Fossile Fuel Endgame... If We Run Out Is It Really So Bad?

[magnemoe]

On 11/10/2022 at 9:04 AM, kerbiloid said:

Whales. They can be saved and herded for blubber.

Dishonored 3: Back to retrofuture.

Oil drilling helped save the whales. 
More important mining for coal saved the forests in Europe. 
Using coal for refining iron is not an problem if that is the main use, nor is using hydrocarbons for for chemical industry. And you obviously clean the waste. 
 

[kerbiloid]

7 hours ago, magnemoe said:

Oil drilling helped save the whales. 

Then saving and herding GMO whales milking oil - whoils.

So instead of whalers, there will be whoilers.

They will be catching the whoils and milking them, and the legends will tell about a mystic giant White Whoil Mobil Dick who gave a whole cistern from every milking.

Edited November 16, 2022 by kerbiloid

[Nuke]

hands down if its between coal and wood, you are better off with coal. trees have a good function in that they help scrub co2 from the atmosphere. i dont understand the types who want to cut them down for wind/solar farms. i also dont understand the anti-logging agenda either. a logged tree takes carbon, sequesters it in our structures, and provides room for a new tree to grow. maybe we should be building our wind turbines out of wood instead of industrial products like epoxy and carbon fiber.  actually ive seen people put a small turbine at the top of their highest tree because free natural pylon. 

Edited November 17, 2022 by Nuke

[kerbiloid]

The wood which stays solid, extracts the carbon from air and accumulates it in inert solid form.
Rotten wood releases it back and doesn't help with that.
Thus, the planet lungs are cold Northern bogs, rather than jungles.

We should be cutting trees (leaving the area for the new trees) and bury them underground, bu making wooden pit props for the coal mines.

Wait, isn't what the dwarves of the Middle Earth were doing?

[farmerben]

5 hours ago, kerbiloid said:

The wood which stays solid, extracts the carbon from air and accumulates it in inert solid form.
Rotten wood releases it back and doesn't help with that.
Thus, the planet lungs are cold Northern bogs, rather than jungles.

We should be cutting trees (leaving the area for the new trees) and bury them underground, bu making wooden pit props for the coal mines.

Wait, isn't what the dwarves of the Middle Earth were doing?

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

[kerbiloid]

7 minutes ago, farmerben said:

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

Yes,  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slash-and-burn

But:

It works on the forest lands, where five years later will grow new forest.
Which also means no crop rotation.

There are various soil types, and in the most of places this will just kill the local biosystem, make the soil either acidic, or dry, or anything else.

The carbon will be returning into the atmosphere, so it solves nothing.

Dark soil gets warm under sun, so the global warming will increase.

Try to cover a whole continent with soot.
For example, Australia. It's anyway mostly a desert and can't get much worse.

P.S.
So, the option with dwarves looks better for me.

Probably, that's elves who said them that they are children of Aule and should live underground and carry excessive wood to there.

[farmerben]

Burning and decomposition on the surface release gases right away.  But underground carbon is different.  Terra preta includes underground charcoal pits.  Burried wood without char is called hugelkulture, and it is good too.  

The living humic acids in the prairie soils of Illinois cycle about every thousand years.  That's mostly leftover carbon from before agriculture when tallgrass prairies were regularly flooded, burned, and trampled by bison.

 

Soil with plant cover is not exposed to the sun, so darker soil is generally better. 

By my calculations turning the atmospheric CO2 into graphite would cover the planet in about one mechanical pencil's worth... like half a millimeter.  That much carbon absorbed in the top few feet of topsoil is feasible and would do no harm.   

Edited November 17, 2022 by farmerben

[Gargamel]

13 hours ago, Nuke said:

hands down if its between coal and wood, you are better off with coal. trees have a good function in that they help scrub co2 from the atmosphere. i dont understand the types who want to cut them down for wind/solar farms. i also dont understand the anti-logging agenda either. a logged tree takes carbon, sequesters it in our structures, and provides room for a new tree to grow. maybe we should be building our wind turbines out of wood instead of industrial products like epoxy and carbon fiber.  actually ive seen people put a small turbine at the top of their highest tree because free natural pylon. 

Younger, faster growing trees sequester more CO2 than mature ones.   It’s why a well managed logging program for an area is actually a benefit to the environment.    

[jost]

On 11/14/2022 at 5:38 AM, kerbiloid said:

 

I doubt that US can get out of fossil fuel at all. Australia as well. The British, German, and Polish coal mines also look not depleted.

Germany stopped mining black  cool some years ago since it's not economical any more. 

[kerbiloid]

9 minutes ago, jost said:

Germany stopped mining black  cool some years ago since it's not economical any more. 

Due to ecological fines and told price?

[miklkit]

9 hours ago, jost said:

Germany stopped mining black  cool some years ago since it's not economical any more. 

The USA too, almost.  West Virginia only has less than 800 coal miners still employed.  Coal no longer can compete with Green Energy and the old coal fired power plants are being closed down.

[Nuke]

i wouldnt be so quick to demolish the thermodynamic infrastructure. as container based nuclear fission plants could be a not to distant future possibility. and the idea behind the polywell fusion reactor was to have a simple easy to manufacture reactor that you could ship to retired coal plants, scrap the boiler and connect the pipes to the heat exchangers in the reactor.  polywell seems to have fallen through but i like the idea of container reactors of any kind. scrap the boiler and leave the turbines and cooling towers. 

20 hours ago, kerbiloid said:

The wood which stays solid, extracts the carbon from air and accumulates it in inert solid form.
Rotten wood releases it back and doesn't help with that.
Thus, the planet lungs are cold Northern bogs, rather than jungles.

We should be cutting trees (leaving the area for the new trees) and bury them underground, bu making wooden pit props for the coal mines.

Wait, isn't what the dwarves of the Middle Earth were doing?

that would be a good fate for construction waste, sawdust (what you cant sell to particle board manufacturers or use as bedding for small rodents), and wood from scrapped structures.  

[Pthigrivi]

13 hours ago, Gargamel said:

Younger, faster growing trees sequester more CO2 than mature ones.   It’s why a well managed logging program for an area is actually a benefit to the environment.    

This is why mass-timber construction is such a win-win, especially if we decarbonize the harvesting and processing chain. With sustainable forests you could turn the whole built environment in a giant carbon sink. You still want old growth forests for biodiversity but well managed tree farms are important too. 

Edited November 18, 2022 by Pthigrivi

[wumpus]

19 hours ago, miklkit said:

The USA too, almost.  West Virginia only has less than 800 coal miners still employed.  Coal no longer can compete with Green Energy and the old coal fired power plants are being closed down.

It can't compete with methane.  And old coal fired plants (the last economically viable ones anyway) were for "base power" (i.e. can't start/stop quickly at all but gets good efficiency).  So not only is the cost of coal power higher per Watt than methane, it has to produce it over longer spans.  And those spans can easily include bursts of cheap green power that even methane can't compete with.  Arstechnica  mentioned that there was a relatively new "base power" methane station shut down.  Of course it was in Southern California: between near constant solar bombardment and ideal wind locations (I remember seeing a wind farm near Palm Springs in the 1980s, it  was much larger in the 1990s) sometimes methane must get completely squeezed out.  I doubt this is true most places, at least so far.

[miklkit]

Around 6 years ago California was getting 50% of their energy from Green Energy in the spring when the dams were all full of snow melt.  One bright day last summer Green Energy made 100% of the state's energy.  California shut down its last coal fired plant well over a decade ago.  Hopefully even methane will be phased out as well as ther are year round sources of Green Energy.

[kerbiloid]

19 minutes ago, wumpus said:

It can't compete with methane.  And old coal fired plants (the last economically viable ones anyway) were for "base power" (i.e. can't start/stop quickly at all but gets good efficiency).  So not only is the cost of coal power higher per Watt than methane, it has to produce it over longer spans.  And those spans can easily include bursts of cheap green power that even methane can't compete with.  Arstechnica  mentioned that there was a relatively new "base power" methane station shut down.  Of course it was in Southern California: between near constant solar bombardment and ideal wind locations (I remember seeing a wind farm near Palm Springs in the 1980s, it  was much larger in the 1990s) sometimes methane must get completely squeezed out.  I doubt this is true most places, at least so far.

Not that long spans it took a decade after invention .

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fischer–Tropsch_process#History