View Single Post
Old 06-22-2019, 02:48 PM   #6038 (permalink)
aerohead
Master EcoModder
 
aerohead's Avatar
 
Join Date: Jan 2008
Location: Sanger,Texas,U.S.A.
Posts: 16,272
Thanks: 24,394
Thanked 7,360 Times in 4,760 Posts
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..
__________________
Photobucket album: http://s1271.photobucket.com/albums/jj622/aerohead2/

Last edited by aerohead; 06-22-2019 at 03:23 PM.. Reason: PS
 
The Following User Says Thank You to aerohead For This Useful Post:
NeilBlanchard (06-24-2019)