NNadir
NNadir's JournalBalance between Reducibility and N2O Adsorption Capacity for the N2O Decomposition: CuxCoy Catalysts
The paper I'll discuss in this post is this one: Balance between Reducibility and N2O Adsorption Capacity for the N2O Decomposition: CuxCoy Catalysts as an Example (Shangchao Xiong, Jianjun Chen,* Nan Huang, Shijian Yang, Yue Peng and Junhua Li, Environ. Sci. Technol. 2019, 53, 17, 10379-10386)
2019 is the second year in which the weekly carbon dioxide measurements at the Mauna Loa carbon dioxide observatory as compared to the same week in an earlier year, in this case 2018, are averaging more than 3.00 ppm. The exact figure as of this writing YTD is 3.07 ppm. 2016 was the first such year, when in comparison to 2015, measurements ran at 3.40 ppm on average.
The climate catastrophe now under way is precisely that which was predicted two or three decades ago. The essence of science is that if a theory's predictions agree with results, the theory gains credence.
One of the theories we've heard a lot about is that so called "renewable energy" would save the day.
It should be clear to anyone not engaged in Trumpian dishonesty that the bet on so called "renewable energy" didn't work, isn't working and won't work. The use of dangerous fossil fuels is accelerating, not decelerating, as are the increases in the concentration in the planetary atmosphere of the dangerous fossil fuel waste carbon dioxide.
People are literally dropping dead in the streets from heat and still we keep prattling on about wind and solar power, how great they are, how wonderful they're doing, and how popular they are.
History will not forgive us, nor should it.
Carbon dioxide is not, however, the only climate forcing gas, as most people know. The second most important one is methane, which is a side product of the real fastest growing source of energy over the last two or three years, the form of energy for which wind and solar are merely marketing lipstick on the pig, methane, the main constituent of dangerous natural gas. (Coal is the fastest growing source of energy on this planet in the 21st century, although there has been a very, very, slight decrease in its use over the last two years.)
The third most important climate forcing gas is nitrous oxide, famously known as "laughing gas," although in context there's nothing funny about it.
The paper cited gives a nice overview of its risks, because it is not only a climate forcing gas, it is an ozone destroying gas as well. From the introduction:
While this introduction is accurate so far is goes, one should state that the largest source, by far, of nitrous oxide is not the manufacture of adipic acid and nitric acid. It is agriculture. Without the nitrogen fertilizers from which nitrous oxide derives, we would need to choose to have a large portion of the world's population starve to death. Any volunteers?
Nitrous oxide, despite being an ozone depleting gas, as is the case with other ozone depleting gases is quite unreactive in the absence of radiation, even though it is thermodynamically unstable with respect to elemental oxygen and nitrogen. Substances in this class, thermodynamically unstable but kinetically metastable require catalysts to drive their decomposition, catalysts being the topic of the author's paper.
They continue:
Metal oxides, especially transition-metal oxides, are widely researched and employed in the N2O decomposition reaction, which are consequences of their low price, excellent reducibility, and adequate catalytic characteristics.(13,14) Particularly, metal oxides exhibiting the spinel structure are efficient catalysts to decompose N2O.(15) The metal cations in the spinel structure are in the mixed valence state, which frequently consists of divalent and trivalent states. The divalent and trivalent cations in the spinel structure are located in tetrahedral and octahedral coordination centers and are represented as AIIBIII2O4. Because the key step in the N2O decomposition reaction is generally regarded as the charge transfer from the active sites to the antibonding orbital of N2O, spinels can decompose N2O at a relatively low temperature because of their excellent redox property attributed to the divalent and trivalent cations in the spinel structure.(16,17) Given this perspective, metal oxides with the spinel structure were systematically investigated in the decomposition of N2O.(6) Russo et al. investigated several spinel-type catalysts and found that Co-based spinels can provide the most efficient N2O decomposition performance.(18) However, the redox properties of Co-based spinels are not the best among those of spinel catalysts. Consequently, there must exist another crucial property that significantly affects the catalytic performance of N2O decomposition. Many researchers used density functional theory (DFT) methods to calculate the reaction pathway of N2O decomposition and proposed that N2O adsorption is the first step in N2O decomposition.(15,19) The chemical adsorption of N2O generally follows “N–N–O–□”...(20,21)
Cobalt is a "conflict metal." It is mined by children working under slave like conditions, not that this has prevented lots of people from cheering loudly for its use in putative "green" Tesla electric cars which for reasons that escape me entirely, are popular on the left.
Nevertheless, it is worth considering the paper while keeping this in the back of our minds. Enslaved children are not really mollified I'd guess by the existence of "green" electric cars, but in any world where they are justly treated, not the one in which we live, nitrous oxide will matter, for the just, the unjust, the free, the slave, the rich, the poor.
The paper gives experimental and modeling (DFT) details.
Some graphic results:
The caption:
The caption:
TPR is a technique known as "temperature program reduction" utilized to characterize the efficiency of catalysts by using a reducing gas, here hydrogen.
The caption:
The caption:
The caption:
Note the high temperatures at which the decomposition is most effective for all of the catalysts herein described. This is another case where environmental remediation - were we to give a rat's ass (we don't) about the future of humanity - would require energy, clean energy, which um, disqualifies the mass intensive solar and wind industries which will never be clean, and which will never be anything more than a foot note to the methane industry.
The mechanism of the decomposition:
The caption:
From the conclusion to the paper:
It is worth noting that one of the uses for nitrous oxide is in a gas phase radiation dosimeter. Radiation destroys this dangerous gas, negating the necessity for a catalyst. In fact, radiation in the upper atmosphere does precisely this, albeit at the environmental expense of destroying the planet's protective ozone layer.
This suggests a use for components of used nuclear fuels, the irradiation of air at tropospheric levels to destroy this dangerous gas, were we to ignore the idiot prattling of anti-nukes and choose to do something meaningful to address the wholesale destruction of the atmosphere.
A few years ago, on this website I took to noting, after decades of hearing horseshit about how so called "renewable energy" was somehow superior to nuclear energy - which it isn't even close to being since mining iron and coal to make steel posts for wind turbines that become garbage in less than 20 years is in no way "green" - that no one now living will ever see the concentrations of dangerous fossil fuel waste in the atmosphere of less than 400 ppm. It is now September, and we are approaching the annual minimum for carbon dioxide concentrations, which now stand well above 408 ppm. Thus just a few years after I began using the statement about how "no one now living will ever see the concentrations of dangerous fossil fuel waste in the atmosphere of less than 400 ppm," we can now substitute "408" for 400.
Next year will be worse.
Wonderful, isn't it?
We should pause to wonder what an "environmentalist" actually is. Despite the pixilated nonsense put out by the insane media, "Greenpeace," has nothing to do with environmentalism.
I have noticed recently that a few of my posts in this section have produced more comments than I can actually read. I if not humanity have chosen to ignore the insane prattlings of anti-nukes. They simply infuriate me, since their ignorance kills people and we should choose not to dignify such deadly nonsense with comment.
I trust you've enjoyed the weekend.
My kid signed up for undergraduate Engineers Without Borders.
He's going to be working, remotely, on water purification systems for the third world, besides his regular classes and research.
He sprung it on me yesterday, out of nowhere, during our weekly phone call.
I'm a proud papa.
They're facing hard times, but they have it in them to be a great generation, those Millennials. They are so much better than we were.
Evaluating the Leak Potential of Giant Fossil Fuel Waste Dumps by Modeling Undersea Vents.
The paper I'll discuss in this post is this one: Simulating and Quantifying Multiple Natural Subsea CO2 Seeps at Panarea Island (Aeolian Islands, Italy) as a Proxy for Potential Leakage from Subseabed Carbon Storage Sites.
The cult of anti-nukes can be quite Trumpian in its pride in it's ignorance and overt hypocrisy.
For example, in the United States, over half a century, the United States has accumulated about 75,000 tons of used nuclear fuel in over half a century of operations. If one is unfortunate enough to engage one of these blunderbuss airheads, one can learn that, having learned to be terrified of radioactive atoms while getting a "C" in their 8th grade science classes, they believe that it is impossible to contain this fuel indefinitely.
Nevertheless, these same people will be perfectly OK with embracing the notion that one could - for them the word "could" is equivalent to "is" - contain 35 billion tons of dangerous fossil fuel waste - generated not over half a century but annually indefinitely.
Of course, they don't call these containment sites "dumps" - since it is their habit to misuse language (they probably got "C's" in 8th grade English as well - they call them "sequestration sites."
Since they're not very good at counting, or thinking and because they have a bourgeois disposable mentality, they think in terms of dumps; but let's be clear, every "dump" is dumped on all future generations.
The planet is not a single use container to be trashed by poorly educated bourgeois airheads. It is, rather, a magnificent, rare and sacred place in a largely unconscious universe.
The nation of Norway has gotten very upset about some technetium atoms in the North Sea. Technetium is a very useful and interesting metal that is radioactive in all of its forms and is a fission product from the production of nuclear energy. Regrettably some of it has been dumped rather than used. Hopefully that sort of thing will come to an end.
At no place in North Sea, despite the protests from Norwegians, is the concentration of technetium any where near what it is in the urine of a person recently having undergone a technetium based diagnostic imagining process designed to save their lives, but, no matter.
Norway has made a mountain of money by drilling for oil and gas in the same North Sea in which the Technetium that so upsets them is found.
And just so you don't think they're bad guys and gals, they built a waste dump for the stuff that their product turns into after its used, carbon dioxide. ...A small dump...a, um, "practice" dump...
Of course, these days people literally drop dead in the street from unprecedented high temperatures, or are killed by extreme weather events. Mention this fact to an anti-nuke or the related fact that seven million people die every year from air pollution - that would be 19,000 people today, and I'll bet they'll mutter some idiot chant about Fukushima or Chernobyl, as if these mattered on the scale of the destruction of the entire planetary atmosphere.
Anyway, about the Norwegian dangerous fossil fuel waste dump, here's some stuff from the introductory text to the paper:
Diverse potential scenarios of subsea CO2 leaks have been simulated.(16?20) This includes large CO2 releases resulting from a massive failure of a facility (e.g., a blowout).(19) The high daily release of 10,000 t d–1 of CO2 from a point source in the North Sea for a full year was predicted to reduce pH by 0.25 units up to 141 km away from the source, and by >2 units nearer to the source. The magnitude of such releases makes it unlikely that they could remain undetected or ignored for prolonged periods. On the contrary, smaller gas leaks remain largely ignored, such as the release of 5–70 t d–1 of methane at the 22/4b blowout crater in the UK North Sea, more than 20 years after the 1990 accidental blowout,(21,22) or the widespread natural gas seepage resulting from offshore oil and gas activities.(23,24)
In the absence of strong bubble plumes, the high solubility of CO2 leads to its rapid aqueous dissolution from bubbles within a few meters of their emission into the sea as indicated by field and laboratory data, and model simulations.(13,16,20,25?27) Consequently, small CO2 leaks disperse in ambient seawater over short distances(20,28) and are therefore particularly challenging to detect without careful monitoring techniques.(20) For example, a recent study indicated that the detectability of a relatively low leakage rate of gaseous CO2 of 85 kg d–1 would be limited to < 30 m horizontal distance from the release source and ? 2 m from the seafloor.(20) Nevertheless, such small single-source releases of CO2 were evaluated as largely insignificant in terms of storage performance, and a single leak of this magnitude would therefore not prevent CCS sites from retaining a millennium climate mitigation effect.(20) However, migration pathways within geological formations and overlying sediments may lead to numerous, spatially distributed emission sources under some circumstances.(14,29) There is concern that several small-sized leaks may remain undetected under these conditions. Being able to ensure leak detection and flow rate determination is particularly important for monitoring of storage sites because major leaks may offset the benefits of energy-intensive CCS facilities.(1,30?32)
At present, two alternative, complementary strategies exist to investigate the impact of potential subsea CO2 leaks: experimental releases and natural CO2 seeps. Manmade subsea (bed) experimental releases of CO2 require costly logistics and afford limited distribution of emission source(s).(15,20,33,34) Natural CO2 seepages(13,17,29,35?38) exhibit less-constrained flow rates and may present more spatially distributed emission sources. The seep system offshore Panarea Island (Aeolian Islands, South Italy) is one of the most easily accessible natural seeps(25,29,36,39?42) and was selected for this study as a realistic leakage analogue.
Here, we use field data collected in May 2014 at a natural CO2 seep site covering ?18,000 m2 offshore Panarea during cruise POS469 of the R/V Poseidon(29,43) to provide insights about the possible geochemical impacts of CO2 leaks from subseabed storage reservoirs. A new simulation tool is developed and validated with field data. This model builds on the existing multiphase bubble and droplet plume model Texas A&M oil spill (outfall) calculator (TAMOC).(44?50) Here, we couple this model to a Lagrangian advection-dispersion model that tracks the movement of dissolved CO2 in the water column and to a model of CO2 speciation in natural seawater (the csys software(51)). Simulations provide a means to evaluate the mass flow rate at CO2 seepage/leakage sites based on observed anomalies in seawater chemistry (e.g., pH or partial pressure of CO2, pCO2). The model is intended to be used as a tool for analyzing field data and to guide sampling during experimental CO2 release experiments and field monitoring of existing and future storage sites.
The authors some details about their study site...
...and then there's lots of discussion of their modeling tools.
I only have time to post some pictures and captions from the text:
The caption:
The caption:
The caption:
The caption:
These waste dumps, the authors conclude, from their modeling exercise are quite prone to leak, where, like all the crap piled up in the quixotic and failed so called "renewable energy" scheme that didn't work, isn't working and won't work, they will be the charge of the same future generations whose resources we are actively squandering on wishful thinking and consumerism.
Nevertheless such dumps will not have as dramatic effect as the 35 billion tons now being dumped every year with no place to put it even while people with no scientific or engineering education prattle on about 75,000 tons of solid used nuclear fuel.
We will kill the entire ocean because, um, um, um, we think that Chernobyl wiped out central Asia and Fukushima wiped out Japan.
Sigh...
The authors conclusions, the bold being mine:
On a 24 h average basis, an area of 3900 m2 experiences a ?pH of ? 0.2 pH units (Figure 4), calculated for the 0–1 m bottom water layer, with a rapid decrease of the impacted area at shallower depths (1200 m2 at 1–2 m above seafloor). On an instantaneous basis, ?pH can reach up to 2.2 pH units locally, with a maximum area of 6300 m2 experiencing significantly harmful pH drops (?pH ? 1). During the 24 h period shown in the figure, an average area of 600 m2 (standard deviation: 1300 m2) experienced ?pH ? 1 at any given time. The pH varied over short time scales as a function of time-varying water currents (Movie S-1), and this result may depend on the period within a 28-day tidal cycle. It is likely that marine organisms can survive acute exposure to ?pH values of this magnitude,(1) and we hypothesized that the 24 h average ?pH is likely representative of the chronic exposure level.
These local estimates must also be considered in the context of ongoing anthropogenic CO2 emissions: the pH of world oceans is predicted to decrease by up to 0.4 pH units by the end of the 21st century relative to the preindustrial level.(3,111) As a consequence, the local impacts faced by marine communities near such leakages (? 1.9 × 10–2 km2 experiencing ?pH ? 0.5) would be dwarfed by a change of similar magnitude in the surface waters of world oceans (361 × 106 km2).(71)
Have a nice weekend.
Hours of the Top 50 CAISO Electricity Loads in California, July 2019.
The data which I have sorted into hourly power demand on the California (CAISO) grid can be found here: CAISO July 2019 Hourly Power Demand
CAISO Home Page
The first column is the power demand; the second is the ranking of the demand, and the last is the hour of the demand (on a 24 hour clock.)
It seems the top ten all took place in the early evening hours, while among the top 20, 6 occurred in the late afternoon, with the other 14 being in the early evening.
Isn't solar energy great? No wonder it's saving the world, and we're "only" increasing the concentrations of the dangerous fossil fuel waste carbon dioxide 2.4 ppm/year, the highest rate ever recorded, but who's counting?
43025 1 18
42723 2 17
42358 3 19
42260 4 16
42203 5 18
41915 6 17
41870 7 18
41859 8 18
41857 9 19
41639 10 19
41605 11 20
41502 12 19
41499 13 17
41418 14 19
41264 15 17
41168 16 18
40879 17 16
40771 18 15
40749 19 21
40720 20 20
40617 21 20
40613 22 16
40591 23 20
40280 24 20
40226 25 16
40214 26 18
40037 27 19
39921 28 17
39666 29 19
39623 30 18
39546 31 18
39527 32 19
39482 33 21
39472 34 17
39385 35 19
39363 36 15
39338 37 21
39318 38 14
39212 39 18
39164 40 20
39164 41 15
39155 42 21
39152 43 21
38892 44 22
38773 45 17
38742 46 17
38585 47 20
38559 48 15
38518 49 16
38333 50 20
I wish you a pleasant Friday.
Shocked Mums Hear Boogie Woogie For The First Time
Interesting Data On Hourly Solar Energy Production On the ISO New England Grid, 2018.
The data in this post will come from a spreadsheet down loaded from the ISO New England Operations web page, ISO New England being the name of the electrical grid that powers the New England states, including Vermont. The spreadsheet can be found here:New England Iso Operations Reports
The data to which I will refer for the title data is the 2018 hourly solar data spreadsheet, which is current up to the end of June of this year. I have been also working with other spreadsheets from the ISO website, and will produce data from them here without direct reference to particular sheets.
I have chosen the full year, 2018, in this post in contrast to the post I will link below, which featured YTD data in the current data, since the insolation of a region varies over a full year, and as were are on the high side
This is a follow on to the post I produced yesterday on another popular, if delusional, "renewable energy will save us" scheme that, as wishful thinking that is soaking up huge amounts of resources for no result with respect to climate change, is helping climate change become worse, not better.
That post is here:
Interesting Data On Hourly Wind Energy Production On the ISO New England Grid, 2019.
And let's be clear on something, the situation with respect to climate change is deteriorating rapidly, no matter how many happy face posts one reads here in the E&E forum or elsewhere about how great so called "renewable energy" is doing, usually expressed in idiotic "percent talk."
The weekly year to year comparison data at the Mauna Loa carbon dioxide observatory posted this morning is this:
Weekly value from 1 year ago: 406.48 ppm
Weekly value from 10 years ago: 385.78 ppm
Last updated: September 1, 2019
Up-to-date weekly average CO2 at Mauna Loa
Here's some "percent talk" to chew on:
The increase over the same week of 2018 is 2.98 ppm, quite nearly 3. There are 2,274 such weekly data points posted on the Mauna Loa website, going back to May 25, 1975. More than half, 1,248 of them were recorded before Jan 2, 2000. Of these, 49 exceeded 3.00 ppm, or in "percent talk," 3.82% of them.
Since Jan 2, 2000, 1,022 such data points have been recorded. Of these, 130 have exceeded 3.00 ppm, or in "percent talk" 12.7% of them.
We are now experiencing 2019. In 2019 there have been 34 such measurements. Of these, 18 have exceeded 3.00 ppm, or in "percent talk" 54.55% of them.
Are we tired of all this winning yet?
The political subtext in contrast to the technical realities I expressed in that linked post about wind power in New England in 2019 was this:
Many of my fellow Democrats agree with these policies which is unfortunate; the goal of controlling the government should not be merely to win elections and hold power, but rather to govern well, to make our country safe, and sustainable for future generations.
We must not miss this; it is our responsibility as human beings, at least if we embrace "the better angels of our natures," to do something other than posturing and embracing wishful thinking, these being the same as doing nothing.
My claim had to do with his cheering for the closure of the Vermont Yankee Nuclear Power Plant, which shut in 2014 after 42 years of operation without a single loss of life. Vermont Yankee was a small nuclear plant, with a rated power of 620 MWe, but despite being small, it was able to produce around 70% of all the electricity consumed in the State of Vermont in a single building in a typical year. The environmental attractiveness of this should be obvious, but isn't, because ignorant rhetoric easily trumps reality in the times in which we live, a regrettable fact. We are all, as a species, dumbing down in times we desperately need to smarten up.
Calculating, using Excel functions, from the 2018 hourly solar data spreadsheet, I report the following:
A year contains 8760 hours. Of these, solar power output in the entire New England region exceeded the output of the Vermont Yankee Nuclear Power Plant, again 620 MW, for 596 hours among them, or in "percent talk" for 6.80%. The highest single hour recorded for all the solar facilities in New England was recorded on April 22, 2018, when the power for the hour ending a 1 pm, unsurprisingly the noon hour, was 855.054 MW.
It is widely reported that the sun disappears from the sky during each 24 hour period; the technical term for this occurrence is "nighttime." Thus it should be unsurprising that for 3,724 hours all the solar facilities in New England produced zero MW of power or in "percent talk," 42.5% of all hours occurring in 2018.
More telling is the fact that 4,680 hours all the solar facilities in New England produced less than 10 MW of power, or in "percent talk," 53.4% of the time. For 5,783 hours, all of the solar facilities in New England produced less than 100 MW of power, or in "percent talk" 66.0% of all the hours in 2018.
In terms of average continuous power measured over a 24 hour period, all of the solar facilities in New England produced more than 200 MW of power for the day as a whole. Interestingly, of the top 4 such days, three occurred in April of 2018, April 22, 2018 when the average continuous power was 294.1 MW, April 21, 2018 when the average continuous power was 289.1 MW, and April 23, 2018, when the average continuous power was 282.2 MW. This may be a function of how the solar cells are oriented. Two of the top ten occurred in June of 2018, three in July and two in May.
For 103 of 365 days in 2018, the average continuous power of all the solar facilities in New England produced more than 200 MW of average continuous power, in percent talk, 28.2% of the days, meaning that for 71.8% of the days, they, um, didn't.
So called "renewable energy" in New England doesn't cut it. The largest source of electricity in New England is dangerous natural gas, the waste of which is dumped directly into the planetary atmosphere, destroying it. It has done nothing to address climate change, is doing nothing to address climate change and won't do anything to address climate change. In this, New England follows the world.
This weekend the Southern United States will be, regrettably, slammed by a major hurricane. There will be, as usual, all kinds of stuttering nonsense relating to misinterpretation of Bayesian mathematics about whether the hurricane was the result of deliberate lying about climate change, denial on the right, wishful thinking on the left.
Intuitively, anyone with an ounce of sense and honesty knows that worldwide the weather is rapidly deteriorating, whether from deadly killing heat waves or severe storms.
This hurricane now coming will rip solar cells all over the regions which it strikes off their moorings, instantaneously converting them to electronic waste. So much for saving anything.
I personally observed this sort of thing on my own block in New Jersey in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy.
What people will talk about, and care about, is Florida's nuclear plants, although arguably, I think, if Florida had more nuclear plants and had them for a longer time, this hurricane, were it to occur at all, would not be this powerful.
This will mimic the situation at Fukushima, where a great hue and cry was raised about the possibility that someone might die of radiation while the tens of thousands of people killed by seawater didn't matter to the general public a whit.
Whether this is true or not, the fact is that we are not doing anything meaningful to address climate change remains.
I wish you a happy holiday weekend, and where relevant, where happiness regrettably cannot be an issue, a safe holiday weekend.
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Gender: MaleCurrent location: New Jersey
Member since: 2002
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