StoppingClimateChange.com
Introduction
About This
website is exploring the technology needed to enable immediate removal of Climate Changing CO2
from the air.
Prolog
Page 2 - The
Skyscrubber Energy Park
Page 3 - Rolling Back Climate
Change
Note: Click on
the
tiny images
to enlarge them, click on your browser's
"Return" arrow to return the image to tiny.
Good Introduction: (Ignore ad.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z6fLkj1KQ60 Another
thought:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ecxCL84n26g A Wrap-up
of sorts:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XHX9pmQ6m_s
Rolling Back Climate Change Could
Begin As Soon as 2030.
Just as a world full of large coal
burning power plants were the major cause of Climate Change,
a world full of large Allam Cycle BECCS wood pellet burning power plants could
be the major method to roll back Climate Change.
*
(BECCS =
BioEnergy
Carbon
Capture and
Storage
technology has just taken a leap forward. A newly-patented naturally carbon
capturing fossil fuel powered Bioenergy-capable power plant ideal for
BECCS
electricity is currently being demonstrated running as a 1/10 size 30 megaWatt pilot plant.)
It's proving to be much
more difficult to get the world's populations to decarbonize than was first
thought.
This Website is suggesting a way we can take the bull by the horns to begin
reversing Climate Change's growth now
while waiting for the world's populations to catch up with decarbonization.
See Also:
https://phys.org/news/2019-12-climate-shot-tolerable-future.html
The CO2
captured by trees as they grow can be temporarily unlocked when harvested, then
permanently re-locked underground by Allam
Cycle power plants.
Trees Can Be The New Coal
When We Use Trees To Make Allam BECCS
Electricity, We
Simultaneously Remove CO2
From The Air.
The world has over two trillion trees with space for almost another trillion. Perhaps
a trillion would be consumed making electricity with Allam
engines. This could extract enough carbon dioxide from the air to roll Climate
Change a long way backwards.
INTRODUCTION:
If we can dream it, we can build it. If we can put a
man on the moon, we can end Climate Change.
The recent invention of the Allam Cycle Engine: - - - A natural gas powered Allam Cycle
engine power plant has been running as a 1/10 size, 30 megaWatt
carbon capturing demonstration power plant in La Porte, Texas since October, 2018.
For the first time since the Industrial Age began in 1700, a replacement for
large coal powered steam engines has been invented.
It has no smokestack. It has made the end of Climate
Change possible within the lifetimes of young people.
Within the foreseeable future, this "no smokestack" engine (and the many other
technical changes we are devising to "Decarbonize" mankind's world) could
ultimately combine to roll Climate
Change back to a tolerable level well before 2050.
Just as engines with smokestacks inadvertently become tools for destroying
the climate, engines without smokestacks often can be used as tools for
deliberately repairing the climate.
DOING IT: We are constantly being told we should plant more trees to pull climate-changing carbon dioxide (CO2) out of the air. Planting a lot more trees is a good idea but is only a half-step forward.
Trees, of
course, are the carbon taken from the carbon dioxide gas in the air — if you
burn or decay trees, the tree's carbons are re-combined with air's oxygen and voila!, you release
that carbon as a gas - CO2 - back into the
atmosphere.
So the downside of trees is that eventually the tree will die, the wood
will decay, and the wood's CO2 will rise back into the air from the
tree's deadwood grave
to make future Climate Change even worse than it would have been
otherwise.
A
better idea: Let's convert those trees to synthetic natural gas to power Allam
Cycle power plants to make electricity.
This will
unlock the climate-changing CO2 the trees have previously removed from the air
as smoke INSIDE the engine.
The Allam Cycle engine's liquefied CO2 emissions pipe can then inject the
liquefied CO2 into deep underground porous strata layers where the CO2 would be
safely re-locked underground forever as limestone.
ALLAM CYCLE power plants powered by synthetic natural gas can be practical
facilities for unlocking massive amounts of
negative CO2 for subtracting Climate Changing CO2 from the air.
A natural gas powered Allam Cycle power plant has been running as a 1/10 size, 30 megaWatt
carbon capture demonstration plant in La Porte, Texas since October, 2018.
This brings the us to a serious moral question: Do we wait until 2050 or later or do we begin taking advantage of the Allam Cycle's BECCS
technology immediately?
The only fuel the chemistry of the Allam Cycle engine will run on
is natural gas or synthetic natural gas:
(Click on
images to enlarge, click on browser "Return" to return.)
Unfortunately biomass (i.e., wood, etc.) is the only
fuel that can be used to roll back climate change.
And adding a "front end" for converting biomass to synthetic natural gas will not be as cheap as adding coal or lignite "front ends" to
Natural Gas Allam Cycle
engines.
Rodney Allam remarked in his paper: "NET Power's CO2 cycle: the breakthrough that CCS needs" that a commercial size 250 megaWatt natural gas Allam Cycle power plant system would require about 3,000 tons/day of oxidant mixture to be supplied to the Allam engine's combustor at 99.5% purity. Instead of standard natural gas, this could be methanated syngas made from trees plus oxygen as shown in the "Unlocking Negative CO2" drawing above.
When we consider
today's worldwide fleet of about 60,000 existing coal power
plant units (often 4 to 6 units per plant), individual units might be in the
same 250 megaWatt or larger class. That
would make 3,000 tonnes/day of oxidant mixture
(CH4 + O2 [chart below]) times 365 days per year times
60,000 or 65.7 BILLION tonnes per year - over TWICE the Climate
Changing CO2 the entire world is going to make this entire year - about a total
of 4 ppm. This is big
number and would immediately reverse the growth of Climate Change's
"Parts-Per-Million" number as the years unfold. This, plus the
more global decarbonization is implemented, the faster we will
return to really good Climate numbers like 350 ppm.
Coal Power Plant Sizes
Wood has more CO2 per BTU than fossil fuels.
How a natural gas fire works. Catalytically
Converting CO2 to Methanol
Only BioEnergy
Carbon Capture and Sequestration (BECCS)
can remove CO2 from the air in quantities large enough
to end Climate Change.
________________________________________________________________
U.S. and Global BECCS CO2 Sequestration Issues
See CarbFix: CO2 Locked in the
ground forever. Watch:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1zDZmIDbDO0
(Skip the ad someone inserted in front of the video.)
If
water is added to the liquid CO2 as it is pumped into the ground, the CO2
will turn into limestone after a few years. This locks the CO2 underground
forever.
Maps Showing various UNDERGROUND CARBON
CAPTURE STORAGE STRATA LOCATIONS
See: "Geospatial analysis of
near-term potential for carbon-negative bioenergy in the United States" by
Ejeong Baik, et al.
https://www.pnas.org/content/115/13/3290 (pdf)
Locations without carbon disposal will have to rely on renewables
"The United States has the technological potential to offset roughly only a decade’s worth of its current CO2 emissions through biological sequestration (i.e., planting trees, etc.,) but a few hundred years’ worth of emissions through carbon dioxide capture and sequestration." - from Congressional Budget Office "The Potential for Carbon Sequestration in the United States, 2007" - Summary, page 2.
Storing CO2 underground can have
geological consequences and is only done legally under the supervision of
government geological permitting agencies.
Example: Midwest Regional Carbon Sequestration Partnership:
https://www.mrcsp.org/
(One of dozens of Global CCS Institute
reports.) Lessons and Perceptions: Adopting a Commercial Approach to CCS
Liability: 14th August 2019, Organization: Global CCS Institute, CCS
Liability, CCS Projects, Liability.
https://www.globalccsinstitute.com/resources/publications-reports-research/
The world may need more than 5,000 Allam clean energy electricity plants to head off the worst of Climate Change. Like cars, airplanes, and ships, clean energy electricity plants would be modular in design similar to today's electricity power plants. Multiple electricity plants could be located at a single site. Such modularity is an economic advantage in several ways. The cost, quality, and reliability of mass-produced machines is hard to beat.
There are almost unlimited opportunities for
locating completely new greenfield electricity power plants now that prime underground strata for CCS CO2 sequestration locations have been identified enabling cheap straight-down CO2 disposal via disposal wells located on plant site property. Since potable water is one of the Allam Cycle's exhaust products, Allam power plants could be located virtually anywhere there is a CO2 disposal strata and sufficient biomass. The national electricity grid is accessible nearly everywhere. This means there is no need for a costly national high pressure CO2 disposal pipeline grid that may take 20 years and billions of dollars to complete due to opposition by environmentalists.Storing CO2 underground improperly could create an unsafe site and is only to be done under the supervision of government geological permitting agencies.
Many countries don't have natural gas, there are a few countries that don't have either abundant coal or lignite, but very few that don't have trees.
________________________________________________________________
Yo
ur Climate Change Outlook
CO2 accounts for 77% of the greenhouse gases. Methane 14% (mostly natural gas),
Nitrous Oxide 8% (mostly cars and trucks), and Freons 1%.
________________________________________________________________
"Technological fixes are often far simpler, and therefore cheaper, than the doomsayers could have imagined." - ( From Prologue )
One objective of this website is to communicate that the current Climate Change crisis resembles the world's early 1900s horseshit crisis described in this paper's Prologue's story.
Here’s an analogy that Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, who
helped compile some of the climate research data for the World Bank, likes to
use.
"Take the human body. If your temperature rises 2°C, you have a significant
fever. If it rises 4°C or 6°C you can die. It’s not a linear change."
________________________________________________________________
Comment: This web site content was
initially inspired by the PNAS (Proceedings of the
National Academy of Sciences) paper: "Geospatial analysis of near-term
potential for carbon-negative bioenergy in the United States" by Ejeong Baik, et
al, 2/12/2018. Written largely by people from the Department of Energy Resources
Engineering, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, 94305. It's an open access
document containing 44 BECCS and negative emissions technical references, you
can Google it and download it as a reference pdf. They identified 1,000 U.S. counties
where power plant, fuel, and CO2 storage could be collocated. Written before the
advent of Toshiba's commercial size Allam Thermodynamic Cycle plant, they talked about
using relatively tiny biofuel
powered power plants about the size of the Allam Pilot plant. pdf:
https://www.pnas.org/content/115/13/3290
Your website author is an electrical/electronic control systems engineer who
worked about 5 years on several power plant designs and 1 small nuclear power
plant, and about 35 years in heavy
industrial energy and control systems. Thermodynamic advances such as the Allam
Cycle typically come to the world once a century and typically offer
breakthrough opportunities in what they enable mankind to do. In the Allam
Cycle's case, it delivers its carbon dioxide emissions in a pure form ready for
underground storage forever (sequestration). Designed to run on standard
pipeline natural gas, switching to a jet fuel-like oil is easy for the
Allam Cycle engine. The fossil fuel industry has already engineered coal
and lignite fuel natural gas adaptor modules to this natural-gas Allam cycle as a way to address the damage their fuels
inflict on the environment today in hopes of retaining their future markets
rather than see their fuels outlawed.
Wood-to-synthetic-natural-gas is more difficult since there is a shortage
of hydrogen in wood.
There is wood-to-natural gas pipeline technology being developed both in the
U.S. and Europe as way to replace fossil natural combustion gas [methane] with
carbon neutral combustion gas [green methane]. Green gas burned in the air is only carbon-neutral.
At this time your author does not know of a wood syngas methanator large enough
to power a full-size Toshiba built Allam Cycle power plant.
It is many times wiser to use Green Gas methanated to duplicate natural gas to power sequestered Allam Cycle electricity power plants than it is to merely use it to heat houses as a pipeline carbon-neutral heating gas with the CO2 emissions then returning to the air.
A firewood-to-methane adaptor module consisting of commercial green gas main pipeline size equipment combined with a Toshiba power plant size Allam Cycle engine, ought to make a serious dent in the amount of Global Warming, Climate Changing, CO2 in the air.
The world's coal power plant fleet numbers about 50,000 units with about 1,800 new coal units in the pipeline to meet 2030 to 2050 electricity demands.
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Page 1 - Stopping Climate Change Page 2 - The Skyscrubber Energy Park Page 3 - Rolling Back Climate Change
