Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach
There is much agitation in the climatosphere about the amount of “coking coal” used in making steel. A number of allegedly smart folks are working on ways to replace that coal with hydrogen to reduce the amount of eeevil CO2 produced in steelmaking. There’s a very recent post on the subject here on WUWT, describing a “green steel” method developed in Sweden.
So I thought I’d take a look at the numbers for steel for the European Union. If you know me, you know I like to run the numbers myself.
From “Hydrogen In Steel Production“, I find:
The steel industry accounts for 4% of all the CO2 emissions in Europe.
Now, Europe emits about 2.5 billion tonnes of CO2 per year. The four percent of that emitted by steelmaking is ~100 million tonnes per year. 8.43 billion tonnes of CO2 equals one ppmv of atmospheric CO2. So 100 million tonnes of CO2 avoided is a savings of about 0.013 ppmv of CO2 per year … except that about 45% of CO2 emissions are sequestered immediately, so they’ll only be saving about 0.007 ppmv per year … be still, my beating heart.
Then we have this estimate of the annual increase in electricity needed to convert EU steelmaking to hydrogen:
The total energy requirement for climate-neutral transformation of the blast furnace route, for example, amounts to around 120 terawatt hours (TWh) per year.
To provide that additional electricity they’ll need 14 new 1 GW nuclear power plants, plus a few more for peak production plus downtime. So call it 18 new nukes.
Plus, of course, the cost of the electricity itself. At say $0.06 per kilowatt-hour, that’s another $4.8 billion per year.
Next, will “green steel” be cost-effective and competitive in the marketplace? Don’t make me laugh.
Furthermore, imported steel that is not produced in a climate-neutral way should be taxed so that prices remain comparable.
If the steel industry has to fend for itself on this task, the prices of its end products will have to be raised enormously, which will make it internationally uncompetitive. The exodus of an entire branch of industry or at least the upstream production will be the result.
(Ibid)
Prices of European steel will have to be “raised enormously”? … wonderful. Steel is used in millions of products …
How about the capital cost?
We calculate that it will cost around EUR 100 billion [US$117 billion] to make the production of crude steel climate neutral.
(Ibid)
Plus the cost of the 18 new nukes, about $8 billion per GW = another $144 billion dollars. And then there’s the cost of the additional electricity itself, which by 2050 will be $4.8 billion/year times 28 years = $134 billion.
So all up, by 2050 the changeover will cost almost $400 billion.
If they did this tomorrow, by 2050 European steelmakers would have reduced the atmospheric CO2 by ~ 0.2 ppmv. And IF (big if) the IPCC is right, that would make the world of 2050 cooler by ~ 0.002°C …
Now, temperatures drop with altitude, at the rate of about one degree C per 100 meters vertical. So if you are standing up, a temperature drop of 0.002°C is less than the underlying altitude-driven temperature difference that constantly exists between your toes and your knees …
And please, please don’t say “If the EU does this the other countries will follow”. Outside of the EU, the US, and a few other foolish sheep, most countries are nowhere near that stupid. As a way to cool the atmosphere, this will cost about US$200 trillion per °C of cooling by 2050. By comparison, global Gross Domestic Product (GDP) is about $85 trillion per year, so it would cost well over twice the globe’s entire annual GDP to cool the planet by 1°C at that rate.
At a cost of $200,000,000,000,000 per degree of cooling, that’s gotta be far and away the world’s most expensive air conditioner … and the looney-tunes folks in the EU think it’s a brilliant plan.
And if Europe does go to “green steel”, what do they get for their $400 billion dollars besides an unmeasurably tiny cooling by 2050?
Oh, right—”enormously expensive” steel. Heck of a deal …
Mathematics. Don’t leave home without it.
w.
AS ALWAYS: I can and am generally happy to defend my own words. But I cannot defend your interpretation of my words. So please, when you comment quote the exact words you are discussing.
PS—How big is a trillion? Almost unimaginably big. As one example, a million seconds is 11.6 days … and a trillion seconds is 31,700 years.
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But the nukes would actually deliver reliable power. To be a proper green, figure for green prayer wheels. Or organically fed hamsters on treadmill.
Making the concrete for all those nuke plants would release a lot of CO2.
As much as the equivalent power production (production, not nameplate ratings) from windmills foundations?
There’s a lot of steel in reinforced concrete.
And a lot of concrete in the foundation pads for the greens’ windmills.
Here are two pictures about the base of a windmill from Germany to get a feeling about the necessary quantity of concrete:
And here is another picture to get a feeling about the necessary amount of steel for the base of a windmill:
I’m waiting for them to tell us how they are going to produce carbon neutral cement. That proposal will be hilarious!🤣
Sweden these days is a minnow in the steel production, green or no green. China is a big fat lady in this singing contest, Estimates are that it produces just under 60% of the world total and more than seven times the EU does, its nearest competitor. It is followed by India and Japan, with USA & Russia making 4% each of the world total.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_steel_production
China is building 43 new coal plants.
I thought this graphic shows more clearly rise to the world dominance of the Chinese steel empire.
It wouldn’t surprise me at all if the idea of “green steel” was a Chinese propaganda effort designed to destroy the industry elsewhere
Too late, it already is destroyed elsewhere than China, or too small in comparison (e.g. the Indian production in green in the graph above, is rising nicely, but you can hardly tell the way the Chinese production has taken off. Good on them though, the Chinese are getting development of their country done while the Western world is quite literally tilting at windmills, wasting precious taxpayer resources on fool’s errands.
However I complete deplore the methods used by the Chinese communists, especially the slave labour in the western regions so helpful in making solar panels so cheap.
The UK government is working hard to destroy our steel industry by giving it the most expensive industrial electricity in Europe.
There was actually a Minecraft mod where you could generate power by putting a hamster on a treadmill. Made a cute squeaking sound too!
So life will imitate Minecraft soon 😉
You still have to feed the hamster carbohydrates, made from water and CO2.
Willis – you’ve costed this using nuclear power. I suspect they intend to do this using wind turbines, so the cost will be around an order of magnitude more. Also, since those turbines need steel, that means we’d need a lot more steel. Best lay in a supply of popcorn.
Burning popcorn in my patent popcorn burning stove is more efficient than bioethanol and all in all emits less CO2 .But oone will buy my popcorn stove yet they will squander billions on Hydrogen , windmills and unicorn farts . Does noone really wabnt to save the planet.
The devil is always in the details. Hydrogen fueled steel makes less sense than “pollution free” EVs when it comes to CO2 abatement. At least EVs have some up sides for appropriate users.
Fixed that for ya.
The best EV case I’ve come across is a logging company that cuts the trees in the mountains and takes them to the mill or port at a much lower level. The EV trucks would be recharging their batteries on the way down, fully loaded with timber, and on the way up they would be using the electricity but using less than the charge since the truck is much lighter.
However, one has to ask why don’t they just put in a slide! Or even an elevator or train system on rails since the load is so one way. But anyways, I thought it was a good case for the EV trucks.
Another is a person who commutes a short distance, in an area with poor bus service, high taxes on gasoline (currently $1/L US or $3.79US/US gallon here in Southern Ontario) but relatively moderate price of electricity in the off-hours, of about 6 cents US/KWh (thanks to lots of hydro, gas and CANDU nukes, and only a small amount of wind… so far)
Similar tax rate here in the UK, where VAT at 20% is added to the fuel duty of 57.95p per litre of petrol /gas or diesel = 69.54pence.
At an exchange rate of 73p per $ this gives 95 cents.
The only way to make running a car possible is to run the current diesel car on to 200,000 miles, which at 8,000 miles per year should last 25 years and see me out. (As long as I keep changing the oil.)
Getting 50 miles per gallon on normal runs, 36 mpg with the trailer loaded with firewood.
I just hope they don’t make running non-EVs illegal.
Willis,
Thanks for the reality check. As far as raising the price of steel “enormously”, that’s a feature, not a bug. Just another marker as the West saunters down the path from the regulatory state to full blown fascism.
Green steel will put you in the red, in more ways than one!
What a brutal take down that was!
I thought about asking if Hydrogen Molecules are really green colored……..
Bravo Willis!
Ask Greta, if she can see CO2, surely she can be trained to see hydrogen as well.
Willis:
You forgot a significant mathematical multiplier. You left out the Green Magic that trumps tiresome real world caculations.
This pious bigotry remains me of sacked COP leader Claire Perry O’Neill when she said we must teach our children the skills that they need to save the planet. I asked Perry a huge number of times to list the skills that children needed to learn to save the planet but I am still waiting. I think one of them was children walking to school! The problem is that guys like MP John Redwood who question Greta’s credulous rhetoric like Matt Ridley still believes Co2 might leap out at any time and spontaneously combust the planet.
In a Telegraph article this morning Ridley is inspired by diddly squat output on the latest fusion experiment saying we have turned the corner, no need for Co2 or fossil fuels but if you read some of his articles he preaches the benefits of Co2 confirmed to be greening the planet faster than climate change.
Maybe someone related to the climate cult could tell me how any of the man made stuff they presume we need to save the planet can be made without fossil fuels. Maybe fusion will eventually work but they will still need to make enough to transition from the 84% of energy generated by fossil fuels hopefully there is enough stuff left in the environment to achieve all of these wonderful dreams.
As Willis says the numbers are important but not one of the promoters for stuff we don’t need appears to understand arithmetic and why it matters. The same goes for gas boilers.
26 million UK gas boilers represent 0.00004% of residual atmospheric Co2 whilst all electricity generation in the UK equates to 0.00004% of residual Co2. Only 4.7 million homes in the UK can be retrofitted with ground or air source heat pumps at – according to BBC Panorama – £110,000/home which represents 0.0000072% of residual atmospheric Co2. Maybe 3.2 million homes could use hydrogen which would represent 0.000004% of residual Co2. Together this absurd nonsense would cost billions but would it influence the UK or global climate not a snowballs chance in hell. This is bare faced virtual signalling at our cost with no conceivable benefit to 66 million people in the UK or the environment. We cannot measure the influence of mitigating 0.0000112% of atmospheric Co2.
this uk gas boiler lark is absurd.
Thanks, Willis. I especially like how you convert a temperature difference into an altitude change. 🙂 Even 1C would be like going up a few hundred feet.
Yup. One hundred feet rise would yield 0.3 degree C of cooling.
I was taught that the lapse rate is 1.98 degrees C per 1000 feet. As a ready reckoner for aviation, and climbing big lumps of granite, use 2 degrees per 1000 feet to get an idea of cold you will be 🙂
I learned the dry air adiabatic lapse rate is 5.4 F per 1000 ft, hence 3 C, thus 0.3 C for 100 feet. But I could be wrong. And air is rarely dry.
Dry air lapse rate is – g / Cp. Cp is specific heat of dry air. We know the old lapse rate but now that Cp of dry air has changed due to CO2 now at 410 ppm unsure what it is.
9.81/1.004.
The FAA says 3.5F or 2C per 1000 feet up to 36,000 feet. page 3 – https://www.faa.gov/regulations_policies/handbooks_manuals/aviation/phak/media/06_phak_ch4.pdf
OK. So 0.2 C for 100 feet.
That height is usually in the stratosphere.
We should all immediately build our homes and cities on very tall stilts…this must save the planet err somehow or other or something …
Mixing english and metric measurements. Isn’t that illegal in most of the EU?
Probably so! Honestly, as I wrote my comment, I considered saying “about a hundred meters” instead of “a few hundred feet.” 🙂
That’s what caused NASA to lose an expensive spacecraft to study Martian climate.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_Climate_Orbiter
The USA uses both systems.
Wine = metric
area — “the back 40” = acres
To try and change the public Land Survey System (PLSS) to metric is silly.
Of course you can find Coke and Pepsi in 20 ounce bottles next to the 1 liter bottles.
In the replies nearby, the 5.4F (or 3C) per 1000 feet is the dry adiabatic lapse rate. That’s what I was thinking of. It’s what a parcel of rising air would experience as it expands. Once water vapor starts to condense, the moist adiabatic lapse rate applies. It’s also true that the environmental lapse rate, which varies greatly with conditions, is typically less than that. The reference to FAA material giving the lapse rate in the standard atmosphere is on this basis. Whichever lapse rate is used, the same basic point is being made.
Yes, Willis was a little off. It’s a minor fraction of one degree C, either way, not 1.0 C.
No, I was NOT “a little off”. I used the dry adiabatic lapse rate, appropriate because it’s generally not condensing around your ankles. And that is ~ 1°C per 100 metres.
w.
You’re right. You said meters rather than feet.
Correct – DALR 3°C / 1000 ft and SALR 2°C / 1000 ft. ‘S’ is saturated.
A marvelous example of ridicule being the best response to greenies.
Can Greenies read? Or would they, if they could?
Like Islam there are no jokes in the Climate Cult.
Greenies don’t “do” Mathematics and Numbers.
Is an American trillion different? A trillion dollars seems like small change these days!
And with Biden-flation it soon will. The USA: Argentina on the road to becoming Zimbabwe.
That seems to depend on your party affiliation.
Definitely true, both parties in the US, and really any party in the world these days is well inclined to flush people’s hard earned money. You get to pick the party with the smallest toilet.
The money is no problem. Paul Krugman is probably in the Whitehouse right now recommending that the treasury simply print a $200 trillion dollar bill. And Joe Biden is nodding along.
There is a difference between U.K an U.S http://www.eyeful-tower.com/muse/billion.htm Hope i got the add link thing correct.
A dollar is 15cm long. The distance earth to sun is 15trillion cm. A trillion dollars laid end to end would reach the sun. A trillion is a lot.
“cost of the 18 new nukes, about $8 billion per GW =”
As usual, you drag all the purposely hidden costs into view. Mind you, you you were kind to use costs of nuclear instead of windmills for the energy to make hydrogen! Woke blokes won’t go for nuclides, though, so 18GW of windmills and backup are the real added costs that align with those who think in groups
You also have to include the 25% utilization rate for windmills, so that means that 72GW worth of faceplate power will have to be built to produce that 18GW worth of output.
The 25% is probably high. In order to build that many new wind mill fields, you are going to have to start less and less optimal locations.
At less than optimal sites, constructing wind turbines consumes more energy than they produce in their lifetimes. And in the US, practically all optimal sites are already exploited. A few still have older turbines, so could be upgraded. But the only way to boost wind generation with any hope of positive cost/benefit analysis is off shore, with the attendant expense and problems that entails.
Willis, I had a piece on Independence Daily on how I lived 500ft above our local town as a boy. The bus that took me to school went from 1900 to 2080 in the unlikely event the IPCC turns out to be right. Guess how different Churches College, Petersfield was from 3,Troopers Bottom, Froxfield.
It’s available if you search for it.
JF
P. S. I always call the tropospheric lapse rate 3 deg C./1000 ft. Like ICAO.
JF
3° C per 1000ft or 304.8 metres -> 1°C/m easier to remember that way.
Eh?
Yeah. Can we have that again in English?
When I was studying metallurgy I seem to remember a bad bad thing called Hydrogen Embrittlement Cracking in steel. I think these clowns have invented the opposite of Reardon metal.
As I understood it they’re not actually producing steel with the hydrogen they’re just reducing iron ore to iron. It would take melting down the iron sponge and alloying it with carbon and other metals to produce specific grades of steel.
Quite a bit of H2 is produced and used. Clearly the embrittlement and escape issues are solvable. Those are in controlled circumstances.
Homes and autos seem to be more chaotic. Ka-boom!
I’m not sure what the solubility of H2 in molten steel is, but it strikes me that at molten steel temperatures, H2 is not hanging around much. Embrittlement happens at room temperatures, AFAIK.
Nice Atlas Shrugged reference.
At some point, woke people will figure out that sitting in the dark at home while wearing a mask for your own good is not what life is all about.
Don’t bet on it. I know many woke Dems voters over 60 who still support dementia Joe and think he is doing a great job. They will support this as long as their 401K is fine. When that fails it will be too late for them to change.
Why are Europeans so stupid?
In that competition no one is better than Californians
You are correct Vuk. California has always led the way.
Basement dwelling urban blighters…
Whether from callyfornia, Collyrado, Pacific NW, Massahucksit, Connectikut and many other urban blighted insular locations.
I just got my Voter Information Guide, California Gubernatorial Recall Election. On Page 4, Governor’s Answer: WARNING: THIS UNWARRANTED RECALL EFFORT WILL COST CALIFORNIA TAXPAYERS 81 MILLION DOLLARS! On Page 9, the Department of Finance estimates the cost to be $276 million.
80 million here, 276 million there, and soon we are talking real money. There is nothing like a creative accounting. Governor Gavin Newsom is a master.
Unwarranted is as unwarranted does. Obviously, millions of petition signers found the recall warranted.
Perhaps. But there are many fine contenders from all around the world for the Stupilympics.
I do admit that the “Western Democracies” would certainly dominate the competition.
Hangs head in shame.
I am a Californian.
But we are having a recall election {he says hopefully].
Whatever happens you still have a Woke legislature.
Mr. McGuire: I want to say one word to you. Just one word. gbaikie: Yes, sir. … Move
apology to “The Graduate
Well, they do have the excuse of earthquakes for shunning nukes. Same here in Chile, where there is but one reactor, visible from Ruta 68 between Santiasco and Valpo.
View your fate on Route 68?
It’s not hard to build nuke’s to handle even large earthquakes.
We have lots of stupid politicians to help us!
They’ve abandoned religion, and are flailing about for a reason to feel guilty. Apparently acting stupid doesn’t qualify.
Canadians and Americans as well.
Thank you, sir. Much appreciated.
But that is known as a tariff. There are two primary reasons for modern economists’ opposition to tariffs.
First, by raising prices of imports, tariffs encourage high-cost domestic production of import substitutes. This production would be uneconomic in the tariffs’ absence. Cost measures what people sacrifice to obtain a particular objective, so substituting higher cost domestic production for lower cost imports means more of other things are given up to get those items. Giving up more means having less, which is another way of saying overall living standards are lower!
The second reason also follows the fact that tariffs raise prices of imports. The higher prices discourage domestic consumption of imports, consumption that otherwise would yield benefits greater than costs. Foregoing such consumption also reduces the size of the tariff-imposing country’s economic pie, which is yet another way of saying overall living standards are lower.
In other words, if you have to pay more for essentials, then you have less money to spend on things that add variety to life and make life more enjoyable.
For poorer or limited income folks it quickly becomes a choise of what essential is most important?
e.g. Does one pay the rent but then freeze when one cannot afford fuel? O should one buy fuel to heat a place where you cannont stay anymore?
Not an issue under CDC-dictated eviction moratorium.
Sort of related, eliminate coal or burning anything that produces CO2, where will “activated carbon” come from? (OK. “Burning” it in the absence of O2. But that takes a LOT of heat and energy.)
Activated Carbon is used in water treatment, aquarium filters, home water filters, air filters … all kinds of things to purify water and air.
Not really.
So called activated charcoal is one of the catches regarding returning to a life similar to precolonial/medieval America/Europe.
People who use various primitive methods to “start” fires usually rely upon scraps of cloth or twine that has been carbonized in an oxygen free environment. People living a prehistoric lifestyle treasure those fragments as much as gold.
These small fragments of carbonized fibers are the actual catch basins for transient burning sparks or small bits of burning tinder. They catch and keep a spark glowing while one puts the spark into a prepared twig bed where light air movement can brighten the spark and ignite the twigs. These carbonized pieces of fiber are carried in ‘coal boxes’.
It isn’t as easy to catch bouncing bit of glowing metal of rock as people like to pretend.
N.B., friction started burning coals tend to larger and hotter than flint struck sparks. Coals that can ignite grasses and small twigs if one is careful with that light bit of wind.
N.B. 2, in Colonial America, before coal was discovered. Man built tightly stacked piles of wood, covered them in clay then built small controlled fires covert the wood mass into charcoal for steelmaking.
Charcoal is still made that way in Chile, an officialy “developed” country, ie member of EOCD.
Coal was known from antiquity, but charcoal was often easier to make than mining for fossil lignite.
Hi, AtheoK,
I was referring to activated carbon used to purify air and water, not scraps to start fires.
We use tons of GAC in our biologically water active filters after O3 treatment to allow microbes to breakdown further the organic precursors that might form disinfection biproducts in the presence of Cl2. We also keep a few tons of PAC on hand to feed at the head of the plant in case we need to deal with taste and odor issues the O3 won’t oxidize or toxins released from certain strains of blue-green algae.
Different sources (coal, coconut husk, wood) produce products best suited for what is to be removed or, in our case, allows microbes to grow on it.
To produce it (and sometimes reclaim it as Cincinnati does by “re-burning” it to drive off the Ohio River organics it’s GAC filter cap has adsorbed) on an industrial scale does require a LOT of heat and energy.
“C”, Carbon and it’s isotopes remain the element “C”.
Short of fusion or fission, the amount of “C” will remain the same.
Why not use it to make life better?
So why is this silly idea getting any publicity? I think I know.
In the UK there was a move to boost the economy of an isolated and thus poor part of the country called Cumbria by opening a new deep coal mine. The area has very good quality coal that could be used for coking.
How to get planning permission for a new coal mine with all the green regulations?
The company proposed the coking coal was a green investment. You can’t make wind turbines without steel. Dig the mine or abandon renewables.
This caused outrage amongst the green brigade (e.g. The Guardian). And especial umbrage was taken because the argument was right.
Solution? Find an alternative to coking coal.
Greens have already found an “alternative” to thinking or measuring anything accurately.
Repeat inane memes! Over and over!
That would have been great for Cumbria, the UK and Europe. Most metallurgical coal (bituminous and anthracite grade) today comes from Australia, Canada and the US. China relied on Oz, as you know, but now is miffed.
Woke green sanctimony long ago degenerated into a grotesque parody of the joke, “How many dopes does it take to change a light bulb?”
Billions, apparently, but it still throws no light.
The suicidal economics, however, is NOT a joke.
Money is no object as long as it’s used to destroy Western Civilization. What a despicable concept.
“Now, temperatures drop with altitude, at the rate of about one degree C per 100 meters vertical. So if you are standing up, a temperature drop of 0.002°C is less than the underlying altitude-driven temperature difference that constantly exists between your toes and your knees …”
Ah, yes, the old reliable adiabatic lapse rate. 😉
Except it isn’t reliable unless one knows whether to use the dry or wet rate — or something in between.
The point is that Willis was formerly in agreement with Prof Robert Brown (rgbatduke) about the adiabatic lapse rate.
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/01/24/refutation-of-stable-thermal-equilibrium-lapse-rates/
But he’s off by a factor of three to five, or more. Depends upon how wet the air is.
I’m rashly assuming that the moisture in the air isn’t condensing around your ankles, so I’m using the dry adiabatic lapse rate. That, as I said in the head post, is about 1°C per hundred meters. So I’m not “off by a factor of three to five” as you fatuously claim.
I’m 100% correct.
And what on earth does this have to do with the lack of a lapse rate in an isolated unheated cylinder as Dr. Brown discusses? I’m still in agreement with him. So what?
Man, people seize on the most trivial things to get all bothered about …
w.
You are only 98% correct, the rate is 0.98 K / 100 m.
Oh, very good …
w.
Thanks Mike – that was an interesting post. I think rgb however missed the point that between collisions gravity acts on the gas molecules, so they don’t travel in straight lines but instead a parabola (if I’m really nitpicking it’s a section of an ellipse). Thus what you would get if bulk movements were inhibited would be that the total energy (KE plus gravitational PE) would be constant up the column and the measured temperature (which only looks at the KE) would drop as we rise.
Since in normal experiments, that’s not done, this gravitational effect is not seen, and rgb is correct. However, this also means that the total energy of KE+PE rises up the tube of air, since the temperature is constant.
See https://tallbloke.wordpress.com/2012/05/29/lucy-skywalker-graeffs-second-law-seminar/ (and related posts for the rest of the information) for Graeff’s experiments on this gravitational lapse rate. He used hollow glass spheres to impede convection, so there’s a systematic error as opposed to using air – the density is higher. However, he did manage to get temperature measurements to 0.01°C which is extremely hard to do. Qualitatively he proved the idea, I think, but the density problem means his gravitational lapse rate figures won’t be accurate.
Simon Derricutt August 23, 2021 4:31 am
It seems that you missed RGB’s point—IF there were a temperature difference as you claim, you could use that temperature difference to run a heat engine FOREVER … congratulations, you just invented perpetual motion.
w.
Willis – there’s nothing odd about perpetual motion, and it happens a lot. Electrons keep going around nuclei. The problem comes when you try to power something with perpetual motion. In this case, you’d simply have heat continually passing from the bottom to the top via the Silver wire. No violation of Conservation of Energy (CoE). Its simply setting up conflicting equilibria. One equilibrium would be trying to attain a gravitational temperature difference between the top and bottom of the gas, and the other is trying to equalise the temperature either end of the Silver wire. However, in order to get this you’d need to stop convection.
A standard solar cell works because of conflicting equilibria. Here, one equilibrium is trying to zero out the internal electric field as the incoming photons produce electrons and holes that go in opposite directions in the electric field in the depletion zone. The other equilibrium is in the external load which has a voltage across it, so current flows to try to zero out that electric field. Once you feed the photons into the system, you can’t satisfy both equilibria for a solar cell with a load across it. The net result is turning the energy of the incoming photons into electrical power. Sure, you can look at this as a conversion process, but the reason it works is that both equilibria cannot be simultaneously satisfied so movement must happen.
If you decided to try to put a pair of thermocouples in the gas column to get energy out, then the gas would gradually cool down and deliver power out, which would violate 2nd Law of Thermodynamics (2LoT). CoE would be satisfied. Your first response here is likely to be that that’s not possible. However, if you look up MerCaT sensors, which have the same structure as solar cells but have a band-gap of only around 100mV, and are used to sense that range of IR, they produce around 100mV from their own internal heat when used at room temperature, so are normally used cooled down to liquid Nitrogen temperatures. The amount of power they produce is extremely small, but it does need to be allowed for in the electronics used. There are enough “hot tail” photons around at room temperature to exceed that 100meV or so, so if you kept them with a resistance across them they would also cool themselves very slightly and deliver power to the external load.
The point is that 2LoT is violated slightly by commercially-available devices. So far, there aren’t any violations that would actually be useful, with the best ones just about lighting a LED faintly. Possibly using a semiconductor with a band-gap of around 26meV and a PN junction to get the electric field would work, but given the number of thermally-induced carriers it would be hard to get a depletion zone with a field across it.
For Graeff, he intended to produce such a heat engine. The thing is that heat conduction in air (when convection is blocked as he did it) is very slow. Thus the power out would only be minute even if he built very large systems. He did however measure that gravitational temperature difference using great care to achieve the accuracy and precision needed. There’s that problem of the hollow glass spheres changing the measured value from the result for air, but then without some sort of barrier he couldn’t block convection of the air. Still, the point here is that the gravitational temperature gradient in air has been measured, even though there are errors in the measurement.
Consider an air molecule between collisions. If it’s going upwards at the moment, some of its kinetic energy will be converted to gravitational potential energy, and of course vice-versa if it’s going down. Thus if going upwards, whatever kinetic energy it started with will be reduced, and if going downwards then its kinetic energy will be increased. It is that changed KE that is passed on in a collision. We measure the average kinetic energy as temperature. Any potential energy isn’t measured by the thermometer. Thus theoretically that gravitational temperature gradient must exist if convection is stopped. However, if you allow normal convection, the gas will mix enough that you won’t see it, and instead the temperature in the column will be uniform.
I think RGB’s point was that the standard lapse rates are produced because of the pressure changes as convection happens. It needs a source of heat to drive it, which is normally at ground level and heated by the Sun. It won’t be totally adiabatic because of the radiation exchange, and the proportion of energy exchanged by radiation as opposed to conduction will vary with height above ground. Still, that convection carries the air from ground level to where it can radiate to space, and then it cools and drops with a bit less energy than it started with. It gets warmer on the way down by almost-adiabatic compression, but not quite as warm as it started. The effects of water phase-changes also need to be allowed for. Since the air definitely doesn’t have convection stopped, the gravitational temperature differences simply don’t happen – packets of air go upwards or downwards depending on their buoyancy. Thus RGB was right on that, and I found that useful. The nitpicking about what happens if you can stop convection is interesting, but hard to achieve in practice. On the other hand, you also ought to see that gravitational temperature gradient in an electrically-insulating solid. You won’t see it in a metal because the electrical field is far stronger than gravity and heat transfer in metals largely depends on electrons. Still, unlike Graeff I’m not going to spend 10 years measuring the temperature at the top and bottom of such a column to hundredths of a degree….
Electron don’t orbit the nucleus – the solar system model of the atom has been disproven for almost a century.
Loren – I was going to say the Earth orbits the Sun, instead, but there are some losses there so in a few billion years there will be changes. For the electrons around the nucleus, that is more of a resonance in space, as you say, but as far as we know that resonance will continue without losses for ever, and thus a better demonstration of “perpetual” motion. I could also have pointed to the perpetual currents in a superconducting ring of material that transitions to the superconducting state in the presence of a magnetic field.
My point there was that perpetual movement, as such, is both allowed and not surprising. Thus you can’t use the appearance of perpetual motion as an argument for disallowing some effect.
RGB’s article solved a paradox for me, in that that gravitational temperature difference has to exist in a gas column where convection is inhibited, but that we don’t normally measure it to happen, and instead we get the standard lapse rate determined by adiabatic volume changes.
$100b here, there and everywhere
Trillions for this, that and the other
Millions as pocket change
Are there enough (climate neutral) printing presses for all this?
Thanks Willis for your analytical approach to these matters. It seems many in the “green world” lack the technical treatment of such issues. Often it seems more political science than actual science. Therefore, one must wonder if those involved have done their due diligence, post production, to assure that the material produced in this experimental process has been able to avoid hydrogen embrittlement, a known failure mode for steel.