If EVs are in fact burning coal... better do it right!

[freebeard]

If biochar were produced in quantities like coal is consumed, the end-product could be used to reverse desertification. This proposal is a high-tech retrofit on an industrial scale.

Biochar can be that, or it can be produced in 55-gallon drums or even more primitive methods. It should be doe on all those levels.

[Xist]

There is clean coal?

[solarguy]

There is somewhat-less-dirty coal.


Since I am extremely cynical, I imagine this process could be used by giant utility scale public and private companies to milk many billions of dollars from the taxpayer, and never produce a competitive viable alternative to the current (pretty terrible) process for coal to electricity.


Again, I hope and pray that it works as advertised and cuts our coal use in half. But as a cynic, I am rarely disappointed.

[freebeard]

This involves creating and deploying an entire new [partial] infrastructure. Meanwhile, wind and solar costs have achieved parity and will continue to decline.

[spacemanspif]

Wind and solar still don't make much power at night. Fuels need to be consumed to make power when wind and sun are not present. Hydro electric is nice but the power doesn't reach all areas So we still need fuels for power.

Any technology that makes more power on less fuel with fewer emissions is worth looking into. Seems that this wouldn't revolutionize anything and the power companies might jump on it as a baby step of progress while enabling them to maintain the status quo for longer.

[Xist]

Future Solar Panels Will Generate Energy From Raindrops -

Solar may be getting better.

[gone-ot]

Originally Posted by Xist

Future Solar Panels Will Generate Energy From Raindrops -

Solar may be getting wetter.

Corrected it for you (wink,wink).

[freebeard]

I saw that. They're talking milli-Amps at micro-Volts, but still...

Is that a weird website or what? Right out of the 1990s. Page title in white on light gray. navigation duplicated 3 or 4 times down the page, with the content in smaller type. Here's another story about incremental gains:

Scientists Create Ultra-Thin Graphene Sheet That Can Power a House -

Originally Posted by spacemanspif

Fuels need to be consumed to make power when wind and sun are not present.

While I won't disagree, keep in mind that hydrogen isn't a fuel, it's an energy store.

[cRiPpLe_rOoStEr]

Instead of making biochar, why not to just use wood chips and other cellulosic residues directly? Some sugar and ethanol mills in Brazil already use the straw and other sugarcane leftovers as a fuel for for power generation, the so-called co-generation.

[freebeard]

You surprise me, being from Brazil and all.

terra preta do índio

You do realize the Amazon Basin was once a vast orchard?

Searching for the Amazon's Hidden Civilizations | Science | AAAS

Terra preta—literally “black earth”—is soil that humans have enriched to have two to three times the nutrient content of the surrounding, poor-quality soil, explains Crystal McMichael, a paleoecologist at the Florida Institute of Technology in Melbourne. Although there is no standard definition for terra preta, it tends to be darker than other Amazonian soils and to have charcoal and pre-Columbian pottery shards mixed in. Most of it was created 2500 to 500 years ago. Like the earthworks, terra preta is considered a sign that a particular area was occupied by humans in the pre-Columbian past.

Archaeologists Will Use Drones to Search the Amazon - Archaeology Magazine

Dark earth, cultivated by humans to create raised agricultural fields, and geoglyphs made up of large ditches, can be spotted from the air by drones carrying Lidar technology, which uses lasers to map the topography of the ground.