Renewable energy

[Paul de Armond]

Long long ago and not very far away, it used to be called alternative energy.  Now it's called renewable energy.  Actually, it's energy not controlled by corporate eco-thugs.

Martin proposed harvesting wave energy, transmitting it either as compressed air or hydraulic pressure and then converting it to anhydrous ammonia.  In the mid-80's, my friend Tip and I used to go surfing off Post Point in Glouster Gull dory.  It took two people because you had to row faster than the wave to get on top and surf it in.  This was a pointless exercise if there was less than gale force winds because even though Post Point is one of the wavy areas of the bay, the waves aren't big enough to  break the hull loose from displacement to planing (which is what surfing is all about..)  Wave power (particularly in inland waters like Puget Sound) is like wind power.  You either get too little or too much and not much in between most of the time.

The ammonia as fuel is interesting until you get into the details.  The Haber synthesis process typically runs at 15–25 MPa (150–250 bar) and between 300 and 550 °C, as the gases are passed over four beds of catalyst, with cooling between each pass so as to maintain a reasonable equilibrium constant. On each pass only about 15% conversion occurs, but any unreacted gases are recycled, and eventually an overall conversion of 97% is achieved.

Use as fuel is a little bit more do-able.  You run the anhydrous ammonia through a cracker with iron catalyst.  It's endothermic, so you have to heat the bugger to get it to break (2)NH3 -> N2 + (3)H2, so what you are running on is hydrogen diluted 3:1 with nitrogen.  However, it takes about 15% of the heat energy for heating the catalyst, so the process is capped at 85% efficiency before it gets to the engine.

These guys built a hot rod that runs on anhydrous ammonia, but how it works is a secret.  The exact opposite of what we are trying to do in the hackerspace movement.

I've worked with wind and micro-hydro energy.  If you go here (stop looking at all the pretty girls, they are too old for you) and jump back using the Prev button to #85, you will see me leveling the foundation of a 30-foot octahedron module tower for a tail-dragger wind turbine.  It was on the ridge that runs from Fairhaven College to Buchanan Towers. 

The ridge is a sandstone fold, so I had to cut into three feet of sandstone because the guys fabricating the foundation anchors followed the plans blindly.  The result was I had to make three 12" diameter holes three feet deep in Chuckanut sandstone.  I started out by forging some large star drills out of gas pipe with pieces of broken file hammer welded in for the cutting edge.  They were very slow going.  One guy held the drill in a big pump pliers while I swung an eight-pound sledge.  After about a foot, I was tired and getting frustrated.

From mucking out the bottom of the hole, I knew the sandstone was wet.  So I figured if I got it hot enough, fast enough, it would soften the stone.  So I went over to the area where Lazar was rebuilding VW's.  He had a lot of bad engine casings and brake drum housings.  These were made from an aluminum-magnesium alloy.  I smashed up a bucketful of fist sized pieces.  Then I built a fire in the bottom of the hole and dumped the metal in.  Blowing air into the fire got it hot enough to slump the metal, but it wasn't enough to fully liquify it.

I sprinted up to the chem lab and wrapped about a quarter pound of potassium nitrate in several layers of newspaper.  Sprinting back to the worksite, I sent everybody on the team to a) rig all the hoses from the Outback garden to the site (there wasn't enough hose) and b) raid the dorms for water-filled fire extinguishers.  Then I pitched the bundle into the hole and ran like hell.  The newspaper insulated the nitrate long enough for me to get clear before there was this big WHOOSH and flaming magnesium went thirty feet in every direction.  There was a very nice mushroom cloud of white smoke (mostly magnesium oxide.) 

Now the magnesium was fully melted and burning slowly (not much air at the bottom of the hole.)  A 10' length of gas pipe (we had a big stash of it for some reason) and a water fire extinguisher provided a source of oxygen and hydrogen -- magnesium burns hot enough to disassociate water.  Ever shot of water, we got a small FOOP.  Eventually, the magnesium was all consumed and the water put the fire out.  About 8" of the sandstone was

Picture # 85 is me leveling the three anchors after pouring the concrete.  Tower bolted up in one day, easy.  Picture #89 is me and the model of the tower.

It lasted until the first November storms -- 95 mile an hour gusts.  The feathering mechanism on the turbine was supposed to turn the blades into the wind if spinning too fast.  It jammed.  One strut failed in compression and that was all she wrote.  I've still got the plans for the tower if anybody wants to build one.

So I'm not much of a fan of wind or wave power.  Micro-hydro, that's another story.  I'll get to that later.

[Martin Passmore]

Nice story and pics!

You know, catastrophic failures like that after so much effort really are discouraging. At least you gave it the old (college) try. Think about poor old Otto Lilienthal--after 2000 successful flights!--and the brilliance of the Wright brothers focussing on control as the next critical step and solving it by inventing the wind tunnel.

But the reality is that the energy is there, and it is large. Eventually we'll use it, however many failures there in the way. (One wave crew here already had a fatal air crash)

Just to pick up on two of your points:

Ammonia can and has been used as-is in several types of engines; there is no need to break out the H2 first. There's a space-engine company in California who have a specialty in ammonia gas turbines, I imagine for backup generation. It will run in diesels at 95%. Because of its lower energy density than hydrocarbons, it would not be the first choice for most transportation, but quite tempting for stationary power, especially given the grid-storage and green-source intermittency problems. Some farmers in CA use it to drive irrigation pumps, since they already have it in the fields. There are (well-known) hazards with liquid NH3, and, depending on permitting and economics, there could be a case for the extra step of urea conversion if there were a convenient CO2 source, although this won't run in engines directly. If such a source were available, hydrocarbons like Doty suggests might be more attractive; a (very) remote possibility here would be harvesting the plastic soup out in the North Pacific Gyre.

The tiresome and energy-expensive, iterative, classic H-B process could probably be superceded in new plants by the SSAS ("solid-state": fascinating chemistry!) one, which is more efficient, more compact, and does not require a preceding hydrolysis.

The current obstacle is not technical nor even mainly cultural risk-aversion, it's the competition from cheap natural gas, which is the dominant factor now in the NH3 market. And there is a push to use flare gas from refineries as the source, which is welcome as long as we still have so many in operation (Nigeria).

The best analysis I've seen is here:

http://dotyenergy.com/FAQs/Faqs.htm

--It's uncomfortable reading, because they take sharp pokes at a number of beloved sacred cows, but I take their economic and chemical engineering expertise seriously, if less so their understanding of biology. These guys have strongly influenced my strategic thinking, especially their dual innovations of using lost energy whose fixed costs are covered, and their private technology for building custom hydrocarbons from industrial CO2. So I now see the original idea as still valid, but too far from commercial implementation while natural gas prices remain low.

That will change, both from exporting LNG, and as we approach peak, even of shale gas. So I see the best future as continuing to develop the technology, and in the human realm preparing a pilot infrastructure for the marketing and use of green fuels. I think Washington's place in this is a combination of the stranded nature of our offshore energy (like Alaska and BC) with our strong agricultural sector and its insatiable demand for ammonia-based fertilizers, with a potential regional market for server-farm backup fuel.

(As a soils geek, ammo-fert and monocultures, both in the field and the boardroom, are not my preferred way to address the truly alarming emerging food crises. Restoring soil carbon to pre-plow levels could be one of the most potent modes of sequestration; innovation in the organic area is by no means limited to biochar, important as that may well be. But the political and cultural obstacles are immense. It's not only Monsanto (a quarter-million farmer-suicides in the Punjab), Beijing has a huge role in Africa and Latin America. (So much for "Farmers of Forty Centuries")).

Thank you for your interest and your youthful pioneering efforts.

Martin

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[Paul de Armond]

Sorry, Martin, but the dotenergy.com snake-oil merchants are actually selling the Fischer–Tropsch synthesis.  This is pretty similar to the reformer tech already in use in the refineries I've worked in as an industrial designer.  It has nothing whatsoever to do with NH3.  It's a way of smacking hydrogen into low molecular weight carbon compounds to make heavier ones.  It is endothermic and requires very high temperatures, pressures and high pressure hydrogen piping.  The last of which scares the pee out of anybody who's worked around it.

Likewise, the Solid State Ammonia Synthesis you are referring to is a patented process held by Conoco-Phillips and some partners.  It uses rare, expensive and patented proton conducting ceramics.  The one they are talking about is adiabatic, so that's at least a plus.

But that wasn't my point.  My point was that harvesting energy from highly variable energy densities is a fool's game when steady energy density is available.  Simply put, it's micro-hydro.  Practical pig simple.  Nothing exotic about it at all.  The oldest source of regularly harvested energy.

I've worked on design and building several of these puppies.  It rains a lot and the ground is not level hereabouts.  As a matter of fact, I've got a 1" line delivering it right to my basement.  I'm not metered and the waste water can just run into the floor drain.  I may need to build a dam around the floor drain, but that's only common sense: the city sanitary sewers are cross-connected to the storm sewers in this part of town.

Furthermore, there is a huge damn pipe running from Lake Whatcom to the industrial Mordor that used to be GP before those fascist creeps the Koch brothers did a Gordon Gecko on it.  They even scrapped a perfectly good ethanol plant.  That alone should be enough to have some Port commissioners dangling from lamp-posts.  At any rate, that process water feed is only used by Eco-Gen now and that is just so they can hang onto the discharge permit they had back when GP was something other than a hole in the ground filled with toxic waste and paved over.

Tell you what:  get me an alternator (preferably 120v, but I'll work with whatever it is)  and I'll build a working Pelton system inside of one month.  I've got everything I need other than a sheet of plywood and a dozen or so soup ladles.

Also, I think we should get the plans to build Gloucester Gulls.  1/4" marine ply is looking pretty cheap in 4x8 sheets.  We'd have to scarf the sides, but cheap is cheap.  The epoxy will probably cost more than the wood.  Once we have the frames for bending the boat, that's it for capital cost.  I had one hooked up with an electric motor and it zipped around quite nicely.  Also, the boats are unsinkable even in weather that only fools would go out in.  I know because I was one of those fools.

I don't know if anybody is going to build a wave-powered anhydrous ammonia synthesizer, but I am absolutely certain that pelton wheels are both high efficiency and low tech.  I also know that there was a pelton generator running off unmetered city water for years in Happy Valley.  It spun the electric meter backwards...

[Martin Passmore]

ANSWER PAUL

You missed the whole point, which is to evolve a workable pathway for scaling-down the carbon in industrial fuels.  Size matters. The danger from climate/carbon

math.350.org

is increasing to the point that our common interest in survival requires postponing a few rounds of political argumentation.

To do this requires a vision with significant appeal for players who currently benefit from the the existing (I think dysfunctional, even predatory) patent/innovation ecosystem, such as Doty or Ceramatec. Especially companies like them who claim to have put the proven but ungainly FT process into a smaller footprint.

Your distaste for FT also got in the way of your understanding where I found their analysis useful, which was that the current natural gas pricing reality precludes the immediate commercial feasibility of any green Haber-Bosch variant for (fully carbon-free) NH3. So my strategy to implement the creation of commodities (such as NH3) using stranded energy sources now has to adapt.

It's wonderful that you feel personal excitement for the specific technology of micro-hydro. (I also agree thet the Gull dory is a very able little vessel, in my opinion the closest anyone has come to making anything resembling a real boat out of plywood). I certainly would not want to come across as disrespectful of any form of distributed energy, human (FOSS, CC, TLUD-biomass) or physical (building-retrofit, passive solar, PV substitution for ghost-power charging-bricks, community wind). This is because in my other "carbon" interest, soils, the experimentation and early effective adoption of promising new methods is going to be a ground-up (sorry!) adventure. In one case (endomycorrhizal inoculation) it's literally a grass-roots process.

Your own interest ought to help you understand that other people will feel just as strongly about something entirely different. Also, I grew up in a situation where waste of anything was visibly hazardous to all of us; it wasn't the eccentric concern of a few outsiders in an environment where wastefulness had for a generation been the officially-promoted ideology with the aim of promoting industry. So to not make any use at all of the 150 HP/beachfront-yard of energy that last week was breaking on the shore outside Gray's Harbor while we are still busy pumping CO2 into an atmosphere already above a level not seen in 800 000 years is to me personally offensive--the lunatics are clearly running the asylum. (We found out last week that our common ancestor with Neanderthals, H. Habilis, was first carefully building stone spears in Africa 500 000 of those years ago).

And the response of the current pretenders to the conservative pole, with the help of the cigarette/cancer deniers of yore, is to shoot the messanger--Michael Mann--the fellow who developed the science behind the "Hockeystick graph" first with tree-rings and now with Antarctic icecores.

If I were to have moved back to my late father's home in wet wooly wild West Wales I would certainly have put his beloved creek to use backfeeding the grid, some day after I put his freshwater-source into better shape. Here I do plan on harvesting and storing rainwater, which will be work enough; I don't think I will at this stage in my life bother with a guerilla MH line from Padden Creek hidden in the brush and under the road when so little of my 120 volts comes from coal. But my friends in Kathmandu likely have relatives back in the mountains who could make real use of MH, especially with a turbine made from (Chinese) soup-ladles.

Enjoy the movie. I'm still coughing, won't be there.

Martin

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[Paul de Armond]

It occurs to me that it is rude to the members of the group to be talking past them instead of to them.

The primary energy consumption by industry here is #1 electricity and #2 natural gas.  I'm talking stationary power equipment.  Half of the input is hydro, the rest is carbon-based.  The primary energy consumption by transportation is petroleum: diesel and gasoline.  Anhydrous ammonia is only going to address diesel.  Not small potatoes,but nobody in this hackerspace doing development work on NH3 synthesis.  If somebody is doing this, I'll lend what assistance I can.

Anybody in Bellingham who pays flat rate water/sewer bills has 1" water at high enough pressure to spin a generator.  It's cheap and doable.  Any bureaucracy and paperwork is avoidable by putting a transfer switch before your main panel.  This is commonly done with emergency generators.  You can buy them at home depot.

For instance, my old house has two 15A 120V knob and tube circuits for the lighting and outlets.  Everything else has been rewired.  I haven't measured my water pressure, but if it's 100psi that's about 1.2Kw through a one inch pipe or about enough to replace one of the two circuits.  The only trick is keeping the frequency close to 60Hz.  With an Arduino you can get frequency control easily.  Last month I used 440 KwHrs total.  Most of that was hot water, range and dryer.  So figure 100KwHrs on the most heavily drawn old circuit @ $0.09 = $9.  I've got all the parts except for some plywood ($40), a servo ($15) for the frequency control (a spear valve) and an alternator ($50).  So roughly a year payback time.  The rule of thumb is three years or less payback means do it.

Take a look at the energy mix for Puget Sound Energy  (see pgs 236 - 243 on the PDF).  Only 13% of their power comes from their hydro.  The rest of their hydro capacity is purchased from Canada.  Also note that they are selling off the energy credits for wind power, so it counts for 0% of the mix.  In generating capacity, all the PSE wind farms are slightly less than their share (approx 4MW) of the Montana coal plant and another 3MW purchased from other utilities.

I do have a fondness for micro hydro.  My great-grandfather, Theo Myers, installed the first electric light in Washington Territory.  The homestead in Alpha was proved in 1876.  I have copies of the land patents.  He ordered a dynamo, wire, lights and sockets from Siemens in Germany.  It came round the Horn on a clipper ship. He built a mill pond and a water wheel.  To turn on the lights, you went out on the back porch and pulled a rope that opened the sluice gate which started the wheel which spun the dynamo which lit the bulbs.  To turn off the lights, you pulled another rope and it closed the gate.

Theo carried the first plow into Lewis County.  It arrived by railway express in Centralia and he walked there to pick it up and carry it on his shoulder back to the farm.  Much to his disgust, when he unpacked it, it did not come with the wrench needed to assemble it.   So he had to walk all the way back to Centralia and get a wrench.  There is a letter from one of his nieces in the Lewis County Historical Society describing the arrival of the wrenchless plow.

The Shoestring Cemetery is the last remaining part of the homestead.  Great-father, his wife and my granddad are all buried next to each other under the big tree you can see in the Google satellite photo.  I still have some of Granddad's hand tools.

[Martin Passmore]

Hi Paul--and anybody else who might find this entertaining, if hardly instructive

First an apology:

I was as surprised as you must have been to see "ANSWER PAUL" in my inbox, so I have to congratulate and thank you for your moderate response. Because rudeness was not my intent at all, not to you, nor to the group in the manner you hinted at.

I finally figured out what happened. Anything complex, I prefer to draft in a text editor before pasting it into an email, and this was the title. (I did at last learn to title a text file internally to give a bit more information than the filename itself might). In the past I highlighted text manually (mousily?) but I had at last internalized the keyboard shortcut Ctrl-A. So my careful-edit default mode backfired as soon as I tried something different, the innovator's occupational hazard. For some reason I didn't look closely enough at the top of the copied page, despite wanting to see the same text in different formats as an easier way to perceive needed edits.

I loved the story about your family connection to the area and to the hydro technology. I'd like to think I am honoring my own family's (windpowered) seafaring past (it's the meaning of the family name, and I had an ancestor aboard the Bounty).

The discussion began with my intention of following the hackerspace.org links' advice to inventory members' interests. (Your bit about Arduino frequency control would fit here). I would not have chosen this as a forum for a discussion of my own wider objectives, only to indicate what I  hoped to learn. But I did reply to your question with a bit more detail and it mushroomed from there.

It seems we are not going to agree on how I ought to spend creative time during my remaining years above ground. I don't think it deserves any more space on the server farms whose reserve-generation capacity I dream one day of powering from offshore. But I do look forward to seeing any turbine you build for yourself--I love the idea of repurposing soup ladles (as someone who destroyed a fine, probably antique, hamburger-grinder mashing naily biochar made from dead pallets, covering my lungs and everything in my garage with a delicious layer of fine black dust)

Keep dry--especially your poor old basement.

Martin

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