NNadir
NNadir's JournalSome Insight Into the Energy Costs Associated with Direct Air Capture of Carbon Dioxide.
The paper to which I will briefly refer in this post is this one: Exploring Geometric Properties and Cycle Design in Packed Bed and Monolith Contactors Using Temperature-Vacuum Swing Adsorption Modeling for Direct Air Capture, Valentina Stampi-Bombelli and Marco Mazzotti, Industrial & Engineering Chemistry Research 2024 63 (45), 19728-19743.
It is - often rightly - remarked that the concept of direct air capture, (DAC) is a means, like hyping "hydrogen" to rebrand fossil fuels as "green," is a potentially a pathway to greenwashing fossil fuels. This argument has some merit. This said, because we have left future generations with a destroyed planetary atmosphere, the research is, to my mind, worthy, since, depending on the resources available to them - which are diminishing in our orgy of consumerism coupled with wishful thinking - they may wish to attempt restoration of the world that once was, should the concept of "history" survive, which it may not do in Orwellian times.
The problem is that to capture CO2 from the air, or for that matter, flue gas, requires energy, significant quantities of it. The more dilute the CO2 is, the more energy is required to overcome the entropy of mixing. In addition, if one wishes to put the CO2 to use, rather than to propose vast unsustainable CO2 dumps, which are in fact, like hydrogen, an approach to greenwashing dangerous fossil fuels.
I have my own ideas about DAC, which involve process intensification using air based Brayton cycles, with both electricity and CO2 being side products, rather than the main product, by increasing exergy capture, essentially increasing the recovery of thermal energy, i.e., raising the energy efficiency in the use of nuclear generated heat.
The text refers to the 2015 Paris Agreement on what was then called "climate change" and to which I now refer as "extreme global heating," as this is what we now observe in our Godotian approach to energy, which is to wait for a so called "renewable energy" nirvana that did not come, is not here, and won't come. In Beckett's "Waiting for Godot," Vladimir and Estragon consider suicide, whereas in waiting for the so called "renewable energy" nirvana, we are actively committing suicide, slowly, by degrees, literally and figuratively, a less than minor difference. What is relevant to the issue is not the details of the paper, which is wonderful as a tool in considering the issues of gas/liquid equilibria expressed in mathematical terms, but rather some insight to the energy cost of direct air capture. This is the energy associated with overcoming the entropy of mixing by taking concentrated carbon - what the dangerous fossil fuels were before combustion and dealing with them in a dilute form, the low, but dangerously rising levels found in air.
From the text:
In alignment with the 2015 Paris Agreement, global efforts to limit warming to a 1.5 °C increase above preindustrial levels call for substantial reductions in CO2 emissions. (1) Although decarbonizing mobility, households, industry, and power generation is crucial, these measures are slow to implement and incomplete, leaving residual emissions in so-called hard-to-abate sectors that need to be addressed. Thus, negative emission technologies (NETs) that allow for carbon dioxide removal (CDR) from the atmosphere, such as afforestation, bioenergy with carbon capture and storage, and direct air capture and carbon storage, play a vital role. Direct air capture (DAC), a technology that extracts CO2 directly from the atmosphere, emerges as a promising CDR technology. Employing both solid sorbents (adsorption) and liquid solvents (absorption), DAC research and deployment are brought forward by both academia and industry, with companies like Climeworks, Global Thermostat, and Carbon Engineering leading the way. The lower energy demand for sorbent regeneration in adsorption offers an advantage over absorption (with heats of desorption of ca. 40–90 kJ/mol vs 200 kJ/mol in adsorption and absorption, respectively (2,3)), yet DAC’s widespread adoption hinges on resolving significant technical and economic challenges.
The low concentration of CO2 and the unavoidable humidity in the air are two of the primary challenges associated with DAC. As a result, a large portion of DAC research has centered around developing materials with high CO2 capacity and selectivity over N2 and O2, (4,5) evaluating sorbent stability (4,6−8) and accurately characterizing CO2–H2O coadsorption. (9−13) Amine-functionalized materials have emerged as promising sorbents, offering high CO2 capacities even in dilute CO2 conditions, often enhanced in humid environments. (12,14,15) However, despite their favorable thermodynamic properties, amine-functionalized sorbents have been shown to exhibit kinetic limitations. (11,16−20) Various studies have shown that external and internal diffusion resistances in the gas phase are the limiting mechanisms defining the adsorption kinetics, (20−22) with their limitations increasing as the feed concentration decreases. (21,22) This is particularly relevant in DAC, where a low CO2 concentration significantly affects gas-phase mass transport, contributing to slow kinetics, early breakthrough, and inefficient sorbent utilization. Experimental characterization of mass transfer kinetics under conditions relevant to DAC remains sparse despite its critical importance. (12,22,23) However, precise modeling of these dynamics is essential, as evidenced by the significant impact that the mass transfer coefficient, k, has on DAC performance through cyclic temperature-vacuum swing adsorption calculations. (24−26)
Another major challenge associated with the dilute CO2 concentration in the feed is that large volumetric amounts of air need to be processed to capture a significant amount of CO2. Coupled with the desire to operate at high air velocities to maintain short cycle times, this requirement might result in a large pressure drop across the air–solid contactor, thus increasing the energy demand of the blowers. Given that pressure drop increases with longer beds, lower bed porosities, and higher velocities, (27,28) it is intuitive to reduce bed lengths or to increase bed porosities to accommodate high air velocities. Multiple new contactor designs have been proposed to achieve the goal of reducing pressure drop while trying to maintain a compact structure. These include thin-layered packed beds arranged in compact geometries, such as radial bed contactors, (12,24−26,29−33) and structured sorbents like laminates (34) and monoliths, (2,21,23,30,31,35−40) which are compact and feature high porosities. Monoliths have gained particular attention due to their wide use in the catalyst industry and readiness at a technical level. With their parallel channel configuration, they have been shown not only to reduce pressure drop but also to enhance mass transfer kinetics in point-source CO2 capture applications, (41−46) thereby also potentially addressing the kinetic limitations inherent in DAC. Both packed bed and monolith structures present distinct advantages and drawbacks for DAC applications, each influenced by current technological and commercial realities. (28) Monoliths, although beneficial for their lower pressure drops and higher mass transfer rates, are typically constrained by lower sorbent loadings, while at the same time, monoliths tailored for DAC are not readily commercially available. On the other hand, packed beds exhibit a higher pressure drop but benefit from high sorbent loadings and the availability of commercially viable pelletized sorbents like Lewatit VP OC 1065 for easier scalability...
What is interesting is the sentence I have bolded, which gives the energy cost of two approaches, absorption and adsorption, to regeneration.
A mole of carbon dioxide (its molecular weight) is 44.0095 grams. This means to regenerate the adsorptive agent, it will take a minimum of 40 kJ of energy to regenerate an adsorptive agent to capture 44.01 grams of CO2.
Ignoring land use changes, it appears that emissions from the combustion of dangerous fossil fuels, as of 2023 is on the order of 37.8 billion tons per year.
Breakdown of Carbon Emissions by Source; 2003-2023
This translates to 3.78 X 1016 grams of CO2 which further translates to 8.59 X 1014moles of CO2.
This means that for the low end of adsorptive cost 40 kJ per mole, the energy requirement of carbon free energy would be roughly 34.4 Exajoules (EJ) of energy. This is slightly more than twice the 16 Exajoules that our multitrillion dollar combined solar and wind energy produced in 2023 for all purposes, this on a planet that was consuming 642 EJ in that year.
IEA World Energy Outlook 2024
Table A.1a: World energy supply Page 296.
At the upper limit for adsorptive processes, 90 kJ/mole, the energy requirement would be 77.3 EJ.
For the absorptive process, at 200 kJ/mole, the energy cost would be 171 EJ.
In the "percent talk" used to justify the useless solar and wind industries, at 40 kJ/mole, 90 kJ/mole, and 200 kJ, these energy costs are respectively 5.3%, 12.0%, and 26.8% of the current world energy supply, not to do any useful work, merely to remove a year's worth of carbon dioxide.
Note that this is simply to capture carbon dioxide from the air - that is to over overcome the entropy of mixing, not to reduce it to a liquid or solid form, which will require reproducing all of the energy, and then some (for the entropy of combustion/reduction) that put it there in the first place, nor to compress it for the putative fantasy of building huge geological carbon dioxide dumps that will inevitably leak but, like the hydrogen fantasy, is pure fossil fuel greenwashing bullshit.
It is feasible, to my mind, to recover more energy from nuclear fuels than is currently captured in the major usage thus far, which is simply to generate thermodynamically degraded electricity. But the technology for doing this is "pie-in-the-sky" as of now. We're in deep shit. I don't really weep for us on this score. We clearly never gave a shit. I do weep, instead, for future generations.
History will not forgive us, nor should it.
Happy New Year.
A Long Positive Review of a Very Bad Idea in Energy: Joule Heating for Chemical and Material Processes.
I will very briefly refer to a paper in the literature I came across this morning, this one: Design and Application of Joule Heating Processes for Decarbonized Chemical and Advanced Material Synthesis Anthony Griffin, Mark Robertson, Zoe Gunter, Amy Coronado, Yizhi Xiang, and Zhe Qiang Industrial & Engineering Chemistry Research 2024 63 (45), 19398-19417.
It starts out well enough, with a statement of some facts and figures. To wit:
...Approximately 80% of the energy consumed in the U.S. chemical industry is related to heat generation, which is most commonly through the combustion of fossil fuels. (14,35) In these processes, thermal energy is required to preheat the reactants and maintain the reactor to desired temperatures in order to produce chemicals and materials at scale. Specifically, for the highly endothermic reaction processes, an array of up to 100 tubular catalytic reactors is positioned within a gas burner furnace for optimal heat distribution within the catalyst bed. This external heating/burning process through the combustion of fossil fuels leads to several sustainability challenges: 1) Heating across the volume of the reactor/catalyst-bed in many cases is not uniform, the steep temperature gradients can lead to side/undesired products or reduced conversion efficiency. 2) Start-up and shut-down times for these reactors can be very lengthy due to their large volumes, resulting in further energy consumption, fossil fuel combustion, and GHG emissions. 3) Insufficient heat flux requires the generation of temperatures much greater than that of the desired reaction to ensure sufficient heat transfer throughout the entirety of the reactor volume, ultimately leading to large amounts of heat waste...
The proposal of the paper is "electrify everything." Joule heating is electrical heating. This is a popular, if insanely stupid, idea.
The problem with this is very much the same as the bullshit handed out by people trying to greenwash fossil fuels by rebranding them "hydrogen," this at a cost of profound exergy destruction: Electricity, by its nature is a thermodynamically degraded form of energy that is decidedly not "green," to use the now highly bastardized term, "green." Electricity on this planet is overwhelmingly made by the combustion of dangerous fossil fuels with the waste dumped directly into the planetary atmosphere, where it is rapidly degrading it.
In my "if you only have a hammer, every problem is a nail" nature, the obvious solution to addressing the problem of the industrial requirement for the production of heat is process intensification, the use of nuclear heat directly with electricity being a side product.
Enough said...
Happy New Year.
Did Elon Musk's Political Gambit Costs Tesla? 40% Sales Drop in Europe Raises Alarm
Did Elon Musk's Political Gambit Costs Tesla? 40% Sales Drop in Europe Raises AlarmI would hope so: "The electric car is green" fantasy was never worth much to me after I looked into the matter, but many of the people who did buy into the fantasy were "leftish." They cared about the environment, albeit not with any sophistication about the realities of popular beliefs about what is and is not "green," "green" being a badly abused word in modern times.
His Maggotcy King Elon is not likely to go broke, but reducing his resources to reestablish apartheid and other unworthy disgusting immoral ideas he supports is a good idea.
In Source Fragmentation of PFAS in Mass Spectrometry Complicates the Identification of These Ubiquitous Pollutants.
The paper to which I'll briefly refer in this post is this one: Unravel the in-Source Fragmentation Patterns of Per- and Polyfluoroalkyl Substances during Analysis by LC-ESI-HRMS Ke Wang, Runyun Wang, Wenyu Shan, Zilin Yang, Yinjuan Chen, Lei Wang, and Yanyan Zhang Environmental Science & Technology 2024 58 (51), 22766-22776.
One of the major environmental problems before the world, which faces vast problems, the most dire of which is the collapse of the planetary atmosphere, is the problem of PFAS (Per and Poly Fluorinated Substances) caused by the widespread use of these compounds in many technologies and products, the most famous of which is Teflon, but hardly limited to it. Technologies responsible for this pollution include fire fighting foams, hydrogen fuel cells, lubricants and other members of a long list of compounds.
Often attempts to replace these compounds with others results in new compounds that are as bad, or even worse, than the compound they were designed to replace.
A big problem is that there are literally thousands of PFAS molecules, and the paper is useful for giving some insight, albeit limited, to the diversity of these compounds, complicated by their degradation pathways in the environment which leads to other, potentially toxic, unknown products.
The paper is somewhat esoteric and concerns the most powerful analytical technique in chemistry in my opinion, mass spectrometry, and represents, for lack of a better term, a Heisenbergian case, where looking at the system results in changes to the system that may complicate the observation.
From the text:
Although only molecular ions are desired, in-source fragmentation (ISF) inevitably occurs even in a soft ESI source and generates fragment ions. (13) These ISF ions coelute with molecular ions, and failure to distinguish them can lead to misannotation of MS features. (14) This increases data complexity and uncertainty during nontarget analysis and transformation product identification, undermining the credibility of newly identified structures and potentially resulting in misinterpretation of degradation mechanisms. (13) The negative impacts of ISF have been well-recognized in omics analysis of biological samples. (12-14) Nevertheless, the ISF patterns of analytes resemble those of CID in tandem MS. (13,15) Thus, ISF is often used to provide pseudo-MS2 spectra, enabling the acquisition of additional structural information during nontarget analysis. (16,17) In practice, ISF features are primarily identified based on the coelution pattern with molecular ions, their presence in the MS2 spectra of molecular ions, and their similar fragmentation patterns to those of CID. (13)
ISF of PFAS has been noted in recent studies but has yet to be systematically characterized in LC-ESI-HRMS. Strong ISF has been observed for perfluoroalkyl ether carboxylates (PFECA) at the weak ether group with relatively low bond dissociation energies (BDE), which helped the discovery of new compounds but also reduces or even eliminates the signal intensity of molecular ions, resulting in poor sensitivity during quantitative analysis. (18-20) ISF has successfully facilitated the identification of new PFAS classes, including chlorine (Cl-PFCA, ClCnF2nCO2–) or hydro-substituted perfluorocarboxylates (H-PFCA, HCnF2nCO2– ). (17) For Cl-PFCA, the elimination of Cl– and the neutral loss of CO2 ([M-44 ]- ) occur in ESI, whereas the neutral loss of CO2HF ([M–64]− ) is observed for H-PFCA. (17) In a few studies, ISF ions from neutral loss of CO2 and/or HF were found in the full scan MS1 spectra of carboxylic PFAS, though they were not explicitly mentioned. (21-23) Coelution correlation has been proposed for use in finding ISF ions in some newly developed nontarget screening tools. (24)
The inadvertent oversight of ISF has led to the misannotation of PFAS structures during nontarget analysis and transformation product identification. For instance, previously identified unsaturated perfluorinated alcohols were suspected to be ISF ions of PFCA (CnF2n+1CO2–) following a rearrangement process in the ion source. (25,26) ISF ions (CnF2n+1–, [M-44 ]- ) resulting from neutral loss of CO2 were erroneously recognized as degradation products of perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA), undermining the reliability of the proposed degradation pathways. (27)...
...Herein, we comprehensively analyzed the ISF potentials of 82 PFAS in 12 distinct classes using LC-ESI-HRMS, aiming to represent a significant portion of the structures found in the environment. We identified the PFAS classes and structure characteristics that are susceptible to ISF and proposed seven ISF pathways...
To give an idea of the variability of these compounds - note that the are representatives of classes of compounds - one can look at this figure from the paper:
The caption:
Note that the perfluoroethers were designed to ameliorate the risks of the straight chain perfluorinated substances, but it is recognized that they are probably problematic in their own right, although they may degrades somewhat more easily.
A somewhat technical discussion of the fragmentation mechanisms of in source fragmentation:
A technical listing of adjustments to parameters in the mass spectrometer and the behavior of the molecules. (Note that the instrument used in the paper was a low level Orbitrap, an Exploris 120, and not one of the more sophisticated mass spectrometers now available.)
This paper strikes me as important.
I was amused some time ago by an antinuke here - now residing happily on my ignore list - remarked that I am subject to the "if your only tool is a hammer, every problem is a nail" cliche, which is accurate. Most of the environmental solutions that occur to me involve radiation. I propose that the ultimate destruction of PFAS, perhaps after adsorptive removal and regeneration of solid phase adsorbents so utilized, is radiolytic, using fission products as a source of radiation in basic solutions in a Brayton cycle nuclear power plant with air as the working fluid. This process will necessarily involve many intermediates before mineralization to fluoride salts and carbon dioxide, and it will be important to track these, especially given the wide range of compounds involved.
Regrettably, we do not as of now have enough radioactive materials to make much of a dent in these pathways, and air based Brayton cycles for nuclear reactors are not under design anywhere to my knowledge, but I've told my kid about it, and members of the faculty, post docs and grad students at his institutions with whom he's raised the point of fission product driven degradation of PFAS have, as I've understood it, universally understood that it's a good idea.
Exposure of the air to radiation fields may serve a similar advantage.
Have a happy New Year.
My Son's Other Christmas Present For Me: Rocks to Save the World.
I remarked over in the history forum that my family gave me some gifts offering a shred of political hope: To Assuage My Despair For America: Two History Books My Family Gave Me for Christmas.
My youngest son, the nuclear engineering Ph.D. student, gave me Fears of a Setting Sun
He also gave me this: Uranium Ore Fragments
I have argued, and will continue to argue, that it may not be necessary to mine uranium for centuries if we recover the energy in so called "depleted uranium" using breeder systems and lanthanide (rare earth) mine tailings containing significant quantities of thorium.
This said, I rather like the gift, since uranium is the key to saving the world, even if his Maggotcy King Musk is a threat to losing the world.
There's nothing wrong with having a shred of hope.
To Assuage My Despair For America: Two History Books My Family Gave Me for Christmas.
One I requested on my extended family's "Secret Santa" list: Jon Meacham's And Then There Was Light, Abraham Lincoln and the American Struggle.
I have at home a significant Library of Lincoln biographies, but could not be tired of reading yet another. I have only read the prologue and the first chapter so far, and was startled to learn things that I did not know, particularly relating to the backwoods religious origins of Lincoln's anti-slavery views, insights to his youth that struck me as original. It promises to be an interesting read.
My youngest son, who knows how I despair for the future of our country under King Musk and his light brained sock puppet, Deluded Don, gave me an interesting book delineating, apparently, how the founders of the United States despaired for its future, Dennis Rasmussen's Fears of a Setting Sun, The Disillusionment of America's Founders.
The title refers to the remark of Benjamin Franklin, the inventor of the United States, who on the closing of the Constitutional Convention, is said to have remarked on the sun engraved in the back (then) Chairman, George Washington, "“I have often looked at that sun behind the President without being able to tell whether it was rising or setting. But now at length I have the happiness to know that it is a rising and not a setting sun.”
Asked on leaving the convention what kind of government the conventioneers had given the people, he said "A republic, if you can keep it."
I haven't opened it yet, but look forward to reading it, perhaps to find a shred of waning hope.
From the promotional literature:
As Dennis Rasmussen shows, the founders’ pessimism had a variety of sources: Washington lost his faith in America’s political system above all because of the rise of partisanship, Hamilton because he felt that the federal government was too weak, Adams because he believed that the people lacked civic virtue, and Jefferson because of sectional divisions laid bare by the spread of slavery. The one major founder who retained his faith in America’s constitutional order to the end was James Madison, and the book also explores why he remained relatively optimistic when so many of his compatriots did not. As much as Americans today may worry about their country’s future, Rasmussen reveals, the founders faced even graver problems and harbored even deeper misgivings.
It is terrifying to think of that senile old badly educated, ignorant, sybaritic narcissistic freak, Trump, once again ensconced in the highest office in the land, appointing cranks and morons and traitors to high office, and I have come to see this as the end of the Republic which we kept long but is now dying by suicide, but if there's any solace, we can see in history - not that we should expect it to repeat - that threats to our national state are not new, and they have been overcome.
I don't think we will overcome this one, but neither is it impossible that we will.
Bioavailability and Toxicity of Critical Metals: A Focus on Indium and Zinc.
The paper to which I'll refer in this post is this one: A Multidisciplinary Approach That Considers Occurrence, Geochemistry, Bioavailability, and Toxicity to Prioritize Critical Minerals for Environmental Research, Sarah Jane O. White, Tyler J. Kane, Kate M. Campbell, Marie-Noële Croteau, Michael Iacchetta, Johanna M. Blake, Charles A. Cravotta III, Bethany K. Kunz, Charles N. Alpers, Jill A. Jenkins, and Katherine Walton-Day, Environmental Science & Technology 2024 58 (51), 22519-22527
The article is open sourced; anyone can read it.
It caught my eye because there used to be a dumb person around here, a rote antinuke, who wanted to carry on about how the supply of indium was so large that we could cover all the deserts in the US with CIGS (cadmium-indium-gallium selenide) solar cells, this in response to my claim that the solar industry - which has been useless in addressing the extreme global heating - faces materials limitations. I pointed to indium, a relatively rare element that is generally found as an impurity in zinc ores. (The indium fraction used to be discarded as mine tailings; these tailings are now considered a resource for the element, which has important uses in electronics, in particular touch screens, in the form of ITO, indium tin oxide.)
It is probably the case that CIGS solar cells are nowhere near as toxic as cadmium telluride solar cells might prove to be, a subject on which I touched here recently:
Comparing the Desert Sun Solar Facility with Diablo Canyon Nuclear Plant: Energy, Cost, and Land Area.
Pedro Amado Petroli, Priscila Silva Silveira Camargo, Rodrigo Andrade de Souza, Hugo Marcelo Veit, Assessment of toxicity tests for photovoltaic panels: A review, Current Opinion in Green and Sustainable Chemistry, Volume 47, 2024, 100885
From the article's conclusions:
The person who used to access geological survey web pages to say that the world will never run out of indium may still be here; I don't know; I have an extensive "ignore list" here.
To me, it doesn't matter whether there is enough indium to create a putative promised but never realized so called "renewable energy" nirvana. I oppose the solar industry on the environmental grounds that its mineral and land requirements are odious, and that the expenditure of trillions of dollars on it has had no result other than to make the collapse of the planetary atmosphere accelerate.
The Disastrous 2024 CO2 Data Recorded at Mauna Loa: Yet Another Update 12/08/2024
Anyway, again, the paper is open sourced, anyone can read it. Some excerpts for convenience:
Because the U.S. Critical Minerals list (2) originates from a legislative mandate, “critical minerals” is a general term that is not strictly technical. The list includes a combination of elements and minerals; for this research prioritization effort, for tractability, we will discuss the primary element of interest associated with each mineral and will refer to them as “critical elements” (Table S1).
Increasing recovery and use of critical elements can enhance mobilization, environmental distribution, and exposures, with unexplored or unanticipated effects on biota and ecosystem health. For example, mineral extraction and processing often increase initial element concentrations by orders of magnitude in recovered concentrates or wastes, compounding the potential for harmful environmental release and exposure. However, the effects of increased exposures are difficult to predict because of substantial data gaps in geochemistry, bioavailability, and toxicity for many critical elements. At the same time, understanding the behavior of critical elements during processing and in wastes is the first step in improving their recovery and minimizing environmental impact. Given the large number of critical elements (∼50 on the most recent U.S. list (Table S1)) and the growing urgency to increase production, how do governments, regulators, scientists, and industries identify research priorities to help ensure that critical elements are recovered, refined, used, reused, and disposed in a sustainable, environmentally responsible manner?
A few studies have prioritized elements for research based on a single topic area (e.g., criticality, health impacts) using criteria such as geographic origin of current supplies, availability of alternative resources, anthropogenic disturbance of natural elemental cycles, and data availability for biomarkers and health impacts. For example, in determining which elements should be placed on the U.S. Critical Minerals list, Nassar et al. (1,8) developed metrics for essentiality and vulnerability to supply chain disruption by which they could prioritize criticality...
...More than 1,200 publications published through March 2023 were categorized into 11 review categories (Figure 2 and SI References). Of the critical elements considered, zinc had the 14th highest number of reviews (49), and indium the 34th highest (22). This ranking would elevate indium’s priority for study (Figure 3). There are more zinc reviews focused on “Bioavailability/Toxicity” than any other category, whereas the “Geochemistry/Geology” category was dominant for indium. Both elements are missing representation in the “Microorganisms” category, which encompasses reviews focused predominantly on microbial-element interactions. The distribution of review articles across the critical elements likely has been driven by factors such as known human and environmental health effects, technological and industrial use, as well as historic economic value...
A graphic from the paper:
The caption:
Happy New Year, even if 2025 is going to be, in my opinion, a form of hell.
My wife's upstairs baking cookies for visiting my in laws; one of my sons is still wrapping, gifts await and I'm...
...down in my messy home office playing around with ideas on a modified hydrogen cycle I described in a post here:
I came across an interesting very old thermochemical hydrogen cycle.
I came up with a way to integrate it into the SI hydrogen cycle.
It's a great last Christmas in the American Democracy before it falls to His Maggotcy King Musk.
Merry Christmas to you all.
On my first visit to a therapist in my life, decades ago, the conversation was about...
...my inability to properly wrap presents, which I described as the height of "anomie." I was over-dramatic I guess.
After five decades, it hasn't gotten any better. Some of the wrapping jobs I just did look like gifts from Ted Kaczynski.
My therapist wasn't very helpful, but he was sure to let me know that he knew what the word "anomie," was and that it was a Durkheim coinage.
As it happened, I didn't get better; I got worse, but eventually I got over that, but as for wrapping presents...
My ability to wrap hasn't gotten any better over 5 decades.
As for the therapist, my housemate recommended him, as he was my housemate's therapist. It wasn't, of course, the therapist's job to teach me how to wrap presents, but I didn't learn much else from him other than some therapists are way better than others, and sometimes you just have to cut your losses.
My housemate killed himself, seriously, jumped off a bridge named after his uncle. This actually happened.
I guess never learning how to wrap presents was a minor thing, comparatively.
A happier thought, nothing is ever as bad as the worst, at least most of the time.
A very merry, if Debbie Downerish, Christmas for those who are Christmas types, and happy Saturnian festivals for Pagan types, and happy Credit Card day for atheist types.
I came across an interesting very old thermochemical hydrogen cycle.
I like to mock the bullshit around here dragging out the tiresome fantasies (or Exxon type promotional stuff) to greenwash fossil fuels as "hydrogen" - this with exergy destruction, lowering the energy value of the fossil fuels themselves - and so I've taken to posting articles from decades ago when the ideas around this bullshit first started appearing. Same shit; same thermodynamics.
A recent example of such a post on these regressive ideas is this one: A solar-hydrogen economy for U.S.A., which dates from 41 years ago.
In that post I called up a paper that seemed less stupid then than it clearly is now, now that the trillion dollar "solar will save" fantasy has been explored and has soaked up trillions of dollars for no result other than the destruction of wilderness and continued reliance on dangerous fossil fuels, the use of which is growing faster than ever.
The paper linked in the post was this one: A solar-hydrogen economy for U.S.A., International Journal of Hydrogen Energy, Volume 8, Issue 5, 1983, Pages 323-340.
All this said, hydrogen is an important captive industrial reagent, which is appropriately handled by highly trained chemical engineers, the production of which the world food supply now depends owing to the industrial Haber-Bosch process to make ammonia, and thus I am interested in realistic, not pie-in-the-sky so called "renewable energy" schemes to make it. Thus I am interested in thermochemical hydrogen production scheme using nuclear heat; many variants are known, my favorite being one of the first considered, the sulfur/iodine cycle.
When opening the old journal about putative "solar hydrogen" I came across another paper that caught my eye this one:
O.H. Krikorian, P.K. Shell, The utilization of ZnSO4 decomposition in thermochemical hydrogen cycles, International Journal of Hydrogen Energy, Volume 7, Issue 6, 1982, Pages 463-469.
It posits a modification of the SI cycle relying on the decomposition of ZnSO4 to generate SO2 and includes a selenium intermediate.
The reactions are these:
It's funny because just the other day, while driving, I was musing on the decomposition of H2Te, tellurium being a congener of both selenium and sulfur, so it caught my eye.
I immediately upon coming across this cycle, began to think of paths to eliminate sulfur from the series of reactions and have begun poking around in the literature for the properties of ZnSeO4; I'll discuss these ideas with my son who is visiting for the holidays.
I've thought about zinc based thermochemical hydrogen cycles, and have thought about the SI cycle as well. This new variant is either syncretic or completely different. I've filed these papers under ZnO cycles in my directories.
I wish you the happiest of holidays; and I hope you're enjoying a successful engagement with the consumer stuff festival.
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