Re: Hydrogen production without fossil fuels
Posted by Uncle Al on Feb 13, 2004 at 19:33
(68.99.179.162)Re: Hydrogen production without fossil fuels (True)
It's grantology. It's an economic tar baby. It's a bunch of crap.
Prof. David Pimentel of Cornell University calculatedPhotosynthesis is very optimistically equivalent to producing 15 bbl/day-mile^2 of diesel fuel and ignoring all energy inputs.
Fat is so cheap that it makes biodiesel only costing two or three times as much as the real thing. If there were any demand for fat as fuel the price would skyrocket, as waste fat is well used for animal feed.
The most efficient uses of bio-fuel burn corn in a stove designed to burn wood pellets. Heating with corn at $2.50 a bushel is the same as using $(US)0.64/gallon propane. The best deal is to burn the anhydrous ammonia and not bother planting the corn. You must have a way to condense the exhaust and store the nitric acid for resale, and you have to keep it burning so it produces nitric acid and not merely nitrogen oxides. That one makes money.
--
Uncle Al
http://www.mazepath.com/uncleal/qz.pdf
http://www.mazepath.com/uncleal/eotvos.htm
(Do something naughty to physics)