A proposed way to replace natural oil with renewable oil

[Keith Henson]

There are two recent news stories that started this line of thinking.

First is the recent MIT release on a method to inexpensively capture CO2.

https://news.mit.edu/2019/mit-engineers-develop-new-way-remove-carbon-dioxide-air-1025

The second is the story about the world's lowest PV bid.

https://www.utilities-me.com/news/14081-dewa-receives-worlds-lowest-bid-of-usd-169-cents-per-kwh-for-900mw-5th-phase-of-the-mohammed-bin-rashid-al-maktoum

One much larger is being planned.

https://www.utilities-me.com/article-5367-japans-softbank-to-build-worlds-largest-solar-power-plant-in-saudi-arabia

The first article says the capture method will work in the air. It
takes about one GJ to capture a ton of CO2. A GJ is 278 kWh. At 1.69
cents per kWh, it will cost about $4.70 per ton of CO2. Or $17.23 per
ton of carbon. 14 tons of oil has 12 tons of carbon at a cost of
$206. Per bbl, the carbon would cost about $2.00

Oil is approximately CH2. Making hydrocarbons is scaled off the
34,000 bbl/day plant Sasol built 12 years ago in Qatar, it would take
about 30,000 plants. 10,000 if the plant size was moved up to 100,000
bbl/day, but that may take too large a PV farm.

CO2 + 3H2 yields CH2 + 2H2O
44 + 6 14 + 36

It may take reverse water gas shift to make the CO2 into CO. It is
also possible that the CO2 might be electrolyzed to CO and O2 at a
lower energy cost than making the extra hydrogen.

https://dioxidematerials.com/technology/co2-electrolysis/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water-gas_shift_reaction#Reverse_water-gas_shift

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sabatier_reaction

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen_production

At 50 MWh/ton, 6 tons of hydrogen would take 300 MWh. That makes 14
tons of oil or 21 MWh/ton of oil. At 7.33 bbl/ton the energy required
for a bbl of oil is about 3 MWh. For an energy cost of $16.90/MWh,
the hydrogen energy cost is very close to $50/bbl.

Add $2/bbl for carbon, and ~$10/bbl for the capital cost of the F/T
plant. Carbon-neutral synthetic oil (fuel actually) would cost
~$62/bbl, possibly less with more process optimization. For example,
there is no reason for inverters, the PV DC output can directly power
the electrolysis cells. This should reduce the cost of energy in
hydrogen below 1.69 cents per kWh.

The take-home is that in some places PV has gotten so inexpensive that
it would be possible to make carbon-neutral synthetic hydrocarbons to
replace natural oil for about the same price.

The area needed for the PV is huge, 120% of Saudia Arabia or about 28%
of the Sahara Desert. (check these numbers, 100 million
bbls/day/34,000 bbl.day, ~30,000 plants at ~90 square km/plant.)

34,000 bbl per day is a rate of around 1466 bbl/hr. At 3 MWh/bbl for
the hydrogen, the average input to the hydrogen cells would be 4.25 GW
and the peak about 4 times higher.

Sunlight comes down at a ~GW/km^2. Between the peak to average and
the PV efficiency, a factor of about ~20 needs to need to be applied.
This takes the PV area per plant up to 85-90 square km.

It could be done over a number of years, but the cost is going to be a
problem. If we built the plants at 3000 a year, that alone would be
$3 T. I am not sure what the capital cost for the PV would be,
probably 4-5 times the billion-dollar plant cost.

I don't believe this option has been considered in the context of the
global effects of CO2.

After checking the math and finding I had the area off by a factor of
ten, I am not so sure it is something that could be considered. The
Sasol plant cost a billion dollars. 30,000 would be $3 T a year for
ten years. Also, the area needed is so large that much black PV might
cause serious weather problems.

Sigh, it's not easy to make use of renewables, especially PV.

As Mike Sneed notes, for the same power from power satellites the
rectenna area would be around 1/5th.

Keith

[Darel Preble]

    Hi Keith,

     You might want to also add that industrial processes are generally continuous processes. You need PV power that is not pseudo-random intermittent, unless you can also add batteries larger in size and lower price that do not blow the budget....

        Cheers,

        Darel

-- 
"Begin by doing what is necessary; then do what's possible; 
finally you will discover that you are doing the impossible." 
- St. Francis of Assisi

[tom.poulin poulin]

If the already-produced petroleum is available to a generator, it  becomes a somewhat perpetual motion machine (until sun burns out or bearings quit).

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[Keith Henson]

On Mon, Nov 11, 2019 at 6:10 AM Darel Preble <darel....@comcast.net> wrote:
>
> Hi Keith,
>
> You might want to also add that industrial processes are generally continuous processes. You need PV power that is not pseudo-random intermittent, unless you can also add batteries larger in size and lower price that do not blow the budget....

The F/T plant is continuous. Runs on stored H2 and CO2 overnight.
Making hydrogen from water and intermittent PV . . . I don't think
there will be a problem. Such cells start and stop fast. But I am
not certain. Good point you bring up.

Keith

[Kieran A. Carroll]

Tom;

 

You wrote:

 

> If the already-produced petroleum is available to a generator, it  becomes a somewhat

> perpetual motion machine (until sun burns out or bearings quit).

 

Except, of course, for the small matter of inefficiencies, both in

converting electricity to oil, and converting oil back to electricity

(say, via burning it, making steam, using that to run a turbine, and

using that to run a generator). The use of the oil as a battery in this

way would have an efficiency of maybe 30%.

 

- Kieran

[Keith Henson]

On Mon, Nov 11, 2019 at 6:38 AM Kieran A. Carroll
<k.a.c...@sympatico.ca> wrote:

snip

> Except, of course, for the small matter of inefficiencies, both in
> converting electricity to oil, and converting oil back to electricity
> (say, via burning it, making steam, using that to run a turbine, and
> using that to run a generator). The use of the oil as a battery in this
> way would have an efficiency of maybe 30%.

It is worth remembering that efficiency is not the determining factor,
the cost is. There is nothing cheaper than hydro, but if you figure
the amount of sunlight it took to move the water to the rivers, it
must be way under 0.1%.

I think that the amount of power needed for the hydrogen could be
considerably reduced.

But if we had an efficiency of 70% for making hydrogen and 70% for the
GTL conversion that's 50%. Fed to a 60% combined cycle turbine, you
are down to 30%. But that's what you pay for storage that's good for
months to years. Can we afford it? Possibly.

Mike Sneed thinks we should make and store synthetic oil in amounts
where we could use it as the total energy source for years. He wants
to overbuild power satellites and use the energy that is more than the
current load to make synthetic oil.

Keith

>
> - Kieran

>
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[tom.poulin poulin]

Inefficiencies would have to do with sizing the enterprise, and would affect the costs.  There will be costs associate with separating CO2 and hydrogen from raw stock, and so forth. I remember reading somewhere that CO2 dissociates at about 1100 Centigrade; if thermal decomposition is the choice of processes, the gases need to be separated and stored. 

In the end there has to be a return on the invested capital so that the project does not simply deplete society's resources. This is how we keep score.  

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[k.a.c...@sympatico.ca]

Tom;

 

You wrote:

 

> Inefficiencies would have to do with sizing the enterprise, and would affect the costs. 

> There will be costs associate with separating CO2 and hydrogen from raw stock, and so forth.

> I remember reading somewhere that CO2 dissociates at about 1100 Centigrade; if thermal

> decomposition is the choice of processes, the gases need to be separated and stored. 

> 

> In the end there has to be a return on the invested capital so that the project does

> not simply deplete society's resources. This is how we keep score.  

 

Fair points. But I was simply reacting to your earlier “perpetual motion machine”

comment, which of course is not the case if there’s any inefficiency at all in the

process.

 

- Kieran

 

 

On November 11, 2019 at 9:38 AM "Kieran A. Carroll" <k.a.c...@sympatico.ca> wrote:

Tom;

 

You wrote:

 

> If the already-produced petroleum is available to a generator, it  becomes a somewhat

> perpetual motion machine (until sun burns out or bearings quit).

 

Except, of course, for the small matter of inefficiencies, both in

converting electricity to oil, and converting oil back to electricity

(say, via burning it, making steam, using that to run a turbine, and

using that to run a generator). The use of the oil as a battery in this

way would have an efficiency of maybe 30%.

 

- Kieran

 

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[Keith Lofstrom]

I call one of the brainfarts I'm fiddling with "5xE" ...
5 times Earth. What would you pay for four more Earths of
capability, compared to a fraction of one Earth /less/?

70% of the world is ocean, but about 70% of the net primary
productivity (photosynthetic fixing of carbon) is on land,
as much as 800 grams of carbon per square meter per year.

Why? Nutrient limits, and the viral phages that attack
phytoplankton.

If we could use space power to:

1) pump sea-floor potassium and phosphorus to the surface

... and ...

2) control ocean-spanning artificial phytoplankton blooms

... we could draw down the current CO2 surplus in less
than a decade. And make billions well-fed and healthy
while doing so.

"(2)" will need some explanation.

The lifespan of natural phytoplankton is about one day;
they are "plagued" (heh) by viral phages, which limits
the lifetime of blooms in natural nutrient up-wellings.

Harvard's George Church hypothesizes "DNA 2.0".
Same genetic sequences, different 3-base codons ("letters")
encoding them and different transfer RNA matching codons to
amino acids. A virus can't transcribe itself in that alien
setup.

So, virus-proof gene-mod artificial plankton.

But without viruses, how do we keep our "super-blooms"
under control?

We don't encode all the necessary reproductive information
in the DNA. Some of it is transmitted as optical signals
FROM SPACE. Plankton range from 2 to 2000 micrometers;
plenty big enough to catch some signal photons, even filter
photons by wavelength.

Perhaps our gene-mod plankton have photo-receptors and
molecular state machines that add essential "start codons"
to the messenger RNA made from the DNA. Or something more
elaborate and more difficult for nature to work around.

How much light signal would we need? I know of two natural
examples of optically-assisted reproduction; fireflies and
coral. You know about the first. Coral is more arcane.

Coral polyps release their gametes in a burst, once a year,
to fertilize each other. If they did that throughout the
breeding season, the encounter rate would be vastly
diminished, and predators could feast on gametes for weeks.
Instead, the polyps detect the light from the full moon
during breeding season, one or two unique nights, and the
polyps all spew their gametes in a synchronized burst.

Phytoplankton are smaller than fireflies and coral polyps,
but we can make our optical space control pulses
(briefly) more intense and monochromatic than either of
those natural examples. Using optical communications math
and some wild ass guesses, the amount of power needed to
control the ENTIRE GLOBAL OCEAN would be less than
100 megawatts (average) of pulsed laser light.

We might even use artificial lifeforms for the pumping
process. Artificial miner-plankton could be engineered
that drift down to the bottom, laden with energetic "fuel";
the miners harvest phosphorus and potassium, then make
some hydrogen for "lift". They rise to the surface to
trade with the phytoplankton, fertilizer for fuel, and
space-initiated messenger RNA enabling reproduction.

My hands wave madly ...

That brings us to (3) - how do we test all this without
unleashing microbial Frankenstein?

Well, there's this small dead not-quite-a-planet about one
light-second away from Earth. The surface is at the bottom
of a 2400 m/s gravity well, equivalent to a 300 kilometer
climb out of Earth's gravity well. There's plenty of sand
to make glass-covered aquariums, and perhaps enough water
at the poles to fill hectares of them, centimeter-deep.

There is a cold, cold 350 hour night to freeze the
aquariums solid, so our lab robots can lift the top glass
cover, slice the plankton-sicles into thin microscope
slides (who needs a slide or cover-glass in 1/6 gee and
vacuum?) and image and probe and filter and bombard a
gazillion test samples all "lu-night" long.

Come lu-morning, distill the water, bake the plankton into
fertilizer, rinse and repeat. After a year or two of this,
and quintillions of tiny phytoplankton "test rats", we
should have a pretty good idea of every trick the little
rascals might pull on us.

The above is "5xE version 1.0". Sadly, not hack-proof.

Version 2.0: I hope we use these lunar labs to learn how
to private-key-encrypt the genomes, so that any copying
error completely scrambles the result, making Darwinian
evolution and terrorist hacking impossible.

When we invent better sequences, we create new coded
genomes with a shared and divided encryption key; multiple
labs must agree to a change before we write and deploy
a new genome. We also split up the design job.

Ditto for the optical bit sequence, transmitted from
space, that enables reproduction. Perhaps that is sent
in segments from many different enabling satellites.

Nothing leaves the Moon labs besides data, of course.
Petabytes of data per hour; we'll need LOTS of comm
lasers and lots of relay stations in orbit to feed
all that data to zillions of scientists on Terra.

-----

O.K., 5xE is NOT what you grew up reading in Analog.

But 5xE doesn't need Dean Drives, or tens of terawatts
from space, either. Not even heros in space suits with
flags and golf clubs. It IS a good first step towards
developing the "soylent space chow" that we will need to
feed space colonies. And feed the Earth. And regulate
climate. And more ...

When we become Really Adept at gene engineering, our tamed
phytoplankton can do more than feed a hyper-abundance of
fish ( "Caviar for dinner /again/?" Mo-om, can't we have
oatmeal instead?" ); perhaps we can teach the little
buggers to weave carbon nanotubes, or at least high quality
engineering carbon fiber. Or filter uranium and gold out
of sea water. We can teach those guys to eat pollution,
perhaps even radioactive isotopes (How? That's another
email, but think "atomic mass" and "optical resonance").

I look at what we've done with SBSP so far as bits and
pieces which can be re-arranged into something VASTLY more
valuable than we've permitted ourselves to think about so
far. For the software-minded, think of how Linus Torvalds
re-arranged GNU-Hurd (technically and socially) into Linux
and a trillion dollar internet software infrastructure.

For the hardware minded, think about how we evolved
micro-photography into chips into supercomputers.
Biologists into semiconductor lab technicians, then
semiconductor lab technicians into genome technicians.

We must inject ourselves INTO this mad, modern merry-go-
round, not ignore it. Time to STOP partying like it's
1968, and Peter Glaser was looking for some way to fill
the Shuttle payload bay.

With these tools and others, we will fill the SOLAR SYSTEM
with LIFE (1e9xE). The other tools will also be reworkings
of our old ideas; my own semi-successful inventions have
been my tenth ideas, not my first. Plagiarize yourself.

----

Our interplanetary success will bring vast new problems;
if a few hundred gigatonnes of extra carbon dioxide can
mess up Earth's atmosphere, imagine what a few gigatonnes
of retrograde propellant plume can do to spacecraft ram
surfaces.

I'm mostly thinking about the plume problem these days.
I'm exploring analytical tools I've found in the academic
literature, which were inspired by the E ring of Saturn,
its moon Enceladus, and data from Voyager and Cassini.
More about that in a subsequent email.

Keith L.

--
Keith Lofstrom kei...@keithl.com

[Bill Gardiner]

Keith,

Lets get at it!  More to come.

 

Bill

 

Sent from Mail for Windows 10

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[Darel Preble]

    Hi Keith,

        Please provide a source for your claim that "about 70% of the net primary productivity (photosynthetic fixing of carbon) is on land, as much as 800 grams of carbon per square meter per year."

https://www.nature.com/scitable/knowledge/library/the-biological-productivity-of-the-ocean-70631104/

    "There are no accumulations of living biomass in the marine environment that compare with the forests and grasslands on land (Sarmiento & Bender 1994). Nevertheless, ocean biology is responsible for the storage of more carbon away from the atmosphere than is the terrestrial biosphere (Broecker 1982). This is achieved by the sinking of organic matter out of the surface ocean and into the ocean interior before it is returned to dissolved inorganic carbon and dissolved nutrients by bacterial decomposition. Oceanographers often refer to this process as the "biological pump," as it pumps carbon dioxide (CO₂) out of the surface ocean and atmosphere and into the voluminous deep ocean (Volk & Hoffert 1985).

    "Only a fraction of the organic matter produced in the surface ocean (typically much less than 1%) has the fate of being exported to the deep ocean. Of the organic matter produced by phytoplankton (NPP), most is respired back to dissolved inorganic forms within the surface ocean and thus recycled for use by phytoplankton (Eppley & Peterson 1979) (Figure 1). Most phytoplankton cells are too small to sink individually, so sinking occurs only once they aggregate into larger particles or are packaged into "fecal pellets" by zooplankton. The remains of zooplankton are also adequately large to sink. While sinking is a relatively rare fate for any given particle in the surface ocean, biomass and organic matter do not accumulate in the surface ocean, so export of organic matter by sinking is the ultimate fate for all of the nutrients that enter into the surface ocean in dissolved form — with the exceptions that (1) dissolved nutrients can be returned unused to the interior by the circulation in some polar regions (see below), and (2) circulation also carries dissolved organic matter from the surface ocean into the interior, a significant process (Hansell et al. 2009) that we will not address further. As organic matter settles through the ocean interior and onto the seafloor, it is nearly entirely decomposed back to dissolved chemicals (Emerson & Hedges 2003, Martin et al. 1987). This high efficiency of decomposition is due to the fact that the organisms carrying out the decomposition rely upon it as their sole source of chemical energy; in most of the open ocean, the heterotrophs only leave behind the organic matter that is too chemically resistant for it to be worth the investment to decompose. On the whole, only a tiny fraction (typically much less than 1%) of the organic carbon from NPP in the euphotic zone survives to be buried in deep sea sediments.

-- 
"Begin by doing what is necessary; then do what's possible; 
finally you will discover that you are doing the impossible." 
- St. Francis of Assisi

[John Strickland]

What about the carbon in calcium carbonate that ends up ln limestone?

Is there any connection or contribution there from organic vs inorganic carbon sources?

 

John S

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[Roger Arnold]

Darel, thanks for posting that link to the nature.com article about biological productivity of the ocean. As it happens, I've been looking for just such a link for an article I'm writing.

My article is about the feasibility of dramatically increasing the organic carbon inventory in large "cultivated" swaths of the open oceans. The increase in organic carbon would translate to a large increase in NPP. I need to do some serious modeling to support the idea, but I think it may be economically feasible to increase organic carbon inventories of the world's oceans fast enough to offset anthropogenic carbon emissions. And that's even without resort to synthetic biology and the kinds of measures Keith L. has been looking into.

As to Keith's statement about 70% of NPP currently occurring on land, I don't know whether that's technically true or not. The article you referenced didn't give a quantitative estimate for NPP in the oceans. But it's clear to me that comparing NPP for land vs. ocean has little meaning to begin with. Ocean NPP is a small wheel spinning fast, land NPP is a much larger wheel turning slowly. Cycle times on land are on the order of years, while those in the ocean are on the order of days. Only a minute fraction of the biological carbon created by ocean NPP makes its way any useful distance up the food chain. 

- Roger A.

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[Darel Preble]

    Hi Roger & Keith,

    That has been tried before with iron seeding, the missing element, (aOIF - artificial Ocean Iron Fertilization). It was extremely controversial and is still studied from that Martin hypothesis and experiments:

"Further investigation reveals that marine ecosystems tenaciously recycle much of the carbon back into the air, rather than sequestering it in the deep ocean. Other inefficiencies and damaging side effects cut enthusiasm even more. Fertilizing the vast tracts of ocean required would be hard to achieve, making the prospect even less attractive.  - https://www.whoi.edu/oceanus/feature/dumping-iron-and-trading-carbon/

    Last year a Korean/American scholarly paper "Reviews and syntheses: Ocean iron fertilization experiments – past, present, and future looking to a future Korean Iron Fertilization Experiment in the Southern Ocean (KIFES) project" came out, which may interest you.

    I am still looking for a good explanation of the major mechanisms involved shown in by Vostok ice core data for CO₂ which shows a ~ 100,000 year oscillation.  I haven't found that yet.

[Al Globus]

Does not have to be perfect, just something in the ball park.

[Paul Werbos]

My concern is $/kwh. That's what the real electric power industry cares about.

I am not aware of anything on that better than what John Mankins provided in his book The Case for Space Solar Power, linked to $500/kg-LEO and $1000/kg-GEO. .

If I were looking for something better, I would ask not just John but Paul Jaffe and Dr. Kaya. If others claim to have better, others should update the story and explain why it is time to do that.

The cost per kg/LEO and kg/GEO still moves me from enthusiastic and hopeful to sad and doubtful. I was so happy when folks like Bloom and us caused a breakup of the SLS monopoly grip, making SPS seem economically absurd forever, but when it morphed into a new SpaceX/Boeing alliance it went back into the category of "technicalLy AND ECONOMICALLY FEASIBLE BUT BLOCKED BY POLITICS WHICH SEEM IMPOSSIBLE IN THE REAL WORLD WHEN REAL TECHNOLOGY IS REQUIRED." (Google wanted this capitalized. OK, maybe it made the right call; I won't overwrite it this time.) In my view, what hope remains depends on new players -- new partners for Boeing -- changing the game. But who?

WPAFB for sure, but what of Mitsubishi, Samsung, Bezos? All debatable, but maybe some hope. 

On Thu, Nov 21, 2019 at 12:54 PM Al Globus <algl...@gmail.com> wrote:

Does not have to be perfect, just something in the ball park.

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[Al Globus]

On Nov 21, 2019, at 10:45 AM, Paul Werbos <paul....@gmail.com> wrote:

My concern is $/kwh. That's what the real electric power industry cares about.

And right now I’m working on a concept that needs a reasonable kg/kw (or the inverse).  Doesn’t have to be perfect, just in the ball park of reasonable.

[Paul Werbos]

It would be more useful if it builds 100% on what Mankins did (e.g.explaining what it adds beyond that), and accounts for balasnce of system issues (at least pulling in what is already in Mankins' book to fill in) to offer $/kwh under launch assumptions, to make it meaningful to industry and energy policy people.

[Al Globus]

I have hypothesized that it will take 10,000 flights per year to drive launch prices down sufficiently to build space settlements in equatorial LEO.  There are only a few markets that can support this flight rate.  SSP is one of them and I’m making an estimate of the power that SSP could generate with that many launches.  Assuming 5 kg/kw it’s 200 GW (unless I’ve make a stupid mistake, always a possibility), but the 5 kg/kw figure is from a very old paper and I suspect someone in this group knows a better value off the top of their head.

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[Darel Preble]

    Attached you will find a chart of global primary production from my old oceanography book. Not an easy thing to measure, still very challenging to update. Note the massive production centered around the south pole; also now called the south ocean. You can see the constant heavy seas down there are extremely productive. As it goes by the tip of Argentina/Chile, the Humboldt current has a huge fish production rolling up the coast by Chile and Peru, which they fight Chinese and Japanese fishermen in a constantly simmering battle for these riches.  I have always wanted to tour the Tokyo's Tsukuji fish market (Youtube) - one of the world's wonders.

    NPP is a hypercritical number. It tells us the  CO2 and O2 exchange from all  plants to animals (not counting tube worms at black smokers at the ocean's bottom,etc.,). NPP has been changing as climate change is slowly raising global temperatures even, most particularly, in the southern ocean.

    Darel

On 11/20/2019 5:06 PM, Roger Arnold wrote:

[John Bucknell]

Caltech's system is 2.64kg/kW.  Ian Cash's Cassopiea is 0.54kg/kW based on the numbers he has published here.  Those are modern designs.

John

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[Paul Werbos]

Any serious electric power guy would want a clear audit or paper trail to explain numerically where the differences come from in the final $/kwh. 

And he would know that date of publication is not a reliable guide to accuracy by itself.

[Keith Henson]

On Thu, Nov 21, 2019 at 9:54 AM Al Globus <algl...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Does not have to be perfect, just something in the ball park.

6.5 kg.kW. Analyzed here

https://spacejournal.ohio.edu/issue18/thermalpower.html

Phil Chapman got the same number for a similar design. The Japanese
came in at 7 kg/kW.

There are lighter designs, but these are conventional/conservative.

Keith

[Keith Henson]

On Thu, Nov 21, 2019 at 10:43 AM Paul Werbos <paul....@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> My concern is $/kwh. That's what the real electric power industry cares about.

Add, cost of rectenna ($200/kW est), parts ~$900/kW est, and lift cost
to GEO $1300/kW at $200/kg and 6.5 kg/kW. To convert from capital
cost to LCOE, divide by 80,000 to get cents per kWh. For this
example, $2400/80,000 is 3 cents per kWh

Keith

[Keith Henson]

On Thu, Nov 21, 2019 at 11:44 AM 'John Bucknell' via Power Satellite
Economics <power-satell...@googlegroups.com> wrote:
>
> Caltech's system is 2.64kg/kW.

That design violates microwave optics and orbital mechanics.

> Ian Cash's Cassopiea is 0.54kg/kW based on the numbers he has published here. Those are modern designs.

Ian's original concept includes cells where materials limits (indium)
will not allow building enough power satellites to solve our
carbon/energy problems. Otherwise, it's the best idea since sliced
bread.

Keith

[Keith Lofstrom]

On Thu, Nov 21, 2019 at 04:05:24PM -0800, Keith Henson wrote:
> Ian's original concept includes cells where materials limits (indium)
> will not allow building enough power satellites to solve our
> carbon/energy problems. Otherwise, it's the best idea since sliced
> bread.

My friend John Freeouf is a solid state materials physicist
at Portland State University (former department chair, now
emeritus, still doing some research). In 2003, he co-authored

"Extreme radiation hardness and light-weighted thin-film
indium phosphide solar cell and its computer simulation"
Solar Energy Materials & Solar Cells 75 (2003) 307–312

John and I frequently discuss InP for space solar power.

A 220 nanometer epitaxial film (on a thicker substrate) is
optimum for radiation hardness, though less efficient for
W/m². With AM0 illumination, that produces 130W per gram
of InP. The molecular atomic weight of InP is 146, the
atomic weight of In is 114, so that works out to 165W
per gram of indium alone, or 165 kilowatts per kg-In.
33 Terawatts of InP solar would require 2e8 kilograms
of indium, 200,000 tonnes, which is considerably more
than annual production today.

The earth's crust masses 2.5e22 kilograms, and is 160 ppb
indium by weight, so that is 4e15 kg indium total, or
4e7 times more than needed for 33 Terawatts.

Processing 5e-8 of the earth's crust to extract 200,000
tonnes of indium is what Bob Forward would have called
"a mere enginering detail". :-)

-----

That said, think of InP as a placeholder; suitable for near
term scaleup development. Researchers are developing
nanostructured meta-materials that mimic "simple" materials
like InP. There are HUGE efforts to develop direct bandgap
semiconductors with earth abundant materials. The number of
potential ternary compounds is gigantic and we are just
starting to explore those. For example, we are learning
new ways to layer 1D nano-crystal films that natural
processes cannot achieve, and seem chemically "implausible".

Look forward to metamaterials, not back to steam engines.

We'll do InP first, focus on ultra-profitable niche markets
first, and roll the profits back into future development
for much larger markets. That is always the way new
technologies develop.

I mentioned 5xE, but a more urgent need is short wavelength
space radars to precisely track NEO objects, especially the
Aten and Amor objects hidden by the glare of the Sun.

Goddard's first rocket wasn't a Saturn V, the Wright's
first flyer wasn't a 787, and Robert Noyce's first
integrated circuit wasn't a Pentium. A journey of a
thousand miles begins with a single step. A journey of
23,900 miles begins with a single step in the opposite
direction.

[Paul Werbos]

**IF** Facebook isn't blocking the post, I recently described some of what I saw in Korea last week, INCLUDING how I spoke about SPS on national TV as a kind of alternative to GROWING nuclearization and risk in that area.

(It's not the same as Chile, folks.)

 https://www.facebook.com/2805872722776460

But more and more I get into situations where facebook won't let me see even my own posts, and blocks all kinds of international communications. That may be just as serious as the Korean nucs!!

Anyway, it helps to have allies or partners who really care about the bottom line outcomes, with some serious technical capabilities.

[Geoffrey Landis]

Yeah, the NASA photovoltaics program for the late '80s and most of the '90s focussed on InP, because of its radiation tolerance.  We could make them almost (but not quite) as good as the contemporaneous GaAs cells.  It's not surprising to see a 2003 paper on InP, that was when InP was still a contender. I could quote about a hundred papers, some of them even mine.  The Navy kept up a funding some InP development even after triple-junction cells made everything else obsolete (because they wanted to fly in the radiation belts), but even they gave it up after a while.

The work we did wasn't wasted; all the basic InP development work we did trying to learn to grow InP got transferred to making high-speed HEMT and HBT transistors, which is a billion dollar industry. Even in PV, we still use some of the InP technologies in that GaInP top cells can be seen as a 50:50 mixture of InP and GaP, so they use the InP growth we pioneered and developed.  But pure InP cells are pretty much a discarded technology, and not likely to come back.

Hot PV research material today is perovskite.  Be interesting to see if they work out in space.

--

Geoffrey A. Landis

[Keith Henson]

On Fri, Nov 8, 2019 at 12:47 PM Keith Henson <hkeith...@gmail.com> wrote:

Arrgh! And I even asked people to check my numbers.

I reworked the calculations from scratch for a response to a blog, and
got a number that was off by nearly ten.

>
> The area needed for the PV is huge, 120% of Saudia Arabia or about 28%
> of the Sahara Desert. (check these numbers, 100 million
> bbls/day/34,000 bbl.day, ~30,000 plants at ~90 square km/plant.)

100,000,000/34,000

100,000/34, 100/34 x 1000 or close to 3000 plants at ~90 square
km/plant. about 265,000 km^2.

That's only 8% of the area of Saudia Arabia or 2.9% of the Sahara.
It's 26% of Egypt, which means they could probably fit the whole thing
in between the Nile and Libya.

3000 plants at 300 per year would cost ~$300 B/year plus the cost of
the PV plants, hydrogen electrolyzers, CO2 capture system, plus
infrastructure.

It's perhaps possible.

I am also thinking about ships full of batteries to export power from
really sunny places. Have not run the numbers yet. Power satellite
economics needs to keep an eye on the potential competition.

Keith

[John K. Strickland, Jr.]

I have found for years that energy calculations are very tricky since there are so many factors to be included in the chain.
I use a method of calculating with round numbers in parallel to the actual numbers to see if both are in the same ballpark.
I have been doing such for over 40 years and usually find the mistakes this way.

Most people seem to underestimate the area and mass of ground solar systems even though they know how dilute the resource really is.
So a lot of people probably thought your first value was right !

John S

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[Tim Cash]

I read at least two papers recently on liquid sodium nuclear reactors, where some higher percentage of the output is a "liquid sodium" energy storage battery, as an attempt to fit the supply demand curve using nuclear power.  There was a small reactor concept as well, with inherent safe power.  Bottom line, nuclear power is rising to our energy challenge and trying to fill the need with fission.

Power Beaming is a great techology, which suffers from the same problem as nuclear power, not fitting the supply-denand curve.

In the next decade, I believe we will find out market and deliver on all our promising technology, if we remain fixed on customer needs and requirements, and quit trying to fit a space solar power (square) peg into a supply-demand curve (round) hole.

[Keith Henson]

On Thu, Dec 24, 2020 at 6:52 PM Tim Cash <cash...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> I read at least two papers recently on liquid sodium nuclear reactors, where some higher percentage of the output is a "liquid sodium" energy storage battery, as an attempt to fit the supply demand curve using nuclear power. There was a small reactor concept as well, with inherent safe power. Bottom line, nuclear power is rising to our energy challenge and trying to fill the need with fission.
> Power Beaming is a great techology, which suffers from the same problem as nuclear power, not fitting the supply-denand curve.
> In the next decade, I believe we will find out market and deliver on all our promising technology, if we remain fixed on customer needs and requirements, and quit trying to fit a space solar power (square) peg into a supply-demand curve (round) hole.

If power from space ever got to be more than the demand and you run
out of storage, then using it to make hydrocarbons seems like the best
way to manage the grid by demand rather than supply. (There are no
savings from turning off a power satellite.) I am not the only one to
discuss this, It's deeply embedded in Ed Kelly's work on StratoiSolar.

Liquid Sodium reactors should definitely be on the list for Mars or
the moon. They are relatively compact. They have a bad reputation
due to the Fermi meltdown, but that was largely due to instrumentation
failure. (I worked--long after--for the company that I think supplied
faulty instrumentation for that reactor.)

Keith

[Paul Werbos]

The technologies you cite here are examples of technologies to produce liquid fuel for transportation which give us zero net CO2 emission.

That is certainly an important topic. You probably know that big activities like COP25 and the Paris agreements we are returning to do not do much to advance that topic. There are ever so many fuzzy unfociused cocktail parties for political activists and lobbyists drowning out the real message.

The two attachments are the tip of the iceberg of what we REALLY need for new directions on climate. One points to FIVE areas where much deeper, more focused efforts are needed. These kinds of liquid fuels fit squarely into POINT TWO, which deserves a focused but integrated 

and broad effort in itself. (It reminds me of how we did good research initiatives in the old days at NSF, like the JIETSSP SSP initiative,

which did a lot in one year but should have been extended.) 

Still, back at NSF I did have a chance to get into this area of technology and fund many aspects of it. At www.werbos.com/oil.htm,

I have also posted a thorough review by IEEE IN COOPERATION with other engineering societies, asking what the best options were at the time.

I never did fund extracting CO2 from air. I did contact the lead experts who had gotten lots of press on that, and asked for information to strat to plan a workshop. But the numbers did not compute. (I have huge detailed files I wish I knew how to archive somewhere motre stable than my files. Ironically, I know Harvard has such an archive, because one of my high school classmates found a way to get some of our high school stuff stored there, but little things like CO2?) Main objection for now: it is easier to get CO2 from flue gas than ambient air, and we are not running out of flue gas. Next: when Republican senators claim to believe in free markets, and then want to hardwire action to ONE path (e.g. from air) but not from flue gas, where is effficient market design, competition and level playing fields?

But that does not rule out funding R&D designed to change the gane when we see a path to maybe do that.

NSF's EFRI program did fund one nerat project, moving light by pipe to a kind of bioreactor producing fuel which looked promising.

===========

As for PVs... people love them so much that they seriously distort policy priorities and markets. The problem is so bad that they ask for immediate deployment of systems which are three to fifty times as expensive as the best alternatives now proven. The 2009 Obama climate bill was killed mainly by NARUC, the association of PUCs which hold down how much people pay for electricity, because folks I knew thought it was more practical to force the use of expensive versions of the technology!! 

SOLAR THERMAL is far more promising than PV right now for the bulk of earth-based electricity. (See www.werbos.com/E/GrioIOT.pdf, funded by the French electric utilities and control society, reviewed by my request at multiple levels of IEEE.) I owe great thanks toGary Barnhard on this list, and to the government of Chile, in that order, for alerting me to the huge progress which has already been proven out with POWER TOWER solar farms, which can rely on US and EU labor (unlike PVs subsidized by provinces in China) , which can use the recent advances in Brayton conversion of heat to electricity, and also allow low-cost thermal storage whichlets them follow load curves without a need for batteries. 

By the way... IF the world ever allows a PROPER follow on to the web page below, the point 3 pages should include discussion of the UNH

success decades ago in developing a modified power tower target to produce liquid fuels. 

I once had great partners in the oil industry, folks who knew economics or chemical engineering. But as the international trained lobby groups took over,,, I have often thought their diligence might be rewarded by pure electric cars just wiping them out altogether. That would be sad for the world eocnomy, but maybe those folks deserve what they fought for. Their successful effort to gut Bush's EISA law, and block Specters proposed fix (again, see werbos.com/oil.htm) may indeed be rewarded that way.

==========

These issues are a matter of life and death for all of us, and I again thank Keith for raising them.

Of course, SSP fits under point one of the five points, and I discussed it in the paper for IEEE.

Best regards,  Paul

On Fri, Nov 8, 2019 at 3:48 PM Keith Henson <hkeith...@gmail.com> wrote:

There are two recent news stories that started this line of thinking.

First is the recent MIT release on a method to inexpensively capture CO2.

https://news.mit.edu/2019/mit-engineers-develop-new-way-remove-carbon-dioxide-air-1025

The second is the story about the world's lowest PV bid.

https://www.utilities-me.com/news/14081-dewa-receives-worlds-lowest-bid-of-usd-169-cents-per-kwh-for-900mw-5th-phase-of-the-mohammed-bin-rashid-al-maktoum

One much larger is being planned.

https://www.utilities-me.com/article-5367-japans-softbank-to-build-worlds-largest-solar-power-plant-in-saudi-arabia

The first article says the capture method will work in the air.  It
takes about one GJ to capture a ton of CO2.  A GJ is 278 kWh.  At 1.69
cents per kWh, it will cost about $4.70 per ton of CO2.  Or $17.23 per
ton of carbon.  14 tons of oil has 12 tons of carbon at a cost of
$206.  Per bbl, the carbon would cost about $2.00

Oil is approximately CH2.  Making hydrocarbons is scaled off the
34,000 bbl/day plant Sasol built 12 years ago in Qatar, it would take
about 30,000 plants.  10,000 if the plant size was moved up to 100,000
bbl/day, but that may take too large a PV farm.

CO2 + 3H2  yields CH2 + 2H2O
44    +   6                 14  + 36

It may take reverse water gas shift to make the CO2 into CO.  It is
also possible that the CO2 might be electrolyzed to CO and O2 at a
lower energy cost than making the extra hydrogen.

https://dioxidematerials.com/technology/co2-electrolysis/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water-gas_shift_reaction#Reverse_water-gas_shift

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sabatier_reaction

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen_production

At 50 MWh/ton, 6 tons of hydrogen would take 300 MWh.  That makes 14
tons of oil or 21 MWh/ton of oil. At 7.33 bbl/ton the energy required
for a bbl of oil is about 3 MWh.  For an energy cost of $16.90/MWh,
the hydrogen energy cost is very close to $50/bbl.

Add $2/bbl for carbon, and ~$10/bbl for the capital cost of the F/T
plant.  Carbon-neutral synthetic oil (fuel actually) would cost
~$62/bbl, possibly less with more process optimization.  For example,
there is no reason for inverters, the PV DC output can directly power
the electrolysis cells.  This should reduce the cost of energy in
hydrogen below 1.69 cents per kWh.

The take-home is that in some places PV has gotten so inexpensive that
it would be possible to make carbon-neutral synthetic hydrocarbons to
replace natural oil for about the same price.

The area needed for the PV is huge, 120% of Saudia Arabia or about 28%
of the Sahara Desert.  (check these numbers, 100 million
bbls/day/34,000 bbl.day, ~30,000 plants at ~90 square km/plant.)

34,000 bbl per day is a rate of around 1466 bbl/hr.  At 3 MWh/bbl for
the hydrogen, the average input to the hydrogen cells would be 4.25 GW
and the peak about 4 times higher.

Sunlight comes down at a ~GW/km^2.  Between the peak to average and
the PV efficiency, a factor of about ~20 needs to need to be applied.
This takes the PV area per plant up to 85-90 square km.

It could be done over a number of years, but the cost is going to be a
problem.  If we built the plants at 3000 a year, that alone would be
$3 T.  I am not sure what the capital cost for the PV would be,
probably 4-5 times the billion-dollar plant cost.

I don't believe this option has been considered in the context of the
global effects of CO2.

After checking the math and finding I had the area off by a factor of
ten, I am not so sure it is something that could be considered.  The
Sasol plant cost a billion dollars.  30,000 would be $3 T a year for
ten years. Also, the area needed is so large that much black PV might
cause serious weather problems.

Sigh, it's not easy to make use of renewables, especially PV.

As Mike Sneed notes, for the same power from power satellites the
rectenna area would be around 1/5th.

Keith

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[Keith Henson]

A ton of oil is 12/14 parts carbon. At 7.33 bbl to the ton, a bbl of
oil has about 0.12 tons of carbon in it. If carbon is charged at
$40/ton, a bbl of carbon-neutral oil would worth $4.70 more than a bbl
of oil out of the ground.

That's probably not enough motivation. It cost the Saudis about
$6/bbl to get it out of the ground. The difference between that and
whatever the price of oil is is what supports their population.

Keith

[Paul Werbos]

The issue is not oil, exactly, but transportation fuel. 

That is point 2 in  my proposed climate strategy, the URL for which I have sent out often enough.

That a actually was a major part of my job both at NSF, and in year at EPW Senate. At www.werbos.com/oil.htm, I posted the bill Spe cter wanted rto send to the floor, after it was fully vetted by Senate General Counsel, but FReid said no. Reid basically brioche many promises he made to Specter as part of the deal in changing pafrties. In that folder, I also posted a thorough an alysius from the IEEE Energy POlicy Committee, more up to date.Back at NSF, I did look hard into phogtionic liquies and other ideas to improve liquids using energy from space beyond the mere electricity input. They did nokt computer. Dowling, leader then of the relevant NASA R^D effort, came hp with little benefit, Life being as complex as it is, I would advise using SSP as a source of lecetricity, and then let a point 2 effort worry about electricity gtitransportation (direct abd indirect routes).

Ironically, the greatest resistance was by oil industry lobbyists who blocked alterate liquids, thereby frcing faster move to electricityworldwide. They may have blocked both in US, for awhile, but if Trump had sgtayed in offce we would merely getall our cars vfrom China, whic is doing qjuite well inits business plans, with help from Musk and many others.

Still, GM's vengture Cruz competing wirh Musk may get a big boost from new Caifornia laws huftring any uber driven by humans. 

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[Keith Henson]

On Fri, Mar 12, 2021 at 2:53 PM Paul Werbos <paul....@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> The issue is not oil, exactly, but transportation fuel.

Sorry, I tend to ignore the difference for synfuels.

The Sasol practice makes wax (slightly contaminated with iron oxide
catalyst). Then they crack the wax to diesel fuel length.

I am not really a strong advocate. What is needed is a lot of energy
to pull CO2 out of the air and make hydrogen from water. I have
thought about this for a long time since there is no point in turning
off a power satellite if the demand for electricity goes down. Making
hydrogen is the obvious thing to do, but storing hydrogen is a pain.
Converting excess energy to hydrocarbons (which are easy to store)
seems like it would be a reasonable path.

But it takes really low-cost electricity, or zero cost (because you
don't have anything else do to with it) to make hydrocarbons that cost
the same or less than natural oil. What got my attention was a story
about 1.69 cents per kWh and not long after that 1.35 cents per kWh
for mid-east PV.

It looks like power at that cost will make synfuels for close to the
same cost we pay for oil today.

Keith

[Charlie Jackson]

Hydrogen is hard to store, but ammonia is a good option for fuel cells, and it can be stored more easily.
Charlie



> On Mar 12, 2021, at 3:22 PM, Keith Henson <hkeith...@gmail.com> wrote:

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[Keith Henson]

On Friday, 12 March 2021 at 15:30:33 UTC-8 Charlie Jackson wrote:

Hydrogen is hard to store, but ammonia is a good option for fuel cells, and it can be stored more easily.
Charlie

"Currently, the round-trip efficiency of liquid ammonia is 11-19%, which is similar to the values of liquid hydrogen of 9-22%1"

https://www.thechemicalengineer.com/features/h2-and-nh3-the-perfect-marriage-in-a-carbon-free-society/

A kg of hydrocarbons is about 43 MJ.  A MJ being a watt-second, 43 MJ would be around 11.9 kWh.  A ton would be 11.9 MWh, a bbl would be around 1.63 MWh.  Using F/T it takes about 3 MW hours to make the hydrogen going into a bbl of oil.  That would give an efficiency of about 54%.  Combined cycle turbines are over 60% so the round trip would be close to 33%. less 3% because I am using hydrogen rather than the electrical energy going into the hydrogen cells.

It's still a big hassle.  Storing four months of seasonal hydrocarbon fuel would take 4 times the capacity of the Strategic Petroleum Reserve and twice that again if we tried to supply all energy this way. 

Keith

[John K. Strickland, Jr.]

I like to provide Gigawatt or Terawatt rates and Gigawatt or Terawatt hours values for energy storage.

So for 4 months, how many Terawatts are needed, either as an average or a base load value.  Base load is typically about  66-75% of the average load.

Also the storage efficiency:  the energy in GWH out divided by the energy in GWH put into the storage system.

 

For example, a typical large but not huge city has a base load demand of at least 1 Gigawatt.  4 months of 1GW of power would be 2191 Gigawatt-hours.

With its large hydroelectric reservoir, the Niagara pump-generation system can probably store about 4 Gigawatt-hours of power, likely used at a rate of about 500 megawatts for 8 hours.

Thus, if this crude calculation is right, to store 2191 Gigawatt-hours would take about 550 Niagara sized reservoirs and the massive row of pump-generators to make them work.

Not all areas have topography to allow such storage.

However, pump-generators are surprisingly efficient and there is no loss of energy while the power is stored (other than tiny amounts of evaporation).

 

John S

 

 

 

From: power-satell...@googlegroups.com [mailto:power-satell...@googlegroups.com] On Behalf Of Keith Henson
Sent: Saturday, March 13, 2021 7:28 PM
To: Power Satellite Economics <power-satell...@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: A proposed way to replace natural oil with renewable oil

 

On Friday, 12 March 2021 at 15:30:33 UTC-8 Charlie Jackson wrote:

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[Darel Preble]

    "Combined cycle turbines are over 60% so the round trip would be close to 33%."

    Except, Keith, when Southern company built gas turbine plant (Dahlberg), they were not  combined cycle.   The reason?    Because they are too expensive to build. All that extra hardware is not free.

    Darel

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[tom.poulin poulin]

At the 1972 Urban Vehicle Design Competition held at GM's Proving Ground, one of the university entries was powered by an ammonia-fueled engine. I do not remember how they handled NO2 emissions testing...

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[Keith Henson]

On Sat, Mar 13, 2021 at 7:00 PM Darel Preble <darel....@comcast.net> wrote:
>
>
> "Combined cycle turbines are over 60% so the round trip would be close to 33%."
>
> Except, Keith, when Southern company built gas turbine plant (Dahlberg), they were not combined cycle. The reason? Because they are too expensive to build. All that extra hardware is not free.

Understand, that makes sense for peaking turbines. This is a
hypothetical system running on synthetic fuel and providing baseload
power.

Keith

[Darel Preble]

    "Not all areas have topography to allow such storage."

      

    Good topography, geology & technology to match for bulk storage are extremely rare.  In this country the good (cost effective)  sites are built already. The previous owner and parent company of APEX CAES for example identified 1500 candidate sites in Iowa for a CAES and still haven't built one - 7 years after Siemens bought the Dresser-Rand company to build a CAES  plant in Texas. 

"The Iowa Stored Energy Park was an innovative, 270 Megawatt, $400 million compressed air energy storage (CAES) project proposed for in-service near Des Moines, Iowa, in 2015. After eight years in development the project was terminated because of site geological limitations. However, much was learned in the development process regarding what it takes to do a utility-scale, bulk energy storage facility and coordinate it with regional renewable wind energy resources in an Independent System Operator (ISO) marketplace..  https://www.tdworld.com/grid-innovations/distribution/article/20961512/lessons-from-iowa-development-of-a-270-megawatt-compressed-air-energy-storage-project-in-midwest-independent-system-operator

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[Keith Henson]

As far as I know, none of these provide seasonal energy storage. The
ones in the US produce power for 10-20 hours, one under construction
in Australia is 175 hours (a week) but none of them are multiple
months.

The only ones I know about that might be up in that class are an
Australian proposal to pump seawater from the south coast
up into a huge lake and a project that Roger Arnold knows about to
pump water out of the Salton Sea to the east.

Even the synfuel idea is huge, the storage would take 4-5 times the US
Strategic Petroleum Reserve.

Keith

[Mark Sonter]

Anybody ever thought about massive multi-Gigawatt NUCLEAR powerplants in
geostationary, powerbeaming to Earth???

Mark

Mark J Sonter

Director & Principal Consultant, Radiation Advice & Solutions Pty Ltd,
abn 31 891 761 435

Principal, Asteroid Enterprises Pty Ltd, abn 53 008 115 302

Chairman, Asteroid Resource Projects Planning & Services Pty Ltd, abn 47
637 823 100

116 Pennine Drive, South Maclean, Queensland 4280, Australia

Phone/fax: 07 3297 7653; Mobile: 0447 755598

(delete '0' & replace with '61' country code if calling from overseas)


“Keep everything as simple as possible, but no simpler” - A. Einstein

[Dallas Bienhoff]

Mark,

There's a thought! Large radiators Instead of large solar arrays to get rid of 70% of the thermal energy.

Dallas Bienhoff

Founder

Cislunar Space Development Company, LLC

8455 Chapelwood Ct.

Annandale, VA   22003

571-232-4554 (cell)

571-459-2660 (Office)

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/power-satellite-economics/fb6e701b-a796-d9d3-6408-17aa4ac37b77%40tpg.com.au.

[Keith Henson]

On Sun, Mar 14, 2021 at 5:14 PM Dallas Bienhoff <dallas....@csdc.space> wrote:

Mark,

There's a thought! Large radiators Instead of large solar arrays to get rid of 70% of the thermal energy.

A few years ago I worked out space radiators that massed just over a kg/kW of radiation.  Used thin plastic tubes and water vapor at 20 deg C.

Dallas Bienhoff

Founder

Cislunar Space Development Company, LLC

8455 Chapelwood Ct.

Annandale, VA   22003

571-232-4554 (cell)

571-459-2660 (Office)

On Sun, Mar 14, 2021 at 7:46 PM Mark Sonter <sont...@tpg.com.au> wrote:

Anybody ever thought about massive multi-Gigawatt NUCLEAR powerplants in
geostationary, powerbeaming to Earth???

I think it would be much less expensive to concentrate sunlight for thermal type power satellites.  But it would eliminate the wild temperature swings when a satellite goes into shadow.

Keith

Mark

Mark J Sonter