There is already an existing cheap way to store energy. Pump water up a hill and extract the energy when you let it flow down the hill. 75% efficient and no pollution. Better than batteries.
Pumped hydro, yes. And heated rocks. Batteries are just one tech, not the best in all apps. Don't forget sodium batteries coming online that will displace most lithium battery need; much cheaper.
Sodium batteries will be a very positive step - they are cheaper and the sodium can be extracted without the same environmentally damaging impacts, but also it is a plentiful mineral, whereas lithium is a trace element that we will exhaust relatively quickly at current rates, and even more so under the goal of transitioning transport to fully electric.
Just consulted with hubby, who is an electric car fanatic.
Sodium batteries are excellent in a static location. Not so good for mobility, like cars. (as of today). Still in prototype and not commercialised or scaled.
Ffestiniog Power Station. "the scheme has a storage capacity of around 1.44 GWh (5.2 TJ) at maximum output for four hours, and the capacity to power the whole of North Wales for several hours."
Hello Marc. I have been too. My first visit to the are was via the steam railway with my parents, perhaps I was 15-16, I can't recall exactly. I went out on my own from Dduallt station and climbed up to Llyn Stwlan, the top reservoir. I believe my wife and I also visited the power station.
I have in-laws in North Wales so go there a lot. I did this on Snowdon looking at the meaning of its name,.
Hi Michael, Yes I vaguely remember reading something a while back about a change of name for Snowdon. Never been there yet but did Striding Edge a few years back in The Lakes. That was some walk!
PS Enjoyed your piece on sodium nitrite. Am reading Ultra-Processed People by Dr Chris van Tulleken and for a change of subject, Bringing Down Goliath by Jolyon Maugham KC.
Yes, not so much a change of name for Snowdon but using the Welsh name that existed. The Welsh language is very romantic really despite seemingly unpronounceable words!
The mountains are typically named a fathers and mothers and children. I will probably explain more in a post one day. This can in fact be seen the world over.
I have done Striding Edge a long time ago and it is quite a walk. If you should ever go up Snowdon, the Crib Coch route is the most challenging route more so than Striding Edge.
Llanrhaeadr YM and the Pistyll Rhaeadr waterfall there are lovely spots. My family used to go up to North Wales up the Tanat valley on the way to Porthmadog and beyond and I am extremely fond of it. I think I could live there.
My wife and I do go that way occasionally to the in-laws in Anglesey, but it is not the most direct route.
In Cornwall 'they' still try and flog the dead horse that was the Cornish language and hasn't even been spoken for hundreds of years. It pops up all over the place, including street name signs and all Council communications. They even inflict it on kids in schools even though it was never even written down or formalised. You gotta wonder why... A bit like much of Wales, but at least Welsh is a real language and still spoken in the North. I sometimes think some people would be happy if we all still talked Chaucerian. (I think I may have made up a new word?)
PS The next time I undertake a mammoth 'walk' I will remember not to to wear a T shirt and trendy trainers.
A ram pump uses no power (electricity) at all. So that's pretty clean energy. Some people on Youtube already use ram pumped water to generate small amounts of power for their home.
To be clear, a ram pump uses the power of running water--a river or the tide, eg. So as you scale up, you will encounter many of the same problems you would with other forms of hydro.
I'm so happy you mentioned that! There is also a technology called a ram pump in which the flow of water downhill ("powered" by gravity) itself is used to pump water uphill, effectively for "free" since gravity doesn't need to be "produced."
From a pragmatic point of view, the simpler and less moving parts, the better. Elevating water or storing hot sand in big tanks are the easiest and most stable solutions.
No rare minerals or metals are needed, just pipes, wire, water, and sand. Flat areas use the sand tank solution, mountainous ares use elevated reservoirs. Simple.
"The existence of methane in the EarthтАЩs mantle does not cause any doubt, however, its possible chemical transformation under the mantle thermobaric conditions is not enough known. Investigation of methane at the upper mantle thermobaric conditions, using diamond anvil cells, demonstrated the possible formation of ethane, propane and n-butane from methane, however, theoretical calculations of methane behaviour at extreme temperature and pressure predicted also heavier hydrocarbons. We experimentally investigated the chemical transformations of methane at the upper mantle thermobaric conditions, corresponding to the depth of 70тАУ80тАЙkm (850тАУ1000тАЙK, 2.5тАЙGPa), using тАЬToroidтАЭ-type Large reactive volume device and gas chromatography. The experimental results demonstrated the formation of the complex hydrocarbon mixture up to C7 with linear, branched and cycled structures and benzene. Unsaturated hydrocarbons were detected on the trace level in the products mixture. The increasing of exposure time led to growth of heavier components in the product systems. The data obtained suggest possible existence of complex hydrocarbon mixtures at the upper mantle thermobaric conditions and provide a new insight on the possible pathways of the hydrocarbons synthesis from methane in the upper mantle." https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-61644-5 See also https://phys.org/news/2019-04-rewriting-textbook-fossil-fuels-technologies.html - so these might be developed as natural gas wells.
So what you end up with looks a lot like natural gas, not oil. Anything below pentane - C5H12 - is what you find, anything above, only in trace amounts. We're not looking at reservoirs of octane/iso-octane or the paraffins, here.
If oil wells recharged at an economic rate, then you could shut them in for five years or so, then go back to pumping the oil, you wouldn't need water flooding, and you wouldn't need fracking, which is done mostly in oil formations where most of the easily recoverable oil has been produced, and you wouldn't need plants for dewatering or removal of fracking fluid.
"At a balmy minus 179 degrees Celsius (minus 290 degrees Fahrenheit), Titan is a far cry from Earth. Instead of water, liquid hydrocarbons in the form of methane and ethane are present on the moon's surface." Those were detected by radar. The rest of the sentence is an unproven assumption without any evidence cited: "and tholins probably make up its dunes. The term "tholins"was coined by Carl Sagan in 1979 to describe the complex organic molecules at the heart of prebiotic chemistry."
This is at best evidence for abiotic methane and ethane, CH4 and C2H6, and not oil. Octane freezes at -71F and would be a solid at the surface temperature. As for tholin - https://www.planetary.org/articles/0722-what-in-the-worlds-are-tholins - it's not oil as we would think of it, if it is in fact present - and would have to have been created in or near something hot enough to sustain plasma temperatures, then deposited on Titan, which is far too cold for the reactions producing tholins to have occurred. And methane and ethane exist in interstellar space, too, so none of this is evidence for the production of abiotic oil on earth.
Apparently there are stories of wells that have been idle for many years and found to have producible oil when tested. Have no idea how prevalent such discoveries might be. But it gives some support to Gold's thesis. I suspect a thicket of legal issues since many wells get capped after they "expire" and the company that held the rights is gone.
I saw an article by a Swedish research group testing Gold's hypothesis, and in fact they found roughly 50 barrels of oil - 1 barrel = 42 gallons - at something like 30,000 feet below ground level. That could have been seepage from a pre-existing oil formation which was drilled through.
I have heard on NM wells long shut down that were found producible. Not sure 50 bbl would qualify. OTOH, I am not anything close to knowing much about the topic. My Exxon shares have arrived at the place that I can never sell them, can't afford the taxes, my kids will enjoy them. I do enjoy the compounded returns over the last 50 years. Unlike the railroads, energy still has utility.
Unrelated IMPORTANT question..... Now that the pandemic is officially declared over, does it not follow that the approval of the experimental vaccine in now revoked??? wouldnтАЩt the drug manufacturers have to start selling and administering the approved vaccines for use in the United States now that the pandemic is officially declared over?????
Try reading CorsiтАЩs book about abiotic oil. HeтАЩs a Nazi expert, apparently they had technology to make diesel/petrol during the war that weтАЩve now lost.
If you like. Deep down the earth is too hot for hydrocarbons other than perhaps methane to survive. They turn to gas and char. Why shale is typically black. (Oil shale with kerogen is an intermediate state.) Oxidized shale tends to be green because it stabilizes ferrous iron against further oxidation. When entirely too hot, methane decomposes to hydrogen and char. This hydrogen, along with additional hydrogen from the reaction of metallic iron with water, percolates up, and reacts with the char to form methane, and perhaps higher hydrocarbons. Thus the myth of abiogenic oil. It's almost entirely pyrolyzed subducted algae.
"Myth" of abiogenic oil? Last I looked into it, they found it on some other planets or moons. Checked with someone who knew a lot about these issues, and he did not deny it. Just thought of it as peripheral.
Off-topic, kinda meta-topic. Sorry if sorry be needed/relevant ЁЯШК
It'd be of immense help if you cared to format headings properly, so as to facilitate the direct linking to your ever-brilliant-yet-sometimes-forking chapters (and subchapters). My advance ty for considering this technicality of consequence ЁЯЩП
Grabbing the opportunity fast & fast, a huuuuge ty for all the indispensable work & knowledge & wisdom you magnanimously share here! ЁЯдй
--
ETA Can't explain it: all of a sudden, the chapter links have come alive! One of those mysterious cases when mere complaining is the remedy? Sends a message to the universe as it were ЁЯШБ
Our bodies themselves run like a hydrogen fuel cell! However I will check out Gold - thank you for putting together such an all-encompassing article on energy:
James Hansen tells the story of how and why we didn't get 4th-generation fast-neutron reactors, and what the many advantages are. Breeder reactors, generate more fuel than they use, automatically shut down rather than melt down, and can use radioactive waste from thermal-neuron reactors as fuel. "Storms of My Grandchildren". Wikipedia has an interesting article too.
I am really hoping someone comments on Thomas Gold's work or Green Nuclear Energy that is stored as hydrogen.
There is already an existing cheap way to store energy. Pump water up a hill and extract the energy when you let it flow down the hill. 75% efficient and no pollution. Better than batteries.
That is an interesting approach I had never heard of.
Its been around for decades. "The first use of pumped storage was in 1907 in Switzerland"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pumped-storage_hydroelectricity
Pumped hydro, yes. And heated rocks. Batteries are just one tech, not the best in all apps. Don't forget sodium batteries coming online that will displace most lithium battery need; much cheaper.
Sodium batteries will be a very positive step - they are cheaper and the sodium can be extracted without the same environmentally damaging impacts, but also it is a plentiful mineral, whereas lithium is a trace element that we will exhaust relatively quickly at current rates, and even more so under the goal of transitioning transport to fully electric.
Just consulted with hubby, who is an electric car fanatic.
Sodium batteries are excellent in a static location. Not so good for mobility, like cars. (as of today). Still in prototype and not commercialised or scaled.
There's one of these lakes in Wales, UK. It's used when they need a surge of energy quickly - but it doesn't last very long...
Two lakes one upper, and larger one lower.
Ffestiniog Power Station. "the scheme has a storage capacity of around 1.44 GWh (5.2 TJ) at maximum output for four hours, and the capacity to power the whole of North Wales for several hours."
Wikipedia.
Hi Michael, I've actually been there but couldn't remember the name. Thanks & best wishes
Hello Marc. I have been too. My first visit to the are was via the steam railway with my parents, perhaps I was 15-16, I can't recall exactly. I went out on my own from Dduallt station and climbed up to Llyn Stwlan, the top reservoir. I believe my wife and I also visited the power station.
I have in-laws in North Wales so go there a lot. I did this on Snowdon looking at the meaning of its name,.
https://alphaandomegacloud.wordpress.com/2022/08/28/snowdon-or-yr-wyddfa-whats-in-a-name/
Hi Michael, Yes I vaguely remember reading something a while back about a change of name for Snowdon. Never been there yet but did Striding Edge a few years back in The Lakes. That was some walk!
PS Enjoyed your piece on sodium nitrite. Am reading Ultra-Processed People by Dr Chris van Tulleken and for a change of subject, Bringing Down Goliath by Jolyon Maugham KC.
Yes, not so much a change of name for Snowdon but using the Welsh name that existed. The Welsh language is very romantic really despite seemingly unpronounceable words!
The mountains are typically named a fathers and mothers and children. I will probably explain more in a post one day. This can in fact be seen the world over.
I have done Striding Edge a long time ago and it is quite a walk. If you should ever go up Snowdon, the Crib Coch route is the most challenging route more so than Striding Edge.
My wife is visiting family now around Llanrhaeadr YM. I'll see if she might be able to take a few photos while out on hikes.
Would agree seeing the already existing, historical name for the area would be good.
Llanrhaeadr YM and the Pistyll Rhaeadr waterfall there are lovely spots. My family used to go up to North Wales up the Tanat valley on the way to Porthmadog and beyond and I am extremely fond of it. I think I could live there.
My wife and I do go that way occasionally to the in-laws in Anglesey, but it is not the most direct route.
A lovely area indeed. But not, unfortunately, immune to the encroachment of Big Agra, Big Pharma and of course, the overall over-reach of government.
In Cornwall 'they' still try and flog the dead horse that was the Cornish language and hasn't even been spoken for hundreds of years. It pops up all over the place, including street name signs and all Council communications. They even inflict it on kids in schools even though it was never even written down or formalised. You gotta wonder why... A bit like much of Wales, but at least Welsh is a real language and still spoken in the North. I sometimes think some people would be happy if we all still talked Chaucerian. (I think I may have made up a new word?)
PS The next time I undertake a mammoth 'walk' I will remember not to to wear a T shirt and trendy trainers.
Next time you undertake a 'mammoth' walk it is probably advisable to take your trunk. :)
That's enough to stop rolling blackouts in some US cities during the hot summer months!
I am stunned by the number of people who are hostilely against this idea. I have been verbally assaulted by folks regarding this concept
A ram pump uses no power (electricity) at all. So that's pretty clean energy. Some people on Youtube already use ram pumped water to generate small amounts of power for their home.
To be clear, a ram pump uses the power of running water--a river or the tide, eg. So as you scale up, you will encounter many of the same problems you would with other forms of hydro.
I'm so happy you mentioned that! There is also a technology called a ram pump in which the flow of water downhill ("powered" by gravity) itself is used to pump water uphill, effectively for "free" since gravity doesn't need to be "produced."
From a pragmatic point of view, the simpler and less moving parts, the better. Elevating water or storing hot sand in big tanks are the easiest and most stable solutions.
No rare minerals or metals are needed, just pipes, wire, water, and sand. Flat areas use the sand tank solution, mountainous ares use elevated reservoirs. Simple.
Pumped Storage Hydropower: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lsSUPpwtqhQ
Sand Energy Battery: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G6ZrM-IZlTE
Here is an example of an over engineered and inefficient solution, the Energy Vault: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iGGOjD_OtAM
"The existence of methane in the EarthтАЩs mantle does not cause any doubt, however, its possible chemical transformation under the mantle thermobaric conditions is not enough known. Investigation of methane at the upper mantle thermobaric conditions, using diamond anvil cells, demonstrated the possible formation of ethane, propane and n-butane from methane, however, theoretical calculations of methane behaviour at extreme temperature and pressure predicted also heavier hydrocarbons. We experimentally investigated the chemical transformations of methane at the upper mantle thermobaric conditions, corresponding to the depth of 70тАУ80тАЙkm (850тАУ1000тАЙK, 2.5тАЙGPa), using тАЬToroidтАЭ-type Large reactive volume device and gas chromatography. The experimental results demonstrated the formation of the complex hydrocarbon mixture up to C7 with linear, branched and cycled structures and benzene. Unsaturated hydrocarbons were detected on the trace level in the products mixture. The increasing of exposure time led to growth of heavier components in the product systems. The data obtained suggest possible existence of complex hydrocarbon mixtures at the upper mantle thermobaric conditions and provide a new insight on the possible pathways of the hydrocarbons synthesis from methane in the upper mantle." https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-61644-5 See also https://phys.org/news/2019-04-rewriting-textbook-fossil-fuels-technologies.html - so these might be developed as natural gas wells.
So what you end up with looks a lot like natural gas, not oil. Anything below pentane - C5H12 - is what you find, anything above, only in trace amounts. We're not looking at reservoirs of octane/iso-octane or the paraffins, here.
If oil wells recharged at an economic rate, then you could shut them in for five years or so, then go back to pumping the oil, you wouldn't need water flooding, and you wouldn't need fracking, which is done mostly in oil formations where most of the easily recoverable oil has been produced, and you wouldn't need plants for dewatering or removal of fracking fluid.
One part of Gold's model was knowing that hydrocarbons are really common in space.
If you didn't see this link in my earlier post, it's worth looking at as it proves abiotic oil is real (brief article):
https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/cassini/media/cassini-20080213.html
"At a balmy minus 179 degrees Celsius (minus 290 degrees Fahrenheit), Titan is a far cry from Earth. Instead of water, liquid hydrocarbons in the form of methane and ethane are present on the moon's surface." Those were detected by radar. The rest of the sentence is an unproven assumption without any evidence cited: "and tholins probably make up its dunes. The term "tholins"was coined by Carl Sagan in 1979 to describe the complex organic molecules at the heart of prebiotic chemistry."
This is at best evidence for abiotic methane and ethane, CH4 and C2H6, and not oil. Octane freezes at -71F and would be a solid at the surface temperature. As for tholin - https://www.planetary.org/articles/0722-what-in-the-worlds-are-tholins - it's not oil as we would think of it, if it is in fact present - and would have to have been created in or near something hot enough to sustain plasma temperatures, then deposited on Titan, which is far too cold for the reactions producing tholins to have occurred. And methane and ethane exist in interstellar space, too, so none of this is evidence for the production of abiotic oil on earth.
Thank you this post
Apparently there are stories of wells that have been idle for many years and found to have producible oil when tested. Have no idea how prevalent such discoveries might be. But it gives some support to Gold's thesis. I suspect a thicket of legal issues since many wells get capped after they "expire" and the company that held the rights is gone.
I saw an article by a Swedish research group testing Gold's hypothesis, and in fact they found roughly 50 barrels of oil - 1 barrel = 42 gallons - at something like 30,000 feet below ground level. That could have been seepage from a pre-existing oil formation which was drilled through.
I have heard on NM wells long shut down that were found producible. Not sure 50 bbl would qualify. OTOH, I am not anything close to knowing much about the topic. My Exxon shares have arrived at the place that I can never sell them, can't afford the taxes, my kids will enjoy them. I do enjoy the compounded returns over the last 50 years. Unlike the railroads, energy still has utility.
Unrelated IMPORTANT question..... Now that the pandemic is officially declared over, does it not follow that the approval of the experimental vaccine in now revoked??? wouldnтАЩt the drug manufacturers have to start selling and administering the approved vaccines for use in the United States now that the pandemic is officially declared over?????
There was some under handed government rules that allowed the shots to continue
Good point
Yeah, I read about how there are different end dates for different aspects of the pandemic. The EUA has not expired and will not for some time.
Try reading CorsiтАЩs book about abiotic oil. HeтАЩs a Nazi expert, apparently they had technology to make diesel/petrol during the war that weтАЩve now lost.
If you like. Deep down the earth is too hot for hydrocarbons other than perhaps methane to survive. They turn to gas and char. Why shale is typically black. (Oil shale with kerogen is an intermediate state.) Oxidized shale tends to be green because it stabilizes ferrous iron against further oxidation. When entirely too hot, methane decomposes to hydrogen and char. This hydrogen, along with additional hydrogen from the reaction of metallic iron with water, percolates up, and reacts with the char to form methane, and perhaps higher hydrocarbons. Thus the myth of abiogenic oil. It's almost entirely pyrolyzed subducted algae.
"Myth" of abiogenic oil? Last I looked into it, they found it on some other planets or moons. Checked with someone who knew a lot about these issues, and he did not deny it. Just thought of it as peripheral.
Obligatory video on this subject: https://bitchute.com/video/S7IA3lR9BpZt
So the Rockefellers lied and mankind is worse off as a result? Same as it ever was
Ra used a stargate to bring it from Titan? Those fossils below 16,000 feet cracked it to asphalt, etc. Fill 'er up with Dino! Sorry, Fred.
Off-topic, kinda meta-topic. Sorry if sorry be needed/relevant ЁЯШК
It'd be of immense help if you cared to format headings properly, so as to facilitate the direct linking to your ever-brilliant-yet-sometimes-forking chapters (and subchapters). My advance ty for considering this technicality of consequence ЁЯЩП
Grabbing the opportunity fast & fast, a huuuuge ty for all the indispensable work & knowledge & wisdom you magnanimously share here! ЁЯдй
--
ETA Can't explain it: all of a sudden, the chapter links have come alive! One of those mysterious cases when mere complaining is the remedy? Sends a message to the universe as it were ЁЯШБ
Our bodies themselves run like a hydrogen fuel cell! However I will check out Gold - thank you for putting together such an all-encompassing article on energy:
https://romanshapoval.substack.com/i/120334740/our-bodys-battery
PLEASE read James Hansen, "Storms of my Grandchildren" and you will know a lot more about CO2 than you apparently do at present.
https://peterwebster.substack.com/p/wind-up-the-spring
James Hansen tells the story of how and why we didn't get 4th-generation fast-neutron reactors, and what the many advantages are. Breeder reactors, generate more fuel than they use, automatically shut down rather than melt down, and can use radioactive waste from thermal-neuron reactors as fuel. "Storms of My Grandchildren". Wikipedia has an interesting article too.
https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Fast-neutron_reactor
what is green nuclear ??
what is that ?
Provide links ?