Frakking, Oil Shale, Offshore Drilling, etc.

[Actaeon]

When I was little, I fell in love with an area of land west of town commonly referred to as Thompson Creek- containing a heady mix of ranches in sagebrush, mines reclaimed by juniper forest, and nearly untouched aspen forest in the high places. While you can bike there in a few hours (or walk if you planned on making several days of it), we generally adopted the use of a car.

 

When my family, with the help of Habitat for Humanity, constructed an apartment for my severely disable brother, we chose to use radiant heat flooring so there was no risk of him hurting himself with the heating apparatus. Prior to that, the whole building was heated using wood, but a natural gas line had to be installed.

 

I went to college largely due to a scholarship financed by the estate of a coal magnate from the turn of the century.

 

During the Bush era, the federal government sold large swaths of mineral rights under BLM and Forest Service land on Thompson Creek. Up until now, it has remained one of the last remaining sections of well-free public land West of the Divide.

 

The community, including myself, is strongly in opposition to risking land that already does double duty for recreation and ranching. At best, they'll carve a bunch of roads where they weren't any before, and put oil pads in the middle of meadows. At worst, we'll be able to light our water on fire.

 

The resources underneath the area are probably enough to run the country for a couple days. It doesn't seem a fair trade to those of us here, but it's ostensibly better than doing it in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

 

I am a hypocrite. That seems to be the upshot of most of my opinions, if I look deeply enough.

 

I am curious what the the thoughts of this community are on issues of this nature. Frakking has nothing on Oil Shale (I hear they're working on trying that in Utah soon), and Deepwater Horizon is not all that far in the past. But even if you, like me, held off driving and bike when you can, our food comes to us with the help of fossil fuels, plastics are ubiquitous, and the electrical grid that allows me to type this includes a fair amount of dirty coal.

 

How do you tout environmentalism when you're the beneficiary of the pillaging?

 

(A similar question could be raised with regards to American foreign policy and the plight of the third world- but that should probably be a separate thread.)

[Seasons of Destiny]

Even though I have yet to see a favorite natural environment violated in such a way, I still say that preserving the enviornment is the way to go, even though not doing so has a few benefits, albeit double-edged.

 

I would love to try to switch out the van with my bike at times, but that presents difficulties, such as living by a highway, the sheer weight of books I have to carry to and from school, and, of course, the weather.

 

One thing I don't understand is why all the environmentally-friendly ways to do things are either expensive or challenging... If it's beneficial to all of us, why make it so hard to do so?

[keira]

There must be balance.

[Alorael at Large]

I reconcile being the beneficiary of environmentally harmful technology to environmentalism by doing a little bit to change things. I'm not a professional activist and I'm not even much as a lay activist, but I put the money I can where my mouth is.

 

—Alorael, who thinks that sooner or later, barring other paradigm-shifting breakthroughs, America will have to grapple its way through nuclear power. Yes, it's imperfect. Yes, it has risks. He still thinks that it's still probably preferable to the slow poisoning of everything and everyone by fossil fuels. Fracking and its more particular poisoning of people in one locality isn't exactly preferable either.

[Triumph]

There must be balance.

 

The Chosen One will bring balance to the Force.

[Callie]

why do people drink bottled water

[Goldengirl]

Not In My Back Yard (NIMBY) protest groups are common when fracking and the like are proposed for a community. The idea is admittedly less than what most environmentalists want - "fracking is fine! just don't do it HERE!" - but if such movements become widespread enough, they transform into Not In Anyone's Back Yard.

 

Wind energy, solar energy, etc. are nice but cannot sustain us at their present level. I agree with Alorael that nuclear power is ultimately going to be the way to go. Fracking and like innovations aren't actually the great oil renaissance that they have been made out to be. Fracking can only reduce the cost of a barrel of oil to ~$80 before it's no longer profitable (cite: http://studies.aljazeera.net/en/reports/2012/08/201285105326812933.htm).

[Actaeon]

Isn't nuclear power also a temporary fix? I mean, the R/P is a lot better than oil or gas, but fissionable materials are still a finite resource.

[Triumph]

Yeah, well, the sun won't last forever either.

 

On a more serious note, none of us can predict the future. Nuclear power would last quite a long time; I have no idea if it could run out, but even if that's possible, it'll be a long time. It's unrealistic to expect that anyone alive today to solve a problem for all time. Long-term is nice, but being "finite" isn't a good reason to reject an option. We don't know the future well enough to predict exactly how long X will last, nor to predict what new possibilities might be discovered. Sometimes the right thing to do is deal with today's problems, not the problems 200 years from now.

[Lilith]

Isn't nuclear power also a temporary fix? I mean, the R/P is a lot better than oil or gas, but fissionable materials are still a finite resource.

 

there's enough readily available thorium to last thousands of years, if we haven't perfected baseload solar by that point our civilisation probably deserves to die out

[Mosquito---Slayer]

I'm personally prefer solar technology, it has none of the risks of nuclear and is very clean, the cells currently used are obviously very inefficient in conversion but one can expect that to get better with time, It's also a great way for utilisation of the huge amounts of land in deserts that's currently going to waste.

(whatever way you go, it seems that Australians are going to bath in energy in future. )

Edit: kind of sniped.

[Goldengirl]

It's also a great way for utilisation of the huge amounts of land in deserts that's currently going to waste.

 

Just because land isn't being used by humans doesn't mean it's being wasted. Just the opposite may be true, in fact.

[Mosquito---Slayer]

Just because land isn't being used by humans doesn't mean it's being wasted. Just the opposite may be true, in fact.

uhh, what does a desert do that's useful apart from expanding and converting more land to desert?

[Goldengirl]

uhh, what does a desert do that's useful apart from expanding and converting more land to desert?

 

A habitat for desert animals, plants, and other organisms.

 

Desertification can occur naturally - that much is obvious. However, the current issue with expanding deserts, in the context of the Sahara, seems to be more an issue of poor water control due to competing interests between cities, agriculture, etc. over a limited supply of water.

[Mosquito---Slayer]

A habitat for desert animals, plants, and other organisms.

Well, so do forests, oceans and other ecosystems, and in all probability to a much larger group of organisms, that hasn't stopped humans from exploiting these areas for economic purposes, So honestly I don't think that's enough of a reason/use really.

Desertification can occur naturally - that much is obvious. However, the current issue with expanding deserts, in the context of the Sahara, seems to be more an issue of poor water control due to competing interests between cities, agriculture, etc. over a limited supply of water.

That's probably true, but the fact is that they are expanding by one means or another, and that currently they provide very little economic benefits , which means more pressure on other ecosystems, so I guess it's better if we find some use for them fast rather than destroying the other systems.

I in general agree with what you are saying but as said before I don't think they are strong enough counters.

[Harehunter]

Solar energy is not as eco-friendly as it seems. Either you destroy the eco-system of large tracts of land for solar-thermal generators, or you can build very clean solar panels.

The problem with solar panels is that they are made with materials that are extremely toxic. Not only that, but energy required to mine, purify, and transport that toxic material, then to manufacture those solar cells themselves is greater than the energy produced by those solar panels. And where does that energy come from?

 

Ethanol is a cleaner carbon based fuel than hexane. But then again, the energy required to produce it exceeds the energy output of the product itself.

 

Hydrogen is absolutely the cleanest fuel to be had. Zero carbon emissions, and there is a vast abundance of it on this planet. Unfortunately, that vast abundance is already oxidized, and the energy required to reduce to molecular hydrogen again exceeds the energy output of the product itself.

 

Hydro-electric power is also totally clean, except for what it does to the eco-systems of the streams that are dammed. This is particularly troublesome for those species of fish that migrate to the headwaters of those streams to spawn.

 

Apparently there are trade-offs with any technology we choose.

[Lilith]

as i understand it the big growth area in solar energy research right now is solar thermal, which doesn't necessarily require photovoltaics and the expensive/environmentally unfriendly minerals they entail. the places where it's viable are a bit more geographically limited right now though

[Cairo Jim]

We have a similar thing with coal seam gas at the moment. We have a bunch of guys, im not sure who, but they're running around, commandeering small parcels of land for it. Although they "recompensate", since a lot of them are on livestock farms, or are in areas where a lot of livestock are, there are complaints of the gas contaminating local water supplies

[Alorael at Large]

There are many promising future technologies for clean, efficient power. Right now we don't have that. Nuclear makes a much better transitional fuel. Yes, the waste is a serious problem. Yes, plant malfunctions are terrible. Those are both workable right now, however. Nuclear makes a viable transitional power in the way that most other technologies do not right now.

 

—Alorael, who can correct that. Uranium is an almost ideal power source right now with the highest tech reactors, although the risk still isn't zero. The real problem is still cost, and much of that is startup. It's easier to pay later in costs of pollution and slowly rising oil prices than pay now to build reactors. What's that old (false) chestnut about boiling frogs?

[Goldengirl]

Well, so do forests, oceans and other ecosystems, and in all probability to a much larger group of organisms, that hasn't stopped humans from exploiting these areas for economic purposes, So honestly I don't think that's enough of a reason/use really.

 

That's probably true, but the fact is that they are expanding by one means or another, and that currently they provide very little economic benefits , which means more pressure on other ecosystems, so I guess it's better if we find some use for them fast rather than destroying the other systems.

I in general agree with what you are saying but as said before I don't think they are strong enough counters.

 

My counters aren't strong enough? Alright, fine, let me explain in detail what's problematic about what you're proposing.

 

Nature needs to be allowed space to exist on its own, regardless of whether or not it's beneficial to humanity. To relegate the world to solely anthropocentric (people-centered) purposes condemns that possibility. We, as humanity, are not the center of the universe; life has existed long before us, and chances are life will continue long after we are gone. However, society has the unfortunate predisposition that human life is always the most valuable. We can see it encoded in our legal system. If one were to kill plants, there is rarely if ever a penalty, unless they belong to someone, and the same holds for animals. Other organisms, except perhaps some fungi, don't even get that benefit. Kill a human, though, and things get crazy; the concept of owning another human likewise has been expunged from the legal code. There are multiple consequences of thinking that non-human nature is something to be controlled by animals.

 

First, let's talk about metaphors. When one wants to belittle someone, one route possible is to liken them to animals. This pattern extends to entire classes of people, as well. Fat people are likened to pigs, for instance. Speaking of slavery earlier, Africans and African-Americans have been likened to monkeys as a type of racial slur. From simple insults to serious slurs, comparing people to animals cognitively dehumanizes (literally) the people one may choose to attack in this manner. Once this dehumanization occurs, it's little difficulty to justify further abuse, such as further verbal abuse, physical violence, etc. This all ties into the anthropocentric frame of thought by that initial judgment that non-human nature is less than humanity, and moreover that people can decide who truly counts as "human" in the first place. However, there is no objective measure to why people are better than nature. Indeed, the dichotomy between people (or civilization, society, etc.) and nature is a false one to begin with! When does one separate from the other? The rubric that distinguishes the two and places a higher value on the one than the other, that is the anthropocentric viewpoint, and since it can define what is nature and what is humanity, it inherently holds the power to exclude people from the classification of humanity. Thus, any anthropocentric view will hold the potential to dehumanize others to terrible effect.

 

Now, let's talk about the ecosystem itself. I already brought up desertification. I can bring up countless other examples of humanity destroying or contributing to the destruction of the ecosystem for their gain, only a handful of which would be climate change and the on-going mass extinction crisis. As a result of these crises, biodiversity is going down. What are the costs? Well, take for instance the example of a simple food chain. If you take one species out of it, it may survive or it may collapse entirely and bring other species with it; that's varies depending on whatever food chains we're discussing. Sometimes we may get lucky and the effects of an extinction are minimal; however, that cannot always be the case. These organisms that are dying off represent incalculable losses - potential cures for cancer, for instance. Even beyond just potential uses for these organisms to benefit humanity, though, they have their own intrinsic values that we should respect because life itself is sacred.

 

We are all interdependent across the broad range of the ecosystem. The bacteria inside of our GI tract, the wide array of animals, plants, and fungi that we have domesticated, and more still are all examples of symbiotic relationships we maintain as a species. To value humanity as greater than the rest of nature may be impossible to avoid, but we must never forget to respect nature at the same time and give it its place - for we are nature, too. We are all a part of the circle of life.

[Student of Trinity]

If you say that it's wrong for lots of animals to die just so that humans can have cheaper electricity to play video games with, then to me that has a ring of truth. Slaughtering animals for trivial purposes is just wrong. They have some kind of right to survive, too.

 

There is also something to the idea that lack of respect for animal life is somehow inhuman. The way I'd put it is that treating animals callously is a training in cruelty that too easily spills over into human relations. Respect for animal life is a sort of imperative of skill. It develops the moral skill of respect for others in general. I believe this is an old rabbinical interpretation of the famous Jewish taboo against mixing meat and milk, which is simply a way of ensuring that one could not possibly violate the literal Biblical commandment not to boil a goat in its mother's milk.

 

But I would happily make an entire animal species go extinct if it would somehow save the life of a single human being. All the seagulls in the world are not worth one human infant. Inside that infant is a whole subjective universe. Inside the seagulls, no-one is home. To sacrifice the life of another human to save some animals would be murder.

 

So somewhere in between there is a balance. I think we could pave most of the sahara with solar panels, and keep a few thousand square miles of it as a wildlife preserve. All life may be sacred in some sense, but there are also limits to this principle. Extinction is also part of nature. The idea that every genome is sacred is a human conceit, not respected at all by the genomes themselves. Animal species have driven each other to extinction countless times in the history of the planet.

 

The earth itself will not last forever. Eventually the whole planet will probably be consumed by the sun when it goes red giant. Write the planet's obituary; carve its epitaph. What grounds will there be for anything out there to care about what happened on this old wet rock before it burned? Human culture, or nothing. Billions of years of seagull screeching won't be worth anyone's notice.

 

If we have to, we can dam some rivers. We should not dam more than we have to. The main reason for refraining from that may be what it does to us, rather than what it does to fish. In this sense, I think I might reach all the same practical conclusions as Goldenking, but I would not apologize for anthropocentrism.

[Mosquito---Slayer]

 

My counters aren't strong enough? Alright, fine, let me explain in detail what's problematic about what you're proposing.

 

Nature needs to be allowed space to exist on its own, regardless of whether or not it's beneficial to humanity. To relegate the world to solely anthropocentric (people-centered) purposes condemns that possibility. We, as humanity, are not the center of the universe; life has existed long before us, and chances are life will continue long after we are gone. However, society has the unfortunate predisposition that human life is always the most valuable. We can see it encoded in our legal system. If one were to kill plants, there is rarely if ever a penalty, unless they belong to someone, and the same holds for animals. Other organisms, except perhaps some fungi, don't even get that benefit. Kill a human, though, and things get crazy; the concept of owning another human likewise has been expunged from the legal code. There are multiple consequences of thinking that non-human nature is something to be controlled by animals.

 

First, let's talk about metaphors. When one wants to belittle someone, one route possible is to liken them to animals. This pattern extends to entire classes of people, as well. Fat people are likened to pigs, for instance. Speaking of slavery earlier, Africans and African-Americans have been likened to monkeys as a type of racial slur. From simple insults to serious slurs, comparing people to animals cognitively dehumanizes (literally) the people one may choose to attack in this manner. Once this dehumanization occurs, it's little difficulty to justify further abuse, such as further verbal abuse, physical violence, etc. This all ties into the anthropocentric frame of thought by that initial judgment that non-human nature is less than humanity, and moreover that people can decide who truly counts as "human" in the first place. However, there is no objective measure to why people are better than nature. Indeed, the dichotomy between people (or civilization, society, etc.) and nature is a false one to begin with! When does one separate from the other? The rubric that distinguishes the two and places a higher value on the one than the other, that is the anthropocentric viewpoint, and since it can define what is nature and what is humanity, it inherently holds the power to exclude people from the classification of humanity. Thus, any anthropocentric view will hold the potential to dehumanize others to terrible effect.

 

Now, let's talk about the ecosystem itself. I already brought up desertification. I can bring up countless other examples of humanity destroying or contributing to the destruction of the ecosystem for their gain, only a handful of which would be climate change and the on-going mass extinction crisis. As a result of these crises, biodiversity is going down. What are the costs? Well, take for instance the example of a simple food chain. If you take one species out of it, it may survive or it may collapse entirely and bring other species with it; that's varies depending on whatever food chains we're discussing. Sometimes we may get lucky and the effects of an extinction are minimal; however, that cannot always be the case. These organisms that are dying off represent incalculable losses - potential cures for cancer, for instance. Even beyond just potential uses for these organisms to benefit humanity, though, they have their own intrinsic values that we should respect because life itself is sacred.

 

We are all interdependent across the broad range of the ecosystem. The bacteria inside of our GI tract, the wide array of animals, plants, and fungi that we have domesticated, and more still are all examples of symbiotic relationships we maintain as a species. To value humanity as greater than the rest of nature may be impossible to avoid, but we must never forget to respect nature at the same time and give it its place - for we are nature, too. We are all a part of the circle of life.

I agree with every single line you have written, born in a family where it is considered a sin to kill even an ant and where plants are worshiped I must make it clear that I respect nature very much, however respecting it or not was never my point, what I wished to say was that there is no particular reason as to why we should leave the deserts in pristine natural conditions while we go on destroying the other types of ecosystems. Let's say we don't use solar energy, but we still need to produce energy from somewhere, which unfortunately as our means of energy production go is going to pollute/violate some part of nature, if the solar energy could do so with lesser pollution, It will be preferable.

Also about the anthropocentric viewpoint, I will have to say it's not all black and white, It's all very well in theory to look at animals and humans being the same, but allow me to ask a simple hypothetical question, If given an option to save either a human or an animal from sure death, which one will I or you choose?

[Alorael at Large]

I'm going to take the strongly anthropocentric position. I do not care about nature beyond the effects of the ecosystem on humanity, including research potential, and a certain aesthetic value derived from natural settings. That said, I think it's worth dwelling on the former. We're quite capable of destroying ecosystems, driving species to extinction, and changing the climate on a global scale. These aren't aesthetic problems or moral problems because nature has intrinsic value; these are problems because we will die long before everything else does. In the (very) long term, evolution keeps going even if we destroy everything less resilient than bacteria and cockroaches. At that point I don't care, because we're all, or almost all, going to be dead.

 

—Alorael, who values unsullied nature to the extent that it is necessary for humans' ability to continue living good lives. Yes, good lives include being able to go for a walk in the woods or enjoy diving in coral reefs. It also includes livable weather, breathable air, food, water, and all those things. And it's amazing how little things can make big things go off-kilter.

[Soul of Wit]

Two things are desperately needed:

 

1. Better storage. That would allow energy to be generated at a different time than when it is needed.

2. Better transportation/grid. That would allow energy to be generated in a different place than where it is needed.

 

With those two problems addressed, wind, solar and others become more practical. I'd like to see more research. If that means more of my tax dollars diverted to universities then have at it.

 

I honestly don't see another nuclear power plant permit being granted in the US. Public fear of the big catastrophe always exceeds fear of the slow destruction of the environment from the alternatives.

[A less presumptuous name.]

As a note, our power gtid is remarkably efficient. Transformers opperate at well over 90% efficiency, and they allow us to drastically resice the power lost due to resistance over long distances.

[Actaeon]

Two things are desperately needed:

1. Better storage. That would allow energy to be generated at a different time than when it is needed.

2. Better transportation/grid. That would allow energy to be generated in a different place than where it is needed.

 

Many would argue that that's where hydrogen generation comes in- a portable fuel that can be produced by renewable means.

 

Myself, I think we're overlooking a lot of low-tech solutions in favor of high-tech and energy-intensive approaches. You could use a high-intensity but inconsistant energy source to compress air or run water uphill, allowing you to extract energy via turbine later. Is it efficient? No, but it has a fraction of the initial costs of a chemical battery. A bit more passive solar and passive geothermal wouldn't go amiss, either. And how about bio-mass? Switchgrass can be grown in places that wouldn't support food crops, and ends up carbon neutral if it's farmed continuously.

 

The idea of putting huge solar farms in Nevada to fuel LA might seem like a nice idea for the urban majority, but the rural areas get sick of being treated as nothing but an energy and mineral resource. Besides which, as noted above, photovoltaics themselves aren't sustainable- they require several rare earth elements for production.

 

In a side note, while I do not agree that the environment has no intrinsic value other than its usefulness for humans, my opinion is based in emotion and faith, rather than intellectual study, and thus cannot be defended here.

 

I will say, however, that I see no logical reason human life is of more value than any other. What's so special about culture? Why should we want people we'll never meet to benefit from natural resources? If we're being really dispassionate, the solution to the energy crisis is to cut down on population and thus on demand. Most of us, myself included, don't like that avenue of thought. Cold logic is only useful to a point.

[Lilith]

And how about bio-mass?

 

at least as far as the US has concerned the corn lobby has pretty thoroughly poisoned that well for the time being

[Brocktree]

why do people drink bottled water

 

Because town water tastes terrible!

 

In the country, we used tank water. People turn their noses up at drinking water which has run over roofs, through gutters, into a tank. But it's filtered. And let me tell you, it tastes like actual water.

 

In town, the water has a horrible metallic bleach taste. It's a sad day when you can't even get an unadulterated glass of water.

[Randomizer]

Some bottle water in the US is straight from the local tap water.

 

Water starring Michael Caine in 1985 has a great scene where oil company executives are deciding what to do about an old oil well that was capped when they hit water. The price of a barrel of bottled water versus oil is funny.

[Balladeer]

Hydrogen gas "is highly flammable and will burn in air at a very wide range of concentrations between 4% and 75%." (wiki) Oxygen is a strong oxidizer that helps flammable materials burn. Water (H₂O) is made of 2 parts Hydrogen and 1 part Oxygen meaning that the gases from the separation of these elements would have a Hydrogen concentration of 66.7%. This isn't rocket science. Why do we not have engines built to run on water? Surely there can be a machine made that can separate the elements, introduce them to flame, and gain kinetic energy from the explosion of it. (And if built like car engines, the process itself should be able to charge the battery that lends to the process of separation.) There are rumors of such engines but no one stepping up to put them into production.

 

I mean, in my mind I see H₂O being separated into its elements, being channeled into a chamber and introduced to a spark which results in an explosive chemical reaction that generates force (both to move a piston and the coils to charge a battery) and turns it back into H₂O again. Then it could be moved to the beginning of the process once again making it almost self-sustaining but for the flame/spark (which comes from electricity arcing off the battery anyway). I mean, am I totally off base here that something like that should work?

 

I think if the gov't was serious about preserving the environment, making something like this work would be top priority. Too bad big oil pays a lot of the bills.

[Student of Trinity]

The First Law of Thermodynamics is the statement that this is indeed a fantasy. You're imagining a perpetual motion machine that just happens to involve a bit of chemistry. People have been working on this kind of thing for centuries. Thermodynamics is the hard-won result. It's an empirical fact that there is no free lunch.

 

The precise way that it fails to work in this case is this. It costs exactly as much energy to separate water into hydrogen and oxygen as you get by burning hydrogen. The fact that the burning makes a nice explosion while electrolysis is a gentle bubbling just says how fast the two reactions are happening. Electrolysis is a lot slower, but the total energy budget is exactly the same for both. And in fact it's going to be impossible to recover all the energy from burning into any useful form, so the machine won't even break even.

 

Thermodynamics says that it's always going to be something like that. It always is.

[Lilith]

I mean, in my mind I see H₂O being separated into its elements, being channeled into a chamber and introduced to a spark which results in an explosive chemical reaction that generates force (both to move a piston and the coils to charge a battery) and turns it back into H₂O again. Then it could be moved to the beginning of the process once again making it almost self-sustaining but for the flame/spark (which comes from electricity arcing off the battery anyway). I mean, am I totally off base here that something like that should work?

 

What you're describing here is a perpetual motion machine, which is physically impossible. If your end state is the same as your starting state, there's no way for you to draw more energy out of the reaction than you put in. To get energy out of a chemical reaction, the final products of that reaction have to have a lower energy content than the reagents. In this case, your reagent is water and your final product at the end of the cycle is water; there's no net release of energy.

 

This is why hydrogen is considered a form of energy storage rather than an energy source in itself. Hydrogen gas doesn't occur naturally in significant quantities on Earth, so you have to use energy to make it. The process of making and burning it isn't perfectly efficient, either -- some of the energy will be wasted as heat, so you actually have to put more energy in than you want to get out. But even if you could find a magical way to do everything with 100% efficiency, you'd only get as much energy out as you put in in the first place.

[Alorael at Large]

The bigger answer is that yes, hydrogen engines can be made. The major problem is in the economics, because the engines aren't cheap, hydrogen gas isn't easy to make in an engine and thus must be made and transported, and if the power driving hydrolysis is fossil fuel anyway it's just moving the fuel use around. The current barriers are mostly financial, and the financial problems are because of the perpetual motion problem SoT and Lilith have pointed out.

 

Hydrogen does make a decent energy storage method, though. If the cost of the catalysts for making the gas goes down enough, it becomes more worth using. Currently lithium ion batteries are cheaper and more efficient, so that's what we use to power electric cars. If the technologies advance and the economics tilt over there will be a switch. But both are just ways of carrying power made elsewhere. You can reduce car emissions, but then you have to step up power production at plants to keep the grid able to power cars and hydrogen factories.

 

—Alorael, who also imagines that there's some concern about having highly combustible gas in vehicles that are known to collide violently with other vehicles quite often. It's certain that hydrogen use and storage has come a long way since the Hindeburg, but explosive fuel cells are a bad image.

[Student of Trinity]

A friend of mine used to have an e-mail sig line that read, "Hydrogen is a clear, colorless gas which, given long enough, turns into people." I think he might have meant that as a kind of creationist argument, though I'm not sure, but I'm happy to consider it as a fact. Cool.

 

Recently I've been working on an important step in that hydrogen-to-people process, namely star formation. Huge, cold clouds of gas in space spontaneously develop hot spots, and the hot spots steadily intensify, until you get a ball of gas, held together by its own gravity, that is hot enough for nuclear fusion in the middle. The thing is that normally heat doesn't spontaneously concentrate like that. Normally hotspots don't just appear in cold objects, and any concentrations of heat that do exist normally tend to disperse and cool down, rather than heating up further. Normally, in fact, this is exactly what the Second Law of Thermodynamics is all about. Some textbooks even state the Law just that way, saying that heat must always flow from hotter to colder bodies, never the other way around.

 

But there's a loophole, involving a curious wrinkle in thermodynamics: the possibility that a quantity called the 'specific heat' can be negative. Normally it's positive, and some books even say it always has to be, but in fact it can be negative for cold clouds of gas in space. When it is negative, thermodynamics turns upside down, and heat flows from colder to hotter. So any little infinitesimal hotspot will tend to amplify, until eventually a star is born.

 

Lately one of my students and I have discovered that we can also make laboratory systems with robustly negative specific heat, in a very controlled way. So we (that is, not we, but groups that actually have labs) may soon be able to investigate this bizarre backwards corner of thermodynamics in the laboratory. Heretofore it has pretty much been pure theory, to explain star formation.

[Kelandon]

I'm assuming that really understanding this requires physics beyond what I ever studied, but would negative specific heat mean that as you add heat energy, the temperature goes down? Or are we talking something beyond q = mcΔT?

 

If so, am I right in thinking that means that something with a higher temperature needs to gain heat rather than lose it in order to equilibrate with a lower-temperature object? That is, heat flows from low temperature to high temperature in order to make them the same temperature?

 

So the idea is that a high-temperature object sucks up heat from colder things around it, possibly reaching an equilibrium, but an equilibrium at which it has even more energy than before, at which point it can start fusing. That's pretty weird.

 

In Stars class, we basically just started from the idea that there was enough accumulated matter in some area to start a Kelvin-Helmholtz contraction, and then that got things up to temperatures and pressures necessary for fusion. Now that I think about it, there were some gaps in that logic. But star formation wasn't really the point of Stars class anyway.

[Student of Trinity]

Specific heat is the rate at which temperature changes with heat input, but its implications for bizarre thermodynamics come about as follows. When you allow negative specific heat, you have to give up the familiar relationship between temperature and being hot or cold. A body with negative specific heat has higher temperature when it has less heat in it, and vice versa. So a hotter body (with negative specific heat) actually has lower temperature than a cooler body (meaning a body that contains less heat). The usual meaning of temperature is flipped around.

 

Temperature still has a meaning in thermodynamics, though, of being the inverse of the rate of change of entropy with heat input. Entropy always increases when heat flows from higher temperature bodies to lower temperature bodies, by definition. What negative specific heat then means is that, if two identical bodies with negative specific heat are put in contact, heat will spontaneously flow from the one that has less heat (so higher temperature) to the one that already has more heat (so lower temperature). Kind of like exploitative capitalism, where the rich get richer by taking from the poor. That's how stars form: heat spontaneously concentrates into protostars, the way money spontaneously concentrates in capitalist economies, because as soon as somebody gets a little bit richer than their neighbors, they tend to keep on getting richer by even more.

 

So much for thermodynamics, which is a high-level theory that doesn't say what specific heat anything has — you have to work that out from lower level theories, or else just measure it. The lower level theories get explicit about exactly what forces are acting, and so on. So for star formation, that brings in gravity. It also brings in gas dynamics, which normally means statistical mechanics, because bazillions of particles bouncing around in a gas don't get any easier to analyze exactly just because the whole thing is taking place across light years in outer space.

 

But the statistical mechanics of negative specific heat is a bit of a can of worms. Statistical mechanics is an axiomatic theory, and its axioms are in principle falsifiable. They are statements about how bazillions of particles should behave, but the particles ultimately answer to Isaac Newton (or Erwin Schrödinger), not to statistical mechanics. The statistical mechanical axioms might just be wrong. And in fact there are several alternative sets of statistical mechanical axioms, which normally all lead to the same predictions, but not always. Negative specific heat is one case where the rival axioms do disagree. The most popular axiom set never permits this, but a close contender in popularity does permit it sometimes.

 

So one way to explain what my student and I have just done is to say that we've found a system that we can solve at the Schrödinger level, and for which the contender axiom set indeed yields negative specific heat. We then verify that the Schrödinger-level analysis supports the spontaneous hotspot behavior predicted by the negative specific heat claim, as in star formation, rather than the usual behavior in which hotspots always smooth out.

[Callie]

But there's a loophole, involving a curious wrinkle in thermodynamics: the possibility that a quantity called the 'specific heat' can be negative. Normally it's positive, and some books even say it always has to be, but in fact it can be negative for cold clouds of gas in space. When it is negative, thermodynamics turns upside down, and heat flows from colder to hotter. So any little infinitesimal hotspot will tend to amplify, until eventually a star is born.

A negative specific heat? My mind is blown. Of course, I don't learn advanced physics for my engineering degree, but still.

 

The bigger answer is that yes, hydrogen engines can be made. The major problem is in the economics, because the engines aren't cheap, hydrogen gas isn't easy to make in an engine and thus must be made and transported, and if the power driving hydrolysis is fossil fuel anyway it's just moving the fuel use around. The current barriers are mostly financial, and the financial problems are because of the perpetual motion problem SoT and Lilith have pointed out.

IIRC, hydrogen fuel for cars is generally compressed to a pressure of 700 bar. I'd imagine that's a significant setback, because that's roughly 700 times the atmospheric pressure.

 

Edit: Oops, I didn't see SoT's explanation above.

[Dikiyoba]

A friend of mine used to have an e-mail sig line that read, "Hydrogen is a clear, colorless gas which, given long enough, turns into people."

Dikiyoba is afraid Dikiyoba doesn't get it. Stars-into-people seems like a rarity, not an inevitability. Space seems too large to allow for any universe-wide cycle comparable to the carbon or oxygen cycle on Earth, and people are just too rare and brief to be anything but a blip in the lifespan of a few lucky stars. Life as we know it requires a very specific set of circumstances, and even when you've got a planet swarming with life the odds of generating a kind of life sapient enough to be considered a people are apparently very low, as are the odds of a kind of life living for more than a few million years before dying out. It all requires the exact right circumstances, and at some point those circumstances will change and everything will be wiped out. People aren't much in the timescale of the Earth, let alone the sun or the universe. The timescale of hydrogen doesn't seem to be anything different.

[Harehunter]

@Excalibur

If negative specific heat isn't anti-intuitive enough, consider the relativistic concept of time-dilation which includes a factor of the square root of negative 1.

 

As for the safe storage of hydrogen gas, I have heard of a method of combining it with certain metals to form a metal hydride compound. Very stable, relatively, and it can be coaxed into releasing its hydrogen readily for whatever use, either combustion (poor efficiency) or fuel cells, (requires expensive materials for catalysts).

Interestingly enough, the wikipedia reference to hydrogen storage (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen_storage#Metal_hydrides) also mentions another chemical hydride that is stable, and in fact is already in common use today; carbohydrates.

[Kelandon]

Dikiyoba is afraid Dikiyoba doesn't get it. Stars-into-people seems like a rarity, not an inevitability.

I guess it's not as snappy a joke if you add the word "sometimes."

[Dantius]

Yeahhhhh, as far as I'm concerned we might as well fill up deserts with solar power, on account of them (if chosen carefully; think the Empty Quarter) having practically no life, no historical or cultural value, and no economic worth whatsoever.

 

And to those claiming that there's a level of moral equivalence between humans and nature, no. Humans have a responsibility to be effective srtewards of nature, of course- it is directly beneficial to us to not drive animals extinct or melt the polar ice caps and innundate costal cities. However, you cannot seriously draw moral equivalnce between humans and animals- it is disingenuous to assert that nature in an of itself is a paramont value above and beyond provide safe, clean energy to the human species, especially if done in such a painless way.

[waterplant]

Deserts contain unique, fragile and intrinsically valuable ecosystems. Although there is scope to use deserts for energy production or other economic benefit, humans have a track record of mismanaging resource collection at the environment &/or local community's expense.

 

Energy wastage is an enormous issue globally which could be addressed parallel to energy efficiency endevours. The UN recently estimated 1/3 of food produced globally is not consumed - the amount of resources used to produce this 'landfill' is surely significant.

[Dikiyoba]

Deserts contain unique, fragile and intrinsically valuable ecosystems.

The problem is all ecosytems are unique, fragile, and intrinsically valuable. A desert isn't a bad place to put something that requires lots of sun, lots of space, and not a lot of water or (presumably) workers. It makes more sense to put photovoltaics in the desert than to plough up a prairie or tear down a forest for them, or to build megalopolises and industrial farms in the desert.

 

Dikiyoba has found that a sufficiently inclusive and long-term anthropocentric view of nature is almost indistinguishable from a biocentric view of nature. What's good for the majority of people is good for the environement, and vice versa.