Lack of Global Warming Messes with Russian Arctic LNG Plans

[Jan van Eck + 7,558]

20 minutes ago, NickW said:

Another  exaggeration? 

This states Vermont has 132000 dairy cattle.

https://eu.burlingtonfreepress.com/story/money/2016/06/09/dairy-farm-production-increases-in-vermont/85597744/

What do they produce - 12kg of manure a day?

Density 0.5kg/m3?

Assuming you capture all of it. Thats approx 3200m3/ day

Over a 22 day cycle - thats 70,000 m3 in storage. 

Thats the equivalent of about 8 large oil storage tanks at a refinery. 

Nope.  It comes in at 130 lbs/day.  Almost 60 KG.  

And you cannot do a digester in some gigantic storage tank.  The method (at least, here) is to spread it out into a core cylinder of about five feet in diameter and 30 feet long.  And then you let that cook for 22 days, or such, usually with some heat added.  Takes lots of land, and construction, and labor input.  Not a solution, by any means.  

[Jan van Eck + 7,558]

16 minutes ago, NickW said:

Thats avoiding the question. I asked you why AD isn't an option? AD will leave you with a fairly dry substrate after dewatering which is what you describe happening to the raw manure. Ultimately in both cases you will have to process and treat that water. The NN, P, & K doesn't magically disappear. 

My system produces water that is totally pure, has nothing in it, you can drink it right off the end of the Converter. 

The other components remain with the solids, and end up in the burner, unless the processor/buyer determines to use it for something else, which could include a feedstock for depleted soils regeneration, if they wanted to do that.  But that is up to the Buyer, I don't determine that. 

[Jan van Eck + 7,558]

8 minutes ago, Tom Kirkman said:

^  Jan, I would like to shake your hand and buy you a beer one of these days.

And you studied Physics at Yale... I certainly can't compete.  But now I'm starting to get why many of your lengthy comments are so well thought out and logically sound.  Were you on a debate team at Yale?

Yup.  Also in prep school.  Always demolished the opposition.  THey shuddered when I showed up. I was called "the Terrible Van Eck."  In those days, winning was not "something," winning was "everything."  Ah, I've mellowed a tad since then.

I will certainly take you up on that beer!  I was a member of Delta Kappa Epsilon there, we were known as "the drunken Dekes."  Totally appropriate, I might add.  [The Administration was not so fond.  Soreheads all,].

[Jan van Eck + 7,558]

39 minutes ago, NickW said:

Fair point. 

The beauty of the industrial farm. 

No opportunities to export the digested sludge interstate?

I read some years back that digested Sewage sludge was being shipped west to improve marginal soils mid west. 

 

 

Sure, if you can figure out a way to do that and make it pay for itself.  

The further problem is that the stuff that has been washing out of the farm fields (the current and past practice is to load up a "liquid manure spreader" with the lagoon slop and go spread it out as a liquid layer over the farm lands) ends up in this long alluvial fan extending well out into Lake Champlain.  If you look up at the far Northern end you will see the gigantic fans of the Mississquoi River, all saturated with legacy pollution.  It is now so extreme that the area in Canada along that bay has to shut off their drinking water piping (which comes from well inside the Bay) due to the cyanobacteria blooms, which are deadly poisonous.  We had a dog go swim in the Bay and two hours later the poor fella was dead.  And that seriously damages the tourist industry, to the extent that the "summer camps" along the northern lake stand empty. 

My plan is thus to dredge out the spoils, load onto barges, send downriver to the Port of Sorel, P.Q., load on a dry-bulker, and ship and sell the stuff to some desert kingdom where they can put it on the desert somewhere between six and sixteen feet thick, for instant farmland.  Of course, somebody has to pay for that, so it is either some rich kingdom such as Qatar, or some place like Morocco where they get NGO money, or some utterly impoverished place such as Gaza and you get paid by the UN.  

I just don't picture anybody in say Iowa paying you good money for alluvial spoils.  Maybe in the Dakotas, who knows. 

[Tom Kirkman + 8,860]

23 minutes ago, Jan van Eck said:

Yup.  Also in prep school.  Always demolished the opposition.  THey shuddered when I showed up. I was called "the Terrible Van Eck."  In those days, winning was not "something," winning was "everything."  Ah, I've mellowed a tad since then.

I will certainly take you up on that beer!  I was a member of Delta Kappa Epsilon there, we were known as "the drunken Dekes."  Totally appropriate, I might add.  [The Administration was not so fond.  Soreheads all,].

Heh heh, no wonder I can't compete with your comments.  Most of my comments are totally off the cuff, just whatever comes out of my fingers while typing.  Heck, I'm usually not even disciplined enough to check for typos before hitting the submit reply button. 

Sounds like you had a great education in critical thinking.  

[Jan van Eck + 7,558]

On 6/28/2018 at 7:47 PM, Tom Kirkman said:

Heh heh, no wonder I can't compete with your comments.  Most of my comments are totally off the cuff, just whatever comes out of my fingers while typing.  Heck, I'm usually not even disciplined enough to check for typos before hitting the submit reply button. 

Sounds like you had a great education in critical thinking.  

Yup, all true,  I am very privileged, I understand that, and now that I am an Old Guy I am attempting to take this poor, rural State and show how capitalism can work for everybody (which the locals do not believe), can get out from underneath the burden of taxation, and live prosperous, productive lives. It helps that it is a small enough State that you get to know all the players.  Most are quite cordial.  In the two years I have lived here, I have not had anybody blow the auto horn at me yet.  WHatever you say, the locals are not rude.  That alone is seriously encouraging.

The govt is in a terrible bind, with that EPA Order breathing down their necks.  The pollution problems stem from a very thin soil covering over rocky, elevated terrain, with a lot of legacy erosion, a difficult dairy industry that makes little money,  old sewage-treatment systems that are single-pipe (they overload with every rainstorm as the storm drains flow into the sewage drains) and excess paving taking soil out of the absorbent base. Of those inputs, the farm (dairy and corn) sector is the biggest issue, and the State has no money at all to address the problem.  Best estimates are for $2 Billion to deal with it.  Now, you can deal with manure by simply collecting it all at the farm and trucking to some abandoned quarry, and dumping the stuff in there, together with lots of leaves, and let that be your catch-basin.  But when I studied that rough solution I determined that the number of trucks you need to roll around the clock and even in winter storms, because the cows never stop pooping, would so overload the rural roads as to make it a non-viable solution.  So, since you cannot truck it away, and giant lagoons are not the answer, what is left is on-site treatment by placing all the slop into a Converter Machine and converting the manure into "something else."  

Now the machine will likely cost out at $125K after it gets into production.  I will sell it at $250K to a third-party finance house, and they will lease it to the farmer on a net operating lease basis, so that the depreciation component can be captured by the financiers and used to offset other income. Then the farmer can process the stuff automatically and sell it to a biomass burn plant (there are two in Vermont) for say $50 a ton.  For a thousand-head operation, figure $2,200 for the lease payments and figure $20,000 revenue for sales of the dried stuff set up in format to burn.  So the farmer makes good money, probably more for the sale of the manure than on the sale of the milk.  The finance guys take their cut, and I make that $125K up front as the machines go out the door.  I figure the total volume is $6.5 billion so I end up with figure $3 Billion, and for that I get out of bed.

And the best part is:  the State pays nothing, since it has nothing from which to pay  (unless you tax the poor people even more, which is not realistic).  Ah, capitalism, it can work for everybody, even the government!  Cheers.

Edited July 1, 2018 by Jan van Eck
scrivener's errors

[Guillaume Albasini + 851]

Cows, manure, dairy and lakes... in Switzerland :

https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/balancing-act_biodiversity-pressures-strain-idyllic-alp/33521698

[Tom Kirkman + 8,860]

5 hours ago, Jan van Eck said:

Be careful not to mix correlation with causation. 

Thank you.  I've grown weary over the years repeating that same point in online discussions.  Correlation does not equal causation.  Here's my default example for Oil & Gas forums:

 

[Jan van Eck + 7,558]

2 minutes ago, Tom Kirkman said:

Thank you.  I've grown weary over the years repeating that same point in online discussions.  Correlation does not equal causation.  Here's my default example for Oil & Gas forums:

 

Ha!  Gotta watch out for those oil barrels parked on the Railroad tracks!

[Guillaume Albasini + 851]

9 minutes ago, Tom Kirkman said:

Thank you.  I've grown weary over the years repeating that same point in online discussions.  Correlation does not equal causation.  Here's my default example for Oil & Gas forums:

 

Conclusion of the study : Norwegian oil is attracted by trains. If your tank is full of norwegian oil there is a higher risk that your car will collide with a train as it has been demonstrated by Dr.Kirkman who found a high correlation between oil imports from Norway and drivers killed in collision with railway trains. The publication of this study has convinced  many Norwegians to switch from oil powered cars to electric cars, a desperate move to avoid fatal crashes with trains in this scandinavian oil producing country.

You can order Dr. Kirkman's book at the Fake Studies University.

We accept the following payment methods : cash, credit cards, oil barrels or dried cow manure.

 

 

[Tom Kirkman + 8,860]

11 minutes ago, Guillaume Albasini said:

Conclusion of the study : Norwegian oil is attracted by trains. If your tank is full of norwegian oil there is a higher risk that your car will collide with a train as it has been demonstrated by Dr. Kirkman who found a high correlation between oil imports from Norway and drivers killed in collision with railway trains. The publication of this study has convinced many Norwegians to switch from oil powered cars to electric cars, a desperate move to avoid fatal crashes with trains in this scandinavian oil producing country.

You can order Dr. Kirkman's book at the Fake Studies University.

We accept the following payment methods : cash, credit cards, oil barrels or dried cow manure.

Heh heh thanks Guillaume  : ) 

And you even worked cow manure into the mix...

It's nice to see some playful banter here on the forum, as members get to know each other's quirks and personalities better.

[DanilKa + 443]

6 hours ago, NickW said:

Clouds are made of water (in liquid rather than gaseous form)

precisely, so as the water vapor. One moves to another as a function of temperature, saturation pressure, micro-particles, cosmic rays etc. Very different climate impact - one keeps the warms, other shields from heating. Fairly high degree of auto-regulation and perhaps impossible to model. Andy May, Euan Mearns, Roger Andrews, Dr. Roy Spenser, Dr. Judith Curry - few names to check if you want to understand whether humans have an impact on climate. My take so far - claims of AGW are greatly exaggerated and raw information often tampered with. Be well.

[HermitMunster + 146]

15 hours ago, NickW said:

The past is generally easier to examine than the future. In any case climate and weather are not the same thing. 

You said it, the future is difficult to predict, which means we really have no idea what is going to happen to our climate.

[NickW + 2,714]

16 hours ago, Jan van Eck said:

Nope.  It comes in at 130 lbs/day.  Almost 60 KG.  

And you cannot do a digester in some gigantic storage tank.  The method (at least, here) is to spread it out into a core cylinder of about five feet in diameter and 30 feet long.  And then you let that cook for 22 days, or such, usually with some heat added.  Takes lots of land, and construction, and labor input.  Not a solution, by any means.  

Fair point on the mass of manure.

Note - I said 'equivalent' as regard tanks - not actual size. I wasn't actually proposing the building of oil tank farm size tanks. I used these to give some perspective on the storage volume. 

I assume your poo fuel pellet production line takes up some space and there is then the issue of final storage of the finished product. 

I also you assume the process produces loads of water up front at the manure needs to be dewatered. What sort of land space does the effluent treatment plant require? 

[NickW + 2,714]

1 hour ago, HermitMunster said:

You said it, the future is difficult to predict, which means we really have no idea what is going to happen to our climate.

We can make some reasonable assumptions based on  the historical geological evidence which shows a clear relationship between high CO2 levels and higher global temperatures 

[Jan van Eck + 7,558]

Just now, NickW said:

 

4 minutes ago, NickW said:

 

I assume your poo fuel pellet production line takes up some space and there is then the issue of final storage of the finished product. 

I also you assume the process produces loads of water up front at the manure needs to be dewatered. What sort of land space does the effluent treatment plant require? 

The total space of the production line is configured to fit onto a truck trailer, 40 feet long and eight feet wide.  That way it can move easily from the factory to the dairy barn.  It is totally self-contained so that there is nothing to do on-site except plug it in and load in the manure.  You want to keep the process simple for the dairyman and his crew. 

There is no liquid effluent so there is no requirement for an effluent treatment plant. The end of the process are fire logs, compressed material of the same size as you would get when you buy a load of split cordwood for your cast-iron stove.  Logs of about 6 inches in diameter and about 16 inches long.  

Trust this explains. 

[NickW + 2,714]

16 hours ago, Jan van Eck said:

My system produces water that is totally pure, has nothing in it, you can drink it right off the end of the Converter. 

The other components remain with the solids, and end up in the burner, unless the processor/buyer determines to use it for something else, which could include a feedstock for depleted soils regeneration, if they wanted to do that.  But that is up to the Buyer, I don't determine that. 

How do you remove the phosphates, Potassium etc?  Most of these will be dissolved in the water as Ammonium Phosphate and Pottasium Nitrate. 

[Jan van Eck + 7,558]

On 6/29/2018 at 11:43 AM, NickW said:

We can make some reasonable assumptions based on  the historical geological evidence which shows a clear relationship between high CO2 levels and higher global temperatures 

Not really, Nick.  The data shows a correlation between CO2 levels and temps.  It does not show a "clear relationship," which I interpret to intend causation. 

Edited July 1, 2018 by Jan van Eck
typing error

[Jan van Eck + 7,558]

1 minute ago, NickW said:

How do you remove the phosphates, Potassium etc?  Most of these will be dissolved in the water as Ammonium Phosphate and Pottasium Nitrate. 

Stays with the solids. 

[NickW + 2,714]

1 minute ago, Jan van Eck said:

Stays with the solids. 

really - all them dissolved salts just precipitate out of the water naturally😂

[Jan van Eck + 7,558]

Just now, NickW said:

really - all them dissolved salts just precipitate out of the water naturally😂

I really don't mind if you laugh at me.  

I would remind you that you are not a customer, so you may take whatever views you wish, it is not going to affect either my sales or the viability of the machinery.

[NickW + 2,714]

2 minutes ago, Jan van Eck said:

I really don't mind if you laugh at me.  

I would remind you that you are not a customer, so you may take whatever views you wish, it is not going to affect either my sales or the viability of the machinery.

I am genuinely interested. From what you have described Vermont clearly has an issue with cow manure and your proposal on the face of it may help to mitigate those issues. 

I am actually interested in the process steps that produce pure water (i guess its not distilled) from a large pile of liquidy manure. 

In any case it was you who sidetracked this thread  for some reason and introduced your dung pellet machine proposal into a debate that concerned Global Warming. 

[Jan van Eck + 7,558]

1 minute ago, NickW said:

I am genuinely interested. From what you have described Vermont clearly has an issue with cow manure and your proposal on the face of it may help to mitigate those issues. 

I am actually interested in the process steps that produce pure water (i guess its not distilled) from a large pile of liquidy manure. 

In any case it was you who sidetracked this thread  for some reason and introduced your dung pellet machine proposal into a debate that concerned Global Warming. 

OK, so if you are genuinely interested, then the missing link is that the material is dewatered by placing it into vacuum.  If you check the vacuum tables for water, you will find that when the pressure is reduced to one psi in the chamber, and the material is brought to 176 degrees F., then the water will flash over to water vapor.  You exhaust the vapor and it is pure material, with the dissolved components, the solute, remaining behind with the rest of the solid matter. You can cycle the vacuum chamber (after exhausting the first load of vapor) as many times as you wish to obtain the required or desired level of moisture content. 

In this particular application the intention is to process the dried manure through an extruder to densify the material and convert the material into log form. The extruders to do that are stock, off-the-shelf machines specifically designed for cow manure.  At the output end of the extruder a cut-off saw chops the extrudate into logs of appropriate length, at this point arbitrarily selected at 16 inches, and the logs are either bulk-packed or stacked (by Mexican labor, in this area) into and onto pallets measuring 4 ft x 4 ft x 4 ft, the completed pallet then shrink-wrapped and placed onto the transfer truck for hauling off to the boiler-generator plant.  Since you can control the dryness, and you want a binder material, the material is first dried to 12% moisture so that leaves can be mechanically mixed in, and the lignin from oak and maple leaves is released and acts as the binder.  Since Vermont has lots of leaves that part should be easy enough. Now after the mixing and extruding, if you want to dry further then it can go into a secondary vacuum chamber when on the pallet, and those chambers (with a RR track in the bottom for material handling on pallets) are already built here in Vermont, by a small manufacturer called Vacu-Therm, so that is all off-the-shelf.   See here:  https://vacutherm.com/   But that is only if you want to go that far.  

The problem with what the Texas researchers did is that they were doing burn calculations on the equivalent of "wet wood," so some of the inherent heat energy released in burning is absorbed in attempting to remove the remaining moisture, which then exhausts out the system without providing any heat transfer to the boiler liquid. And you want to avoid that, as it is wasteful. 

As to how this all links back into Oilprice.ciom, remember that the development of any substitute fuel in the generation of electricity is going to eventually have an impact. How much of an impact, I dunno. 

[NickW + 2,714]

20 minutes ago, Jan van Eck said:

Not really, Nick.  The data shows a correlation between CO2 levels and temps.  It does not show a "clear relationship," which I interprest to intend causation. 

Ok fair enough but a correlation is a starting point for further investigation. 

You can demonstrate the effects of radiative forcing by different gases in a Laboratory

You can further refine the hypothesis that Co2 is a significant GW gas by investigating other possible causes and if appropriate ruling them out - as has been the case with Milankovitch cycles / sunspots / variability of output of the sun (there hasn't been any in the sort of time frames we are talking about)  and nonsense claims like Cosmic Radiation. 

Venus gives a pretty good descriptive account of CO2 as a warming gas. It reflects 80% of incoming light but is the hottest plant in the solar system and that heat is pretty much uniform despite the fact the planets day is 240 days long. 

I have no doubt there are numerous other predictive and descriptive power theories to support the claim. 

[NickW + 2,714]

3 minutes ago, Jan van Eck said:

OK, so if you are genuinely interested, then the missing link is that the material is dewatered by placing it into vacuum.  If you check the vacuum tables for water, you will find that when the pressure is reduced to one psi in the chamber, and the material is brought to 176 degrees F., then the water will flash over to water vapor.  You exhaust the vapor and it is pure material, with the dissolved components, the solute, remaining behind with the rest of the solid matter. You can cycle the vacuum chamber (after exhausting the first load of vapor) as many times as you wish to obtain the required or desired level of moisture content. 

In this particular application the intention is to process the dried manure through an extruder to densify the material and convert the material into log form. The extruders to do that are stock, off-the-shelf machines specifically designed for cow manure.  At the output end of the extruder a cut-off saw chops the extrudate into logs of appropriate length, at this point arbitrarily selected at 16 inches, and the logs are either bulk-packed or stacked (by Mexican labor, in this area) into and onto pallets measuring 4 ft x 4 ft x 4 ft, the completed pallet then shrink-wrapped and placed onto the transfer truck for hauling off to the boiler-generator plant.  Since you can control the dryness, and you want a binder material, the material is first dried to 12% moisture so that leaves can be mechanically mixed in, and the lignin from oak and maple leaves is released and acts as the binder.  Since Vermont has lots of leaves that part should be easy enough. Now after the mixing and extruding, if you want to dry further then it can go into a secondary vacuum chamber when on the pallet, and those chambers (with a RR track in the bottom for material handling on pallets) are already built here in Vermont, by a small manufacturer called Vacu-Therm, so that is all off-the-shelf.   See here:  https://vacutherm.com/   But that is only if you want to go that far.  

The problem with what the Texas researchers did is that they were doing burn calculations on the equivalent of "wet wood," so some of the inherent heat energy released in burning is absorbed in attempting to remove the remaining moisture, which then exhausts out the system without providing any heat transfer to the boiler liquid. And you want to avoid that, as it is wasteful. 

As to how this all links back into Oilprice.ciom, remember that the development of any substitute fuel in the generation of electricity is going to eventually have an impact. How much of an impact, I dunno. 

I had a suspicion we would get to flash distillation technologies. 

I'd be interested to see the input energy for that process and I can't see that much of that energy is recoverable to reuse.