Safehold Oil and Gas Industry

Weird Harold wrote:
New York city once had electric streetcars powered by Niagra Falls

Toronto still has electric streetcars that are powered by Niagara Falls, at least partially. Not to mention the Pickering, Darlington, and Bruce nuclear power plants.

I'm not too sure how much of our power still comes from the Falls. I rather suspect that these days most of the output of Adam Beck #2 has been blotted up by the time you reach Brown's Line

Keith_w wrote:

Weird Harold wrote:
New York city once had electric streetcars powered by Niagra Falls

Toronto still has electric streetcars that are powered by Niagara Falls, at least partially. Not to mention the Pickering, Darlington, and Bruce nuclear power plants.

What does one use to provide the heat to generate the steam? So far as I can see, there is still no reasonably compact alternative to fossil fuels for doing that, and the point has already been made that it will have problems providing instant power. The reason that steam locomotives worked so well was the very low rolling resistance of a steel wheel on a steel rail. If the Stanley Steamer had worked better, it would not have been so rapidly obliterated by the internal combustion engine.

The gazogene engine, relying on a process of using wood chips to generate a combustible gas which is then used in an internal combustion engine, is a far better bet.
.

Maybe, but Ontario Power Generation just dug that humongous tunnel to divert more water to the Niagara generating stations, so there should be even more power coming out of there. As for Brown's line, that's Etobicoke and there's nothing there worth mentioning but the Mimico gaol anyway. Maybe Hamilton is sucking more power up but since Stelco (or whatever it is called now) is mostly shutdown and was generally coke* powered anyway that shouldn't make any difference. Same for Dofasco.

* When I say coke, I don't mean either the white powder or the brown drink, I am referring to the solid carbonaceous material derived from destructive distillation of low-ash, low-sulfur bituminous coal.

Louis R wrote:I'm not too sure how much of our power still comes from the Falls. I rather suspect that these days most of the output of Adam Beck #2 has been blotted up by the time you reach Brown's Line

quote="Keith_w" quote="Weird Harold"

New York city once had electric streetcars powered by Niagra Falls

/quote

Toronto still has electric streetcars that are powered by Niagara Falls, at least partially. Not to mention the Pickering, Darlington, and Bruce nuclear power plants./quote

As a sidenote, to melt steel scrap, it takes a theoretical minimum of 300 kWh/ton. To provide superheat above the melting point of 1520°C (2768°F) requires additional energy and for typical tap temperature requirements, the total theoretical energy required usually lies in the range of 350–370 kWh/ton. However, EAF steelmaking is only 55–65% efficient and as a result the total equivalent energy input is usually in the range of 560–680 kWh/ton for most modern operations.

BTW, a quote from OAF: "He'd spent a lot of that time working out with the katana and wakazashi he'd used Pei Kau-yung's fabrication module to build. He'd had Owl design and actually fabricate the weapons, and he'd cheated just a little bit with them, too. The blades looked like the work of a Harchong master swordsmith, with the characteristic ripple pattern of what Old Earth had called "Damascus steel." They even carried the proof marks of Hanyk Rynhaard, one of the legendary swordmakers of Harchong, but they were actually made of battle steel, orders of magnitude harder and tougher than any purely metallic alloy."

Peter2 wrote:What does one use to provide the heat to generate the steam?

Anything that can heat water to boiling or higher. The point is that Safehold can avoid a dependence on fossil oil by staying with coal or fire vine oil, or geothermal or whatever suits the application without burning up fossil oil instead of reserving it for plastics, medication, or other recyclable applications.

Peter2 wrote:So far as I can see, there is still no reasonably compact alternative to fossil fuels for doing that, and the point has already been made that it will have problems providing instant power.

Steam only has a problem with providing instant power from a cold start. Once the proscriptions are lifted and catenary wires can be strung, trams and trains have all the instant electrical power they might need.

Peter2 wrote:The gazogene engine, relying on a process of using wood chips to generate a combustible gas which is then used in an internal combustion engine, is a far better bet.

Gazogene systems were used because they already had the internal combustion engines and couldn't get gasoline. If you don't have an ICE already, gazogene is a really bad choice for an energy source. You get more energy turned into usable power by burning the same amount of wood under a boiler to make steam.

PS: Trivial fact from the internet: The very first internal combustion engine, invented in 1806 ran on Hydrogen.

Harold, again you seem to be acting deliberately obtuse. preferred fuels are energy dense, inexpensive, and easy to obtain in large quantities. Firevine is described as a weed with some of the less endearing properties of both poison ivy and creosote bush. It burns readily, and the smoke is noxious. I believe that burning the oil in a hot blast fire (lots of oxygen and high temps) will take care of most of the noxious fumes, but how great is the current production and can it be increased easily?

Your great idea will also run into the problem that crude oil refining will produce a lot more than just chemical feedstocks, and burning these wastes is probably the best disposal method. Your alternative methods for heating water have issues of location and scalability.

Lack of electricity will slow the development of ICEs as most of our current designs are electronically controlled. Most of the controlls can be operated either pneumatically or hydraulically. However an interesting fact is that anything smaller than an ocean going steamship is more efficiently powered by ICE than steam. I have seen references that coal fired plants can be more efficient at sizes of over 350MW.

Weird Harold wrote:

Peter2 wrote:What does one use to provide the heat to generate the steam?

Anything that can heat water to boiling or higher. The point is that Safehold can avoid a dependence on fossil oil by staying with coal or fire vine oil, or geothermal or whatever suits the application without burning up fossil oil instead of reserving it for plastics, medication, or other recyclable applications.

Peter2 wrote:So far as I can see, there is still no reasonably compact alternative to fossil fuels for doing that, and the point has already been made that it will have problems providing instant power.

Steam only has a problem with providing instant power from a cold start. Once the proscriptions are lifted and catenary wires can be strung, trams and trains have all the instant electrical power they might need.

Peter2 wrote:The gazogene engine, relying on a process of using wood chips to generate a combustible gas which is then used in an internal combustion engine, is a far better bet.

Gazogene systems were used because they already had the internal combustion engines and couldn't get gasoline. If you don't have an ICE already, gazogene is a really bad choice for an energy source. You get more energy turned into usable power by burning the same amount of wood under a boiler to make steam.

PS: Trivial fact from the internet: The very first internal combustion engine, invented in 1806 ran on Hydrogen.

Castenea wrote:Harold, again you seem to be acting deliberately obtuse. preferred fuels are energy dense, inexpensive, and easy to obtain in large quantities. ...

I'm not being obtuse, I'm looking at the shortest path from where Charis is now to the entire planet having access to the kind of energy density that powers Merlin, Nimue, OWL and the rest of Merlin's toys.

As much as Americans love their cars, much of the rest of the world gets around on bicycles or scooters and/or electric powered mass transit. Safehold doesn't have the massive personal transport tradition Americans have or even Europeans. They'll never miss what they never had. That would do away with something like 75% (a guess ) of internal combustion engines. That would also do away with a 80 or 90% of the demand for gasoline.

Safehold does NOT have to follow our progress and can skip over entire blocks of technology. Their first computer after the Proscriptions are lifted is going to be at least an Apple II or McIntosh; it is definitely not going to be a 30 ton vacuum tube monstrosity like ENIAC.

They could have bullet trains crisscrossing the continents before they get an airplane off the ground -- once they can use electricity. All they have to do is make sure that the tracks for steam trains are up to high-speed traffic and string catenary wires as soon as the proscriptions are lifted.

Weird Harold seems to be ignoring the fact that there were reasons the Wright Brothers used an ICE instead of a steam engine for their plane. It was much simpler to get the power to weight ratio needed that way. If Merlin is going to let people think things out for themselves instead of continually handing out candies, lots of things are going to get done the simple way first. ICE powered vehicles are not just used for cars despite Harold's focus on them, they also form the end of every efficient distribution chain for goods, sometimes both ends.

Moreover Harold seems to be under the misapprehension that having burnt lot of hydro-carbons was a something that held back TF society. Where is the evidence for that in the long term? They seem to have been getting along just fine till the Gbabba turned up, with no evidence of any shortage of plastics, drugs, or anything else you might think of as being made from crude oil. In other words all his wrangling is to solve a non-problem

FWIW my own thought is that if they had more or less as much energy as they could think of requiring they just made any long chain hydrocarbons they needed from simpler starting points, possibly by genetically manipulating microbes to do it for them.

Their first computer will not be a Macintosh or anything like for similar reasons. The investment of time and technique and oodles and oodles of cash required to make an IC fab capable of producing a Macintosh level processor would not be a sensible first step down the line of electronic development. (You might even need a precursor computer to design a chip that complex, I can't remember the exact details.) Valves do a whizz-bang job for basic radio, TV, and Radar and are a much simpler less capital-intensive way to start building up an electronic industry and infrastructure. Similarly, cathode ray tubes are good for early experiments on the electron and make decent screens for electronic test instruments and TV's at a much lower level of tech than that required to make flat, digital screens.

Randomiser wrote:Weird Harold seems to be ignoring the fact that there were reasons the Wright Brothers used an ICE instead of a steam engine for their plane.

No, I'm assuming that there will never be a Safehold equivalent of the Wright flyer.

Merlin does indeed want to encourage indigenous innovation, but the inner circle is already leaping over a lot of elementary research to production ready products.

Heavier-than-air flight is one technology that is problematic without resorting to ICEs. But gas turbines or even pulse-ramjet engines will run on any flammable liquid -- alcohol, perfume, coal-oil, etc. They don't need to run on fossil oil.

If Safehold can limit oil refining to simple distillation of Kerosene and Gasoline and ICEs to places an other option is truly unavailable (not just more inconvenient, truly unavailable) then they won't be stalled in an oil-based economy built in ICEs like the US currently is.

Randomiser wrote:ICE powered vehicles are not just used for cars despite Harold's focus on them, they also form the end of every efficient distribution chain for goods, sometimes both ends.

That distribution chain was around and working fine when Steam ruled the rails and seas and "horsepower" meant four-hooved ungulates. It does NOT require ICEs.