Yeah, the missing key is seeing power and energy as money, because that's essentially how our economy works.
We can convert one in the other, at different conversion rates granted, but still.
Energy input cost is a line in every company spreadsheet, it can block or allow companies to succeed. Today this line is kept artificially low because we base our economies on a very exothermic open loop CH to CO. Closing this loop is not an option because basic thermodynamics, which is the very logic behind carbon removal.
We have to stop entering this path as much as possible.
Oxidizing carbon fuels is a irreversible process, meaning an increase in entropy. Dispersion of CO2 in the atmosphere also increases entropy.
We will always, 100% of the times, expend more energy to reverse a irreversible process than we could possible extract from this irreversible process.
This statement is valid regardless of the path chosen.
Which naturally spawns the argument 'let's not reverse it, let's do CH to CO to Cx, all we have to do is find x'.
The problem is this is not valid because we burn a lot of fuel.
Even if we found x, it would not be enough to sustain our rate of carbon emissions. In 2022 the world consumed 5.8*10^12 liters of crude oil.
So it would be necessary to include y. And z. Etc until n.
Inevitably including a regeneration step Cn + H to CH + n.
Now the path looks like:
CH -> CO -> Cx -> Cy -> (...) -> Cn -> CH
Which is a closed loop, meaning net power loss. With 100% confidence.
Maybe the one who oxidizes CH pays the bill to remove the CO2 emitted. Is it even possible to put such measure worldwide? Logistics would suddenly be prohibitively expensive for all but the most valuable products per weight/volume. Globalization is addicted to fossil fuels.
Well, that is literally all we did and build and invest in the last century or so. The very power grid of the world is based on carbon fuels. We can't run our carbon removal machinery on dirty power or we would be emitting more than we could possible remove.
It becomes 100% clear the winning strategy is not removing CO2 from the atmosphere, it is replacing all machines and appliances that burn carbon. Worldwide.
By simple thermodynamics we can be 100%, not 99%, 100% sure, that the energetic cost of removing CO2 from the freaking atmosphere is higher than the benefit of putting it there in the first place.
The challenge of using synthesized chemicals for energy storage exists for quite some time indeed. For aviation and marine there may be no other option outside of synthetic fuels, I agree.
Can this scale up? Or is this a small scale only solution?
Transportation. How much energy would a truck be able to move? How does it compare to a tank truck? Weight is absolutely relevant here.
Also, production. Consider that reducing iron is measured by millions of tons per year per plant, and right now, it's done burning it with plain old coal.
Seems very odd to me the subtitle of the news is 'carbon free fuel'. That alone is a massive bullshit indicator, but I digress.
How something that may have a 10% global energy recovery efficiency could beat a pure redox power storage solution? This question has been avoided so far.
Let's be reasonable here, mantle and nucleus iron don't matter to this analysis.
Crust iron is all oxide. Fe at 5% average. In some locations obviously more concentrated up to 90% ore. Not all sites are viable for mining, and this is very important to understand. Just because there is plenty of iron out there doesn't mean all of it is commercial grade.
This means energy input to turn iron oxide into iron, which the article claims could be used as fuel and/or long term energy storage.
-Fuel I don't believe for a second.
-Energy storage it's a maybe. It needs to commercially beat plenty of options. Which to me seems unlikely since the path still includes heat and steam engine which would incurr at a cicle loss of at least 50%. And this being conservative etc. Would mean a steam engine operated in a very narrow power band - which would mean a baselevel powerplant not a peaker powerplant. And didn't yet consider other possible losses, as for one, the Fe degradation over time. Energy cycles that count on heat and engine are wasteful. Could this waste be compensated by a much cheaper capex and/or opex relative to Li or similar batteries? That's a big Maybe.
I myself want to believe there is a solution to renewables intermittency. But on this one in particular, I'm quite bearish for the reasons above.
If using Fe why not iron batteries? Keep the redox, remove the energy from the system via eletrical current instead of low efficiency heat, boiler and steam engine combo.
To illustrate the problem of accelerating any relevant piece of mass at relativistic speeds, observe how the kinetic energy increases towards infinity as the object approaches the light speed:
This means it's required infinite energy to reach c speed for any mass.
And c speed is quite slow for space travel.
Just for the fun of it, let's imagine humanity has assembled, in space, an aircraft-carrier sized vessel, fully equipped to function and nurture the little humans living inside of it.
Weight: 100 ktons.
Power is infinite ok, because badly rewarded nerds discovered new physics. Good for them they are now immortals of human history.
With Lorentz kinetic energy equation, one can estimate the kinect energy this vessel would have while traveling at say, 1% of the speed of light.
Energy: 4.5*10^20 J.
This is about two thirds of the total energy Earth receives from the sun in one hour. Or close enough to the energy the world consumed in 2017.
Now we have humans inside a vessel hurdling through space at 0.01 c, in addition to the pre-existing humans in a planet swirling through space. But there is a problem! It would take 424 years to reach the nearest star system. So we need to go faster and maybe break things. Hopefully not the hull, though.
F*** it let's go 0.5 c and reach Andromeda in about 9 years - long enough to write a book.
Energy: 1.4*10^24 J.
That's 3x the energy released by the Chicxulub meteor impact. Or 30+ times the 2003 world's total fossil fuel reserves.
Which raises the question what is the fuel being used?
Doesn't matter ok because new physics, we are transforming mass literally in energy no constraints 100% efficiency lol.
By e=mc^2 that fuel would weight - at least - 14.9 ktons.
There is margin for error, since the vessel would be shedding mass, and getting lighter. That would allow engineering to run the global process at 80% efficiency, which is a very realistic metric and maybe miss a turn or two on the way to the neighboring star.
A central payment system is absolutely not a tool of oppression. Case in point: don't like it? Don't use it. People are still free to not use it just like it even didn't exist. For everyone that chooses to, there is now an instant and free payment method. Where is the oppression?
In your hypothetical scenario of nazis taking the gov, lets assume there is no central database. Nazis would go: ok banks give me your databases or else. Banks gives databases because they care about money. There, now nazi have central database. And in this scenario you have deprived the people of enjoying a really nice service.
Where is the win here I don't see it. Let's not do good thing because, oh, in a doomsday scenario good thing might be bad. Like, shouldn't we channel efforts in ensuring doomsday never comes to reality in the first place? This way we all enjoy good life with ever improving services.
Important comment: PIX is not a bank killer and isn't designed this way. Banks still exist in Brazil and they rake in pornographic profits just like everywhere else. The absolute majority of the banks profits here does not comes from payments processing fees. The fees exist to cover the transaction operating cost. Since for PIX there is a much much lower operating cost, it makes the service free for people and businesses! The ones losing here aren't banks, but credit cards companies.
Brother fckn nazis taking the government is a much bigger systemic problem that no financial system can protect against.
The system works if democracy works. If we lose democracy, of course, the blocks built on top of it would crumble. That does not means everyone should stop building on top of democracy. Even more so for things that makes the life of the people better.
BCB is a governmental institution, composed mainly of career civil servants hired rather than appointed or elected, whose institutional tenure typically survives transitions of political leadership. They answer to the government, not a political party.
The Complementary Law No. 179/2021 defines a four-year term for the nine members of the BCB’s Board of Governors that does not coincide with the term of office of the President of the Republic, as well as establishes the rules for the dismissal of the Board’s members.
The personal information and the information related to the operation (value etc.) transmitted in Pix is protected by banking secrecy, as governed in Complementary Law 105, and in the provisions of the General Data Protection Law.
All transactions take place through digitally signed messages that travel in encrypted form.