fossil fuels, and reducing the need

[miriam_e]

Almost every technology we have relies upon fossil fuels. We need to work out ways to break that chain of dependency. I don't count using oil to make plastics as an example of a bad thing, but I do see the use of oil as fuel to run the processes in making that plastic as bad. Plastics are amazing materials that we should value more. Correctly used they are light, flexible, resilient, non-toxic, and can last thousands of years, potentially being handed down to our descendants. Using them for disposable items is obscene.

We could use solar furnaces instead of oil and coal for almost all industrial processes that currently require fossil fuels, but it does require effort. And it would help to have a government which is not corrupt and whose heads are not buried in the sand.

The most important change is to design our buildings properly. We've been building them badly for thousands of years and it feels like we've learned almost nothing over that time. They are our biggest standing consumer of energy -- much worse than transport. We need to insulate and light them sensibly so that they need as little additional heating, cooling, lighting, and shading as possible. It is actually easy to do.
● Clerestory lighting and skylights, and ponds or other reflective surfaces oriented correctly outside windows can greatly reduce the need for artificial lighting.
● Insulation and passive convection heating and cooling, can vastly reduce energy needs, especially if a sunroom is used to gather heat in cold climates, and appropriately calculated roof eaves ensure light is admitted in winter, but not summer. Strategic placement of deciduous trees can also help in this respect.
● Building underground, if designed with sensible lighting and heating/cooling can bring great improvements to many aspects of homes and commercial buildings:
- better thermally insulated
- greater thermal mass (so they change temperature slowly)
- much better sound insulation (play the drums without upsetting the neighbors)
- double use of your land (you can still use the land on the "roof")
- safety from bushfires, earthquakes, hurricanes, tornadoes, and if designed right, even floods
- better protection from thieves and other hostile invaders

Any other thoughts?

Comments

[greylock]

Kinda related, but there is a company called Foyson Resources which is investing in a 50tph pilot plant at Berkley Vale that is aiming to take waste plastic and basically re-cracking it to convert it back to liquid hydrocarbons. The same process is supposed to use the syngas to power the plant. It's an interesting take on recycling.

Hasn't been proven, of course.

Thought you might be interested.

We could use solar furnaces instead of oil and coal for almost all industrial processes that currently require fossil fuels

Including steel production? I was going to argue that you need coking coal, but apparently it is possible with arc furnaces. There's no reason I can find that suggests solar can't do that, but I spent five minutes on google.

The main issue with coal production is that it's primarily used in poorer countries, (and India and China), where they are looking for the cheapest and easiest means of hooking up the population. Add it (or char) are also burnt in homes.

I'm wondering how resilient a distributed solar network would be in terms of flood/fire damage. I must look into that.

The new Tesla battery is interesting. We've been waiting for something like that before looking seriously at solar, but I am also curious how much "resource shifting" will happen as a result. I gather some home solar panels have a high failure rate, plus the raw materials like graphite, scandium and lithium need to come from somewhere, so there's something of a risk that - purely at the mining level - we'll swap digging up the Hunter Valley for digging thumping great holes in Fifield.

Building underground, if designed with sensible lighting and heating/cooling can bring great improvements to many aspects of homes and commercial buildings

Not great for population density issues.

I'd love an underground house.

[miriam_e]

Very interesting about Foyson Resources. Thanks for the pointer. It's wonderful that someone is doing this, though I'm a little disappointed they are being secretive about their processes instead of doing what Elon Musk is with all his ventures now, where he opens them all up to other companies. That, I think, is the way of the future. I'm also a little disappointed they are concentrating primarily on producing fuel, mostly diesel, as far as I can see. I'd be happier if they were more interested in using the converted plastic as feedstock for plastics, pharmaceuticals, libricating oils, and so on. They seem stuck in the mindset of burning stuff. A pity, but at least a step in the right direction of recycling plastics much more effectively than we currently do, even if it does still add greenhouse gasses to the atmosphere.

:) Yeah, solar furnaces can reach incredible temperatures -- far higher than coal/coke furnaces. Interestingly, iron and steel were two of the functions I was thinking about recently. The process would have to be substantially redesigned, but it would be far cleaner and have no fuel costs so it should be much more efficient. The drawback of only receiving sunlight during the day can be worked around using heat storage and insulation, though it is inconvenient. Much better would be to move such plants off Earth entirely and into the L1 Lagrangian point between Earth and the Sun, which isn't as impractical as it might at first sound (NASA's Solar and Heliospheric Observatory Satellite SOHO is currently sitting there). We are only just starting to understand the mind-bending wealth available in the asteroid belt just sitting there for the taking (Elon Musk has his eye on this bounty). The recent tantalising development of an EM drive that doesn't use propellent holds out the possibility of cheap, regular journeys there taking just months. If we could move most mining and refining (and possibly some manufacturing) off Earth we would eliminate some of our planet's worst burdens. From orbit gliders can deliver the product easily to anywhere on Earth. The final link (though not initially necessary) will be the Space Elevator, which might finally be made possible by great cables constructed of carbon nanotubes -- the only material that might have the required strength.

I read an article by an Indian guy a little while ago who was annoyed at the poor being the justification of coal use. He was saying they actually don't tend to see the benefits, but cop most of the pollution. The electricity goes to the wealthier members of those societies, not the poor, he was saying.

A couple friends came back from Africa recently. One, Suzanna, grew up in Zambia and returns periodically, the other, Damien, visited for the first time I think last year. Both independently told me how well people in Africa are doing at leapfrogging us here in the West. We rely upon copper wires for power and communications and coal for electricity and we pay through the nose for both. They use very cheap extremely easy-to-use mobile phones and solar panels. Suzanna is a bit of a technophobe and she found their phones ridiculously easy to use. A couple of years ago Suzanna brought back a gift for me of a wonderful solar LED lamp shaped like nothing I've ever seen before. During the day I leave it on the kitchen windowsill. It can give about 4 hours of very bright light and its simple swivel stand means it can easily be hung from a shelf or hook, or stood on a table. These things are cheap and readily available there, but I've never seen anything like it here.

China is closing down its coal-powered generators in Beijing and coal demand generally has fallen by about 10% recently, I believe. When the government tried to expand a coal-fired power plant recently in Haimen they had to abandon the plans when there were massive protests. This seems to be becoming common in China as people are getting fed up with the pollution. And their coal gasification plants, which burn cleaner, are producing mountains of melamine waste that they can't do anything with. China has begun an aggressive alternative energy program that makes Australia look like a backward Third World nation. I'm betting they'll drop coal pretty soon.

I was reading an article by Amory Lovins, the head scientist at the Rocky Mountain Institute (RMI) who was talking about when the nearby town was heavily snowed in and without electricity all the emergency workers came to RMI to charge their phones and computers because with their large independent solar systems they were the only ones who still had power. One of the biggest drawbacks of grid-tied solar panels is that during a blackout (as we had recently) you still lose your power in spite of having all those solar panels. Julie, who owns this house, has said that as soon as the electricity rebate drops to a level where it isn't worthwhile anymore she will buy batteries and sever from the grid. I suspect a lot of people will do the same and the dopey power companies will suddenly find they killed the goose that laid golden eggs.

Julie is very interested in the Tesla PowerWall battery. I see it as an interim solution. I'm waiting for supercapacitors to become more usable. Then we will have energy storage that has infinite charge/discharge cycles. You need never throw it away. And if built on the very promising graphene technology uses non-toxic carbon. You have to mine lithium. You can mine graphite, but you can also make it from carbon dioxide. Kinda nice to imagine making the next big storage system out of thin air. :)

Underground building can manage high population density. You simply build down instead of up. It does mean it is more difficult to use passive lighting, but "normal" houses all require electrically powered lighting, even during daytime, already, so that isn't a great change.

Yeah, I'd love an underground house too. However, unless I make an unexpected windfall on one of my books or manage to find a job again in VR I doubt I'll get to build one. I'm starting to run out of time. I'm 62 and women in my family have a bad habit of developing Alzheimers as they age. :(

[greylock]

I'm also a little disappointed they are concentrating primarily on producing fuel, mostly diesel, as far as I can see.

Sadly, there's just more of a ROI on that.
I'm not surprised they're keeping quiet.
I suspect the tech won't work.
The kinds of people investing in it.... worries me.
It suggests other, smarter people have doubts.

If we could move most mining and refining (and possibly some manufacturing) off Earth we would eliminate some of our planet's worst burdens.

I've researched a few articles on 'space mining' and there are a few issues.
The first is obvious. Do we really want to mine the moon, or asteroids? Do we trust NASA or anyone to move an asteroid into orbit? Because as soon as we can do that, we're pretty much in mass driver territory.

The second, the transportation costs are pretty rubbish for bulk commodities (iron ore and bauxite) because they are so common on Earth.
Even at the good old days of $150/tonne they're not viable.

The electricity goes to the wealthier members of those societies, not the poor, he was saying.

True, that. They're looking at electrifying in PNG (around Ramu) which could give three million people access to power (gas fired) using the income from PNG LNG. Which is nice.

China is closing down its coal-powered generators in Beijing and coal demand generally has fallen by about 10% recently, I believe.

I'd be wary of those numbers. Not the trend, but specifics.
China has all the benefits of 1960s era environmental issues, and a 21stC economy. Plus a central government.

I suspect a lot of people will do the same and the dopey power companies will suddenly find they killed the goose that laid golden eggs.

I consider grid connection a net social good. Not everyone will have renewables, and it's good to have redundancy.

You simply build down instead of up.

True, but you can only go down so far.

[miriam_e]

Pity about the ROI for diesel being such a motivator, though I can understand that. It will be interesting to see whether the tech pans out.

Most of the stuff I've read (and written) about space mining concentrates on mining at the asteroid(s) and sending the raw material to the refinery, which would be at one of the Lagrangian points (probably L1). One of the big advantages is that there's good reason to think a lot of it is pretty-much pure metal. The nickel, more than anything, would pay for it and iron would almost be free. On Earth our iron was oxidised (rusted) in our oxygen atmosphere, mostly by bacteria, over hundreds of millions of years. Out there in space it may be available as large chunks of metal from the cores of wrecked planet(s). Admittedly this is largely speculation, but there are good reasons for thinking this may be so.

Transport costs in space (once out of the gravity well) are negligible, especially if the EM drive turns out as hoped. And when the space elevator is built even gravity won't be much of a problem. There is even some possibility that the EM drive might make lifting to orbit cheap, but I need to read more there.

I know there is a big list of "ifs" in the foregoing. :)

I'd trust NASA to deliver goods across vast distances with pinpoint accuracy. They already do this routinely. My only qualms are that it will probably not be NASA so much as dozens of get-rich-quick companies.

I consider grid connection a net social good. Not everyone will have renewables, and it's good to have redundancy.

I agree 100%. I've tried to argue this with politicians, but they seem to be all about casting solar users as "cheats", and want to find a way to reduce the incentive to stay connected. When they manage to do so they'll find that more than a million homes currently grid-connected will drop off and they'll lose that enormous backup.

When digging down for high density housing you don't really need to go very far to get terrific density. Remember, underground you don't need to leave room for roads the way you have to on the surface. Roads, parks, and even rivers can have housing built under them, while leaving the surface as pristine-looking parkland. And there are very good reasons to move roads underground too. One of the things I hate most about cities is that they tend to be built on the most fertile and naturally beautiful land, which gets promptly paved over so nothing can grow there anymore, and gets turned from an area of natural beauty into a horrible scar that is actively hostile to life. (I'm biased against cities, I know. I grew up in the bush.)