Re: "The Only Thing They Learn" -- does anyone else find it irritating?

On Jun 20, 7:43 pm, lath...@xxxxxxxxxx (Richard D. Latham) wrote:
Quadibloc <jsav...@xxxxxxxxx> writes:
On Jun 19, 11:40 pm, lath...@xxxxxxxxxx (Richard D. Latham) wrote:
John Schilling <schil...@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> writes:
On Wed, 18 Jun 2008 07:09:12 GMT, Gene <g...@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

If energy is too cheap to meter, what is the cost associated with production
of hydrogen from water or methanol from air? It seems to me the price could
easily undercut those kinds of gas prices.

If by "easily" you mean "after tens of gigabucks and tens of years of
investment", sure.

BTW, you mentioned that "oil refineries and the like require billions
of dollars all at once". Hint: those things already exist, so I think
we have an existence proof about the ability of companies to allocate
capital in those amounts, with payback periods measured in decades, in
the industry in question.

A processing facility requiring a large investment can certainly
exist. But the condition required for its existence is a suitable
expected return on investment, whether that return is nearly certain,
and somewhat larger than the investment, or more speculative, but
significantly larger than the investment.

This is why, despite the technology being well-known, we don't have
plants for making a gasoline substitute from coal. It isn't because of
an oil company conspiracy and cover-up. It's because today's high oil
prices are, at bottom, artificial. It doesn't really cost the Arabs
that much to pump the stuff out of the ground, hence while such a
plant might benefit the public by lowering oil prices, it would not
recoup the investment of its owners by selling the oil it produces.

This is why government subsidies and tax breaks are required for oil
sands development, despite high oil prices.

Producing gasoline from electricity and the hydrogen in water and the
carbon in the air's carbon dioxide would be difficult and expensive
even if the electricity were free, enough so that the final product
would still be somewhat expensive gasoline.

Yep. Econ 101. We don't currently do it, even though we know how,
because it costs too much.

Jeez, do you guys bother to read what I wrote ?

I'm trying to figure out about _how_ expensive the gas would be, if we
decided we _had_ to make by grabbing the raw materials right out of
the atmosphere. I'm assuming that figure represents the ceiling over
which petrol pretty much can't exceed for extended periods of time.

And I'm trying to get an answer with a little more precision that
"somewhat expensive". Really and truly guys, I know that much already.

I keep hoping that one of the readers is a chemical engineer, and will
be able to say "we make amount A of product P at plant Y per year, and
that is a similar process to the one you're curious about, and plant Y
cost D 20xx dollars to construct, and we charge about C dollars per
gallon for product P, whole-sale delivery FOB our loading dock".

Instead I essentially get nothing but random drive-by platitudes.

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Richard D. Latham   lath...@xxxxxxxxxxx Hide quoted text -

- Show quoted text -

My chemical engineer says that the cost of doing makes it impossible.
You expend more energy doing that even if it were possible, which he
doubts. He said, you would be better off burning wood and using steam
engines. Apparently he thinks it will not produce gasoline, and if it
did it would consume more energy to produce than it gave. He said the
cost was not possible to guess as he didn't believe it could be done
and he said pick any number it didn't matter. Billions, Trillions,
whatever you want to say. Ken Hogan
.

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