Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm joins Morning Joe to discuss the devastation caused by Ida and preventing future climate change.
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Energy Secretary: The Costs Of Inaction On Climate Change Are So Expensive
When you have science / big business mixed with politics…
It’s going to be a disaster
Be thankful if you only had a hurricane or storm, when everything burns down it’s gone forever and you can’t just rebuild for months on end, you have to make sure that there are no hidden embers and you have to wait until it’s no longer toxic before you can even begin, oh and the smoke isn’t over in a few days it’s three months or more before you can breathe without a freaking mask. Feel lucky that your storm can be cleaned up asap.
Not to mention how long it takes for trees to grow and nature in general to fully recover after wildfires. Not months, not years but decades
@Rune Hove-Kreutzfeldt even the scorched ones have a hard time
I gonna tell you something that is unfortunatelly not covered in the media when it comes to climate change. And believe me, it’s worth to read this entire comment to the end, even if it takes a few minutes. Internal documents of fossil fuel companies prove that they were already concerned in the 1950s about possible consequences of CO2 emissions for the Earth’s climate. Furthermore internal documents of fossil fuel companies from the 1970s prove that at this time these concerns have already become a certainty for them. That means that already in the 1970s the fossil fuel industry KNEW that CO2 emissions will cause a dramatic climate change. And now let’s take a look on what could have been done against it in the 1950s until the 1980s:
The Smith-Putnam wind turbine from 1941 was the first wind turbine with a power of 1.25 megawatt. Typical modern on-shore wind turbines in Germany have a power of 2 to 5 megawatts. As you can see it was possible to build really good wind turbines already in 1941. If development of wind turbines continued after 1941 then wind turbines as good as our modern on-shore wind turbines could have been available already in the 1960s or 1970s. Wind power back then could have been combined with technologies which I will describe in the following sections.
The “Kværner process” is a technology originally developed in Norway in the 1980s to split hydrocarbons like oil & gas into clean CO2-free hydrogen and solid carbon which can be safely buried again as a waste product. It is a method which uses electricity and it takes 75.6 kilojoules of electric energy to convert 1 mole of methane into an amount of hydrogen with an energy content of 572 kilojoules. Currently it is in fact the most energy efficient way to produce hydrogen, 7.6 times more energy efficient than electrolysis of water and even more energy efficient than steam-reforming which today is the state-of-the-art method used in the industry. The start-up “Monolith Materials” and their partner Mitsubishi opened a commercial clean hydrogen plant this year in Nebraska which uses the “Kværner process” and they plan to open 30 more plants in the coming years. Hydrogen can be used as a clean CO2-free fuel for cars, trains, ships & airplanes, it is used in the production of ammonia for fertilizers, in Germany and Sweden it is already used to make steel without CO2 emissions and it can be used for heating.
Another method called “Methane Pyrolysis” is known even earlier since the 1960s. “Methane Pyrolysis” does the same as the “Kværner process” but uses heat instead of electricity and has a similar energy efficiency. Although it contains “Methane” in its name it is as well perfectly suitable to process higher hydrocarbons like oil. In 2020 the german chemical company BASF has announced that they have developed “Methane Pyrolysis” to the point where it can be commercialized. In the future natural gas from Russia will be processed to clean CO2-free hydrogen which will be used in the german industry to produce CO2-free steel and for the heating of homes.
The “Lockheed CL-400 Suntan” was a reconnaissance aircraft developed in the 1950s with liquid hydrogen propulsion. In the end the CIA opted against it because the “SR-71 Blackbird” with its conventional kerosine fuel was cheaper. But the airframe, the tanks & the engines of “Suntan” were fully developed and successfully tested. This was in the 1950s which means that with government support liquid hydrogen powered passenger jets for commercial airlines could have been available already in the 1970s or 1980s. At this time the liquid hydrogen fuel could have been produced in sufficient quantities from oil & gas with “Methane Pyrolysis” and the “Kværner process” which were already known at this time and which I have described further above. Instead we still fly on Kerosine and civil aviation has become a major source of emissions.
Hydrogen powered cars would have been impractical in the 1960s because hydrogen needs either cryogenic tanks if it is liquid or very high pressure tanks at room temperature. Hydrogen fuel cells were already in use in the 1960s in space ships like Apollo, but at this time they were way to expensive for cars. So how would it be possible to power cars with clean hydrogen in the 1960s? The answer is ammonia. If one combines “Methane Pyrolysis” for hydrogen production with the “Haber-Bosch process” for ammonia production then it takes in the ideal case 14.08 kilojoules to convert 1 mole of methane (or another hydrocarbon) into an amount of ammonia with an energy content of 422.4 kilojoules. This is a ratio of 30!!! If one assumes that the efficiency is not 100% but only a very bad 33% then the ratio is still 10!!! It means that even at a very low efficiency of 33% one can make 10 kilojoules of ammonia energy from 1 kilojoule of renewable or nuclear energy with fossil fuels as feedstock, ALL without any CO2 emissions! Ammonia is much easier to handle than hydrogen because it can be kept liquid at room temperature at very modest pressures below 20 bars. Even in the 1960s this was a very low and safe pressure for gas tanks. In addition liquid ammonia contains 1.8 times more energy per volume than liquid hydrogen. Ammonia is a good fuel for internal combustion engines and it combusts to water and nitrogen without greenhouse gases. Since “Methane Pyrolysis” is known since the 1960s it would have been possible to make clean cars in the 1970s.
Now these two technologies target hydrocarbons. However there also exists a technology called “Direct Carbon Fuel Cell”. A “Direct Carbon Fuel Cell” is a fuel cell which uses coal instead of hydrogen. The first patent for such a fuel cell was granted in 1896 to William W. Jacques, US Patent 555,511. Now a “Direct Carbon Fuel Cell” does produce CO2 because it oxidizes coal, however its efficiency is twice the efficiency of a conventional combustion based generator. This means that one can use only half as much coal for the same amount of power as in conventional coal power plants. With a “Direct Carbon Fuel Cell” one can therefore cut CO2 emissions from coal in half! Furthermore a “Direct Carbon Fuel Cell” produces a concentrated stream of 100% pure CO2 as exhaust. One can therefore capture the exhaust directly without any complicated & energy intensive additional steps. This CO2 can then be either pumped into empty oil & gas fields, so that it is not released to the atmosphere, or it can be used as an ingredient for carbon-negative concrete like “Carbicrete” from Canada or “CarbonCure” from the United States. Working “Direct Carbon Fuel Cells” have been developed multiple times since the 1930s. In 2001 for example the “Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory” made a “Direct Carbon Fuel Cell” which was able to convert 80% of the chemical energy of carbon into electricity.
So what does all this means? Not only did the fossil fuel industry know about the disastrous consequences of their CO2 emissions, they also already had the technologies to fix this problem decades ago. The fossil fuel industry has spent billions and billions over the decades to influence politicians so that effective measures against climate change were not put into practice. They could have used the money for R&D instead so that the “Kværner process”, “Methane Pyrolysis” and “Direct Carbon Fuel Cells” could have been used already decades ago. This way they could have been able to continue their business, make money AND contribute to climate protection.
Greed vs common sense? What will prevail?
Greed.
Greed of course. It’s sickening to have lived long enough to remember Al Gore and his fearmongering decades ago. And yet here we are today with the same scenario and Al Gore and other bureaucrats sitting on millions.
I gonna tell you something that is unfortunatelly not covered in the media when it comes to climate change. And believe me, it’s worth to read this entire comment to the end, even if it takes a few minutes. Internal documents of fossil fuel companies prove that they were already concerned in the 1950s about possible consequences of CO2 emissions for the Earth’s climate. Furthermore internal documents of fossil fuel companies from the 1970s prove that at this time these concerns have already become a certainty for them. That means that already in the 1970s the fossil fuel industry KNEW that CO2 emissions will cause a dramatic climate change. And now let’s take a look on what could have been done against it in the 1950s until the 1980s:
The Smith-Putnam wind turbine from 1941 was the first wind turbine with a power of 1.25 megawatt. Typical modern on-shore wind turbines in Germany have a power of 2 to 5 megawatts. As you can see it was possible to build really good wind turbines already in 1941. If development of wind turbines continued after 1941 then wind turbines as good as our modern on-shore wind turbines could have been available already in the 1960s or 1970s. Wind power back then could have been combined with technologies which I will describe in the following sections.
The “Kværner process” is a technology originally developed in Norway in the 1980s to split hydrocarbons like oil & gas into clean CO2-free hydrogen and solid carbon which can be safely buried again as a waste product. It is a method which uses electricity and it takes 75.6 kilojoules of electric energy to convert 1 mole of methane into an amount of hydrogen with an energy content of 572 kilojoules. Currently it is in fact the most energy efficient way to produce hydrogen, 7.6 times more energy efficient than electrolysis of water and even more energy efficient than steam-reforming which today is the state-of-the-art method used in the industry. The start-up “Monolith Materials” and their partner Mitsubishi opened a commercial clean hydrogen plant this year in Nebraska which uses the “Kværner process” and they plan to open 30 more plants in the coming years. Hydrogen can be used as a clean CO2-free fuel for cars, trains, ships & airplanes, it is used in the production of ammonia for fertilizers, in Germany and Sweden it is already used to make steel without CO2 emissions and it can be used for heating.
Another method called “Methane Pyrolysis” is known even earlier since the 1960s. “Methane Pyrolysis” does the same as the “Kværner process” but uses heat instead of electricity and has a similar energy efficiency. Although it contains “Methane” in its name it is as well perfectly suitable to process higher hydrocarbons like oil. In 2020 the german chemical company BASF has announced that they have developed “Methane Pyrolysis” to the point where it can be commercialized. In the future natural gas from Russia will be processed to clean CO2-free hydrogen which will be used in the german industry to produce CO2-free steel and for the heating of homes.
The “Lockheed CL-400 Suntan” was a reconnaissance aircraft developed in the 1950s with liquid hydrogen propulsion. In the end the CIA opted against it because the “SR-71 Blackbird” with its conventional kerosine fuel was cheaper. But the airframe, the tanks & the engines of “Suntan” were fully developed and successfully tested. This was in the 1950s which means that with government support liquid hydrogen powered passenger jets for commercial airlines could have been available already in the 1970s or 1980s. At this time the liquid hydrogen fuel could have been produced in sufficient quantities from oil & gas with “Methane Pyrolysis” and the “Kværner process” which were already known at this time and which I have described further above. Instead we still fly on Kerosine and civil aviation has become a major source of emissions.
Hydrogen powered cars would have been impractical in the 1960s because hydrogen needs either cryogenic tanks if it is liquid or very high pressure tanks at room temperature. Hydrogen fuel cells were already in use in the 1960s in space ships like Apollo, but at this time they were way to expensive for cars. So how would it be possible to power cars with clean hydrogen in the 1960s? The answer is ammonia. If one combines “Methane Pyrolysis” for hydrogen production with the “Haber-Bosch process” for ammonia production then it takes in the ideal case 14.08 kilojoules to convert 1 mole of methane (or another hydrocarbon) into an amount of ammonia with an energy content of 422.4 kilojoules. This is a ratio of 30!!! If one assumes that the efficiency is not 100% but only a very bad 33% then the ratio is still 10!!! It means that even at a very low efficiency of 33% one can make 10 kilojoules of ammonia energy from 1 kilojoule of renewable or nuclear energy with fossil fuels as feedstock, ALL without any CO2 emissions! Ammonia is much easier to handle than hydrogen because it can be kept liquid at room temperature at very modest pressures below 20 bars. Even in the 1960s this was a very low and safe pressure for gas tanks. In addition liquid ammonia contains 1.8 times more energy per volume than liquid hydrogen. Ammonia is a good fuel for internal combustion engines and it combusts to water and nitrogen without greenhouse gases. Since “Methane Pyrolysis” is known since the 1960s it would have been possible to make clean cars in the 1970s.
Now these two technologies target hydrocarbons. However there also exists a technology called “Direct Carbon Fuel Cell”. A “Direct Carbon Fuel Cell” is a fuel cell which uses coal instead of hydrogen. The first patent for such a fuel cell was granted in 1896 to William W. Jacques, US Patent 555,511. Now a “Direct Carbon Fuel Cell” does produce CO2 because it oxidizes coal, however its efficiency is twice the efficiency of a conventional combustion based generator. This means that one can use only half as much coal for the same amount of power as in conventional coal power plants. With a “Direct Carbon Fuel Cell” one can therefore cut CO2 emissions from coal in half! Furthermore a “Direct Carbon Fuel Cell” produces a concentrated stream of 100% pure CO2 as exhaust. One can therefore capture the exhaust directly without any complicated & energy intensive additional steps. This CO2 can then be either pumped into empty oil & gas fields, so that it is not released to the atmosphere, or it can be used as an ingredient for carbon-negative concrete like “Carbicrete” from Canada or “CarbonCure” from the United States. Working “Direct Carbon Fuel Cells” have been developed multiple times since the 1930s. In 2001 for example the “Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory” made a “Direct Carbon Fuel Cell” which was able to convert 80% of the chemical energy of carbon into electricity.
So what does all this means? Not only did the fossil fuel industry know about the disastrous consequences of their CO2 emissions, they also already had the technologies to fix this problem decades ago. The fossil fuel industry has spent billions and billions over the decades to influence politicians so that effective measures against climate change were not put into practice. They could have used the money for R&D instead so that the “Kværner process”, “Methane Pyrolysis” and “Direct Carbon Fuel Cells” could have been used already decades ago. This way they could have been able to continue their business, make money AND contribute to climate protection.
The annual cost of repairing the damage from extreme events are in the HUNDREDS OF BILLIONS when it used to be BILLIONS. Climate change is an economic disaster.
Tax Energy Companies for the damage.
Biden will go down another 10 points with this BS and be lucky to hit 30% approval rating
@Ralph Boyd They will just pass the costs onto the public with higher charges
I gonna tell you something that is unfortunatelly not covered in the media when it comes to climate change. And believe me, it’s worth to read this entire comment to the end, even if it takes a few minutes. Internal documents of fossil fuel companies prove that they were already concerned in the 1950s about possible consequences of CO2 emissions for the Earth’s climate. Furthermore internal documents of fossil fuel companies from the 1970s prove that at this time these concerns have already become a certainty for them. That means that already in the 1970s the fossil fuel industry KNEW that CO2 emissions will cause a dramatic climate change. And now let’s take a look on what could have been done against it in the 1950s until the 1980s:
The Smith-Putnam wind turbine from 1941 was the first wind turbine with a power of 1.25 megawatt. Typical modern on-shore wind turbines in Germany have a power of 2 to 5 megawatts. As you can see it was possible to build really good wind turbines already in 1941. If development of wind turbines continued after 1941 then wind turbines as good as our modern on-shore wind turbines could have been available already in the 1960s or 1970s. Wind power back then could have been combined with technologies which I will describe in the following sections.
The “Kværner process” is a technology originally developed in Norway in the 1980s to split hydrocarbons like oil & gas into clean CO2-free hydrogen and solid carbon which can be safely buried again as a waste product. It is a method which uses electricity and it takes 75.6 kilojoules of electric energy to convert 1 mole of methane into an amount of hydrogen with an energy content of 572 kilojoules. Currently it is in fact the most energy efficient way to produce hydrogen, 7.6 times more energy efficient than electrolysis of water and even more energy efficient than steam-reforming which today is the state-of-the-art method used in the industry. The start-up “Monolith Materials” and their partner Mitsubishi opened a commercial clean hydrogen plant this year in Nebraska which uses the “Kværner process” and they plan to open 30 more plants in the coming years. Hydrogen can be used as a clean CO2-free fuel for cars, trains, ships & airplanes, it is used in the production of ammonia for fertilizers, in Germany and Sweden it is already used to make steel without CO2 emissions and it can be used for heating.
Another method called “Methane Pyrolysis” is known even earlier since the 1960s. “Methane Pyrolysis” does the same as the “Kværner process” but uses heat instead of electricity and has a similar energy efficiency. Although it contains “Methane” in its name it is as well perfectly suitable to process higher hydrocarbons like oil. In 2020 the german chemical company BASF has announced that they have developed “Methane Pyrolysis” to the point where it can be commercialized. In the future natural gas from Russia will be processed to clean CO2-free hydrogen which will be used in the german industry to produce CO2-free steel and for the heating of homes.
The “Lockheed CL-400 Suntan” was a reconnaissance aircraft developed in the 1950s with liquid hydrogen propulsion. In the end the CIA opted against it because the “SR-71 Blackbird” with its conventional kerosine fuel was cheaper. But the airframe, the tanks & the engines of “Suntan” were fully developed and successfully tested. This was in the 1950s which means that with government support liquid hydrogen powered passenger jets for commercial airlines could have been available already in the 1970s or 1980s. At this time the liquid hydrogen fuel could have been produced in sufficient quantities from oil & gas with “Methane Pyrolysis” and the “Kværner process” which were already known at this time and which I have described further above. Instead we still fly on Kerosine and civil aviation has become a major source of emissions.
Hydrogen powered cars would have been impractical in the 1960s because hydrogen needs either cryogenic tanks if it is liquid or very high pressure tanks at room temperature. Hydrogen fuel cells were already in use in the 1960s in space ships like Apollo, but at this time they were way to expensive for cars. So how would it be possible to power cars with clean hydrogen in the 1960s? The answer is ammonia. If one combines “Methane Pyrolysis” for hydrogen production with the “Haber-Bosch process” for ammonia production then it takes in the ideal case 14.08 kilojoules to convert 1 mole of methane (or another hydrocarbon) into an amount of ammonia with an energy content of 422.4 kilojoules. This is a ratio of 30!!! If one assumes that the efficiency is not 100% but only a very bad 33% then the ratio is still 10!!! It means that even at a very low efficiency of 33% one can make 10 kilojoules of ammonia energy from 1 kilojoule of renewable or nuclear energy with fossil fuels as feedstock, ALL without any CO2 emissions! Ammonia is much easier to handle than hydrogen because it can be kept liquid at room temperature at very modest pressures below 20 bars. Even in the 1960s this was a very low and safe pressure for gas tanks. In addition liquid ammonia contains 1.8 times more energy per volume than liquid hydrogen. Ammonia is a good fuel for internal combustion engines and it combusts to water and nitrogen without greenhouse gases. Since “Methane Pyrolysis” is known since the 1960s it would have been possible to make clean cars in the 1970s.
Now these two technologies target hydrocarbons. However there also exists a technology called “Direct Carbon Fuel Cell”. A “Direct Carbon Fuel Cell” is a fuel cell which uses coal instead of hydrogen. The first patent for such a fuel cell was granted in 1896 to William W. Jacques, US Patent 555,511. Now a “Direct Carbon Fuel Cell” does produce CO2 because it oxidizes coal, however its efficiency is twice the efficiency of a conventional combustion based generator. This means that one can use only half as much coal for the same amount of power as in conventional coal power plants. With a “Direct Carbon Fuel Cell” one can therefore cut CO2 emissions from coal in half! Furthermore a “Direct Carbon Fuel Cell” produces a concentrated stream of 100% pure CO2 as exhaust. One can therefore capture the exhaust directly without any complicated & energy intensive additional steps. This CO2 can then be either pumped into empty oil & gas fields, so that it is not released to the atmosphere, or it can be used as an ingredient for carbon-negative concrete like “Carbicrete” from Canada or “CarbonCure” from the United States. Working “Direct Carbon Fuel Cells” have been developed multiple times since the 1930s. In 2001 for example the “Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory” made a “Direct Carbon Fuel Cell” which was able to convert 80% of the chemical energy of carbon into electricity.
So what does all this means? Not only did the fossil fuel industry know about the disastrous consequences of their CO2 emissions, they also already had the technologies to fix this problem decades ago. The fossil fuel industry has spent billions and billions over the decades to influence politicians so that effective measures against climate change were not put into practice. They could have used the money for R&D instead so that the “Kværner process”, “Methane Pyrolysis” and “Direct Carbon Fuel Cells” could have been used already decades ago. This way they could have been able to continue their business, make money AND contribute to climate protection.
@Ayan Biko nA. people will thank him for it.
“come back to bed baby daddy’s getting cold” – tRump to Ivanka nightly
@Super Scary Russian Bot It’s all in tRumps latest bio, Ivanka and the journey to the tiny mushroom on racist hill.
@Super Scary Russian Bot
Dnd is a pervert
@Lee the truth usually hurts you uneducated racists the most
@DNDaudio Editing
I mean, you got the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy. I mean, that’s a storybook, man.
– Joe Biden
@DNDaudio Editing, are there videos?
Let’s see a comparison between a cleanup and actions claiming we’re gonna stop these disasters
nothing will stop them, however we can reduce slow them
@Anonymous again, at what cost is my question.
It is so refreshing to have an Energy Secretary like Granholm who is NOT a fossil fuel mouth piece and is fighting against global warming NOT denying that it exists.
@Aaron Oneal I would be cool with that.
@Piotr Trebisz The oil companies were the only ones aware of climate change??
@Bud Fudlacker
What do democrats have to do with it? We need to fix the problem and I really don’t care who helps.
@Jock Young How do you fix billions of years of climate change??? What would make you think our government can do that?????
To lower sea level .. begin launching solar orbital shading .. try the crazy MEERS (mirrors to reflect light to space) equatorial. The water content is too hot already so just mine Greenland into the sea … and blow water up in cold air which falls to snow storing carbon dioxide .. ice floats sink to bottom .. pray Thwaites Glacier holds .. who cares if we lower sea level a little bit in a year? Stores a lot of CO2 10 meter thick ice cap in the Arctic Basin .. gives us chance to tamp the forest fires globally out .. combating climate change is about money ?? This is where the math to lower sea level 400 feet in 5 years sounds (IS) very prosperous .. manufacturing clean energy technology, gravity engines by G sub c also provides benefits combating climate change .. just a water column in your back yard .. above or below ..will serve the Secretary of Energy of the United States of America, as well as the People.
US politics in a nutshell:
Liberals see climate change as an opportunity to invest in green energy, bringing new jobs to people who are losing to a shrinking fossil fuel industry.
Conservatives see climate change as a threat to established industries like fossil fuel and will fight to protect those wealthy donors’ profits.
It’s an opportunity for Dem leadership to invest in China; that’s all. You’re taken the blue pill.
I gonna tell you something that is unfortunatelly not covered in the media when it comes to climate change. And believe me, it’s worth to read this entire comment to the end, even if it takes a few minutes. Internal documents of fossil fuel companies prove that they were already concerned in the 1950s about possible consequences of CO2 emissions for the Earth’s climate. Furthermore internal documents of fossil fuel companies from the 1970s prove that at this time these concerns have already become a certainty for them. That means that already in the 1970s the fossil fuel industry KNEW that CO2 emissions will cause a dramatic climate change. And now let’s take a look on what could have been done against it in the 1950s until the 1980s:
The Smith-Putnam wind turbine from 1941 was the first wind turbine with a power of 1.25 megawatt. Typical modern on-shore wind turbines in Germany have a power of 2 to 5 megawatts. As you can see it was possible to build really good wind turbines already in 1941. If development of wind turbines continued after 1941 then wind turbines as good as our modern on-shore wind turbines could have been available already in the 1960s or 1970s. Wind power back then could have been combined with technologies which I will describe in the following sections.
The “Kværner process” is a technology originally developed in Norway in the 1980s to split hydrocarbons like oil & gas into clean CO2-free hydrogen and solid carbon which can be safely buried again as a waste product. It is a method which uses electricity and it takes 75.6 kilojoules of electric energy to convert 1 mole of methane into an amount of hydrogen with an energy content of 572 kilojoules. Currently it is in fact the most energy efficient way to produce hydrogen, 7.6 times more energy efficient than electrolysis of water and even more energy efficient than steam-reforming which today is the state-of-the-art method used in the industry. The start-up “Monolith Materials” and their partner Mitsubishi opened a commercial clean hydrogen plant this year in Nebraska which uses the “Kværner process” and they plan to open 30 more plants in the coming years. Hydrogen can be used as a clean CO2-free fuel for cars, trains, ships & airplanes, it is used in the production of ammonia for fertilizers, in Germany and Sweden it is already used to make steel without CO2 emissions and it can be used for heating.
Another method called “Methane Pyrolysis” is known even earlier since the 1960s. “Methane Pyrolysis” does the same as the “Kværner process” but uses heat instead of electricity and has a similar energy efficiency. Although it contains “Methane” in its name it is as well perfectly suitable to process higher hydrocarbons like oil. In 2020 the german chemical company BASF has announced that they have developed “Methane Pyrolysis” to the point where it can be commercialized. In the future natural gas from Russia will be processed to clean CO2-free hydrogen which will be used in the german industry to produce CO2-free steel and for the heating of homes.
The “Lockheed CL-400 Suntan” was a reconnaissance aircraft developed in the 1950s with liquid hydrogen propulsion. In the end the CIA opted against it because the “SR-71 Blackbird” with its conventional kerosine fuel was cheaper. But the airframe, the tanks & the engines of “Suntan” were fully developed and successfully tested. This was in the 1950s which means that with government support liquid hydrogen powered passenger jets for commercial airlines could have been available already in the 1970s or 1980s. At this time the liquid hydrogen fuel could have been produced in sufficient quantities from oil & gas with “Methane Pyrolysis” and the “Kværner process” which were already known at this time and which I have described further above. Instead we still fly on Kerosine and civil aviation has become a major source of emissions.
Hydrogen powered cars would have been impractical in the 1960s because hydrogen needs either cryogenic tanks if it is liquid or very high pressure tanks at room temperature. Hydrogen fuel cells were already in use in the 1960s in space ships like Apollo, but at this time they were way to expensive for cars. So how would it be possible to power cars with clean hydrogen in the 1960s? The answer is ammonia. If one combines “Methane Pyrolysis” for hydrogen production with the “Haber-Bosch process” for ammonia production then it takes in the ideal case 14.08 kilojoules to convert 1 mole of methane (or another hydrocarbon) into an amount of ammonia with an energy content of 422.4 kilojoules. This is a ratio of 30!!! If one assumes that the efficiency is not 100% but only a very bad 33% then the ratio is still 10!!! It means that even at a very low efficiency of 33% one can make 10 kilojoules of ammonia energy from 1 kilojoule of renewable or nuclear energy with fossil fuels as feedstock, ALL without any CO2 emissions! Ammonia is much easier to handle than hydrogen because it can be kept liquid at room temperature at very modest pressures below 20 bars. Even in the 1960s this was a very low and safe pressure for gas tanks. In addition liquid ammonia contains 1.8 times more energy per volume than liquid hydrogen. Ammonia is a good fuel for internal combustion engines and it combusts to water and nitrogen without greenhouse gases. Since “Methane Pyrolysis” is known since the 1960s it would have been possible to make clean cars in the 1970s.
Now these two technologies target hydrocarbons. However there also exists a technology called “Direct Carbon Fuel Cell”. A “Direct Carbon Fuel Cell” is a fuel cell which uses coal instead of hydrogen. The first patent for such a fuel cell was granted in 1896 to William W. Jacques, US Patent 555,511. Now a “Direct Carbon Fuel Cell” does produce CO2 because it oxidizes coal, however its efficiency is twice the efficiency of a conventional combustion based generator. This means that one can use only half as much coal for the same amount of power as in conventional coal power plants. With a “Direct Carbon Fuel Cell” one can therefore cut CO2 emissions from coal in half! Furthermore a “Direct Carbon Fuel Cell” produces a concentrated stream of 100% pure CO2 as exhaust. One can therefore capture the exhaust directly without any complicated & energy intensive additional steps. This CO2 can then be either pumped into empty oil & gas fields, so that it is not released to the atmosphere, or it can be used as an ingredient for carbon-negative concrete like “Carbicrete” from Canada or “CarbonCure” from the United States. Working “Direct Carbon Fuel Cells” have been developed multiple times since the 1930s. In 2001 for example the “Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory” made a “Direct Carbon Fuel Cell” which was able to convert 80% of the chemical energy of carbon into electricity.
So what does all this means? Not only did the fossil fuel industry know about the disastrous consequences of their CO2 emissions, they also already had the technologies to fix this problem decades ago. The fossil fuel industry has spent billions and billions over the decades to influence politicians so that effective measures against climate change were not put into practice. They could have used the money for R&D instead so that the “Kværner process”, “Methane Pyrolysis” and “Direct Carbon Fuel Cells” could have been used already decades ago. This way they could have been able to continue their business, make money AND contribute to climate protection.
As we are discussing on how to rebuild Louisiana’s power grid to withstand a cat 5 hurricane and how to rebuild the storm drainage of the northeast to withstand a 1 in 500 years rain event, the GOP is still saying climate change doesn’t exist! Hey Texas, do you actually think that February’s Arctic blast won’t happen again this winter? Yeah, good luck with that…
Nicely conveyed and said!!!!!
TOTALLY AGREE and UNDERSTAND DOING My small part to leave a MINIMAL CARBON FOOT PRINT 👣
ALWAYS HAVE!
While the politicians fly around in private jets and act like they care.
HAHAHAAA she said 2050 AS IF we even got that long as a species
Been waiting since I was born for the world to end due to climate change and that was 43 years ago. Except back then they called it global cooling.
I invented the hybrid 6 skystream but GE bought 70% shares and folded it. GET THE POWER THAT BE OUT OF THE WAY !!!
Yet MSNBCs carbon footprint is thousands of times bigger than yours.
350 million dollars a day for 20 years that is what it takes to start to bring any changes. Starting with the fast rail and health care for all. There will be at least another 1.7 trillion left to do much more.
After the derecho last year, it took weeks to restore power, months before schools and businesses and homes were inhabitable, and will take years to restore the 75% tree canopy that was lost.
The OBSTACLE to caring for our nation, to building back better, IS THE FILIBUSTER. Joe! Fascist GOP, Merrick!
Self interest is for the past; common interest is for the future. – D. Attenborough
Lu’sè Changcheng (Great green wall) can be seen from space.
A fire from a US gender reveal party was seen from space.
Start using goats to clear forest brush and start dobbing in Fire Karens.
Self interest is for the past; common interest is for the future. – D. Attenborough
Lu’sè Changcheng (Great green wall) can be seen from space.
A fire from a US gender reveal party was seen from space.
Start using goats to clear forest brush and start dobbing in Fire Karens.
China and EU are doing far more on clean energy and electrification. It’s laughable the USA would lecture China or any EU country, but we welcome the USA to stop talking the talk and start walking the walk on this. So I hope Secretary Granholm can really get this moving.
Make an immediate difference become vegan.