Tuesday, January 8, 2013

Starving the world's poor

to feed green biofuels  link via Instapundit

Quote:
The world needs a smart green movement. Barring that, a green movement that bothered to think through consequences and make a serious cost benefit analysis on its proposals would be an immense improvement over the shambles we have now. [ emphasis added]

Hallelujah to that.  You can produce ammonia using the Kvaerner Process on fossil fuels plus the Haber Process to make ammonia.  You can burn ammonia in internal combustion engines.  No carbon dioxide is produced.  All of this is possible today.  That would be smart.  The current policy is stupid.

To add further, the book I read over the last couple days described how well the Shuttle fuel cells worked.  If you were to ship the ammonia to the point of sale, you could remove the nitrogen from the ammonia, which leaves your hydrogen.  Then cryolyze the hydrogen and run your fuel cell vehicle on it.

The Shuttle's fuel cells do not use expensive platinum.  But it isn't suitable for use as it is.  But you can get around that.  How?  What you could do is to use the cryolyzed hydrogen to fix the oxygen out of the atmosphere and then run pure hydrogen and fixed oxygen through the fuel cell.  The Shuttle fuel cell can't use the atmosphere as is because carbon dioxide in the atmosphere will foul it.  Those adaptions will solve that little problem.

So, with the less expensive fuel cell and system to make zero carbon hydrogen, you could solve the global warming problem and energy problem in one fell swoop.

It's all under their noses and they don't even know it.  Stupid.

Update:

It is also stupid for the government to mandate ethanol in gasoline as it harms the engine.  If ammonia was substituted instead, it would actual enhance performance and longevity of the engine.  The government's idea was to make it more green, but as is seen above, this isn't necessary.  As a matter of fact, it isn't even green and it is costly.


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