Global Warming fix?
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@dcon said in Global Warming fix?:
@Mason_Wheeler said in Global Warming fix?:
basic supply and demand.
Considering we've been having rolling blackouts, our current supply can't satisfy the current demand.
Are those a supply and demand problem, or a "liability during wildfire season" problem due to California's insane policies against responsible tree cutting?
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@Mason_Wheeler said in Global Warming fix?:
@dcon said in Global Warming fix?:
@Mason_Wheeler said in Global Warming fix?:
basic supply and demand.
Considering we've been having rolling blackouts, our current supply can't satisfy the current demand.
Are those a supply and demand problem, or a "liability during wildfire season" problem due to California's insane policies against responsible tree cutting?
It's too hot and everyone is running their AC. (Some of the blackouts are high wind / fire related, but most of them have been 'stop using so much!'.)
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@Mason_Wheeler said in Global Warming fix?:
@dcon said in Global Warming fix?:
@Mason_Wheeler said in Global Warming fix?:
basic supply and demand.
Considering we've been having rolling blackouts, our current supply can't satisfy the current demand.
Are those a supply and demand problem, or a "liability during wildfire season" problem due to California's insane policies against responsible tree cutting?
Yes
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Re the OP: If something like this could be made to work then it would be a big mitigation for CO2 related warming. Yes, the CO2 that you pull out of the atmosphere will go back there if you burn/drink the ethanol, but if you burn it, you're still substituting fossil fuels, so it still has a net benefit in terms of reducing the amount of carbon in the surface carbon cycle.
And it's much easier to do CCS if you have the carbon in a liquid form - if there's a need and a political will to remove that carbon from the cycle entirely we can do that much more easily when it's in the form of ethanol. (You could probably just pump it straight into depleted oil reservoirs - ethanol has a similar buoyancy to oil so the reservoir should be stable like that.)
Re the graphs on page 1: showing an outdated graph of the last 1000 million years is completely irrelevant to a climate discussion over 1000s to 100,000s of years, which is what affects us. And the 'average temperature' line on that graph looks like nonsense anyway to be honest.
Rapid global warming is not a problem for the planet. It's not even a problem for most wildlife, although on a species level bad things can happen if a habitat disappears or moves so fast the wildlife can't keep up with it (trees and corals don't move fast). But it is a huge problem for individuals - particularly for people because our modern life is based around fixed infrastructure and property rights, and those don't play nicely with changing terrain and rising sea level.
In addition, rapid climate change can cause serious 'short term' (geologically) problems. One interpretation of the PETM is that a warming phase caused positive feedback when methane clathrates started to destabilise and release their methane, and the black shale deposits indicate that lots of things died. If our CO2-based warming triggered that, it would be a serious problem for civilisation.
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@HardwareGeek said in Global Warming fix?:
They're the ones I worry about
They're the lunatic fringe. Don't worry about them, at least until they break the law (and then prosecute as with any other bunch of lawbreaking nutters).
The good thing? We're making decent progress on areas that will help a lot. It's going to take a while to reduce the carbon intensity of transport and heating (which cover two of the really big CO2 emitters) but nobody (sane) imagined it was going to happen overnight. Electricity generation is doing well too, to the point where that's really thoroughly switching over in at least some countries. That's good because there are other parts of the economy where switching is far more difficult.
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@bobjanova said in Global Warming fix?:
You could probably just pump it straight into depleted oil reservoirs - ethanol has a similar buoyancy to oil so the reservoir should be stable like that.
True, but what really matters is more its viscosity and how it combines (or not) with the surrounding rocks. CO2 trapping is tricky because it has a huge mobility and gets through stuff that would act as a seal for other fluids, including natural gas (methane), so it's not a given that ethanol would behave in the same way as (light) oil. It's also not obvious it would stay as a liquid (oil reservoirs are hotter than surface -- more pressurised as well, but that just means the underground state is complicated to predict).
Also you want to be sure it's stable on the long term and doesn't react with the surrounding rock or fluids, or that if it reacts, it's not in a way that compromises the seal (e.g. if the reaction products are more brittle this might not be a good idea). I don't think there is any ethanol naturally occurring in crude oil (probably because of the low O content overall), so this may not have been investigated a lot...
Tl;dr: the "storage" part of CCS is tricky.
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@remi said in Global Warming fix?:
Tl;dr: the "storage" part of CCS is tricky
Yeah, absolutely. But starting from a liquid with a similar density to oil, which has a pH close to 7, and which afaik is relatively unreactive with most minerals, seems a lot more promising than starting from a gas which dissolves in water to form an acid which definitely affects the mineralogy of carbonate rocks.
It's also not obvious it would stay as a liquid
Should be a simple look at the phase diagram and the PT conditions of a reservoir to work that out. A quick check indicates that an oil reservoir is typically in the 50-100 MPa range and temperatures below 200C, which is well within the liquid/compressable liquid part of the phase diagram.
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@bobjanova said in Global Warming fix?:
But starting from a liquid with a similar density to oil, which has a pH close to 7, and which afaik is relatively unreactive with most minerals, seems a lot more promising than starting from a gas which dissolves in water to form an acid which definitely affects the mineralogy of carbonate rocks.
CO2 is even trickier than that, in that when pressurized right it acts as a supersolvent. Fun with chemistry!
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@dkf said in Global Warming fix?:
CO2 is even trickier than that, in that when pressurized right it acts as a supersolvent. Fun with chemistry!
In high school I once filled a rubber balloon with CO2, and it escaped very quickly, much quickier than air or even helium. This is really because CO2 dissolves in rubber, or were there some impurities (like oil from the compressor) that damaged the material? I was told the second explanation, but now I'm not sure.
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@Mason_Wheeler said in Global Warming fix?:
when you divide the range of a fully-charged EV by the speed limit, you get approximately the amount of time you'd normally go between meals, and a charging time for dedicated supercharger facilities that's less than the time you'd spend having a meal at a restaurant.
Without a team of dedicated researchers and an unlimited budget, I was able to come up with this relevant figure:
Are you seriously saying that you would stop every 2-3 hours on a road trip to eat a full meal?
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@Mason_Wheeler said in Global Warming fix?:
Is this "degradation" any worse than that which an ICE experiences over the intensive use a road trip puts it through?
A gas tank doesn't lose capacity no matter how often or how much you fill it. Even if your electric car was an ideal spherical cow and all the rest of the components never degraded, the battery still would, from discharging and recharging over time. And the rest of those components, while not 1:1 with ICE cars, are similar enough.
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@hungrier said in Global Warming fix?:
Are you seriously saying that you would stop every 2-3 hours on a road trip to eat a full meal?
Not many highways (outside cities and Oregon) in the US have speed limits that low. Even in cities, the highways are typically about 105, and in rural areas tend to be (again, outside Oregon) 113 to 135. (Note: This is the posted speed limit, not what people drive at, which is generally higher, except in cities, where it's often ~0.) 243 km @ 135 km/h is only 1.8 hours. I might stop that often, depending on how much caffeine I've been drinking, but only for a 5 minute pee break, not long enough to recharge my car's battery.
