The scale of the damage done in the gulf of Mexico disaster is unprecedented. Here’s an overview of what has gone wrong deep underground.

Firstly there are many independently documented and recorded oil fissures erupting in other locations away from the well head. The entire affected area is in vicinity of 400 square kilometers. The measurements that are being made on the pressure inside the well are redundant as the actual pressure is being dissipated across a much larger area.

With the Methane Hydrate feeding into the rock layers, cracks open and pressure makes it’s way to the surface, with more pressure building up in the intermediate rock layers there are a couple of possibilities for the pressure to be released.

1: Cracks develop spewing pressure and oil to equalize the area
2: A massive volcanic explosion

In much the same way that a bridge will collapse or an avalanche will build until it is out of control this is what is happening now in the Gulf. The pressure exterting outwards and will eventually find relief upwards. The odds are high it will blow like a volcano.

Seismic data for the area contains all the latest info on p waves and s waves however it is not being publicly released for independent analysis. This data provides everything we need to solve for the modulus of elasticity to enable us to calculate how strong the pressure is.

The questions we should be asking are:

Where is the geophysical data for independant analysis?
How bad is it really?

This data should be public record as it will require a massive evacuation of the area before it blows.

Methane Hydrate is highly unstable super compressed Methane Gas in solid form. Just like Gun powder.

There are a couple of labs being funded to work on the possibility of using sunlight to transform water and CO2 into a combustible fuel with equivalent stored energy to existing carbon based fuel. An article in the daily telegraph attempts to portray it as a serious potential option for ensuring future energy demands are met. What they don’t tell us is the math behind the technology. It does sound like a viable solution and with the labs working on the problem maybe they will solve the issues holding it back before we actually run out of oil and our real problems really start. The main question is if they can extract enough CO2 from the surrounding environment to get back the potential energy that will make it an equivalent in energy storage to existing fuels. It’s definitely possible to make combustible fuel with this technique but will it really scale to meet the requirements that we have for the global energy supply over the coming 10 years let alone the following decade once the existing fuel supply we can extract energy positively has been exhausted?

Solar-powered reactors can take carbon dioxide and turn it into carbon monoxide. The same reactors can also be used to turn water into hydrogen and oxygen.

The two can then be reacted together with a catalyst to form hydrocarbon fuels, in a technique known as the Fischer-Tropsch process.

Fuels made in this way are sufficiently similar to those currently used in cars that major redesigns of engines and refuelling stations should not be necessary. If fuels can be made entirely from atmospheric carbon, running a car on that fuel would be carbon neutral.
One such machine, the Counter Rotating Ring Receiver Reactor Recuperator (CR5), created by a team of scientists at Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque, New Mexico, captures carbon dioxide from power plant exhaust fumes. In the future, however, they hope to extract it directly from the air.

The system uses a giant parabolic mirror, which concentrates sunlight on to two chambers separated by spinning rings of cerium oxide. As the rings turn, the cerium oxide is heated to 1500C and releases oxygen into one of the chambers. The oxygen is then pumped away.
As the ring spins, the now de-oxidised cerium moves into the other chamber. Carbon dioxide is pumped in, and the deoxidised cerium steals one of the oxygen molecules, creating carbon monoxide and cerium oxide.

Another team, the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Zurich, uses a similar system, but with calcium oxide, zinc oxide and steam, which can create a stream of hydrogen and carbon monoxide. Their system can already use atmospheric carbon dioxide.

At the moment the two reactors have problems. The New Mexico team’s system currently only works for a few seconds at a time, while the Swiss model runs at a mere 10 kilowatts. But both hope to improve reliability and yield.

Tags: Energy Storage, Fuel, e=mc2 by Sparky
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The Horizon Fuel Cell company is preparing to release to market their Minipak AA compatible fuel cell that runs on water. They say it has enough stored energy to charge 1000 AA batteries. This looks like a great addition to the consumer fuel cell market. They are also planning to market notebook capacity fuel cells in the near future. It’s a pity they are still energy negative when the full amount of energy that is consumed in their creation is accounted for but at least they are significantly more efficient on the consumer end of the deal than the options we are currently faced with.

Tags: Energy Storage, Fuel by Sparky
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