The Emperor Has No Clothes A Practical Guide for Environmental and Social Transformation (16 page)

60. When referring to the Harvard study
which provides a low, mid , and high values, the mid range values
will be used which they consider to be the most likely. In this
example the range was from 13,000 – 34,000 deaths / year.

61. This list is quoted from the executive
summary of Mining Coal Mounting Costs (see full citation in the
bibliography), on page 3, Internet source.

If a closer look is taken of the coal
engendered air born pollutants, not only are they causing land
based problems but also in the oceans. The combustion products
produce several sources of acid, carbonic acid from dissolved
carbon dioxide, and acid that is formed from sulfur dioxide which
produces acid rain. The acid rain has made some of the lakes on the
east coast inhospitable to aquatic life. It also produces crop
damage reducing yields, and has killed large swaths of forest and
degraded even more. It also eats into, degrades, and destroys
infrastructure, buildings, machinery, works of art, textiles, and
of course our health. Recent evidence suggests the current EPA
standards are inadequate and that a further reduction of at least
80% of the sulfur dioxide emissions are needed above the 1990
standards. At the present time 81 million people live in areas of
the North East United States and Eastern Canada that fall below the
current EPA standards.xli If coal combustion pollutants impact on
human health is considered, the result of the sulfur dioxide that
is produced gives rise to respiratory illnesses. These illnesses
include nasal congestion, shortness of breath, asthma attacks,
pulmonary inflammation, heart arrhythmia, and greater numbers of
infant deaths. Coal combustion also produces additional pollutants
besides sulfur oxides such as particulates and nitrogen oxides.
Exposure to particulates are one of the major sources of heart
attacks and lung cancer. The nitrogen oxides produce smog an
irritant, and ozone which attacks the lining of the lungs.

Coal mining is also a highly destructive
enterprise, the methods used are tunneling and open pit. At the
present time the open pit method is the most prevalent technique.
It typically requires the removal of overburden (the material
laying on top of the coal seam) which is blasted away with massive
explosions and then removed. The most common open pit practice is
to blast off entire mountain tops (MTR) and then push the rubble
off the mine into the valleys where streams are often found,
thereby producing severe ecological problems. Once the mine is in
operation it produces tailings which are deposited in retention
basins which fail occasionally inundating surrounding areas. The
mining byproducts also seep into the underground aquifers that the
people are reliant on for potable water produced by wells tapping
the aquifers. In mining areas such as West Virginia much of the
water has already been contaminated and rendered unusable by the
heavy metals arsenic, selenium, cadmium, beryllium, barium,
antimony, thallium and lead. At the present time there is no way of
removing mining pollutants to restore aquifers. It will require
ages for natural processes to accomplish restoration. Some of the
tunnel type mines have also caught on fire which generally smolder
on for decades forming hollows under the ground in unknown
locations. These hollows often suddenly collapse without warning
producing large holes and of course lots of air pollution. Coal
mining also produces large quantities of methane which is a
greenhouse gas 25 five times more potent than carbon dioxide and
has the same effect on the environment as the emission of
71,100,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide.

~~~~~~~~~~

Even when the plum has wilted and winter has
reached its deepest cold,

do not let your body be numb or your mind
absent.
Dogen Zenji

Shortly after George W. Bush was elected to
his first term of the United States presidency, as is customary, he
gave a state of the union address which I watched on TV. During
this speech he mentioned that it was being anticipated that ethanol
alcohol production from corn would enjoy continuing support by the
government, and was expected to become a significantly more
prominent source of fuel. I wondered how this could be? When I was
a university student my major was in chemistry [62] and I knew that
ethanol alcohol did not have a high energy content. As a result of
this curiosity I started to investigate alcohol fuel. After
evaluating grain alcohol's fuel potential, I expanded the appraisal
to other sources of energy that are often touted as providing
significant potential to replace the current fossil fuel based
economy.

In order to evaluate the feasibility of
replacing fossil fuels they have to be compared to the potential
that alternatives offer which require numerical values. The format
that I will use will be to: alert you that an evaluation is going
to be made; give some background information so that the answer(s)
will make sense, provide the arithmetic proofs as
a foot
note
so that you can see how the conclusions were arrived at if
you choose, and give the conclusion sandwiched between a top and
bottom centered divider like this -----0-----. That way you can
bypass the arithmetic if you wish and just read the conclusions. To
start, the amount of potential alcohol has as an energy source to
replace the oil used for transportation will be evaluated. In order
to examine this question a few preliminary facts need to be known.
In 2013 the daily consumption of oil in the United States was 18.89
million barrels each day. The continental United States has 340
million acres of arable land. 1 acre produces 140 bushels of corn
[63], which yields 392 gallons of alcohol. Alcohol has less energy
content than oil (52%), thus, 1.923 gallons of alcohol has the same
amount of energy as 1 gallon of oil. [64]

62. My area of concentration was in organic
chemistry and I also took a course in nuclear and radio
chemistry.

63. The yield of crops varies from year to
year in 2012 the yield for corn was 123.4 bushels/acre and in 2013
158.8 bushels/acre, the average for those two years is 141.1
bushels. The average for the last 30 years was 137 bushels per acre
during years of average rainfall. I will use 140 bushels per
acre.

64. So 1 acre of land can produce the
equivalent energy of 203.84 gallons of oil, i.e., 392 gallons of
alcohol / acre X .52 = 203.84 gallons of oil.

1 barrel contains 42 gallons of oil. So 1
acre produces the equivalent energy of; 203.84 gals. Oil / 42 gal.
/ barrel = 4.853 barrels of oil/ acre.

In a year (1 growing season) we use 18.89
million barrels of oil / day X 354.25 days /year = 6,880,682,500
barrels of oil per year.

If we used all of the crop land in the
continental United states to grow corn for alcohol production we
get 340 million acres X 4.853 barrels / acre = 1,650,020,000
barrels each year.

So if the entire US agricultural production
were used to make alcohol it could offset 1,650,020,000 /
6,880,682,500 = .24 X 100 = 24% of our current oil consumption for
transportation!

Or to put it another way it would provide
transportation fuel for 2.9 months!

-----0-----

If we use the entire arable agricultural land
to produce alcohol in the continental United States it would power
our transportation fleet for
2.9 months
.

-----0-----

There are a few other problems though; it
requires fossil fuel to produce the agricultural chemicals, till
the fields, sow the crops, harvest the crops, and then process it
into alcohol. The amount of energy to do all this is controversial
some studies indicate it uses more fossil fuel energy units than
you get from the alcohol. An EIA study indicates that for every
unit of energy available in the alcohol it requires .72 units of
fossil fuel energy to produce it. Another problem is that
conventional agricultural methods of crop production also produce
methane and nitrous oxide which are powerful green house gasses.
Because of the uncertainties in how much fossil fuels are used to
produce the alcohol, I am not able to arrive at a numerical value
to determine what effect using alcohol has on the greenhouse gas
problem.

From the above analysis
it's obvious that alcohol and the other crop produced
bio-fuels which share the same limitations, are not able to come
even close to providing the energy needed to replace a significant
amount of the fossil fuels
that are currently being
consumed. Don't forget that this analysis was only for
transportation oil and did not include coal!

Much is said about the “hydrogen economy” but
the people who are promoting it ignore some basic facts. Hydrogen
is a potential way of storing energy. It is not a
source of energy.
To obtain hydrogen it must be produced
using other sources of energy, and the amount of energy used to
produce it is greater than the amount it can store. At the present
time most of the hydrogen is produced by a process called steam
reforming which combines methane (a fossil fuel) with water. This
process produces carbon monoxide and hydrogen. It requires 1.25
units of production energy (from fossil fuel) to produce 1 unit of
the energy content in the hydrogen; a large energy loss. The carbon
monoxide is a weak greenhouse gas but its greenhouse effect is
large because it prevents methane, a powerful greenhouse gas from
breaking down, and also produces ozone. A similar production method
called water gas uses coal and water to produce carbon dioxide and
hydrogen. The water gas method produces one molecule of carbon
dioxide for each molecule of hydrogen. This is a lot of carbon
dioxide. Now let's consider rarely used systems that are being
researched. Plasma can be used to break down hydrocarbons (such as
some of our waste; plastic for example), however, this system is
very inefficient, it requires 2.08 units of input energy to produce
1 unit of hydrogen energy. At the present time a few small scale
commercial plasma units operating, mostly for waste product
processing.

Experimental and micro
scale hydrogen production methods.
Thermal chemical methods:
sulfur / iodine uses 2 units input energy to 1 hydrogen and copper
/ chlorine, 2 1/3 units input energy to 1 energy unit of hydrogen.
Direct electrical production approximately 1.8 units input energy
to 1 hydrogen energy unit. A number of biological systems are also
being researched. These examples were chosen as a representative
cross section of the types of research being conducted and there
are quite a few more systems being worked on.

Lets consider the first group which is being
currently used to produce hydrogen. They all produce green house
gasses (which we are trying to eliminate) and also use fossil fuels
to produce. They also store only a fraction of the energy used for
production, thus, hydrogen as an energy storage system produced
this way is a lot less efficient and expensive than just using
current conventional energy sources.

Systems that uses
electricity as an energy source to produce hydrogen.
Plasma
can be used to produce hydrogen from some of our waste but uses
lots of electrical energy. Direct electrical production from water,
is another system that is inefficient and expensive, it uses 1.8
times the amount of energy to produce as can be stored in the
hydrogen. A further problem is that at the present time about 2/3
of the electrical energy in the United States is produced by fossil
fuels that generate green house gasses. Unless the electrical
energy to power these processes come from non-fossil fuel energy
sources they will produce more air pollutants from the fossil fuels
burnt in the power plants than using conventional gas or diesel
engines.

Biological systems - Some are in the lab and
others theoretical, they have the same disadvantages as alcohol and
other bio fuels, requiring grown or harvested feed materials as
described above.

One often hears much about the “potential” of
experimental processes that will soon solve the hydrogen production
problem. The question is how likely are these experimental
processes to produce a viable product? I have a significant amount
of experience in this area, having worked in commercial research
and development (R&D) and also the laboratory Here is how the
process works:

1. One has an idea that can theoretically
produce an improvement in something or for an entirely new
product.

2. An experimental lab design is devised to
perform simple test(s) of the idea. In many cases the idea is
dropped at this stage because the results are insufficient to
warrant further investment of resources. However, if the idea does
show some promise it will either be pursued further or moved to
stage 4.

3. If the invention is pursued further,
various improvements will be attempted which will either produce a
positive enough result to keep working on it or it will be dropped.
If it isn't dropped and still seems promising,

4. the invention is then embodied in a
prototype where it is further debugged or refined until it works
OK. At this stage again many inventions are dropped because they
have some flaw that can't be corrected. If the invention succeeds
in making it through this stage it may be patented if
warranted.

5. The last part is scaling up for a
production model, again many inventions can not be scaled up for
viable commercial production. This is the last stage where an
invention can be patented. Once it becomes known about, it enters
the public domain and can not be patented. Then the product is
placed in commercial production and may or may not succeed.

If you consider the process just described,
the promising idea has to successfully make it through many stages,
as a result very few ideas ever actually end up as a useful
product. Even if the new device or process makes it through the
last stage very few of them are actually successful. At the present
time the United States Patent & Trademark office has about 9
million patents on file. At the present time over 300,000 patents
are currently being granted each year. Obviously a very minute
number of these ideas ever turn out to be actually utilized in a
successful commercial product. So when you here about something
being worked on in a lab or is under development being promoted as
being “near” to solving some problem with just some more
development needed. I would suggest that what is being said should
be considered with skepticism. If the status of hydrogen production
is considered, the likelihood that any of these lab projects
actually ending up with a viable product is very small to
practically nonexistent. Particularly if the device being touted is
starting out with the handicap of having the inherent deficiencies
that was pointed out above, i.e., poor energy balance,
environmental problems, high expense, etc.