A cleaner future!

[Zachstar]

It's that time of the year again. The time where people who still deny global warming while the rest of the world is trying to do something about it come out in droves. They claim how industry will be hard hit by mandates for reduced emissions while ignoring science and ignoring the stunning amount of breakthroughs that will make things cleaner for the young ones.

Now before I ramble on about some of these technologies let me say that I am not so deluded to think that Coal and Oil can be replaced by expensive solar and wind. My view on these is load reducers not eliminators. That job goes to fusion and its numerous developments for universities or the US NAVY outside of the political parties and feel good dollars of ITER.

We will continue to need existing mines and wells of coal and oil. Thankfully pressure has influenced these companies to spend more and more on science and development and less and less on useless campaigns to fight the idea of climate change.

However what these fools in my opinion do not understand is the versatility and the adaptiveness of the US economy. They do not need mandates to see that Oil can gain 50 dollars in a few weeks just from speculation. Or that a dirty image costs them sales. The mandates are for the people who still rather push politics than progress.

For the past decade atleast people have been searching for a viable way to reduce the amount of Co2 entering the atmosphere. The prime way to do so currently is expensive carbon capture tech that relies on chemical reactions to reduce carbon emission from coal and oil fired power plants. This equipment is extremely expensive and expensive to operate. What companies desperately need is a cheap and natural way to reduce carbon. The solution to that is algae...

If you have been watching my posts you will note how excited I am about algae recently. In nature there is nothing that grows as fast or absorbs as much carbon as algae. Some are much better than others and some can even "eat" crap plant material instead of needing carbon and sunlight. Right then and there you are solving the solution to fuels from non food crops and carbon capture.

Get this. A proper algae bioreactor can remove close to 80 percent of carbon from the system. 80 percent is far more than needed to SERIOUSLY reduce our contribution to global warming at a price much cheaper than existing systems. That my friend is not socialism that is capitalism. There is nothing hippie about it. The challenge is setting standards and figuring out what they want to do with the resulting Algae. Also the need to operate at night will require red and blue LED setups along the lanes.

This is where legislation will have to be clear about this. You can turn that Algae into diesel and jet fuel to run transportation or you can bury it to return the Co2 to the earth...

Even tho it means only carbon neutral I would have to say go for the transportation fuels. The need to get away from oil from nations that use it as a tool of unrest is extreme. If we don't achieve this we will be in a new war in the middle east every decade. You cant tell Boeing to make an airliner that runs on batteries. fuels that pack a high energy density and base part of their energy on atmospheric oxygen cant easilly be replaced. Cars can run on batteries because the engines take up a much larger ratio of weight than large trucks or airliners and the electric engines are much lighter. In airliners the engines are already in a decades long weight reduction program and electric motors that can give the same power would be of a similar weight neutralizing the advantages. Now a small 20 passenger craft could use electric motors to cruise at 40-50 thousand feet for cross country trips IF battery tech improves but that advantage is only due to the less drag that is encountered at such altitudes and thus ground speed and trip time is better. Jetliners already have this advantage and wont benefit from going to just 55 thousand.

Now all that mess is just to reduce imports of oil and and get a double dip for the same carbon use. A huge achievement in itself. But just because we reduce does not mean a developing nation is willing to do the same. We will actually have to grow massive amounts of algae in order to start recovering atmospheric CO2 at prices we can afford. Obviously in this case we would have to kill and bury the algae my guess would be to boil it to kill and reduce the water mix it with stuff to keep it from rotting and pour it into areas marked for no extraction. Abandoned mines come to mind as a cheap way to do this. Flood them with this crap and blow any exits That would close off any route for leaking Co2 to find its way back out. It will be somewhat expensive but we are talking about in the millions for an effort that can remove tons of CO2 by the day here not billions it would take with some proposals that involve turning CO2 into chalk. Or burying it in the ocean or in the ground as a gas (Which is insane BTW because scientists have proven that the ocean is about saturated and the ground will never hold Co2 properly) And the jobs it would create per million spent are far more.

Algae therefore solves the transportation fuel crisis and the Global warming crisis. Cost overall? Low billions with much if it being brunt internationally and by industry in my opinion. And the jobs it will create are serious and meant to produce an end result rather than jobs from stimulus bills that are often without use.

So that is the tech in dev that solves two MAJOR issues that are costing the economy insane amounts of funds. But what is another that we worry about? Trash itself!

And yes I mean just about anything that has little value in its existing location so is disposed of or ignored. I am talking about everything from food scraps to shredded paper to medical waste to even high sulfur coal.

Out of sight out of mind does not work.. When you get a chance find out what your community or city is paying for landfill fees. If it can even find space as landfills are filling up fast. This is a SERIOUS issue not only for the local level but for the planet as these landfills leak enormous amounts of methane and other carbon based gases that are MUCH more potent greenhouse gasses. And if that is not bad enough. Some areas are forced to start burning large amounts of trash to compensate for space issues. open burning is not an efficient means of managing the carbon in the least bit. Coal when burned in a power plant gives off an extremely high ratio of energy to Co2 output. That means less coal has to be burned. (This is why electric cars output less CO2 per mile than traditional engines) When trash is burned its just burned to reduce pouring astounding amounts of pollution into the atmosphere.

Well when people starting saying they wanted the issue fixed. A little PR later and suddenly new tech appears to fix the issue economically.

http://www.earthtimes.org/articles/s...-megawatt.html

Plasma is extremely good at reducing trash. It does not belch polluted crap into the atmosphere it produces a gas that can be cooled and turned into fuels or burned to produce more energy than the facility uses (The military is already doing this) And the resulting stuff is harmless matter than can be used as road material. Capitalism folks.

By the time the garbage gets near the heat bed, it is vaporized - reduced to its basic elements. The gaseous elements consist of hydrogen and carbon monoxide which create a synthetic gas similar to natural gas. Residue that drops to the bottom of the island is turned into an inert glass-like substance that can be used for road beds, floor tiles or simply returned to the earth.

What is even more important? How about this

Third, what kind of processing can be done prior to intake? Recycling is better than gasification, right? The answer to this question is a resounding
"Yes!" Every item of value can be recovered from the waste stream before it is delivered to the gasification facility. This is simply the last stop in the garbage cycle. One great aspect of this technology is that there is no requirement to process the garbage after recycling. As long as the garbage can fit into the hopper, it can be utilized. This includes tires, small appliances, computers, sewage sludge - you name it!

Sewage.. Do you have any idea how bad this issue is? Waste treatment plants use millions of dollars worth of equipment to reduce what could be called algae fertilizers. If left untreated this stuff would cause an algae bloom from hell and kill insane amounts of wildlife and make the water unsafe to drink (Wild algae can produce toxins extremely dangerous in large amounts) Reducing even part of the sluge would save cities insane amounts of funds.

Computers.. I don't know if you have seen the 60 minutes report on E-waste but there are companies that try to avoid certain costs by shipping tons of dead computers and equipment to china. In lax regulatory (Regulation OH NOES SOCIALISM!!!) conditions towns spring up that revolve around recovering gold from circuit boards. They actually burn the nasty boards and use the local water supplies to get to the gold. The crap gets everywhere and into the local water supplies and has created one of the most polluted places on the face of the planet. The people are paid pennies by rich companies that use their influence in china to police and gov officials to try to keep media out. Things have gotten better but this could likely finally make it cheaper to ship it to these facilities to be reduced than to ship it to china. The US is not running out of gold. The price of gold is causing mines to work that much harder and for people to try to find small pockets of gold all over the place. FAR more than can be recovered from circuit boards.

Also this article mentions an interesting conversion system.

In another example, an electric generation plant in Massachusetts is being repurposed to use plasma gasification instead of combustion to produce electricity from coal. This results in a vast reduction of emissions and allows the plant to use local coal instead of having to bring low-sulphur coal all the way from South America. The plant operator intends to mix the coal with biomass, creating a renewable energy source.

Do I need to explain this? Able to burn local coal that gains jobs instead of paying to import coal a whole continent away? The ability to burn HIGH sulfur coal that we are plagued with?

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Some politicians and certain types of people want you to believe that there is no money in a green economy. No jobs and no future. Meanwhile people with half a brain are fast forwarding into the future by developing this tech. Algae is going to become the next giant green business while plasma burning of trash is set to save cities inane amounts of money and improving local conditions. And that is just scratching the surface. I could go on for days about HUGE advancements in battery technology that will make electric cars cheaper to own and operate than traditional cars. Days about humanitarian green tech like water filtration tech that can turn NASTY polluted water in the poorest of nations into desperately needed pure water. The important thing is that these things are running now. Small scale so far but far better than a power point presentation at a party.

I can hardly believe when I hear people in my political party talk about how we are doomed to constant recessions and depressions and constant addition to middle eastern oil. It is almost as if there is a certain amount of people that think that if we go into some kind of deep depression that we will suddenly either accept living with nature or accept massive deregulation of business. None of that will happen. In a true economic collapse people will burn everything they can to stay warm. Hunt everything in sight. Fish everything dry.. With 6-7 billion people highly dependent on modern facilities and systems a sudden reversion to "the simple times" would cause environmental destruction not seen since the end of the dinosaurs.

However I do have hope for the future. Algae will keep planes flying and provide bio oil to make the plastic bags that the children will fill to make road material and energy not landfills. I don't believe in a model of tech stagnation just because of rapid population growth. The idea of reducing impact on the planet does not mean bankruptcies. It means the simple progression of capitalism into a model of sustainability.

This has been one of my longest opinion pieces I have ever posted. If you lasted through it good on you! I don't expect to change peoples opinions only to get them saying "Hey that looks interesting let me google that"