Environment & Energy

The key to doing so was described in 2011.

In 2011, the late great Nobel Laureate George Olah proposed a closed carbon cycle to address the ongoing and accelerating tragedy of what was then called climate change and now should be recognized as extreme global heating:

Anthropogenic Chemical Carbon Cycle for a Sustainable Future George A. Olah, G. K. Surya Prakash, and Alain Goeppert Journal of the American Chemical Society 2011 133 (33), 12881-12898.

Of the two options presented in the paper, DME and its precursor, methanol, neither of which is mutually exclusive, were proposed as the fluid fuels, I favor DME for its low toxicity, facile elimination from water, and its excellent physical properties including a high critical temperature, a low critical pressure, and flexibility:

Quoth Dr. Olah and colleagues in an excerpt:

Dr. Olah's Nobel Prize was awarded for hydrocarbon chemistry.

Catalysts for the direct hydrogenation of CO₂ avoiding the MeOH intermediate are known. I have a rather large collection of papers in my files on this topic, coming under the rubric of "CCU," carbon capture and utilization. CCU is accessible by exergy capture using high temperatures.

DME also makes a fine, if flammable, refrigerant or heat pump fluid with essentially zero global heating potential, having an atmospheric lifetime of around five days

Such a program will not work, by the way, with wind and solar toys, but nuclear hydrogen cycles based, either, to a limited extent on steam (or supercritical water) reforming of carbonaceous waste, dry reforming using CO₂ as an oxidant of reduced organics to CO, or on a potentially far broader scale, direct thermochemical water splitting with the SI or related cycles will work. Currently most work along these lines is being conducted in China. The side product of this type of industrial production, would be electricity in a process intensification scheme; one can calculate potential thermodynamic efficiencies exceeding 70%, even approaching 80% for these types of intensified heat exchange processes.

I am continuously pushing my son to think about refractory materials in nuclear engineering. He is getting excellent preparation in his program for doing exactly that.

These processes have been understood for a long time, but intellectual and commercial laziness has failed to embrace the potential. This is hardly surprising. Doing the right thing will cost money, and usually when the choice is between doing the right thing by spending money and making money by continuing to do the wrong thing, the wrong thing being represented by the status quo, making money by doing the wrong thing wins.

We could do away with a lot of lithium and cobalt mining, and for that matter fossil fuel mining, if we really wanted to do so.

As for all the stupidity and danger connected with hydrogen as a consumer product being marketed here, I will not under any circumstances refrain from stating I inflexibly regard this as nothing more than the promotion of fossil fuels. It often includes a little dishonest evocation of a "solar and wind" fig leaf barely obscuring the nakedness of the act. It's called "bait and switch." I will not be dissuaded from calling the rebranding of fossil fuels as "hydrogen" as anything but a fucking marketing ploy by the fossil fuel industry. I will never apologize for identifying fossil fuel salespeople as, um, fossil fuel salespeople because it represents, clearly to me if no one else, a tautology obviated by an equivalence.

I stand by every word I wrote in this piece: A Giant Climate Lie: When they're selling hydrogen, what they're really selling is fossil fuels.

It's funny to see how the fossil fuel salespeople here rebranding their product as "hydrogen" love to drag out antinuke rhetoric, including insipid whining about Fukushima. The explosion of the Fukushima reactors was a hydrogen explosion, with the hydrogen having been generated by the steam oxidation, when the heat sinks were removed, of zirconium metal (zircalloy) with the concomitant reduction of the steam to hydrogen gas. (Nuclear fuels with cladding to avoid this reaction have been designed and are now undergoing testing.)

I propose the utilization of nuclear heat to generate hydrogen for uses as a captive industrial intermediate (as it is currently used in the ammonia and petroleum industries), in a controlled fashion, obviously not involved with zirconium.

In any case, nuclear energy, and only nuclear energy, has the potential to eliminate the fossil fuel industry. I firmly believe the fossil fuel industry knows this very well. They manage some very smart people into being malignant smart people. They must love the antinuke industry which often works on their behalf for free; I very much doubt they don't.

As you seem to have some familiarity with my writings, you may have seen me post this ad, from Exxon, which I love to post, baldly stating the source of this filthy and dishonest affectation, the lie about there being "green" hydrogen. It's great marketing.

Exxon rebranding fossil fuels as hydrogen:



The dishonesty of the ad borders, or resides completely, in the realm of astounding, but I concede slick lies work, in politics as in 2016, and in energy today.

Have a nice evening.