Here's a machine that turns water into synthetic gasoline

originally posted by: Bedlam

originally posted by: surfer_soul

Yes temperature is used to measure heat, but whats your point?

Actually, temperature is not used to measure heat. Heat is energy. You can calculate heat from temperature, if you know some information about the thing you're measuring the temperature of.

The point is, people are confused by temperature, like you were just then. If something is hot, they mentally conflate that with heat. If you ask - "Which contains more heat, a bathtub full of tepid water or a white hot needle?" they will invariably state that the needle contains more heat energy. It doesn't. "Hot" is related to "heat" but is not the same.

Thus, in the post where I stated this, the poster had said "Take a fresnel lens, and at the focus you can boil water, therefore you can make electricity with it and have all the free fossil fuel EVAR" (more or less), he's making the same mistake, and it's one you see on ATS a lot in solar threads.

Yes, you can concentrate the heat you get from a certain area of sunlight, and at the focus you'll have a higher temperature. Maybe you can even do something faux dramatic like melt tin foil. But all the heat you're going to have is limited by that collection area. It doesn't matter that you can boil a tiny bit of water at the focus. If you want to have enough energy to produce enough Fischer-Tropsch fuel from water and CO2, it's going to take a lot of area. Like most of the deserts in the US, covered with solar thermal towers, or plated over with PV cells.

Actually temperature is used to measure heat, relative to the freezing point of water. If temperature is not used to measure heat what do you propose is? What makes you assume I'm confused by temperature? I simply stated a fact, I am well aware heat is a manifestation of energy.
With regards to the Fresnal lens being able to 'boil only a tiny bit of water' I find that a tad derogatory from someone who sounds like they should know better. Even a relatively small Fresnal lens like one taken from and old TV can be used boil water in about twice the time as a 1000watt kettle, giving such a lens a potential of roughly 500watts of power.
Of course it is dependent of the power of the sun directly on it, but still it could be utilized to generate usable electricity. By hooking one up to a Sterling engine for instance, which in its turn can be hooked up to a dynamo/generator and a battery pack for storage in non sunny periods. Its not something to be discounted as purely 'faux dramatic'.
Heres a vid of a bit of a demonstration of such.


I for one am sure the German company knows what they are doing and to me it sounds like they are just trying to come up with a more efficient way of creating usable fuel from water, by combining the F-T and electrolysis process's. Now as someone else has pointed out if a geothermal plant like the one they have in Iceland was used for the electrolysis bit. That could make it very cost effective and efficient indeed.

originally posted by: surfer_soul
Actually temperature is used to measure heat, relative to the freezing point of water. If temperature is not used to measure heat what do you propose is?

Heat is measured in units of energy, like Joules or BTUs. Temperature is measured in degrees. Very different. Thermometers measure temperature. Something can be quite hot and have little heat.

With regards to the Fresnal lens being able to 'boil only a tiny bit of water' I find that a tad derogatory from someone who sounds like they should know better. Even a relatively small Fresnal lens like one taken from and old TV can be used boil water in about twice the time as a 1000watt kettle, giving such a lens a potential of roughly 500watts of power.

And as I said more than once up thread, no matter how you focus it, you're not going to get more power than the collection area permits. To collect enough solar energy to produce the petroleum that the US uses by a F-T synthesis, you will end up having to plate a significant portion of the country over with solar collectors.

I for one am sure the German company knows what they are doing and to me it sounds like they are just trying to come up with a more efficient way of creating usable fuel from water, by combining the F-T and electrolysis process's. Now as someone else has pointed out if a geothermal plant like the one they have in Iceland was used for the electrolysis bit. That could make it very cost effective and efficient indeed.

Depends on how much energy they can get out of the geothermal plant. And the F-T part of the synthesis takes a lot of energy as well, not just the electrolysis. Basically, you are going to have to put in about 2x the energy you get out of the petroleum you produce. And we use a lot of petroleum. I suspect you're looking at several dozen nuclear power plants going balls out. Let's look at it on the back of this virtual envelope, here...

Okey dokey. How many barrels of oil, equivalent, does the US use per day?

Looking around, I see that the accepted number is about 19 million barrels of oil per day.

(here, here)

A barrel of oil, equivalent is 5.8GJ of energy. So in terms of petroleum energy use per day in the US, you're talking 11.1E7 GJ of petroleum used in the US. A day. Or, about 3E7 megaWatt-hours. A day.

Dividing by 24, we'd need about 1.25 million megawatts of continuous power output. And I'm assuming the F-T/electrolysis conversion is 100% efficient. That's a lot of power. But it's all the petroleum we use. What if we only look at that used for transportation? Surely that can't be as much.

Whoops. It turns out that 70 percent of that IS for transportation use. So that figure is still pretty close, given that your F-T/electrolysis is only going to be about 50% efficient for the entire cycle. So, let's take them at their word, if 70% of that number is for transport, and the process is 70% efficient when they get it tweaked, then you're still looking at 1.25 million megawatts of generation capacity.

A biggish nuclear power plant can make about 1250 megawatts of power. So, 1000 biggish nuclear plants and you're there.

Looked at another way, Ivanpah has, at its peak, put out about 1645 MW-h per day. You need 3E7 MW-h a day to make all the transport fuel the US uses. So you'd need about 18000 Ivanpahs, running at peak efficiency.

originally posted by: N3k9Ni

originally posted by: jtrenthacker
Even if this is successful, I'm not sure this will help much. Fresh water is increasingly becoming more scarce. Not sure what sense it would make to process fuel out of it. The water wars are coming. This would just exacerbate the problem.

Good point. Fresh water could become as expensive as gasoline which would be a bigger problem than we have right now.

?? Water is already more expensive than gasoline by a wide margin. Next time you roll in and fill up, buy yourself a bottle of water too.. then work out the price per gallon for each of the two.

originally posted by: bigfatfurrytexan
fresh water can be made. the problem; the energy it takes to distill it.



If water can be turned into gasoline, or other burnable materials, then the process could be a little less expensive to operate.

For a small price and you can clean it over and over again to use. Buy yourself a berkey water bottle. It has a filter in it. It filters out 99.992 % of contaminents like mercury,lead to name a few and takes out e-coli and so much other stuff. You can use it to drink lake, river, stagnant water . Does not take alot of energy on your part to distill the water, just drink.

A preppers dream come true. The berkey FILTERS. Get the black one.

a reply to: bronco73

Bottled water is so expensive for the simple reason that suckers are prepared to pay that much for what, in many cases, is only tap water with a fancy label on it. In many cases it's even worse than a lot of tap water quality-wise.

originally posted by: N3k9Ni
Well, now. This is quite an interesting development.

A German company is working on turning water and carbon dioxide into
hydrocarbons like diesel, kerosene and gasoline. The process is about 50% efficient right now, but they hope to get it to 70%

Even with the amount of electric vehicles we've seen lately, it's likely going to be a long time until they completely replace traditional combustion engines on the road. So how are we going to get away from pricey fossil fuels until then? Well, water could be a possibility. German company Sunfire GmbH thinks it has the solution for turning H20 and carbon dioxide into liquid hyrdrocarbons like synthetic diesel, kerosene and petrol, according to CNET. It does this in part by using a combination of the Fischer-Tropsch process (a chemical reaction that performs the aforementioned transformation) and solid electrolyzer cells (fuel cells that produce gas forms of hydrogen and oxygen).

link

The US military already has done this and will be deploying the technology on a new ship. The process uses sea water b/c the CO2 is already present and you get hydrogen from splitting the water.

Scientists with the United States Navy say they have successfully developed a way to convert seawater into jet fuel, calling it a potentially revolutionary advancement.

U.S. Navy sea water to fuel

Heat is measured in units of energy, like Joules or BTUs. Temperature is measured in degrees. Very different. Thermometers measure temperature. Something can be quite hot and have little heat.

Thanks for your reply, I gave you a star for the last part, about U.S oil consumption which I thought well reasoned and much food for thought. Firstly though, yes temperature is measured in degrees and it tells us how hot or cold something is, that's what I've been saying all along. What your talking about is the amount of energy measured in Joules heat has. Energy and heat are not the same thing. Heat is just one way in which energy manifests itself. I'm not sure what you mean by saying something can be quite hot and have little heat. The example of a bath full of tepid water and a white hot needle doesn't apply as we first need to divide a substance by its mass to determine how much relative heat energy it has.



The last part of your post is very interesting indeed, perhaps worthy of a thread in its own right IMO.I don't think though they were looking into replacing the oil the world consumes though, rather perhaps creating a more efficient fuel for use in rockets and such. As you have pointed out, it will take more energy to produce the fuel than what will be given back. Its raises a few questions in mind too, firstly why not use oil fired power plants in the first place? If 70% of the energy use in the US (and also I suspect in other developed nations) comes from oil already why bother with nuclear or coal for the other 30%? It can't be so much more cost effective can it? Coal is just as polluting as oil, and Nuclear is extremely toxic when things go wrong. Even if there was never a nuclear disaster the long term storage and de-commissioning of nuclear waste poses many problems. There literally was no long term plan when these power stations were commissioned in the first place, (not above 50 years or so)they simply thought a solution would present itself in the future. Something I find shocking really!
Of course oil is a finite resource and we badly need to find alternatives, but until you posted your figures I didn't realize the developed world was as dependent on it to the shear extent it is.
Perhaps the solution will come from using many different ways and alternatives to reduce our dependency on oil. Rather than hoping for a break through in cold fusion or some such which might never happen. I don't know but it is worrying to be so dependent on oil alone for the vast majority of our energy needs. Not just because it is a finite and polluting resource, but because of the power it wields in the worlds economy not to mention the wars fought over it.