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Politics : Politics of Energy -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Eric who wrote (47250)	2/3/2014 10:52:18 AM
From: Thomas A Watson	1 Recommendation Recommended By FJB Respond to of 86363

Eric, It is nice to see Josh portraying you in a cartoon. Josh on ‘The Uncomfortable Pause” Posted on February 2, 2014 by Anthony Watts Josh writes in with a new cartoon. This is a spoof on the xkcd.com/1321/ cartoon that was doing the Twitter rounds the other day. First, the XKCD cartoon on global warming: Now, here’s Josh’s spoof of it:

To: Eric who wrote (47250)	2/3/2014 12:21:36 PM
From: Maurice Winn	1 Recommendation Recommended By Bilow Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 86363

Eric, coal is a bit short on hydrogen compared with fossil fuels. Homeopathic amounts of hydrogen which are already mostly part oxygenated is not quite the same as the hydrogen which fills methane, and gasoline and is generously available in good quality diesel fuel though there are some murky fuels which are black and gunky and more like coal [such as BP's Orimulsion which my colleague Charles used to mess around with, literally]. Plants are cellulose and lignin type compounds, which form coal when swamped. There is homeopathic amounts of hydrogen energy during combustion of coal, which is why the Global Alarmists call it so "dirty" = the main output is carbon dioxide from the energy production. Oil and gas on the other hand are formed from subducted marine deposits which are from fishy and radiolarian type deposits which are cooked during the subduction process and then filtered through zeolites and whatnot while flowing into sedimentary layers where they remain extinct until humans come along and bring them back to life in the world's biggest recycling process. Methane is chocka with hydrogen in combustible form. The OH in coal is already partly combusted, same as with oxygenates such as ethanol in petrol, hence the low energy per litre with ethanol despite the presence of lots of hydrogen. In the liquids, the ratio of hydrogen to carbon is about 2:1. Benzene and other aromatics give more bang for buck and reduce the hydrogen ratio, but they give the stink on start-up [before the catalysts light up] so good quality fuels are not too full of those these days. An extreme form of coal is diamond, which is not normally considered a fuel, because it's so valuable. But if diamond was in profusion like quartz, covering beaches by the megaton, we'd be happy enough to shovel diamond into the furnace and call it fossil fuel, with zero hydrogen which is stripped off during the cooking process in the deep slow rise from subduction zones. Coal is a bit short on hydrogen, especially in a calorific form [which is the function of coal]. Mqurice