The Dark Green Solution to the Energy Crisis of Peak Oil and Global Warming

The Dark Green Solution to the Energy Crisis of Peak Oil and Global Warming 

It really is this simple:

The luminosity of the Sun has been estimated to be 3.8478 × 10²⁶ watts and the Earth intercepts 1.74 × 10¹⁷  watts while

1.585 × 10¹³  watts was the average total power consumption of the human world in 2005

Anthropogenic warming* of the Earth is a scant 1.6 W per Square Meter

Over the surface of the entire Earth that tiny increase adds up to 7.65 × 10¹⁴watts,  an astounding 48 times the energy consumption of civilization.

graph credit: www.physicalgeography.net

 

The greatest flux of this excess energy in the global weather system circles the earth's mid latitudes in high altitude winds miles above the earth. The greatest store of this energy is in the tropical oceans. The greatest reservoir of potential carbon fuel is the atmosphere.  

 

The knobs have been frobbed.

It's now to time to tweak the dials.

 

The pre-cautionary principle is that even though the danger may not be as bad as feared it is still wise not to push things too far.  Even after Peak Oil atmospheric pollution could get pushed to far worse from the indiscriminate exploitation of known coal resources.

 

It makes sense then to consider removing as much as the surplus energy as possible from the planetary system, along with improving the Earth's air quality.

 

Fortunately there are three affordable technologies that exist now that can re-capture some of that excess energy in the global weather system for human use, and on a scale that could replace fossil fuel entirely by harvesting that extra energy, and scrub the skies of the carbon dioxide that increased it:

a.) high altitude wind power

b.) sea solar power

c.) carbon negative fuels

THE ENERGY IN THE SYSTEM:

WIND AND SUNNY OCEAN WATERS

WIND   credit image to www.SkyWindPower.com 1.7 cents per kWh SkyWindPower.com Kitegen.com Applications: High Altitude Wind Power @ Latitudes  30 to 60 degrees North and South   800 Meter Altitude Wind = 500 MW per station Rapid implementation in the United States could entirely replace the use of coal for producing electricity 3 X times over.

WARM OCEAN credit image to www.SeaSolarPower.com 120 MW at 7 cents per kWh with profitable by-products SeaSolarPower.com Application: "Ocean Thermal Energy Conversion"  for an abundance of Food and Energy, and Practical Carbon Dioxide Sequestration, from Farming the Ocean  @ Equatorial Latitudes 20 degrees North and South OTEC is essentially a reverse refrigeration process that generates electricity from the difference in temperature between surface and deep water.

The sky wind power and ocean thermal energy systems could produce 4X the power now supplied by all sources as electricity for the production of Hydrogen and direct supply to the national power grid, and to a global power grid.  This electrical power is required to re-tool industry and provide for transportation needs.  This is a significant change from the "business-as-usual" of removing ancient carbon from the ground and burning it. That is is not going to stop anytime soon, nor should it stop abruptly.* What must take place that is in order to master the carbon cycle we must reverse the direction of carbon in the global system and take it out of the sky and put it back into the ground.

 O.M.E.G.A. AVIATION FUELS

Offshore Membrane Enclosures to Grow Algae

NASA Envisions "Clean Energy" From Algae Grown in Waste Water

NASA bags algae, wastewater in bid for aviation fuel

"The inspiration I had was to use offshore membrane enclosures to grow algae. We're going to deploy a large plastic bag in the ocean, and fill it with sewage. The algae use sewage to grow, and in the process of growing they clean up the sewage," said Jonathan Trent, the lead research scientist on the Spaceship Earth project at NASA Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, California

Upper Center Gyre is the North Pacific Gyre. At its heart slowly spins the the Pacific Trash Vortex where marine plastic litter collects in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. It covers about half a million square miles. 

OMEGA farms in just 5% of this area will be able to produce 10 times as much fuel for all US transportation needs as is required.   There are four other gyres, and millions of miles of coastal waters. 

Uploaded to Youtube.com by SmartPlanetCBS on Jul 6, 2010

NASA scientist Jonathan Trent is developing a smarter way to turn algae into oil. He's created plastic osmotic containers that will float below the surface of the ocean, grow algae, and then help it bloom into oil. He says the new method is more beneficial because algae can grow in a larger area and doesn't compete with agricultural land.

Managing the Carbon in the System:

to produce Agrichar and Carbon Negative fuels

Liquid Fuels are the backbone of industry and transportation. The existing infrastructure would be very expensive to replace. Preserving the utility of the liquid fuel infrastructure in a post-petroleum world requires alternative liquid fuels.

The post-petroleum fuels are going to come from biomass.  Of these there are two broad categories: terrestrial biomass and marine biomass.

On land the the key is to make biochar, with biofuel and electricity as byproducts,  fertilize the soil and sequester carbon in the soil.

On the open ocean the key is to grow algae in floating bioreactors fertilized with sewage.

Terrestrial Biomass: The key is to exploit biomass for economic efficiency in agriculture and that means, paradoxically, exploiting "biomass energy" at less than 50% economic efficiency worldwide. In a world used to thinking of maximizing profits "bio-fuel", particularly ethanol and bio-desiel in most cases, is a scheme for disaster for billions of people. It is a raw power grab by hunger.

The good news is that billions of people, the farmers, are needed to do something about the carbon, by drawing it down out the sky with good old fashioned photo-synthesis to sequester that carbon in the soil and improve crop yields with agrichar.

It's easy, rather than burn a bunch of biomass down to the dottle of a little ash and extract as much of the energy out of it as you can, instead to get the job done right is to burn it only halfway and put the rest of that energy stock away as unburnt carbon into the soil.

 Locally, within a radius of 20 miles, for rural communities worldwide, the process of pyrolysis of purpose grown biomass energy crops such as hemp, kenaf, switchgrass, wood trimmings, and also crop residues to produce electricity and biochar, and some methanol rather than a lot of ethanol. 

The technology is open source: Producer's Gas: Just don't run the system at full tilt for profit at the pump rather than enriching the soil as is due, if you want it to keep running.

                                                                             The important caveat: the production of liquid fuels from biomass can not totally replace liquid fossil fuels. It is important to produce at least 150 to 200 kilos of charcoal from every ton of biomass, and to sequester that charcoal as "agrichar" and "biochar" to the soil to restore its fertility and improve its moisture and mineral retention too, to ensure that the process is better than "carbon neutral".  To be carbon negative best practices demand that the energy yield be secondary to putting down carbon to soil beds that grow better food crops, not more fuel.

Take a look at this diagram:

Biomass on the left vs. Fossil Fuels on the right 

Best Practices mandates that the production of transportation fuel from biomass does not exceed Carbon Negative values. No more than 30% at best of liquid fuels can be replaced by "bio-fuel"  see http://www.gatech.edu/newsroom/release.html?id=844  and remembering the caveat that you have to put down carbon from the process in best practices the actual ratio of replacement can't be more than 15% of current rate of use in 2003.

Civilization as it is energized now consumes rather than produces energy: the human species has developed a detrivorous civilization gobbling up the natural stores of energy gradually pooling in rock for countless millennia. To survive humanity must find its ecological niche and thereby earn its survival by becoming a civilization that produces the energy it uses.

The three energy schemes listed above can actually quadruple the amount of energy available for human use, and then in time as the oil, gas, and coal near exhaustion, humanity can still have an energy budget fully 3 times what it uses today.

There is one last part to the equations for mastering the carbon cycle: people.   In the rush to embrace these solutions, to provide energy and food and lots of productive good useful employment, you can get too much of a good thing. The exponential growth of human population could not be sustained.  Whether it is popular or not some form of population control must come into existence, and to some extent has already come into being: Better it be by education, prosperity and political will of the nations working together rather than the law of conquest or, ultimately, the hard and merciless limits imposed by the laws of thermodynamics.