out of this mess , make rational, educated choices, develop a strategic energy plan both long-term and short, and subsidize the right technologies instead of the wrong ones, for a change?
This long doctoral thesis was interesting and useful, if I understood maybe half of it: https://spiral.imperial.ac.uk/bitstream/10044/1/11000/1/Zhang-F-2013-PhD-Thesis.pdf and encouraging in that it says there are enough magnesium silicate deposits alone on Earth to sequester all of the carbon we could emit burning all the fossil fuels we can access. We still have to stop burning fossil fuels afap, but then between CO2-absorbing cements, enhanced weathering, and storing char in soils we can draw atmospheric CO2 back down to safe levels. I hope. Whether we will find the will to do so fast enough to prevent major climate disruption and the extinction of many more species remains to be seen.
The most abundant minerals in seawater are chloride, 18,980 parts per million (ppm); sodium, 10,560 ppm; magnesium, 1272 ppm; sulfur, 884 ppm; calcium, 400 ppm; and potassium, 380 ppm. We can make cements with several of those. A cubic kilometer of seawater holds more than a million tons of magnesium compounds; 63 percent of the magnesium produced in the U.S. in 2015 was extracted from seawater and brines. The current process requires 900 °C., but Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) is developing a process using a titanium catalyst that will require <300 °C. You can do that with concentrating solar, carbon free, or with the waste heat from a molten salt fission reactor, after you’ve concentrated the brine for more efficient extraction making fresh water in a desalinator. http://www.miningweekly.com/article/over-40-minerals-and-metals-contained-in-seawater-their-extraction-likely-to-increase-in-the-future-2016-04-01
We talked about ThorCon earlier, a shipbuilding company that wants to begin building molten salt fission reactors using ORNL’s MSRE (Molten Salt Reactor Experiment) design. They would build and pre-test 150-500 ton modules that they would barge to the site and assemble; one problem (I see two or three) is that, except where large rivers allow moving these modules through locks and dams, they will necessarily be erected at sea level, and so subject to sea-level rise, storm surge, and tsunami. The up side is that the waste heat could be used to desalinate seawater, and the concentrated brine left would be easily mined for the 47 useful minerals it contains, including magnesium oxide and chlorates and alkaline caustic soda, AKA sodium hydroxide--cements. New technology from MIT will make extracting useful chemicals from brine easier. https://newatlas.com/brine-sodium-hydroxide-desalination/58500/
ThorCon would like to build a 250 MWe prototype now (that’s about the right size to replace the boiler at a smallish coal-fired plant—the temperatures should be about right--which would conserve the expensive turbines and condensers and such) have it operational in four years, and test it rigorously before beginning production of 1GWe plants, of which they think they can build 100 per year. That would be prototyping, testing, and building along the commercial aircraft model; apparently the Nuclear Regulatory Commission model is in their way. http://thorconpower.com/ Their reactors could burn up high-level radioactive wastes from our misbegotten flirtation with pressurized water fission. Jiminy Crickets, did we just solve another pattern? That’s a buncha birds—carbon-free energy, our dangerous “store” of high-level radioactive wastes reduced tenfold, desalinated water, a lot of useful minerals easily mined, including carbon-sequestering concrete—a buncha birds with one stone. Remember what I said about one tropic level in nature supporting another, each either feeding on the last, or feeding on the last’s wastes? We already have three times too many people on this little planet. We have to get that efficient or we won’t survive. Here’s one way.
The ancient Romans used Lime-pozzolana (volcanic ash) cement, which puts some CO2 into the atmosphere on mfr, but much less than OPC, then sucks some out as it cures. The Pantheon, built with it, is the world’s largest unreinforced concrete dome, and is doin’ just fine after 2000 years. Our high-carbon OPC/steel bridges fall down in less than 100. Aren’t we smart.
Lime-based hempcrete can absorb and sequester about a quarter of its own weight in CO2 over a century. It’s the lime that absorbs CO2, but the hemp is mostly carbon that came out of the atmosphere, too, and that is sequestered as soon as the cement is poured. Hemp may be the most useful of all plants. For a fascinating discussion of how it came to be illegal along with marijuana, http://www.drugwarrant.com/articles/why-is-marijuana-illegal/ .
Unfortunately the carbon footprint of fired clay brick is even worse than OPC: 991 Lbs CO2/cubic yard of clay brick vs. 572 Lbs / yard of concrete brick. https://www.structuremag.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/C-StructSustain-Volz-May101.pdf But brick can be re-used, avoiding the embodied energy/carbon in new brick. If you gotta build with brick—and I like the stuff too—please use recycled brick. And if it will work for you, fly-ash brick has a far smaller carbon footprint, maybe 15 percent that of clay brick, 191 lbs/cu yd.
And there is plain old clay. Clay-straw “slip” covered with lime plaster is the insulation/wall material of many European half-timbered houses, some of which have been around for 600 years.
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Aw, shoot. These were some great pics of European half-timbered houses.
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Timber Framing, Wikipedia
Clay pulls moisture away from wood and straw, preventing rot; mud brick, cob, adobe, rammed earth, even wattle and daub can make very comfortable, breathable, low-carbon/carbon sequestering, energy efficient, artistic buildings that can last a very long time, especially if you use big overhangs to keep the rain off. Works well with bamboo and hemp reinforcement, too. You do need to spend a day a year maintaining the exterior plaster.
This article is worth reading, too. https://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/2016/mar/04/making-concrete-green-reinventing-the-worlds-most-used-synthetic-material
ENUF ABOUT CONCRETE! Let’s talk about steel.
This very interesting article https://theconversation.com/so-much-for-cop23-theres-a-whole-class-of-carbon-emissions-were-totally-ignoring-87544 makes the point that often the embodied carbon, the carbon released in making things, is greater than the operational carbon, the carbon released in running/using those things. We need to choose/use the least carbon-intensive, most durable, highest-performance materials available or that we can design for that purpose. Using steel where it’s not really needed is a good example of a bad practice.
STEEL IS ANOTHER FLTHY INDUSTRY, lots of air and water pollution and toxic wastes, and if OPC is six or seven percent of climate change, steel is seven or eight or more? Producing a ton of steel puts almost two tons of CO2 into the atmosphere. Like all of this, it doesn’t have to be that way. We use steel where we don’t need to; steel rebar is overkill for light construction. Use the right cements and we can adequately reinforce two and perhaps three-story residential construction with bamboo; the tensile strength of some bamboos is as much as mild steel, ~45,000 psi. Seventy-five foot Japanese timber bamboo Moso, faster-growing Vivax, and others, should do well in parts of the Pacific Northwest; tropical bamboos along the Gulf Coast. Unfortunately I recently phoned the bamboo growers I googled up in the Willamette Valley; none of them have timber ‘boo that big to sell. What are we waiting for?
Automobiles are still mostly made of steel--iron, a heavy metal. Why not use lead? My old, compact Toyota pickup weighs 4500 Lb.; it takes two and one-quarter tons of iron to schlep my 200 Lb. butt about town? A vehicle should be just heavy enough to hold the road in a stiff wind. And (see next) I don’t care whether you use lightweight high-tensile steel alloys or aluminum for the frame. And what might you do with magnesium?
MIT materials science profs Donald Sadoway , Antoine Allanore, and students found a new, cleaner way of refining steels and other metals, “molten oxide electrolysis,” while exploring ways to produce oxygen on the moon for NASA, and researching molten-metal battery technologies. That technique uses electricity instead of heat to separate the oxygen from oxides. Pure, clean oxygen, little (or no?) air pollution, no coal, no CO2, less energy and better-quality steel. http://news.mit.edu/2013/steel-without-greenhouse-gas-emissions-0508 https://www.nature.com/articles/nature12134 They hope to have it on-line in about three years. We need clean electricity to make it work; get busy, fusion-energy developers!
Lending U.S. steelmakers the money, out of the Remediation Fund, to adopt the new technology would be a better way to revitalize that industry than imposing tariffs that honk off our allies, and that are actually paid by U.S. consumers of those products. That’s right. Tariffs are actually a punitive tax on consumers for not “buying American.” And if a taxpayer-owned fund were lending money to profitable industries, instead of paying interest on its own money supply, we might just start to dig our way out of the $22 trillion hole irresponsible government has put us in.
ALUMINUM is already made with electricity, but the electrodes that “zap” the ore are carbon, and oxidize during the process, and apparently that alone creates lots of CO2. Canada has been cooperating with Alcoa and Rio Tinto to develop a new electrode material, that releases oxygen instead of CO2 during smelting. Adopted across Canada alone, they say it could save 6.5 billion tonnes of CO2/year, and reduce costs by ~15 percent. They don’t expect to be making aluminum with this process until 2024: don’t they know we have a world to save? Instead of sitting on the process and trying to corner the market, I hope they license it far and wide. If there was ever a time in history when cooperation beat the hell out of competition, we’re living it. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/may/10/new-technology-slash-aluminium-production-carbon-emissions
* * *
Carbon capture and storage (CCS) is a dirty term to most of us who understand that continuing to burn fossil fuels to generate electricity is suicide. But we can’t stop all at once without freezing to death in the dark. Even if we outlaw new coal and gas plants today (please!), and switch to wind and solar and battery storage and geothermal and molten salt fission (we can do all of this right now), and fusion (just as soon as it comes on line), we’re still going to be phasing out the last fossil fuel power plants 20, 30—I hope it doesn’t take 40--years from now. Until then we can insist that they capture and actually sequester all the CO2 in their exhaust—and we will pay the freight in higher rates. It’s temporary. Aneutronic fusion with direct energy conversion (LPP, Helion) really should be cheap, like pressurized water fission promised and never was.
Meanwhile, this interesting series of articles https://qz.com/1144298/humanitys-fight-against-climate-change-is-failing-one-technology-can-change-that/ and more I’ve read make it look like parts of CCS just might work, for all that it smacks of “clean coal.” Pump CO2 into the right (basaltic—silicate?) rock, and it actually combines with the rock, like CarbonCure soaking it into concrete, I suppose. They probably have to frack the rock first, to get a lot of surface area; that would be a bummer, but they’ve already fracked a lot of rock. They use liquefied CO2 (at high subterranean temperatures? Must be very high pressures) to scrub more oil out of wells; they say that eventually they will leave it there. We’ll see; their hydrofracked wells leak methane to atmosphere and poison groundwater with all kinds of nastys. I don’t trust. But if they can make it work, we can use it as another way of sequestering carbon, once it becomes inexpensive enough to take CO2 directly out of atmosphere. Surprisingly, it looks like that may be affordable, in the not too distant, too. https://theconversation.com/putting-co2-away-for-good-by-turning-it-into-stone-60688
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Monkeys in Japan hang out at the hot springs all winter. As an old hot-springs hanger-outer, I suspect people have been hanging out at hot springs since before we were people, cookin’ bathin, washin’ out the loincloth…. The Chinese were building geothermal spas by the third century B.C., the Roman Empire used hot springs for bathing and for heating, there’s a geothermal heating district in France operating continuously since the 1300s, in Boise, Idaho since 1892, and Klamath Falls OR since 1900. The first geothermal electric station was installed 4 July 1904 in Larderello, Italy; it powered four light bulbs. And Iceland will eventually run its entire economy on hydropower and geothermal energy. This is mature, well-understood technology. Lots of countries around the world, including New Zealand, Chile, Indonesia, Kenya, the Philippines and of course Iceland (92.5 percent of homes geothermally heated), and just a few American states, especially California, use Geothermal energy (GE) to heat homes and businesses, de-ice roads, grow winter veggies in greenhouses, and catfish, tilapia, ornamental fish, coral, and alligators in Idaho. Yep. Alligators. In Ida-ho. And, oh, yeah, to generate electricity. But if numbers I found on two different web sites, and my math, are correct, geothermal is just .002 percent of the world’s installed generation capacity. In the U.S. it’s 0.3 percent of our electricity, and that’s 29 percent of the world’s geoelectricity supply!? (Wikipedia)
Most of the world’s geothermal plants are located where hot rock is close to the surface, and you don’t have to drill too deep. Nothing like all of the shallow sites are being used, especially here on the Pacific Ring of Fire, yet the most important reason we don’t use more (high temperature) geothermal (generation) is that it is expensive to drill deep wells, $5 to $10 million, $140/foot and up, and sometimes you need two of them. Some configurations, pipe within a pipe, use one. Those costs make for long payback times, and a capitalist economy runs on compound interest. 1/3 of the time the well will not produce, and capitalism doesn’t like risk. Neither does socialism of fascism or hooliganism…. Actually, I guess we hooligans do take risks. Parta the job description….
The steam usually contains corrosive chemicals, so you’d want primary and secondary loops, a heat exchanger between well and turbines, but you need that with nuclear, and you’d need neither reactor nor boiler; you might have to either replace corroded components on a schedule, or use expensive materials that don’t corrode so fast, in that primary loop. Otherwise except for the well it should be no more expensive than a coal fired plant—except that the temperatures are apparently low, up to ~300°C., which will reduce the efficiency—10 to 23 percent, according to Wikipedia, about like a pressurized-water nuke—which slows return on investment/requires more plant for the same watts compared to something more efficient. I don’t know why they can’t drill deeper and run hotter, unless all steels start to lose strength at only ~425°C.? I know some do…. Otoh, a GE plant can run continuously, up to 98 percent of the time, and so make great baseload power while still being able to follow load, provide peak power.
Oil/gas wells can go as deep as 35,000 feet—6-5/8 miles, as deep as an airliner at altitude is over your head, or from the ocean surface to the bottom of the Marianas Trench. The averaged fracked well is 8,000 feet deep, and most are less than two miles. The same technologies can be used, including hydraulic fracturing (“hot dry rock” or “enhanced” geothermal) and directional/horizontal drilling, to access geothermal heat. In many places the bottom of an oil well can be hotter than the boiling point of water, maybe 120°C, and researchers are exploring extracting geothermal energy from suitable dry oil/gas wells. There are an estimated 2.5 million abandoned oil and gas wells in the U.S. alone. If even a small fraction of them are hot enough to exploit, that’s a lot of geothermal energy where the well is already drilled and paid for, and it’s technology we understand; no more time/money consuming research needed. Let’s get busy already! Southern California is lousy with old oil wells, and with tens of millions of people who need power. Start there? And if a well isn’t deep enough to reach hot rock, can it be drilled deeper cheaper than drilling a new one?
Hot dry rock occurs three to five miles deep everywhere beneath the Earth's surface, so high-temperature geothermal is potentially available almost everywhere. And if it costs more up front than a coal plant, over time it should cost less, because you don’t have to buy a train load of coal every day. A 1000 MWe coal plant (~a million energy-efficient homes) burns 9000 tonnes, 90 carloads at 100 tonnes per, each day, every day. That produces about 25,700 tonnes of CO2. Every. Single. Day. From one plant. And a really large plant may be 3, 3 ½ times that size, burn 11 millions tons of coal a year. https://gizmodo.com/americas-largest-coal-power-plant-burns-11-million-tons-5850299
A geothermal plant can release greenhouse gasses, too, up to three percent as much as a coal plant. That’s a whole lot less, and state-of-the-art geothermal plants capture all of that and re-inject it into the ground—though you could also extract anything useful, like sulfur. We’re going to capture and sequester all 27 million tons of CO2 even one big coal plant produces every year? Really? Even if electricity from coal might cost a third less, after carbon capture and storage, it will cost more. And we cannot let them burn and more coal/gas without CCS.
Scientific American reports that there might be 2000 times our current annual energy use just waiting beneath our feet, and deep drilling and fracking gives us a way to exploit it. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/fracking-for-renewable-power-geothermal/ In just a few years we might have an embarrassment of riches, a choice between geothermal, molten salt fission, fusion, wind and PV with storage, whichever works best/costs less for that location. The only problem is, we can’t wait; we need clean, fossil-free power now. Portland General Electric wanted to build two new gas-fired plants in Eastern Oregon; ratepayers shut them down in favor of wind, PV, and Li-ion batteries. But the south rim of Mt. St. Helens is only 46 miles from PDX. Buy a lease….
If we were extracting heat from Mt. Rainier, the most dangerous volcano in North America, we might just learn enough about volcanism to turn off its next eruption. That would be good; otherwise it’s inevitable, and it’s going to be a very bad day for Seattle, Tacoma, South Hill, Kent, Issaquah, Redmond, and every little town up every river valley around the mountain, all the way to Portland/Vancouver B.C. /the Palouse, depending upon the winds. And I know it’s a stretch and a half, but look at the scientific progress of the last century or so: if we have a few thousand more years before Yellowstone blows—and that, too, is inevitable--we just might learn enough about volcanism, if we get busy using it, to turn off a supervolcano, and so save half of North America, or the whole Northern Hemisphere, depending upon the size of that ash cloud and the volcanic winter it produces. Nutz? Maybe. But Neil deGrasse Tyson thinks it’s worth a shot, too, and he’s way smart. You’re generating affordable power sustainably, with (if you do it right) zero net carbon, and in the process, for free, just maybe learning to control volcanism. Another three birds with one stone. Another pattern solved.
While lower-temperature geothermal is more suitable to heating than to power generation, “binary cycle” power plants use hot water to vaporize a lower-boiling point fluid, like ammonia, and use that to spin a turbine. The efficiency must be low, but you can generate electricity cleanly, without fuel, without greenhouse gasses, 24/7/365 for years. Chena Hot Springs, Alaska, generates electricity from a primary-fluid temperature of only 57 °C, 135 °F. No coal, gas, or oil needed, and no CO2 produced to cook the future.
Indonesia, Kenya, Chile, Iceland, many other nations are going for geothermal generation big time. We have the resources and the know-how, we have a lot of already-drilled sites to exploit, if many need to go deeper, and we need clean electricity, all of it we can get, yesterday. What’s the hold-up?
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Heat pump vs. gas furnace
I keep thinking that this discussion should come later, in the What Individuals and Families Can Do section, but which to use where might better be a societal than an individual choice, so it is here.
Insulate and weatherize a house/business property before buying a heating system; you will need a smaller, less expensive unit. And get an energy audit and size that unit correctly for your building; most contractors go too large, and too large is less efficient, and that costs money and carbon. Use a programmable thermostat to set the heat back at night, and all day, if you’re away. And if you use ducts, seal and insulate them, especially if they pass through the crawlspace or other unheated area; my heat bills are noticeably less for having insulated the ducts in my basement.
Using biogas efficiently so we can replace all of the (un)natural gas possible with it means not using it where another clean heat source is more efficient. I live at about 46 degrees north latitude, in a semi-maritime climate, where the average winter temperature is—was--46 degrees, design temp 20°F. Older air-source heat pumps don’t work so well when the outside temperatures drop below 40 degrees. I read that the best of current designs work down into the 20s; colder, and the back-up heat, usually electric resistance, has to kick in. North of some broad, fuzzy line of latitude that used to be ~46° but now might be a bit farther north, we might be better off using biogas for heat and hot water; and south of that zone, heat pumps. Except that an air-source heat pump water heater inside your conditioned space is just stealing energy from your furnace.
I don’t like plugging a heat pump into a coal-fired-power plant, but fossil gas is not as clean as I thought it was when I had new gas appliances installed three years ago. I knew that burning (un)natural gas produces half the carbon emissions of coal, but I did not know that the frackers lose half the methane they liberate to the atmosphere, where over the crucial next 20 years it will capture ~86 times as much heat as the same amount of CO2. Overall, fossil gas is as bad as coal. We keep hearing lies—excuse me--“alternate facts”--to the contrary from the utilities and gas producers. Call them on it.
A good air-source heat pump can have an HSPF (Heating Seasonal Performance Factor) of 8.5 to 12.5 BTU/Watt-hour (one watt-hour is one watt applied for an hour, or two watts for ½ hour, etc.). 12.5 BTU would raise the temperature of 12.5 pounds (pints) of water one degree F., or one pound of water 12.5°. The HSPF is an average, and it falls off, the unit becomes less efficient, as outdoor temps cool and there is less heat to pump inside. A heat pump with an HSPF of 7.7 (federal minimum) will move 2.25 times as much heat into a house, over the heating season, as if you just burned the electricity in a resistance heater like baseboards (Wikipedia).
Electric resistance heating is considered to be 100 percent efficient at turning electricity into heat. One watt-hour = 3.412 BTU by definition, so a heat pump at an HSPF of 8.5 BTU/Wh should use ~2 ½ times less electricity (8.5/3.412=2.49) than baseboards (or you could say that the heat pump is 249 percent efficient, though that would offend a physicist*); at HSPF 12.5, ~3-2/3 times less power over an average heating season.
*Heat pumps are the only thing that are “more than 100 percent efficient,” and they can only do that because they move and concentrate energy rather than transforming one form of energy to another.
I burned 10 therms (100,000 BTU = 1 therm, so one million BTUs) of gas last April-May 15, @ $0.839 per, or $8.39. One therm = 29.3 kwh. Ten therms x .95 (because the furnace is 95percent efficient) = 278.35 kwh; at $0.141/kwh, = $39.24 if I had used electric resistance instead. Heating with an 8.5 HSPF heat pump would have cost ~$15.70; @HSPF = 12.5, ~$11.27. A ground source heat pump at HSPF = 14.5 BTU/Wh is still ~$9.25. It is a huge mistake to think of all this only in terms of financial cost; that’s the trap. But without carbon capture and storage I’m not convinced that a heat pump plugged into a fossil gas-fired plant is much cleaner than a 95 percent+ efficient gas furnace, and I’m pretty sure that plugged into any coal plant it is a whole lot dirtier. I figure that a single-stage, coal-fired power plant gets electricity to me at only ~30 percent efficiency, with line losses, and coal is a higher-carbon fuel. WHEN we have clean, carbon-free electricity here, I can always add a heat pump; there’s a space in the furnace for coils. And I could still use biogas for backup heat from the already-in-place and paid-for gas grid when it’s really cold.
That’s important. Using all the existing infrastructure we can will help make altering our energy technologies more affordable. Methane is clean, efficient energy; we merely need to take the carbon in it out of the atmosphere instead of the ground. We have a lot of existing infrastructure for diesel, too, and carbon-neutral biodiesel should be happy in it. Ethanol, otoh, is a lousy, low-energy fuel, that attracts water that rusts steel pipelines and tanks, and spoils in a month or so; and hydrogen is a nightmare to try to store and transport. Little things like that should help inform our choices of which technologies to pursue first.
I wish people would stop calling ground-source heat pumps “Geothermal.” Gets confusing. Because the temperature of the ground is stable, a few feet down, a GSHP doesn’t lose efficiency in cold weather, is a little more efficient than an air source HP, and should never need backup heat. They don’t last forever; the ground loop may last 50 years or more, but it will probably need replacing during the life of a (disposable, fire-hazard, North American, wood-frame) house. If you go with boreholes they will need to be 100 to 150 meters deep, and you may need several of them. If you go shallow and horizontal, four to six feet deep or more, depending upon subsurface temperatures, you might need 500 to 600 feet of pipe per ton of heating/cooling, and a mid-size house may need three tons, a big one, five; the ordinary urban back yard might not be big enough. If a 2500 sf house needs 60,000 BTUh of heating and cooling, that’s five tons (12,000 BTUh/ton*), and that might cost $20,000 or $25,000 to install. A very high efficiency gas furnace might be ~$3500 installed; a five-ton air-source heat pump, maybe twice that. Modern “mini-split” heat pumps are usually less, maybe $5000 for a comparable unit, and you need no ducts. *12,000 BTU per hour will melt a ton of ice in 24 hours.
A GSHP might produce 3 to 4 ½ times the heat per watt compared to electrical resistance; air source heat pumps run from 2.5 to 3.67 times as efficient as resistance. I did an analysis that follows; given the early 2019 cost of electricity vs. the cost of gas, the efficiency of a modern gas furnace, the inefficiency of most coal-fired power plants, and line losses, a very efficient modern gas furnace might heat your home for about the same monthly money as even a GSHP, and unless your electric utility does CCS, the CO2 to the atmosphere should be roughly the same or less. I would get local professional help, firm cost and efficiency numbers from your local electric and gas utilities, and do a very careful analysis before I decided between the two, because I hope for a near future in which both electricity and biogas are zero net carbon. Of course, if you already have zero-carbon electricity available, that changes the variables in favor of the heat pump. If you can afford the ground source heat pump, and using the most efficient tech available is important to you, go for it. Although I would like to see an analysis of the embodied energy content of a GSHP system.
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Let’s see. Taking back our democracy, Carbon Taxes, reinstating the energy conservation tax credits, anaerobic digesters and biogas, algae, farming, cow burps, grazing the right way, sequestering carbon while improving the soil while making biofuels, enhanced weathering to suck carbon out of the atmosphere, hydrogen fuels, reforestation and afforestation, BECCS, bamboo, industrial hemp, fission, fusion, transportation, concrete and steel and aluminum, CCS, geothermal energy, heat pump vs. gas furnace, and a Remediation Fund to pay for it all. What are we missing? Oh, yeah, overpopulation.
Thirty, 35 years ago overpopulation was the hot environmental topic; I have heard it mentioned just twice on media in the last several years, and I am a news junkie. Every ecosystem and planet has a carrying capacity, the number of species and individuals it can sustainably support. It’s a zero-sum game: exceed that number and everyone begins to starve. I’ve read that the natural sustainable carrying capacity of Earth, leaving room and resources for other creatures, is roughly 2.5 billion humans. With petroleum-based Green Revolution farming techniques we’ve extended the food supply to 7.64 billion (1/13/2019), and “only” a quarter of us are hungry, and “only” 150-200 innocent species go extinct every day . We gain about 200,000 people every day, will hit eight billion by about 2025, nine by 2040, and 11 billion by 2100. http://www.theworldcounts.com/counters/shocking_environmental_facts_and_statistics/world_population_clock_live
But we are running out of petroleum, and we would be unforgivably stupid to burn what’s left; and it’s not all about food, of even food and fiber. We talked about the world running out of phosphorous, an essential nutrient for all living things; fresh water may be the next major shortage, and robber baron capitalists like T. Boone Pickens and Nestle, who make their bazillions converting public resources, the commons, to private property—the railroad barons of the 21st century--are already trying to privatize and control the “rights” to this second-most essential—after oxygen—of all resources (as they continue to foul the air, watch them try to profit ofrom your need to breathe). Productive soil; helium; rare earths used in electronics, motors, and wind turbines; phosphates; timber, rare metals, the list goes on. And we will run out of many of these resources this century. Got kids?
Please don’t have more than your share. Here is an article in theguardian that says having one less child saves 58.6 tonnes of CO2/year, considering that child’s descendants. That sounds excessive, and their methodology looks a little weird, but…. The next best thing you can do, they say, is to not own a car, which saves 2.4 tonnes/year, or don’t fly across the Atlantic and back, which saves 1.6 tonnes. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/jul/12/want-to-fight-climate-change-have-fewer-children
Scarce resources prompt wars. China has most of the world’s rare earths, Morocco its phosphates. Even Rex Tillerson has admitted that productive agricultural regions may shift. Translation? As climate change reverts California, now about 1/5 of the nation’s food supply, to desert; as the Great Basin, and the Great Plains, another 1/5, dry out even as we suck the Oglala Aquifer dry, and agriculture in the Southeast is increasingly devastated by extreme weather; if we can no longer feed ourselves and agriculture shifts north, remember that the good old U.S. of A. can always find an excuse to invade a neighbor who has something we want. Canada, be afraid. Be very afraid.
Something over 200 million women lack access to contraceptives and family planning in the developing world. GHG emissions avoided through family planning might cost $4.50 per ton of CO2 equivalent, far less than any means of removing carbon from the atmosphere. Women with limited resources can support only so many children; having too many means raising all in poverty and perhaps malnutrition. Yet people who would impose their religion on others would deprive those women of the vital right to limit their reproduction. Some—not all—of those same people also insist upon the right to more children than are needed to replace themselves. But bringing more children into the world than you can care for is selfishness, not love. If I choose to limit my reproduction, and you insist upon overrunning the world, you are stealing from my children’s future. Many decried China’s one-child policy as tyranny. I suppose it was. But unless we stop breeding like rats, a responsible government will sooner or later be forced to impose limits on our reproduction, too. Take responsibility or have it imposed upon you. I don’t like it any more than you do, but that is the way the world works. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2011/oct/31/stemming-population-growth-climate-change
Population irruption and dieback is a chilling term to any wildlife biologist. Mass extinction is worse. If we overrun the planet at the same time we render half of it uninhabitable, and destroy the soils of the other half, it’s really going to hurt; hungry hurts. If you love your children, stop at two. Please. And one might be better, for a few generations.
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What did I hear on NPR yesterday? Twenty-six people own as much of the world’s wealth as the bottom 50 percent of everybody? That doesn’t help. And three people own as much as the bottom 50 percent of Americans? Fortunately a couple of them just might be persuaded to help, and are investing in some of the technologies we will need. Bill, Warren, we could use a few Blue World Crete plants on the West Coast. Just sayin….
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OK, for now, that’s a short (hey, only 45 pages!) overview of what, IMNHO, society can and should do to reverse climate change. I hope you see that there is a lot of research going on, by dedicated people, many of whom could use more help and more money. Some of them are close; but we’re out of time. There’s a lot we could do right now: reforest, afforest, plant bamboo, and hemp instead of cotton; use the right cements; biogas, algae, char and powdered silicates on/in soil. Use the most sustainable farming techniques. Build renewables/geothermal/ molten-salt fission instead of gas-fired power plants. I mean YOU, PGE; fusion would have made new gas plants obsolete before they were built. There are multiple benefits to all of these measures, and some, like caring for the soil, are as essential to the future as is getting a handle on the climate. It will be two more years until we have a hope of a responsible government doing something about it. We should prepare legislation for that day, whether we have a hope of getting it passed and signed before then or not; and we need to be vigilant against vested interests trying to maintain their profit stream at the expense of the future. They can all have a profitable future, if they have the sense to reinvest in sustainable technologies. Meanwhile, there are things we can do as individuals and families, too. Let’s talk about those next.
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Some things you and I can do to stave off climate change, beginning with
Saving money, energy, and carbon in an existing home.
First, watch climate scientist Katherine Hayhoe’s YouTube video I'm just one person, what can I do? AKA, Global Weirding, At https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q48BvprCFr0&app=desktop .
SHP training was just a few years ago; as I recall from it, our building stock in America uses around 60 percent of our total energy, and we still waste around 60 percent of that. It is the easiest place to conserve, and the payoff is immediate in lower energy bills and less carbon.
The first thing to do is to caulk and weatherstrip. Sealing the air leaks into and out of your house will save you more money than the caulk and weatherstripping costs in the first winter month or two, and it’s easy enough that most any homeowner can do it. If there are gaps/cracks between the siding and door/window frames, anywhere in the frame itself, or, for example, where new vinyl inset window frames meet old wood frames, caulk them. Come inside the house and do the same thing. Look for any wall penetrations and make sure they don’t leak air. If you need tutorials, YouTube is replete with them.
For most structural caulking—around doors and windows, holes into/through the siding, rim joist to wall plates—you usually use acrylic latex caulk; siliconized acrylic latex lasts longer, and polyurethane caulks might be an even better choice. Where components might move, you need something stretchier, like an elastomeric caulk; Big Stretch and Extreme Stretch are examples. Use Butyl rubber caulk/strip to stick glass to glass, to aluminum, to painted wood; you can remove it if you have to. 100 percent silicon will glue glass to glass permanently, and is used in wet locations (use one with a mold inhibitor) or at “changes of plane” in the corners where tile walls and floors come together. It is often used around showers and tubs, but it doesn’t stick very well to acrylic, which is what fiberglass is finished with. A polyether caulk like ChemLink M-1 will adhere to acrylic better. And if you would prime that building material before painting it, prime it before you caulk it. Unsure? Ask at the paint store. Most exterior caulking should be painted to protect it from UV. You can’t paint all caulks. Read the label.
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The vinyl “bulb” of the weatherstripping on the left is too small, and too stiff in cold weather, to seal against a door well. The softer vinyl covered foam WS on the right seals better. Some door frames have a slot for its tail (on right) to slip into. If not, trap the tail against the door frame under carpet bar, and use enough caulk behind it to seal against air leaks. I add holes to carpet bar to get a small screw every six or eight inches; I don’t screw it down too hard, so it stays flat instead of dimpling.
There are a number of different kinds of weatherstripping; you might want to watch some YouTube tutorials, pick one that looks like something you can do, then go find it at the home improvement store. You can always do better than the sticky-back foam stuff; I use it rarely, and never for anything permanent. It’s easy and inexpensive, but it doesn’t last and it traps dirt. Still, if you live in a leaky apartment and your landlord is a turnip, it can be an inexpensive way to cut down on drafts.
Weatherstripping a door, you need to press the weatherstrip against the door hard enough to seal, but not so hard that it makes the door too difficult to close. Don’t forget a new door bottom seal/threshold gasket.
If you can access the tops/bottoms of your walls in the attic and crawlspace/basement, find holes where wiring and plumbing penetrate (which is how you find the walls), and seal them, in both exterior and interior walls. Where sheetrock or lath and plaster meet wall top plates in your attic is another potential leak, and you don’t want cold air flowing through your walls. It’s a pain, but if those joints look gappy, clean (caulk/foam doesn’t stick to dust; a small vacuum cleaner helps) and caulk/foam them. Spray foam-in-a-can can be useful for bigger holes/gaps, and it is what you use to fill the adjustment gaps, the ¼” you leave around windows and doors when you install them, so you can shim them square and level (carpenters got a thing ‘bout square and level. It’s a good thing) but it is difficult to use (because the can has to be upside down and the nozzles are always too short) and apply, messy, and they sell you one too-short applicator nozzle per can, so you have to use the entire can at once or throw away money and resources. That is planned waste, planned obsolescence, and that is a big part of what is wrong with the world. If you are going to use the stuff, plan ahead so you can use an entire can at once. If the gaps are small, use non-expanding foam (it still expands a little). I end up wasting a lot of the expanding stuff; it expands a lot. There are different kinds for different applications; some, for example, are fire resistant. Read the labels.
Install outlet and switch-plate gaskets. Outdoor outlets, too. Get under lighting fixtures, indoor and out (after turning the power off!), and seal those holes into walls and ceilings, around the wires.
You would like to get your house’s air leaks down to ½ ACH (air change (the complete volume of the house) per hour) at 50 pascals pressure differential between inside and out, about the pressure of a sheet of paper on your hand, or a middilin’ breeze blowing against one side of the house and creating a slight vacuum on the other. I did it to a 94 yo house. That’s what a blower-door test tells you: unfortunately you can’t get a free energy audit from/through your electric/gas utility, anymore. I paid for one as part of the package when I had new furnace and WH installed almost three yag, so that’s one way.
My house is tight, ½ ACH, and I would smell onions for hours after I cook, except for the HRV. You need a heat recovery ventilator to stay healthy and prevent mold in a tight house. An HRV flushes out stale air--I can cook fish with onions, and have the house smelling clean and fresh an hour later--and brings in fresh air across a heat-exchange membrane, recapturing about 75 percent of the heat you’d waste just opening windows. But open windows instead when outdoor temps are comfortable, and save the energy it takes to run the HRV; mine uses the furnace fan to distribute the fresh air, so I save that (small amount, but every erg counts) energy, too. And I don’t run mine anything like all of the time. I let my nose, or condensation on windows, tell me when I need it. Mine will run on high, low, or 20 minutes per hour. One-half hour or so two or three times a day would be a good setting to have, too. Oh, well….
I just replaced my furnace filter. It was filthy. I should do it more often. It would save me money. And carbon. I know better. Bad Crowboy, bad! But I’ve been remodeling and making dust. Check it at the beginning of every heating season, unless it’s plugged up badly then; if it doesn’t look like air is getting through, replace it in the middle of the heating season, too.
Attic
If your attic is not insulated, that is the next thing to do. Here in climate zone 4, “they” recommend R38 to R60; east of the Cascades, zone 5, R49-60. My little attic is only R38, and it is installed wrong: two layers of R19 (5 ½ inch) fiberglass batts, one down between the 2x6 joists, one perpendicular, over the top. If the bottom batt settles away (fortunately they rarely do) leaving an air gap between, cold air flowing through can negate the value of the upper batt; and they left the tarred paper face (fire hazard) moisture barrier on the bottom of the upper batts. The only place you want a vapor barrier is right above, touching, the ceiling sheetrock or plaster; anywhere above that, it can cause condensation and moisture damage. But I have looked mine over carefully, and see no damage or gaps, and again, tight house (air leaks are the problem), <$40/mo. gas bills. I’m still working up there, on occasion; once I’m done I should do the math, rent a blower and add fiberglass to R60, and see how the numbers reflect in the heat bills.
In new construction, by all means use all you can, up to R80 (passive house standard 49-80; R80 is 36 inches of blown-in fiberglass, 24 inches of cellulose) and do blow-in, which seals all the little gaps better than batts. If you use batts, detailing them so there are no gaps is important; wherever cold air can get behind them, they might as well not be there. Remember to seal penetrations from living space into the attic first. And ventilate your attic properly—minimum one square foot net free area—meaning twice that, with bug screen—per 150 square feet of ceiling, half low on the roof, half high, or you may have moisture problems.
There’s no such thing as too much attic ventilation. It keeps your roofing cooler, so it lasts longer; and the roof emits less IR down through the insulation and ceiling in summer, keeping your house cooler.
Walls
I’ve seen people tear off the siding, when remodeling, to add Larson trusses and make the walls deeper for more insulation. If the siding has to come off anyway, sure. If not, it might not make sense, given the waste and carbon and cost involved in trashing good siding. Old frame walls (mine are 93 yo) will have “spaced sheathing” –boards, not plywood--and lapped siding, tarpaper between. Hard to seal. So I had them blown with cellulose, which is slightly better insulation and packs tighter, slowing air movement better, than blown-in fiberglass. 3 ½ inches will be at least R13; well packed, maybe R15. I’d like twice that, but it’s not worth destroying a house’ worth of good cedar siding, and having to cut trees to replace it.
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Furring out walls with Larson trusses to add insulation. Framing new walls entirely with Larson trusses is an economical way to build thick walls with little thermal bridging, the heat conducted out through continuous studs, which are only about R-1/inch. Another way is a double stud wall, studs offset, each tier insulated separately. Larson trusses are usually 2x2s spanned with plywood. The inner members here look like steel. I wonder if those might be condensation points? If so not good, and steel is a filthy, high-carbon industry while building with wood sequesters carbon. Think about embodied energy and carbon footprint when selecting materials. Permission to use photo from Taunton press, ref. # 12222
Cellulose insulation is recycled newspaper, with a lower “embodied energy”—the energy it takes to make something-- content than fiberglass. Add the rest of the components and the total wall might be R16 or 18. I had them blown from the bottom; I removed and replaced the bottom couple of siding boards, and so was able to caulk the rim joist to the floor sheathing and mud sill at the same time. That sheathing is diagonal, lapped 1x10. It took a lot of caulk to seal the end joints between each board, but you want to prevent any air/moisture movement into your building surfaces.
Blowing the walls from the bottom worked surprisingly well (and left no unsightly plugs in the siding). I’ve had an IR scan since, and we saw no gaps in the insulation.
Designing a new house for this climate, I like at least R30 wall insulation; passive house is R31-51 in climate zone 4. If you are remodeling and replacing the siding anyway, go for it, fur the walls out so you can add insulation. It will let you get vapor-permeable sheathing you can air-seal—plywood—on the outside of the wall where you want it, too.
Seal the seams of plywood exterior sheathing to stop air movement, but don’t seal or paint the plywood. ½” CDX should let just enough water vapor permeate out to prevent condensation in your walls. Use housewrap, then stand the siding off the wall a bit, to allow air to circulate behind it, with spacers. That’s code, and there are all kinds of materials available designed to do that. I like simple vertical 3/8” lath over the studs, or ¾” 1x2s, either soaked in cuprinol.
OSB (oriented strand board) sux. It’s not as strong as plywood, and it’s mostly glue, so not permeable—it stops moisture vapor, which can condense on and rot it; and I’ve seen it begin to deteriorate when it had no reason in only ten years. I might use it on a chicken coop--if I didn’t mind that it wouldn’t last.
You can also fur out the inside of a wall to add insulation. Housing professionals these days like blown-in fiberglass (or cellulose) because it fills all the little gaps, fills behind wiring and plumbing, better than batts. If you want all the insulation possible while losing as little space, use polyisocyanurate board.
It’s very important to prevent water vapor from inside the house seeping out with leaking air through walls, ceilings and floors—it can condense in the insulation and rot wood or grow mold. Caulk any gaps/cracks in the interior sheetrock at wall-ceiling and wall-floor “changes of plane,” then use a good thick vapor barrier latex paint. I just remodeled a bathroom, a damp room, and I used two coats of Sherwin Williams Water Blocking Primer/Finish, a thick acrylic latex used to seal porous masonry, on the ceiling.
Windows
If you haven’t replaced your single-pane windows yet, what are you waiting for? Wood or aluminum, they are only ~R1. They must feel cold any time you get near them—they suck heat out of your body and pass it to the outside (or that’s very much what it feels like: actually you radiate more body heat to colder surfaces). They don’t do your heat bill any good. Time for an itty bitty physics lesson? Thermodynamics 101.111?
One BTU, British Thermal Unit, of heat is the energy necessary to raise the temperature of one pound (pint) of water one degree F. It is also roughly what you get striking a wooden kitchen match and letting it burn down to the end. R values are the inverse of U values; you can do math with Us, not with Rs. An R1 window loses one BTU of heat per square foot per degree F. of temperature change (ΔT) between inside and out, per hour; its U value is 1. If it’s 40° out and you are trying to maintain 70° inside (first, put on a sweater and turn the thermostat down to 68!) that’s a 30° temperature difference (ΔT), and you will lose 30 BTU per hour per square foot of that R1 surface. An R2 window loses ½ BTUH/°F./sf, so its U value is .5; R3, 1/3 BTUH, U = .333…. An R-30 wall (U= .0333…) loses 1/2 the heat of an R15 wall; remember that an R15 wall already loses 1/15 the heat of that R1 window, and a maybe a fifth what it lost before you insulated it. Do what you can afford. It all helps.
So. Single pane windows lose tremendous heat per square foot; unless they leak lots of air too, you still do walls first. Because windows are usually a much smaller area, you lose much more heat through uninsulated walls, and windows are relatively expensive. But you’ve weatherized and insulated the attic and walls. Time to do the windows. Affordable vinyl-frame thermopanes like the Milgards I installed ~20 yag are around R3.5. The small Milgard casement I put in last summer claims R4.1667. They seal pretty well, and I just had several of the thermopanes replaced under Milgard’s lifetime warranty, no hassles and the technicians were good guys. Do-it-yourselfers, Milgard will not provide any installation instructions; they would rather you pay a contractor twice the cost of the window to install it. You can find what you need on YouTube.
The best windows available are fiberglass frame triple pane; they run as high as R9 or 10, can look like painted wood, and cost about half again as much as vinyl—but the cost seems to be coming down, so shop around. Or use vinyl, and if you want more insulation google up a host of insulating window treatments. I’m still researching the best to use as night insulation for passive solar glazing. They want to seal to the frame at sides and bottom, if not at the top, too, have a relatively high R-value, and be white on the outside to reflect the sun back out when that is what you need of them.
Wood is lousy insulation. Douglas fir is about R1/inch, pine maybe R1.5. Wood windows are not as durable, require maintenance, and cost more. Here’s a useful website for roughing-in costs: https://www.roofingcalc.com/window-replacement-cost/ .
Doors
I replaced both original invitation-to-burglars wood-and-glass, ~R1 doors with insulated steel doors (from a Habitat for Humanity ReStore). Those can be up to ~R10; as both were salvage (reuse renew recycle!), I don’t really know. They are not only warmer than the originals, but let less street noise through. They are also much stronger, and installed correctly, far more secure than wood doors.
Floors
are next. I once did a blower door test on a rental with nothing but lapped board sheathing for a floor; it floated the vinyl right up off the subfloor in the kitchen. Spooky. If you’re not sure, get into the floor deep enough to be sure it is better sealed than that! Car decking/”post and beam” floors can be leaky, too. If you have to add a layer, particle board makes a decent sub-floor, it’s cheap—and that is pretty much all it is good for. It’s crumbly and doesn’t hold caulk well, on edges where you cut it; seal edges with an oil-based primer, then caulk the seams and corners to stop air movement. If the subfloor moves (squeaks), I’d use polyurethane or elastomeric caulk. Remember that you want to prime most materials before you caulk them.
Once you’ve sealed any air leaks through the floor, insulate it. That’s usually done with batts, fiberglass or rock wool, that fill the space between joists, placed with the vapor barrier against the floor (always against the warm side). There are numerous ways to secure it; decide what insulation you are going to use, then YouTube up an installation method. Just make sure it’s tight against the floor, and snug against the sides and ends, so no air can get behind it. Wear particle mask, gloves, eye protection, and long sleeves, and shower after; the little fibers itch because they’re cutting into you. AND you need a sheet of 6 mil (6/1000 inch thick) black (for soil contact) polyethylene, or equivalent, on the ground to stop moisture evaporating up through the soil, where it can condense on building surfaces and cause mold and rot. It will also stop radon, which causes lung cancer. Lap seams at least 12 inches—I prefer to spray-glue them, with good ventilation or a respirator—and lap it up the foundation walls. In new construction I like to lap it over the foundation, under the mud sill, and leave little channels, like embedding a soda straw in the top of the foundation every couple of feet, under the plastic to let radon escape. And a crawlspace must still be ventilated (unless it’s open to a basement), one square foot per 150 feet of floor, again net-free area, so twice that with bug screen. You want cross-ventilation, and a vent within three feet of each corner. Keep plumbing above the insulation.
If you put a vapor barrier on the ground right, you are supposed to be able to reduce ventilation by 90 percent. I wouldn’t. Like the attic, there’s probably no such thing as too much crawl space ventilation.
Basement
A lot of older houses, like mine (94 yo), are part basement, part crawlspace. I insulated my basement walls years ago, with blueboard (XPS, extruded polystyrene) salvaged from a construction job. I normally wouldn’t use XPS; it works best in ground contact, but I’m told it takes 100 years to pay back the energy used to make it. And older XPS (and polyiso) was blown with CFCs and HCFCs, ozone-layer destroying greenhouse gasses thousands of times worse than CO2. This wasn’t blown with CFCs, at least, and as it was headed for the dump, it’s greener to use it than to waste it and cause the manufacture of more foam. If you are buying foam sheet insulation, dense expanded polystyrene (EPS), about R-4/inch, works well enough in ground/concrete contact, and is much greener, ~ a ten-year payback; polyisocyanurate returns the energy needed to make it even faster, it’s better insulation, and it can be made at least in part with soy (or algal?) oils instead of petroleum polyols, but it can absorb water from soil and is best used inside walls; it insulates a little better when it stays warm. Check out https://www.ecohome.net/guides/2254/polyisocyanurate-foam-is-a-hot-new-building-product-learn-where-and-where-not-to-use-it/ .
I used 1.5” blueboard because that’s what I salvaged; free is my favorite price. That’s about R7.5; covered with sheetrock (fire barrier), barely the minimum-legal R8. But we foamed three-inch (R21) blocks of polyiso between the floor joists at the rim joist, to further seal, and insulate, that; glued 1.5” blueboard to the crawlspace walls, and then draped them with R15 fiberglass batts. No crawlspace vents; leave it connected to the basement so air circulates and keeps things dry.
They didn’t make very good concrete here 93 yag. My basement walls are all effloresced, and used to leak water through cold joints all winter long. I tried several products to seal those walls; finally settled on Quikwall surface bonding cement, (after a good steel-wire power brushing) which I used behind the furring strips (cuprinol-treated 2x2s) and to stick the XPS to the walls. Worked great; no more leaks and a dry basement—though adding a carport to move the rain away from the worst wall helped.
Two more little things. Use a clothes line if/when you can. An electric dryer consumes 1800 to 5000 watts, average around 3000 (3kW). Two hours a week would be six kilowatt hours (kwh). It looks like PGE is charging me 14.1 cents / kwh; x 6 = 85 cents. That’s not a lot, but it also looks like generating one kwh burns about 1 ¼ pounds of coal, which produces about 2.86 lbs of CO2, or >17 lbs for those two loads of clothes. That’s ~149 cubic feet; spread out to 407 ppm (parts per million, 1/2019) a lot more CO2 than I want to dump into the atmosphere to dry two loads of clothes. If they come off the line stiff and scratchy, I tumble them in the dryer for five minutes, or longer with no heat. https://science.howstuffworks.com/environmental/energy/question481.htm https://www.eia.gov/coal/production/quarterly/co2_article/co2.html
Unfortunately my desk is on the north wall of this little house. Repeat after me: living rooms belong on the sunny SOUTH side of the house, regardless of where the street is. But it was built 94 yag, and it is what it is. Staying warm working at the computer in the winter is difficult. I could crank up the furnace, or put a 1500 watt electric heater under the desk; instead I have a couple of 100-watt terrarium heaters (lizard lamps; yep, I’m a reptile) attached (carefully, so they’re not a fire hazard) under the desk, aimed at my legs and feet. They keep me toasty with the thermostat set at 68°, and a 0.3 watt LED night light in the circuit reminds me to turn them off at night.
I don’t know if all parts of the country have help and advice for people upgrading their homes. Here it’s Energy Trust of Oregon. ETO administers cash incentives to help pay for insulation, new windows, new, energy-saving appliances, especially furnaces and water heaters, and a few other items, and their Savings Within Reach program offers extra help to low-income homeowners. There is help available for rental property owners, too. The money comes from the Public Purpose Charge on power/gas bills in Oregon. I’ll bet not all other states do that.
There are still some tax incentives for conservation, but congress is tearing them down and throwing them away, so don’t wait. Whose are on the things we will have to reinstate when we get grown-ups in charge again. ETO offers incentives and help saving energy for businesses, industry, and agriculture, too, in both Oregon and Washington (Pacific Power and Light customers), and if you are building a new home they can help you make it as energy efficient as possible. You may also find help from Portland General Electric (heat pump and thermostat rebates) from the Oregon Department of Energy (insert your state name), and from the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services, Office of Community Services. Surf the Database of State Incentives for Renewables and Efficiency (DSIRE) website, or, your local energy utility should be able to put you in touch with similar services. https://www.energytrust.org/about/explore-energy-trust/about-resource-center/
Earth Advantage promotes sustainable, energy efficient, low-carbon construction, particularly residential, in the PNW; I’ll bet there are such organizations in your city/state. EA Teaches Sustainable Housing Professional; Trains real estate professionals, architects and many other professions in building science/energy efficient buildings. See https://www.earthadvantage.org/training/ for a list. Trains assessors for Portland’s Home Energy Score program; encourages re-use of used building materials; certifies homes and apartment buildings as “green” via Earth Advantage Home Certification program, and other certifications; and certifies Net Zero and Net Zero Ready buildings, that produce as much energy as they use. www.earthadvantage.org info@earthadvantage.org LIHEAP (The Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program, federal Office of Community Services) helps low-income Americans pay their energy bills, but will also help with limited weatherization and energy-related home repairs. https://www.acf.hhs.gov/ocs/programs/liheap/about (202) 401-9351. A lot of this or similar will be available where you live. Sorry I can’t track down your local orgs.
Time for a little more—ohmygosh no!—politics? At the same time the Republican congress gave the gas/oil/coal companies the right to sell off all of our newly fracking-accessible gas/oil/coal to Asia as fast as possible (Feb. 2018) they consigned the residential energy efficiency tax credits to the trash heap; they are being stepped down/phased out and expire at the end of 2021. We’ve barely begun making existing buildings as energy efficient as possible, and saving energy is the most cost-effective way of avoiding carbon. This insanity will last as long as big money—the fossils—can corrupt congress. https://www.energystar.gov/about/federal_tax_credits
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How I stayed cool during the hottest summer on record, without air conditioning.
It starts with a decently-insulated house, caulked and weatherstripped to keep the hot air out. If you have many or large south and west-facing windows, and your roof overhangs don’t keep the summer sun from shining in, use awnings, shades, shutters, to keep the sunlight out (best) or reflective curtains etc. to reflect it back outside. Exterior roll-up bamboo shades work well, still let a little light in, are inexpensive and are a fairly green product—though they would be greener grown and made here, not Asia. Ships run on bunker oil. Nasty. Local materials save on transportation carbon and costs, and shipping low value bulk goods long distances on fossil carbon negates the value of carbon-saving goods.
Dark colors absorb light and turn it into heat. Light colored, pastel roof and walls help; bright white might reflect away 94 or 95 percent of the visible light that falls on it. But ~half the sun’s energy is infrared, and some “organic”—petroleum based—pigments can be white and still absorb IR as though they were black. Metallic pigments reflect IR, but most metals are toxic. Titanium is one of the least toxic, and titanium oxide is bright white; you can add color to it and it’s still quite reflective. “Cool Roof” IR-reflective coatings come on both sheet metal and architectural asphalt shingles; light colors are best. The roof stays cooler, and it lasts longer. But the big dang deal is that a hot roof re-emits infrared, which radiates right through the insulation—fiberglass doesn’t even see it—and warms the ceiling which warms the house. Cool roof = cool house.
AND an IR reflective, light-colored roof reflects that sunlight back out into space—it’s not absorbed, doesn’t warm the planet. It’s a teeny tiny little itty bit, and if every roof on the planet were a cool roof, it would still only take a nibble out of climate change. But it’s every-little-thing-we-can-do time, and in a way it’s free—you gotta have a roof, right? No? It’s gotta be black? Your esthetic trumps your grandchildren’s right to a future?
IR reflective paints, developed in the hot Australian Outback, are harder to find here, and one or more that were on the market a few years ago weren’t promoted, didn’t sell, and were withdrawn. I got a company called ecoprocote to mix me some in their DuraSoy soy-based acrylic line; it won’t last as long as the best acrylic latex paints, maybe ten years, but it was a lovely paint to apply; rolled/brushed on smooth without dripping. I can paint the south wall of this house in an afternoon; worth doing once a decade to help stay cool without AC. DuraSoy does dry awfully fast, so maybe not (again) on a hot day.
BTW: German-developed coatings like Kynar are expensive, are made with toxic solvents, and may last 20-30 years. Ask about the guaranteed life span of the cool-roof coating on sheet metal roofing before you buy—you want the coating to last as long as the metal, if possible. The Aussies mix IR reflective pigments and MMOs (mixed metal oxides), which make the paint emit infrared as well as reflect it, into acrylic latex paints, which seem to last 12-15 years, cost a little more than ordinary acrylic latex paints but way less than the German/petro-solvent stuff, are low VOC (little/no toxic fumes), don’t fade, and are waterproof but breathable. All good.
An attic will stay cooler under a cool roof. Add ventilation to keep it dry. And don’t go bright white if it will reflect into a neighbor’s windows, or under the flight path into an airport. Men in black will come talk to ya.
Paint mfrs will give us more IR reflective paints when we ask for them. It looks like there are some available again; google IR reflective paints, and start here https://www.echo-ca.org/article/guide-solar-reflective-paints-energy-efficient-homes .
I hope climate change doesn’t warm our lovely cool summer nights hereabouts; that’s the other side of this equation. I open windows at opposite ends of the house at night, put a fan in one, and do a night flush. That’s enough, when the nights drop into the 50s, to bring the house down to around 64 in the morning; I need to wear sweats first thing. The hottest part of last summer when the days were in the high 90s, the nights stayed up in the low 60s, and I needed two fans to bring the house down to 68 or so. I close the house up before the morning warms—usually anytime before 9:00 (and sometimes I get another degree of cooling between 7:00 and 8:00 or 9:00)—then open doors as little as I can. Dressing light, I’m comfortable to about 78°, and it takes all day for the house to warm that much. Mid evening it might hit 80°, when it was 98 or 99 outside that day; a small reciprocating fan (remember fans?) on low keeps me comfortable for the hour or so until I can open the house up again.
A recent article in the New York Times said that air conditioning contributes around five percent to global warming. It comes at the worst time of year for electricity generation: the rivers are low, and there is less wind than in other seasons, so the electricity to cool your home comes from burning coal or natural gas, probably at an over-all system efficiency around 30 percent, about like a gas guzzler. And when CFC/chlorofluorocarbon refrigerants were found to destroy the ozone layer, the replacements chemists came up with, HFCs/hydrofluorocarbons and HCFC/hydrochlorofluorocarbons, are up to 32 thousand times as potent as CO2 at trapping heat. Chemists are working on a replacement; Trump wants to back off on the regulations mandating that, too. Fortunately the Canadians still have half a brain, and I understand they are working on replacements. More technology we will have to license (or steal) from someone else, because of the anti-science bias of the party in power and the idiot in chief.
If you have to use AC, use it right. My brother-in-law sets his to 72° all summer, and wonders at his huge electric bills. Set it to come on at 78, and go off at 68, and don of doff sweats or shorts as needed. And please keep it maintained so none of those dogawful HCFCs escape.
And if you can afford it, if you have to use AC, install enough solar PV (photovoltaic) panels on your roof to run the thing—and maybe your neighbor’s. PV works best during AC season, when we’re burning more coal to make power. Make use of that symmetry.
Here’s an article that says GE has figured out a way to air condition and refrigerate with magnets—I kid you not—instead of compressors and condensers and REFRIGERANTS. NO REFRIGERANTS! HCFC-23 traps 14,800 times as much heat in the atmosphere over 100 yrs as CO2; others are much worse. GE says 20-30 percent better energy efficiency, too. They hope to be in production in 2020—maybe.http://www.newportpartnersllc.com/technologies/energy_efficiency/magnetic_refrigerators.ht
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Lighting
The output of a lamp is measured in lumens; its efficacy in lumens per watt (l/w). A 60-watt incandescent might produce around 850 lumens, at 14 l/w; a 100 watt incan, up to 1750 lumens, at 17.5 l/w. They generally last 750 to 1000 hours. Even the obsolescent “T-12” (12/8 inch, inch and a half diameter) fluorescents were around three times as good, at ~65 l/w, and they lasted around 20,000 hours. Compact fluorescents are in the same efficiency range, 60-65 l/w; they only last ~8000 hours, but they give you the efficiency of a fluorescent in any old incandescent fixture, and still last around ten times as long. 32 watt 4’ T-8 fluorescents are up around 88 lumens per watt—about where most LEDs are today-- and today’s best fluorescents, 21-28 watt (4’) T-5s, produce 100-111 l/w. That is better than most LEDs currently on the market, they last up to 36,000 hours, and they are still a very good choice for energy efficient lighting, especially if you already have those fixtures. https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/led-vs-t5-technology-larry-harris (2015)
Compact fluorescents are not that much less efficient than most of today’s LEDs. Manufacturing them took a fair amount of energy (“embodied energy”) that you don’t want to waste; if you have some, use them up before switching to LEDs. I keep one 9 watt (60 watt replacement) LED and two 13 watt CFLs in the living room fixture; the CFLs are only on when I need task lighting. They’re a little brighter than the LED, almost as bright as the 100 watt incan they are supposed to replace. I have more CFLs in use in the basement and elsewhere where they are not on much of the time; elsewhere I have LEDs. The manufacturers cheat a little; their recommended LEDs and CFLs are not really quite as bright as the incandescents they are supposed to replace. They will probably be bright enough anyway, but if you really need more light, go the next higher wattage.
Recycle fluorescents faithfully. They contain mercury. For outdoor lighting use LEDs, low pressure sodium, high pressure sodium, or if you really have to have white light, metal halides, in descending order of efficiency. Halogen incandescents are only acceptable on security lighting on motion sensors.
As for incandescents, I still have a few—in fact there is a full case of 100 watters somewhere in my basement. I use one once in a great while, briefly, when I need lots of light for a task, or the task risks breaking the lamp. Maybe a museum will want the rest of them, some day. Don’t use those up; it is worth recycling them to replace them with LEDs and CFLs.
BTW, there is actually good reason for “landlord white” interior paint. White is white because it reflects all of the light that falls on it. Any other color absorbs some, and you need more wattage or you make do with less light. Some of my walls are latte. But most, and all of the ceilings, are white.
You should understand color temperature, too. 2700 to 3000°K means that the lamp’s color is the same as that of virtually anything heated to and glowing at that temperature in Kelvins. We call that range warm white; it gives skin a nice, ruddy glow, renders colors the way we expect them to look, and is generally pleasant. It’s also the fall sunlight color temperature some plants need to bloom. And some LEDs now are even “warmer.” I have a dimmable 2200K LED reading light over the tub; dimmed way down, it’s almost as “warm” as firelight. There are fluorescents at around 3500K, 4000K, 5000K, and 6500K, as well. You mostly want warm white in a home; the others are generally task lighting, though some 3500-4000K lamps can produce superior color rendition, a comparison to how colors look in sunlight. Anything over CRI (color rendering index) = 85 is good; >90 is excellent. Daylight, or “cool white,” 5000 - 6500K, is the color of sunlight before Earth’s atmosphere filters out much of the blue; it’s harsh, people look sallow and colors washed out. Plants like it in their vegetative stage, when they are growing and before they bloom.
You see the dichotomy, right? “Cool” lamps are actually ~twice as “hot” as “warm” lamps? Hey, red “feels” warm and blue feels cool. No doubt because we evolved hangin’ around the campfire every night and dodgin’ glaciers….
LEDs are finally here. There is a good selection of types and color temperatures; some only last 10,000 hours, but those are relatively inexpensive; most of them now last (on average, not all will go that long, and some, longer) 50,000 hours—some claim 100,000--meaning you should never have to change that lamp again. BTW; the light bulb is the lamp; the “lamp” is the fixture, if ya wanna sling the lingo like a perfeshinal. The price has come down to where even I don’t mind paying for them, and I am notoriously cheap; some apparently pretty good ones (Utilitech, 108 l/w) are <$5 each. They’re still a lot more than dirt-cheap incandescents—until you have to buy 50 or 65 incandescents to replace one LED. They save you every month on your energy bill--$10 or $12/year/fixture in average use. And you may never have to change that lamp again. Never have to change that lamp again. Never….
This field is still growing. Philips developed small LEDs for Dubai a couple of years ago, that produce 200 l/w. And here is “high bay” (expensive bright industrial/warehouse lighting) LED lighting from Orion Energy Systems at 214 l/w. I don’t see anything this efficient yet on the market for American homeowners. I asked Philips back in December when their Dubai LEDs might be available here, and I’m still waiting for an answer. Maybe they will be available in the U.S. of A by the time you use up all your already-purchased CFLs, if we pester Philips for them. (888) 744-5477 / http://www.usa.lighting.philips.com/support/connect/contact-us
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New Construction
If you build a house to less than the best energy efficiency standards, it will waste energy, add more carbon to the atmosphere faster, and cost more every month to heat and cool for its entire life, and that could be well over a century. Worse is building too big. Our houses have doubled in size over the last century, and some have gotten ridiculous. An architect from whom I once took classes told of having to fire a client who wanted a 5000 sf house for two people, with lots of big north-facing windows to a view—and who wanted it really, really energy efficient. Small is efficient. If you keep it small you can spend your budget on more efficient materials and construction methods, the best windows, better appliances and nice bathrooms…. You’ll spend less on maintenance; you’ll spend less time on maintenance, you’ll have more money to spend on that leisure time, and you’ll spend less every month on utilities. Win, win, win-win-win. Small is beautiful.
The most energy efficient building standard in the world is Passive House—Passivhaus in Germany, where it was developed. It’s now the standard or model across northern Europe. Unfortunately, U.S. building code officials think it will take another dozen years or so to make it the standard here, overcome builders’ always always always resistance to change, and train them in it. And we don’t have another 12 years. Fortunately there are builders and designers in Portland who understand Passive House.
Building an actual certified Passive House can be expensive; you tweak your design on a spreadsheet until the energy usage is where you want it; then there is a lot of monitoring and data gathering and number crunching (it is a German standard) to prove that it works as designed, and for some strange reason people won’t do that unless you pay them. But a house doesn’t have to be certified to save you money and carbon. All you need is a designer and builder who grok energy efficient design and passive house standards—and a builder who doesn’t cut corners. https://www.treehugger.com/green-architecture/irish-passive-house-gets-built-budget.html
A Passive House needs very little energy to keep itself comfortably warm or cool, around 1/10th that of a conventional house. It will be well insulated, with walls framed to eliminate thermal bridging, the heat conducted through each stud and plate; few and small windows, and those probably very efficient triple-pane fiberglass frame units, except in the south wall; those are large, and the glass and coatings are designed to transmit all the sunlight possible. Let that shine on mass. In this climate about four inches of insulated masonry floor one room wide, perhaps with a masonry wall behind it, if that wall gets at least reflected or diffuse (direct is better) winter sunlight, is enough. Or containers of water, or trays of eutectic salts, if you want to get—industrial. Mass evens out temperatures in a house. There is such a thing as too much, and you don’t want it where it doesn’t get sunshine; if it’s too cool you’ll radiate body heat to it any time you get close. But if you can cool it with night air, you can make use of that “thermal flywheel effect” to help cool the house all summer.
To learn more about Passive House go to https://www.phnw.org/. To find a list of Passive House designers/builders click on the three red bars at right top of page, and scroll down to the business directory on the left.
And let the sun shine in. There is no such thing as seasonal affective disorder (SAD, a type of depression linked to winter light levels) in a passive solar home, and you get to live in whatever sunshine there is, all winter long, and turn the lights off during the day. It’s simple: you build a passive house with a lot of south glass and some mass behind that to absorb and store the heat. Socrates groked solar design 2300 yag: “Now in houses with a south aspect, the sun’s rays penetrate into the porticos in winter, but in the summer the path of the sun is right over our heads and above the roof, so that there is shade. If, then, this is the best arrangement, we should build the south side loftier to get the winter sun and the north side lower to keep out the winter winds.” He was describing the New England Saltbox…. A century earlier Greek playwright Aeschylus said it a little grumpier: “Only primitives and barbarians lack knowledge of houses turned to face the winter sun.” Are we barbarians? Or primitives? We humans have a hard time holding onto the wisdom of the past. Even here in cloudy old Portland (OR), the sun can provide about 60 percent of your heat needs. Why wouldn’t you?
You may want night insulation for all that south glass: otherwise you will lose much of the heat at night that you gained during the day. A Passive House also wants to be fairly airtight, so it will need a heat recovery ventilator. It may not need a central heating system, but you will need small-diameter ducts to distribute the fresh air. Adding a micro furnace (like a Life Breath Clean Air Furnace) to the HRV is inexpensive back-up heat, that should satisfy a mortgage company that demands central heat. The Life Breath “furnace” is actually hydronic (hot water) coils in the HRV; your tank-type water heater provides the heat, so you want it to be very efficient, and correctly sized, and gas or heat-pump, not electric.
Here’s a reference that essentially says a passive house can repay the few thousand extra dollars it costs to build in about that many years: https://insideclimatenews.org/news/10122018/net-zero-energy-efficiency-home-infographic-solar-pay-off-years-midwest-detroit-chicago-columbus and that a Net-Zero Home, basically a passive house that generates most or all of the energy it needs with solar or wind, should repay its extra costs in nine to 14 years.
There can be a lot of electronic gadgetry, “green bling,” to a passive or net zero house; you need very little of it. Keep is simple, keep it inexpensive. Or knock yourself out, technogeek. It’s yo’ money.
SIPs—structural insulated panels—are an interesting way to build fast, airtight, and energy efficient, but they are usually made with OSB and Styrofoam, and I’d rather not build with petroleum. But here’s one made of recycled paper and soy-based foam. Six inches is R-40. BioSIPs are worth checking out. http://www.newportpartnersllc.com/technologies/energy_efficiency/biosips.html There are SSIPs made with straw bales https://www.greenbuildermedia.com/buildingscience/dry-straw-bale-sips-a-new-approach that seem to make straw bale construction faster and more efficient.
And here’s something called Agriboard that compresses straw while heating it; its lignin melts, re-hardens, and bonds the straw into a panel that looks about six inches thick and is R25. https://www.treehugger.com/green-architecture/greenbuild-agriboard-structural-insulated-panels.html
And of course there’s plain old straw bale construction. That sounds like a cheap way to build, but it’s not; there’s enough to doing it right that you want to hire someone to supervise who’s done it a few times, there are a number of steps that end in stuccoed walls inside and out, and stucco is labor-intensive. And please don’t plaster with high-carbon Portland cement. But done right it can result in a long-lasting, warm, quiet home with R36 walls that sequesters the carbon in the straw for the century or more that the house should last.
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I just learned that you need a Portland Home Energy Score before you list a house for sale in PDX, or the city will fine you $500—it sounds like repeatedly—until you comply. Prices for the audit vary from $99 to $250. It looks as if Energy Trust of Oregon Energy Performance Scores (EPS) or Home Energy Rating System (HERS) reports can be substituted. Check out https://www.pdxhes.com/ for more info.
And if you are contemplating a commercial structure, check into the New Building Institute and the Living Building Challenge. A little thougt before you design can save you energy money and carbon every month for the life of the structure.
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I happen to think that a Masonry Heater is the perfect back-up heating system for a Passive House or passive solar home. IF you burn it hot, with the right amount of air, firewood can be a clean, green, efficient, carbon neutral, renewable heat source, especially if you have access to waste wood that otherwise would rot, releasing carbon uselessly. But iron and steel are the wrong materials in which to burn wood. If you give dry wood the right amount of air for a clean burn you can get a 2200°F. flame, though it’s usually a bit less. That’s too close to the melting point of iron; steel can warp, and split seams, and glowing white hot, would set the room around it ablaze. Firebrick doesn’t care; it’s happy to ~3200°F. So you build a firebox out of firebrick, soapstone, or other refractory ceramic, and route the combustion gasses in some serpentine manner so the flu has time and surface area to absorb the heat; leave a half-inch air space, then skin the heater in brick, stone, soapstone, adobe, insulating plaster…. Here’s a small one made of silicon carbide; seems an efficient material. http://www.eccostove.us/home
Many masonry heaters are works of art. Burn small dry wood fast, hot, and efficient, absorb almost all of the heat into the masonry, and it radiates deliciously into the room for hours after the burn. Most are designed so that you can always touch the stone surfaces without injury. You have to watch the weather and plan ahead, because it takes a while for the heat to conduct out to the surface—up to eight hours for a big heater. But it’s supposed to be the most comfortable heat there is, just the right temperature to emit IR of the right frequencies to penetrate deep into you and warm you from within; well-designed masonry heaters are pretty much across the board 87 percent efficient, and burned right produce almost no air pollution, almost nothing out the flue but CO2 and water vapor. The CO2 came out of the atmosphere in the first place: cycling it in and out is far better that adding fossil carbon.
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These were beautiful. Google up Masonry Heaters, go ti Images, and enjoy.
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Tulikivi soapstone cookstove
As for an efficient burn, too much air is almost as bad as not enough. It cools the flame below the 1128°F. ignition temperature of carbon monoxide, and burning CO to CO2 provides the heat needed to burn up all the other nastys. Wood smoke is far more noxious than tobacco, as you know if you’ve ever gotten a good lungfull of campfire. But the right amount of air burns all the nastygens in dry wood to very little but water vapor and CO2. Some masonry heaters are designed as a wood cookstove; warm the house for the day while cooking breakfast over a fistful of wood, then pop lunch/bread/pies into the now-hot oven to bake. If you built hot water coils into your heater, your bath is now ready, and hot water for the dishes, all without burning any un-natural gas or coal.
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Tulikivi will even make you a woodstove out of a giant soapstone boulder (left). Unfortunately you are paying—and burning oil--to ship rock from Europe. We need a larger domestic masonry heater industry.
Read what Mark Twain had to say about masonry heaters here. https://www.firespeaking.com/media/mark-twian-on-european-masonry-stoves/
Avoid open fireplaces like the plague. Even with the damper closed, they leak warm air right up the chimney; they are a big, very conductive brick hole in your insulated envelope; and most of them pull more warm air out of the room than they add to it—they can actually increase your heating costs. If you must have one, IR-transmissive ceramic-glass doors can help—a little—by giving you better control over the air to the fire, as can a “fireplace heater.” That’s not very descriptive, and doesn’t google up much; try https://www.woodlanddirect.com/1360037-450px.jpg to see what one looks like, or here.
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These help, but not much. Stack wood on the bottom, back, and top: the cavity between becomes one giant hot coal that radiates a beam of IR into the room.
There are firebox shapes, like the Rumford, that radiate heat into the room a little better. If you have an open fireplace, and don’t use it, there are several ways to seal the chimney, so that at least it doesn’t leak warm air all winter and pull hot air into the house all summer. Ask at any fireplace shop. And if it’s brick all the way through the wall, insulate the outside, if you can. Or the inside. A good fireplace insert woodstove can help a lot, but it’s not going to be as efficient as a freestanding masonry heater, nor as clean burning. If you must use one, small hot fires as often as you need are more efficient and far less polluting than big loads of wood choked down.
Pellet stoves are better than 90 percent efficient, and extremely clean burning, and the carbon came out of the atmosphere in the first place. As long as only waste wood is used to make pellets, I consider them clean and green. Gasifier wood furnaces and boilers are also 87 percent or better efficient, and produce very little pollution, and again the carbon came out of the atmosphere in the first place; better to cycle it in and out than to add fossil carbon. I wonder if a gassifier could be set up to heat a home while leaving charcoal to sequester improving the soil in the garden?
Ceiling fans can dramatically help by bringing warm air pooled near a high/vaulted ceiling back down where the people—and thermostats—are. There are a bunch of energy saving tips at https://www.energytrust.org/about/explore-energy-trust/low-cost-and-no-cost-tips-to-save-energy-and-money/ . Check ‘em out.
Plant deciduous trees on the south side of your house. Prune them so they are just thick enough to block summer sun through your solar glazing, but let all the sunlight possible through when the leaves fall. Semi-espaliered (you don’t have to crucify them) fruit trees are a great option; with edible landscaping and thoughtful gardening, you know what goes into your food, and no one has to burn a drop of diesel or Jet A to get it to you.
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We are on the cusp of a brave new world of energy abundance wherein our technologies clean up after each other, solve problems without creating new ones, make our lives cleaner and safer and healthier and less expensive (in the long run) while creating good-paying jobs.* We have to have a vision of the future we want, and some idea of which technologies to support, and which are a waste of time and money. And then we have to fund that research, pursue and insist upon that future, and no longer let the (un)free market, and the greed of selfish people with no regard for the needs of others or the future of the species, herd us toward a precipice.
*Heard somewhere recently—Morning Edition?—that renewable energy should ultimately create twice as many jobs as the fossils they’ll replace. I recall that there are already one million solar jobs in California alone, that there will be half a million in wind power by 2050, and there were never more than 200,000 in coal. And WA Governor Jay Inslee said this morning (4/11/19)—on CBS this morning?—that there are already three million jobs in renewable energy. We’re obligated, IMNHO, by compassion to offer new clean energy jobs, and training, first to displaced coal miners and other fossil-fuel workers. There will be plenty left for the rest of us.
“A series of reports released last year by the Clean Energy States Alliance on behalf of three of its members—New York, Massachusetts and Rhode Island—estimated that about 8,000 megawatts of offshore wind could be developed in the northeast by 2030 and that it could result in the creation of nearly 40,000 jobs.” https://insideclimatenews.org/news/09042018/offshore-wind-renewable-energy-massachusetts-manufacturing-jobs-mandate-new-bedford-port-boston
8,000 mW. Eight thousand million (8 billion) watts. That’s eight million energy efficient homes. What’s the holdup?
BTW: for every URL embedded in this review, I read six or eight or twelve articles. They ones listed were those that best illustrated the point I wanted to make, and that best reflected the rest of what I learned.
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