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Old 06-22-2019, 02:48 PM   #6038 (permalink)
aerohead
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Psychrometric dumping ground

I've never seen anything published about the direct atmospheric heating from fossil-fuels.I did a back-of-the-envelope calculation,using 2016 data.
Global energy use was 18-TW.80% of that was attributed to fossil-fuels.That's 14.4-TW.For a year that's 126,144-TWh,or 126,144,000,000,000 kWh.Converting to Btu's gives 430,655,616,000,000,000 Btu.At 144-btu/LB of ice,this is enough heat energy to melt 2,990,644,000,000,000 pounds of ice.At 12,000 Btu/ton refrigeration,this is equivalent to 249,222,000,000-tons cooling/year,or 42,301,400-tons/hour/24-hours a day,365-days at constant output,to balance the sensible load from the power plants.
At 300,000 gallons water/GigaWatt,cooling tower evaporation losses,the power plants would remove 37,843,200,000,000 gallons of surface water/year,or, 310,314,240,000,000 lbs H2O /year,or be adding 155,157,120,000-tons of latent heat,water vapor to the atmosphere/year.This is more than global agriculture uses according to Wysessions,at Washington University.
I'd be happy if some of you would run the numbers also and see if I blew it!
PS I used a thermal efficiency of 35%,which Wysession said was about a mean-average industry-wide.Also,these values do not include the heat load for fuel prospecting,extraction,cleaning/processing/refining,transportation,storage,delivery,waste treatment,reclamation,well-plugging,dry-holes,etc..
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Last edited by aerohead; 06-22-2019 at 03:23 PM.. Reason: PS
 
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