Development of fuelless powerplants?

Belial666 wrote:The main issue on Earth was that the oil/coal industry had 200+ years of development and refinement before anyone thought to build large-scale solar power plants. That drove the prices down and the efficiency up, and renewable sources had to play catchup in the commercial department. Despite that, commercial applications of such plants have already begun appearing.
After all, oil will eventually run out. Sun in the various deserts won't - and where else are you going to use the Mojave as, anyway?

In Safehold, there is no oil industry yet. Building a large-scale refinery isn't less costly than building a large-scale solar plant if you don't have the industry developed for either yet. Also, there's the whole prohibition of electricity thing.

Take it from me as a geologist, we are not running out of oil by any stretch of the mind. Our reserves of conventional oil are still higher than they have ever been in history. The stores of unconventional hydrocarbons are orders of magnitude larger.

The main issue with solar is the poor energy density and even poorer energy capture rate (throughput). Photovoltaic still only manage to capture and convert less than 15% of the energy that hits their surface (under ideal conditions). Solar-Thermal systems (what you are describing) are only a little better at around 25-35% (depending on latitude). The reason we use coal, oil, natural gas, and (especially) nuclear energy is that they are all energy dense. Solar, wind, and biofuels are by definition less energy dense because they require hundreds and thousands of acres to capture the energy. Whereas the few hundred acres of coal mines in wyoming provide about 20-30% of the electrical demand of the entire us (40% of us electricity is from coal, and 48% of US coal comes from the Powder river basin in WY and MT)

Give me a couple dozen geologists who understand structural traps, a few thousand roughnecks, and extremely primitive refineries and I could replace every candle and whale oil lamp on safehold. The refineries especially are easy, you look at a modern refinery and think they are complicated, and they are, but only because they are trying to change the characteristics of the oil we get out of the ground. We are trying to turn more of the unfavorable fractions of the oil into the more useful (and valuable) fractions. Make the very heavy oils lighter, and the lighter oils heavier into the Petrol/Jet Fuel/Diesel range. If you're willing to settle for the fractions nature gives you there is no need to get any more complicated than a distillation column, which safehold fully understands thanks to the alcohol industry.

Thanks to Merlin the early safeholdian oil industry shouldn't be plagued by the early oil industry on Earth. The rampant overproduction that destroyed fields, and shortened their lifetimes/recovery factors shouldn't happen. That alone would hugely increase the efficiency of manpower needed.

As a possible side benefit if you get a bunch of curious fellows started drilling for oil they are going to start asking where it comes from, why it migrates, and it might not take too long for some clever geologist (safeholdgist?) to start realizing that the oil has been there since before the day of creation..... Curious huh?

Solar plants aren't the best renewable resource - it's why I suggested them for Safehold and not Earth. The best renewable source of power is geothermal. Just drill deep enough (4 miles ought to do), put down an outer pipe made of steel with an inner insulated pipe of ceramics and pump water in the outer pipe, getting supercritical steam in the inner. The obvious reason I did not suggest that for Safehold is that everyone would start screaming about Charis getting power directly from Shan-Wei if Charis did that.


For nuclear power, I got no problems with it. A 500 MWth reactor only weighs a bit over a thousand tons today so a correctly built nuclear plant would be a supertanker-sized ship with 200+ of them, with an output of 50 GWe or so. Park it off-shore somewhere, put out cables and power a small nation. Advantages over land-bound plants include not taking up space, not "polluting" near cities (it wouldn't - but lots of people think it would), huge quantities of water available for cooling in case it's needed, quick relocation when demands rise in other areas, capability to rent it to other nations directly, and last but not least its warship potential. Because a ship capable of 100+ knots and with enough deck space and power supply for dozens of high-power FEL antimissile/antiair/antisatellite arrays when a war comes calling is cool - and effective.



For oil and other hydrocarbons, I see solar, geothermal and nuclear powers as cheaper once the infrastructure for them is set, more easily available, easier to increase production, not limited geographically, and a way to promote technological progress in sciences that have remained undeveloped for far too long.

Aegis99 wrote:As a possible side benefit if you get a bunch of curious fellows started drilling for oil they are going to start asking where it comes from, why it migrates, and it might not take too long for some clever geologist (safeholdgist?) to start realizing that the oil has been there since before the day of creation..... Curious huh?

I don't think the Day of Creation is taught as the day the world was created, but rather the day that Humans were created. They already know there are things on Safehold older than Humans.

Belial666 wrote: For oil and other hydrocarbons, I see solar, geothermal and nuclear powers as cheaper once the infrastructure for them is set, more easily available, easier to increase production, not limited geographically, and a way to promote technological progress in sciences that have remained undeveloped for far too long.

Your statement about renewables having cheaper maintenance costs than comparable fossil fuels sources is incorrect. Per Megawatt hour solar/wind are the most inefficient in terms of both capital and ongoing costs. The Ivanpah project (the large Solar-Thermal project in the Mojave that has been mentioned here) is going to have a full time staff of 300ish, and have a max electrical generation of 392 MW, which ignores capacity (the amount of time that the facility spends actually generating that electricity). Even this facility, built with modern technology, cost 2.2 billion dollars, and does not include any heat storage, meaning even with that massive price tag it won't run at night.

I'll direct you to http://www.eia.gov/forecasts/aeo/er/electricity_generation.cfm which sets out the levelized capital costs. Solar thermal is on the order of 4x times as expensive as conventional coal (in start up cost in other words), in addition to a capacity factor less than 1/4 of a coal plant. That is after 40+ years of trying to get solar to be cost effective. I argue it doesn't make sense in modern economics, much less a muscle powered society where the VAST majority of the population is still involved in simply feeding itself, there is not enough surplus on Safehold to accept that kind of inefficiency.
*edited for clarity

SWM wrote:

Aegis99 wrote:As a possible side benefit if you get a bunch of curious fellows started drilling for oil they are going to start asking where it comes from, why it migrates, and it might not take too long for some clever geologist (safeholdgist?) to start realizing that the oil has been there since before the day of creation..... Curious huh?

I don't think the Day of Creation is taught as the day the world was created, but rather the day that Humans were created. They already know there are things on Safehold older than Humans.

You could sure be right, it had simply been my impression that the Safeholdian creation story was pretty similar to Genesis (just with the Archangels being directly involved).

40 years of a minor portion of total research funds worldwide being devoted to renewable energy sources does not equal 200 years of a significantly higher percentage of research funds being devoted for fossil fuel.
The efficiency and total development of solar power today is comparable to coal mining and use in 1820, and oil extraction and refinement in 1880.
The total development of geothermal power is practically nonexistent.



Speaking of geothermal power, it only needs a steam turbine, some water, and a deep bore. Some boreholes have temperatures as high as 180 C today - producing steam would only require 60-70% of that depth. Steam production would then be limited by number of bores and how quickly one could pump water into them.

Belial666 wrote:40 years of a minor portion of total research funds worldwide being devoted to renewable energy sources does not equal 200 years of a significantly higher percentage of research funds being devoted for fossil fuel.
The efficiency and total development of solar power today is comparable to coal mining and use in 1820, and oil extraction and refinement in 1880.
The total development of geothermal power is practically nonexistent.

You're quite correct, 200 years of fossil fuel experience/R&D has yielded some impressive efficiencies compared to 40 or so for serious efforts for solar. That should highlight my point, however. The EoC can try and spend the next 40 years making solar work (poorly), or they could spend the next 40 years taking coal/oil work better than their current tech allows.

More importantly though is that the heat energy generated by a solar plant can only be used right there. Compared to coal and oil which can be extracted and used elsewhere, that means you can concentrate your big industrial efforts in one place (the oil field for instance), achieve the economy of scale there. Then you can use that energy in thousands of places, at the same time, and in tiny amounts at any given moment. But to work your idea would require that all the effort be put into only place to achieve the economy of scale, which doesn't allow for widespread distribution

Aegis99 wrote:The main issue with solar is the poor energy density and even poorer energy capture rate (throughput). Photovoltaic still only manage to capture and convert less than 15% of the energy that hits their surface (under ideal conditions). Solar-Thermal systems (what you are describing) are only a little better at around 25-35% (depending on latitude). The reason we use coal, oil, natural gas, and (especially) nuclear energy is that they are all energy dense. Solar, wind, and biofuels are by definition less energy dense because they require hundreds and thousands of acres to capture the energy. Whereas the few hundred acres of coal mines in wyoming provide about 20-30% of the electrical demand of the entire us (40% of us electricity is from coal, and 48% of US coal comes from the Powder river basin in WY and MT)

Yeah, but land area is not really important -- sunny desert land is cheap and common. What you need are not really efficient photovoltaics, but really cheap even if inefficient photovoltaics.

Solar constant is 1353 W/m^2. Cut half of that for nighttime, half for atmosphere/clouds, 10% efficiency... that's 33.8 W/m^2. So... 1000 square kilometers is 33.8 gigawatts (Hoover Dam is about 2 GW)... and that's a speck in the US Southwest.

Use 10% of Nevada alone, and that's about 1 Terawatt. If you could transfer the energy without losses, you could power the entire Earth from the unpopulated parts of the US Southwest (though if you paved THAT much with solar panels you would start to have ecological problems.)

I don't think land is the issue.

Belial666 wrote:Solar plants aren't the best renewable resource - it's why I suggested them for Safehold and not Earth. The best renewable source of power is geothermal. Just drill deep enough (4 miles ought to do), put down an outer pipe made of steel with an inner insulated pipe of ceramics and pump water in the outer pipe, getting supercritical steam in the inner.

That sounds trickier than solar, honestly. And it's less expandable (not an issue for Safehold anytime soon, but...) -- Earth gets orders of magnitude more power from the sun than from internal heat.

Cheap solar panels would let us become a civilization using far, far more energy than today -- everybody could have better-than-current-US energy supply, for much less environmental harm. (Not zero-- but far less.)

cralkhi wrote:

Belial666 wrote:Solar plants aren't the best renewable resource - it's why I suggested them for Safehold and not Earth. The best renewable source of power is geothermal. Just drill deep enough (4 miles ought to do), put down an outer pipe made of steel with an inner insulated pipe of ceramics and pump water in the outer pipe, getting supercritical steam in the inner.

That sounds trickier than solar, honestly. And it's less expandable (not an issue for Safehold anytime soon, but...) -- Earth gets orders of magnitude more power from the sun than from internal heat.

Cheap solar panels would let us become a civilization using far, far more energy than today -- everybody could have better-than-current-US energy supply, for much less environmental harm. (Not zero-- but far less.)

One environmental problem generally ignored in the rush to alternative energy sources is that it is an environmental near disaster to produce those photovoltaics. Most of the original processes require, and contaminate with, some very dangerous chemicals to produce the photovoltaics in the first place. For all the semiconductor manufacturing done in silicon valley, the cost is a lot of contaminants burried like some of the WWII era dumps that are now super fund clean up sites. This is the left coast, and we have a lot of environmental concerns, but our need for energy results in a LOT of pollutants being produced for clean energy and materials. Solar photovoltaics may be relatively clean in operation, but they have been anything but to produce. I don't doubt that today's processes are much cleaner than the ones I grew up with, but it is hard to safely dispose of things like arsene gas.