Not so foolish cells

When they speak of efficiency, we never know how much of the upstream process they're including. And my one big question: With the latest, most expensive technology available - how much power could be extracted out of the NG in more traditional ways?

I too, think that FC's have their place. Mostly in the space program at this point.

 

There is a place in transportation too. Let's just not do the crazy bad stuff CARB and the federal government did and give huge subsidies to fuel cell research while starving other more promising technologies.

80% is your peak efficiency of converting NG to electricity and it can be done either with steam reformation and fuel cells or combined cycle and reuse of heat. A typical new power plant combined cycle gas turbine/steam turbine is 60% and these should be replacing man NG steam plants. My local grid uses a combined cycle plant with peaking gas turbines. Here the peaking turbines get turned on and off about 300 times per year. A new combined cycle turbine/steam plant can go from turn on to full power in 30 minutes. The peaking turbines about 5 minutes.

FCHEV busses are probably the first vehicular use. University of Texas has one running as a demonstration shuttle. It is a plug in electric bus with a 20kw fuel cell. The batteries recharge as it is waiting at stops so the cell can be much smaller than you would think for a vehicle that size. The research grant included a ng to hydrogen charging station which cost around $1M. The city is going to purchase another FCHEV bus and one more hydrogen filling station. Germany is furthest along in building a hydrogen fueling infrastructure.

 

The $1M hydrogen charging station, and the cost of the One Bus ... I wonder how that'd compare if the money would have been spent on an electric trolly system.


Still, I hope it works. As one skeptic wrote,

is this "hybrid news" ?? or are we talking environment stuff. Just wondering.
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Turning NG into hydrogen is a foolish waste of energy. Several in the archive of Caltech's Engineering & Science magazine include discussion:
E&S Article Archive

For example
http://eands.caltech.edu/articles/LXXII2/CO2_to_Fuel.pdf
http://eands.caltech.edu/articles/LXIX2/Jensen.pdf

 

Wow Bob, did your 401K take such a big hit in the market that it's down to a 301K now.

 

Being the state capitol there are a lot of politics involved. The commuter rail system just started this year, and various plans were to build new track and make it electric. The less expensive alternative that was to use existing track which meant diesel electric trains. There are currently 6 trains that each cost $6M, and that's before any operating costs upgraded tracks stations etc. The majority of the city wants rail, but the plans all seemed to suck, and this one passed. It will lose money every year. The cost of that one test bus and filling station are very small. One existing bus and hydrogen fuel station is used for university research and often has government take tours to learn about the benefits and problems with hydrogen.

I was trying to bring it back to hybrid by bringing up the plug in fuel cell hybrid electric buses.

The fuel cells in the article mainly work because of how screwed up californias energy policies are. Small cogeneration makes a lot of sense everywhere. In california where peak power prices are high, and a large percentage of power is purchased from other states, businesses save by doing things that might economically not make sense in other states. California has many inefficient steam NG plants so efficiency gains are easy since these plants often only have efficiencies in the low 30s. FC are subsidies so microturbines which are the cogeneration choice in many parts of the country can be replaced with fc in california. In places with peak surplus, this future tech of fuel cells is likely a cheaper way to store energy than massive batteries, but only time will tell.

 

Leave the NG for agriculture. People are forgetting the lesson of ethanol, that it is foolish to run transport on human food.

 

I presume I have an arithmetic error I am hoping to have corrected ...

I am curious how much NG reserves the US has per person. Wikipedia says the US has 6,731,000,000,000 m^3 reserves, and I put the US population as 300 million.

I used these conversions:
1 therm is 2.75 m^3, and a therm has 30 kwh

I calculate 7000 therms/person, or 210,000 kwh/person. I *very* grossly estimate this as 10-20 years to completely deplete reserves if all energy use was NG.

Anywhere near correct ?

 

NG is not food. There is plentiful reserves for use as energy, and the key components can be generated by waste.

The conventional reserves are estimated at 100-300 years at current usage. In the last decade a new method for extraction was found that increased these reserves. Your error is likely the amount of NG used per person per year. Note methane can be generated by sewage, garbage, or any number of waste recycling plans. It can also be converted from coal, or oil sands or saw grass, so there is not a near term scarcity. These other methods are more expensive than getting it out of the ground, and because of this price stability has been an issue. The price is somewhat capped by these alternative methods.

 

Remember when Alaska oil came on line? or when South/Middle American oil came on line? The promises were that there'd be virtually infinant supplies that would last for untold generations. Once these new supplies went into full production for a couple decades, the promises went the way of so many other untold over-promises. I'm just saying that although the newer horizontal drilling methods DO allow for greater amounts of NG to be extracted, remember there is no penalty for fossil fuel companies to over promise.

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No I don't remember those things because I'm too young. The higher estimates provide reason to substitute NG generated electricty for oil in phev and bev cars, and NG powerplants mixed with wind, solar, and biomass for coal based electricity. And yes some of the NG can be converted to hydrogen. And some will be compressed and used in vehicles. Note these are normally different companies producing each source of power. Here is an article about the last increase in estimates

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/18/business/energy-environment/18gas.html

Note the nearly limitless supply is because methane can be created by many renewable means. I don't know the over promise history of alaskan oil and your information was not readily available. I do know the texas history of NG. Drillers used to just burn it off of wells, until the Texas government in the 50s made the practice illegal. Since then estimated supplies and uses have increased each decade.

 

I don't remember hearing those promises from any credible source and I never got that impression. Do you recall who was saying that?

 

AG,
NG is most certainly food. Read up on fertilizer dependency in modern agriculture.

My calc attempted to substitute NG for *all* other fossil fuels. Do you see a specific number or calc that is wrong ?

 

NG can be used to make fertilizer, as can other things. Crop rotation and planting methods can greatly reduce the need for fertilizer. The haber process uses hydrogen and this is cheapest in the united states from natural gas. China uses coal as the source of its hydrogen, and as mentioned we can get fertilizer from livestock waste, mining of bat buono, numerous methods, bacteria using solar to split water, etc. This is quite different from mandating the growing of corn for ethanol.

I didn't verify your numbers but there is a spread, and your estimate is at the low end of this spread if you used NG for all fuel (fossil, nuclear, or renewable). There would be a big price spike as production ramped up, then a big decline as it came on-line. I don't think anyone is proposing NG for the all energy, it is about 25% today. NG is a natural for co generation, and in a large building having a gas turbine generate electricity, while the heat heats the building makes a lot of sense for a distributed grid. The article was about a similar set up but using fuel cells and steam reformation of NG, with the heat used.

 

I don't remember specifics I do remember natural gas projections being very high at first to the order of several 100 years, only 2 b re adjusted when natural gas popularity exploded in the late eighty's and ninety's.

But part of the issue i believe Was a simple inability to estimate Reserves accurately.
Bob's post is right on, we were blind to our immediate needs when
gas is just over a buck a gallon and conservation was simply not a priority Although we were warned More than 3 decades earlier by a president who was ridiculed; our ignoring him will probably go down is 1 of our greatest mistakes ever.

Hopefully in less than 4 months, i will be getting a highway capable electric vehicle. It will essentially have The capabilities Of vehicles offered more than 15 years ago. That 15 year gap And lack of advancement Is primarily because Of big oil squashing electric vehicle and hybrid technology.

Instead the cost of financing big oil has undermined our economy, strengthened our enemies, then forced us to spend a lot of money outside of our shores, fighting an enemy that is nearly wholy funded by foreign oil money.

If that is not f**king ourselves, i don't know what is

 

A good solution in some cases but there are impediments to general application. eg.

• Most buildings have a heat surplus and if their systems are efficient, they need little heat for much of the year
• High capital cost / sq ft that gets progessively higher as the building gets smaller
• May need full time operators which is expensive
• Noise issues to deal with

 

Perhaps you too, are too young to remember how often "high production claims" were made. But "over-forcasting" has been an everyday practice in the oil business, ever since the 1920's. Do the math. How would YOU get investment dollars ... you want to tell investers that MAYBE your well will hit?


Here - Pulled from Scientific American, March 1998:

Don't be so naive to think the gas industry isn't the same. Folks with bridges for sale will come out of the wood work to find you. And ... I'm old enough to admit I've lost 10's of thousands on "sure thing" investments. And don't miss the point ... which is simply to look what side of the bread their butter is on. Businesses that need investment capitol often paint a rosy picture. The Bloom Box is no exception. It may not be a hoax, as some fear ... but there are very few silver bullets left in the world. Even the NY times article quoted above hints of the "down side" of natural gas extraction methods:

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I'll do the calculation the other way. And in English units, because that's the system in which CCF of gas convert nicely to therms.

The US DOE says US total energy use amounts to just about 100 quadrillion BTU, of which natural gas supplies about one-quarter:

U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) - Annual Energy Review

A cubic foot of natural gas at standard pressure is 1000 BTUs, more or less.

So that's 100*10^15/1000 = 100^12 cubic feet of gas per year, to supply all energy, for the US. In words, 100 trillion cubic feet of natural gas to supply all US energy needs for one year.

That matches well with actual consumption data. Natural gas accounts for about one-quarter of US energy use, and 2009 consumption was 22,800 billion cubic feet, or 22.8 trillion cubic feet. Shown here:

http://www.eia.gov/emeu/aer/pdf/pages/sec6_5.pdf

So either working down from the total energy use or up from actual natural gas consumption, I get about 100 trillion cubic feet of natural gas, per year, required to supply all US energy.

Highest estimated reserve figure I found was from the natural gas industry, looks like it includes the kitchen sink, of 2600 trillion cubic feet of reserves:

NaturalGas.org

That's technically recoverable reserves. About one-tenth of the total is proved reserves. The rest is, well, unproved reserves.

Technically recoverable means recoverable using current known technologies, without regard to cost. (So it's not the same as economically recoverable, which would be the gas you could get profitably with current technology).

I've looked across a bunch of sites, I don't see anything higher than that industry estimate.

So, at current consumption, accepting the industry estimate at face value, you've got a little over 100 years.

If you substituted gas for everything else, and had no increased total energy consumption, then something like 26 years.

If somebody can cite a plausible higher estimate of reserves then the numbers would rise accordingly. Alternatively, if you think that a 10:1 ratio of technically recoverable to proven seems a bit high then the numbers would shrink accordingly.

EDIT:

Actually, now that I look hard at the definitions, those unproved reserves are typically allocated into probable and possible, where probable = 50% chance of actual recovery at some time, possible = 10% chance of actual recovery. So nobody would take the total of unproven reserves as an estimate of the actual amount of gas that will eventually be recovered. But from 10 minutes of reading on the DOE website, I'd need a degree in this to get any better estimate than that.