Entries Tagged as 'Fuel'

Blow out preventor or methanol injector?

Independant experts have declared the so called BOP is actually just a methanol injector and not a Blow Out Preventor as the press is reporting.

The so called Blow Out Preventor


The so called Macondo Blow Out Preventor

Here’s why:

A Blow Out Preventor stops the drill stem from blowing out of the ground. Conversely a valve is used to control fluid flow just like a faucet.

Clearly something that sits ontop of the pipe and uses the pipe for support is not going to stop the pipe from coming out of the ground or seal the pipe at the kind of pressure that would cause it to blow out in the first place.

A typical Bore hole


A typical Bore hole

The top of the bore hole is very big as the wells are very deep, and the piping is stacked on top of each other, pieces on top of pieces.. The top of the well is approx 1-2m in diameter down to 2/300m in depth until hard consolidated rock is reached.

According to the old rules (that were dismissed as unnecessary by BP management for the Macondo well) the first BOP was located near to the cosolidated rock 2/300m under ground with several hundred meters of concrete on top so they won’t move anywhere.

The BOP at the ocean floor should be automatically triggered if the pipeline starts to move upwards for any reason. It is effectively a huge huge slab of steel approximately the size of a house. It sits on top of the well head and when triggered clamps onto the pipe and closes the hole. The reason for this is If the pipe blows out it whips around like a firehose and the steel pipe will take out pretty much anything in its way.

Making fuel from water, sunlight and CO2

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.

The Gulf Oil Spill and the Mohorovicic Discontinuity

Background

The Mohorovicic Discontinuity (Moho) is the layer of the earths core that is directly underneath the earths crust. It is technically a liquid mass that has no S-waves which is a primary characteristic of liquid. Another aspect of the Moho is that, due to the pressure at that location, the P-waves measure between 7 – 8 Km/s. Between the Moho and the Earths crust there are pockets of Methane Hydrate which although in gaseous form due to the pressure at that location display the characteristics of a solid mass.

If you have a highly pressurized gas and you stick a tube into it connected to a less pressurized gas/liquid the inherent balance in nature will cause the highly pressurized gas to escape at high velocity into the less pressurized gas/liquid. This is essentially what is happening in the Gulf of Mexico oil spill with the addition of a layer of oil between the gas and the final outlet of the tube.

Players

The brain dead, greedy, economists who run BP and Halliburton were attempting to use the pressure from the Methane Hydrate located underneath the oil field to turbo charge the remaining oil out of the holes they drilled in order to minimize the expense of getting it out of the ground. If they did not use this approach it would have been more energy expensive to extract the oil than the energy the oil would have provided. Hence the reason why none of the other US companies were prepared to do it and were even winding up their operations in that part of the world as they could not find a safe way to extract the oil while staying energy positive in the process. No scientific experts who understood the physics of what was being asked of them were prepared to take part in the process which is why there is now so little knowledge of the situation being applied by the people working on ground zero as they are not knowledgeable enough to know what they are actually up against. There may be some good people working there right now doing their best to try to fix this problem but they are definitely not from the small, worldwide community of geophysics experts.

Result

The result is that we now have the worst man made ecological disaster in known history. The oil being pumped out of the volcanic rupture in the earths crust has been estimated at 1,000,000 barrels per day by independent experts. There is also an unmeasured, phenomenally large amount of methane gas which has been pushed out of the fissure. The Gulf of Mexico is the spawning ground for most of the Atlantic fish stocks. They have now been wiped out. That will have a knock on affect for the rest of the Atlantic fish supply and therefore a substantial amount of the worlds food supply. After all when the guys with the nukes tell us to give them our food we can hardly say no can we? In addition there is now massive amounts of toxic chemicals being evaporated by the natural weather cycles, carried on the winds and which is coming back down as rain and pollution on the agricultural lands normally feed by the sea air and currents of the Eastern US seaboard. There is benzine rain coming out of the sky. Benzine is highly toxic in ppm to humans and people are already dying from exposure. That is also affecting the grain supply along the coastal and inner eastern areas.




Finally there is a massive amount of volcanic activity going on way below the surface due to the sudden increase in pressure in the gulf area. This is manifesting itself in places like Guatemala, Ecuador, Missouri, and San Andreas. The longer the leak is left unplugged the more damage that is going to be done to the ecosystem and agriculture. The potential for massive loss of life in the region due to volcanic and seismic activity is unthinkable.

Solution

We are experiencing the worst possible situation. There is no good solution for the problem that is at hand there are only lesser forms of catastrophic loss to come. The longer they wait the worse things will get. The only known solution for plugging the hole is to nuke the area and fuse the earths crust with the resulting heat. The Russian have been saying this from day one as they have experienced this problem at least 5 times. However due to the political power structure in the States and the greed of the regional authorities they have persisted with this charade that they know what they are doing. In reality they have fired, killed or otherwise got rid of everyone in the industry who knew anything about the science of the resources they were dealing with in order to get the information they wanted to hear to allow them to justify the decisions that were made to get them to this point.

Future

The political fallout from this mess is sure to be enormous. This could well be the final nail in the coffin for the “United States” of America in much the same way that the end of the cold war was the end of the USSR. Tony Haywood and his family are marked and will no doubt be taken out within short order if not just to prove a point to anyone of the Hereditary Elite who might think they can get away with this kind of behavior in the future. The shear volume of oil will probably make it all the way across the Atlantic and end up in places like Ireland once it has traveled through the gulf stream and devastated what is left of the Atlantic fisheries. When they do eventually fuse the crust with a nuclear explosion the simple fact they have waited so long to do it will mean the nuclear explosion will set of a chain reaction in the mantle that will have a massively devastating effect on the whole region.

Horizon Fuel cells use water as fuel

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.


The minipak from Horizon fuel cell company runs on water

Using bacteria to extract energy from water

Scientists at UMass/Amherst are researching the possibilities in using geobacter strains to extract electrons from water using only sunlight as a power source. With a simple process and the right bacteria it is possible to produce acetate or acetyl-Co A which is a basic building block of all oil based fuels and plastics.

In practical terms, the closed ME system Lovley envisions could be located anywhere sunlight is available, and harvested with an array of solar panels. As he explains, “It’s a two-electrode system. One electrode extracts electrons from water and produces oxygen as a byproduct. The electrons travel to the second electrode where the bacteria are, and they take in carbon dioxide and spit out acetate. With further engineering the bacteria are expected to also be able to produce fuels or other valuable commercial chemicals, for example, butanediol, used to make plastics. ”

Official wikipedia page for water fuelled cars

This page has a biased and jaded overview of the potential for water as a fuel in automobiles and a general overview of some of the more contentious claims that have been made for powering cars on water. Clearly the writer is not impressed with the numerous claims made over the years for cars that run on water or use water as a storage medium for Hydrogen or Browns gas.

However the writer also fails to mention the plasma spark plug, the Geet Plantone fuel system allowing leaned out ratios of 80:20 water:gasoline, the Firestorm sparkplug from Robert Kruiper, the Plasmatron from MIT, ArvinMeritor’s Plasma Fuel Reformer, the potential in using Al-Ga composite from Jerry Woodal at Purdue, solar hydrogen electrolysis and photosynthesis using silica catalysts from MIT or even a general overview of the actual energy potential available in a liter of water in real world numbers and not just abstract (for most readers) chemical algorithms.

Even though there is an indisputable energy loss in freeing hydrogen from it’s watery prison that does not mean it is not possible to use it as a fuel source. The question is how inefficient are we prepared to be when it comes to transportation and energy supply and are there other ways to coax hydrogen out from it’s watery orgy so that we can also use it as an energy source.

Water is fully oxidized hydrogen. Hydrogen itself is a high-energy, flammable substance, but its useful energy is released when water is formed–water will not burn. The process of electrolysis, discussed below, would split water into hydrogen and oxygen, but it takes as much energy to take apart a water molecule as was released when the hydrogen was oxidized to form water. In fact, some energy would be lost in converting water to hydrogen and then burning the hydrogen because some heat would always be produced in the conversions. Releasing chemical energy from water would therefore violate the first and/or second laws of thermodynamics.

Using aluminium and gallium to split water

This has been known about since 1967 but still has not made it to market. Purdue University Professor Jerry Woodal has found a way to use Aluminium and Gallium to split water. No electricity needed!!! Well, except for the energy required to extract the metals from the earth and form them into the composite in the first place… Jerry is most excited about the possibility of using it as a fuel multiplier so in conjunction with a plasma spark plug or plasma fuel reformer the hydrogen could be used to increase the efficiency of the gasoline used in hybrid or standard ICE cars. What’s the delay?

View the lectures below.

THE SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY OF ALUMINUM-GALLIUM ALLOYS AS A MATERIAL FOR ENERGY STORAGE, TRANSPORT AND SPLITTING WATER

THE ALUMINUM ENABLING HYDROGEN FUEL ECONOMY

From 2007 lecture

2,7lbs of Al will produce the same amount of energy in the form of hydrogen as 1lb of gasoline. i.e 19K BTU

It takes 20 gal x 6.5 lbs/gal = 130 lbs gasoline to drive an average car for 350 mi or 350 lbs Al

At $3/gal for gasoline and $0.8/lb for Al the trip costs $60 using gasoline and $280 using Al

If an Al recycler is built next to a nuclear power plant with and on-site power cost of $0.02/KW-hour Al can be recycled from alumina back to Al for 9 kW/hr/lb x 350lbs x $0.02/kW-hr = $63

The cost of 2.7 lbs would be about 49 cents

At $3/gallon, 1lb of gasoline costs 46 cents

Overview of hydrogen as an energy source

Here’s an write up from a Stanford University Professor of Computer science about the various uses and drawbacks for hydrogen as a fuel. Seems not much has changed since he started writing the page in 1996. Has useful data about the power available in hydrogen.

Hydrogen is the lightest of the elements with an atomic weight of 1.0. Liquid hydrogen has a density of 0.07 grams per cubic centimeter, whereas water has a density of 1.0 g/cc and gasoline about 0.75 g/cc. These facts give hydrogen both advantages and disadvantages. The advantage is that it stores approximately 2.6 times the energy per unit mass as gasoline, and the disadvantage is that it needs about 4 times the volume for a given amount of energy. A 15 gallon automobile gasoline tank contains 90 pounds of gasoline. The corresponding hydrogen tank would be 60 gallons, but the hydrogen would weigh only 34 pounds.

In terms of energy contained, 9.5 kg of hydrogen is equivalent to 25kg of gasoline ( Peschka 1987). Storing 25 kg of gasoline requires a tank with a mass of 17 kg, whereas the storage of 9.5 kg of hydrogen requires 55kg, (Peschka 1987). Part of the reason for this difference is that the volume of hydrogen fuel is about 4 times greater for the same energy content of gasoline. Although the hydrogen storage vessel is large, hydrogen burns 1.33 times more efficiently than gasoline in automobiles ( Bockris and Wass 1988). In tests a BMW 745h liquid-hydrogen test vehicle with a 75 kg tank and the energy equivalent of 40 liters of gasoline had a cruising range in traffic of 400 km, or a fuel efficiency of 10 km per liter ( Winter 1986).

They’ve used water in their engines

Here’s an interesting little promo for a book from Hypnow.fr chronicling water engines over the past century. Worth a read for anyone who doubts the long term research that has been suppressed or otherwise delayed from getting to market.



Revizal’s Plasma/Geet Engine. 80:20 water:gasoline. Super lean!!!

Here’s a lost Revizal video showing him running his generator on an 80:20 water:gasoline mix using the plasma spark and the Geet system. Recall that Robert Krupa also claimed upto 80:20 ratio for the Krupa sparkplug too.

When is this tech going to make it to market? Surely the remaining oil is worth more to us as a long term resource and we should conserve as much of it as possible now that it is running out since we passed the worldwide peak in 2003/4. What makes the oil companies think it is a good idea to use it all up as fast as possible? Is it just greedy shareholders that demand they make as much money as possible as quickly as possible? If that is the case why is it publicly acceptable for this to happen let alone legally possible.

Where is the governmental oversight? They can print money as much as they want but they can’t make new oil to replace the dwindling reserves. Surely it is in everyones interests for the oil reserves to last as long as possible than it is to consume it all as quickly as possible?