Hi DX. Yeah I should have said almost all of the energy content of straw is in the form of carbon. In terms of making heavy hydrocarbons out of methane, you are right about the difficulty, but you are also right that it can be done. Given that we don't want to go on using fossil fuels. Given that there is only so much biomass we can use without being ecologically destructive or competing with food sources, eventually making methane from hydrogen and other fossil fuels from the methane will probably be one of the few paths to enough sustainable hydrocarbons to make stuff like plastic and steel. (High grade steel is almost always made from ore, not recycled scrap. To turn ore into steel there has to be step that adds carbon.) The other paths will involve just as many problems. Also, while there are non-hydrocarbon jet fuels, while they may provide the same power as kerosene, they have about half the energy per volume, which would drastically restrict jet ranges.

The reason I think there will be spare electricity to do this: all the ultra-low carbon means of generating electricity are capital intensive - nukes, wind , sun. (The same applies to the ones that could only supply a small percent of electricity demand with today's technology but might supply more with breakthroughs such as wave and geothermal.) So let's look at France for the moment. France gets 80% of its electricity from nuclear power. To do this it runs nuclear plants at 70% of capacity. But it is only able to run them at that high a capacity because it sells nuclear electricity to other nations. Without those sales it would be running at lower than 70% capacity. Now 70% capacity is not bad. That is the best most coal plants achieve. But American nukes where nukes supply only baseload run at above 90% of capacity. So in France right now, if you had a customer that could just take any nuclear electricity that France had no other customer for, with any timing the French national utility chose, that utility could run their nukes at 90% or better of capacity just like the USA does and sell it to that customer very cheaply. Basically the cost of urnanium per kWh plus some minor operating costs that vary with production. I know it would be less that 1/2 cents per kWh. Ginger who keeps up with the nuclear industry could probably give a more precise estimate.

Now you know I prefer wind and solar to nukes. But if you had an all wind and solar grid, because of varietions not only in demand but in generation, you would have the equivalent of nuclear lost capacity factor - curtailment. Meaning that in order to have all the renewable electricity you needed when you needed it, you have to produce a great deal of renewable electricity when you didn't need it. Past a certain point, this type of overproduction is cheaper than storage just as with nukes. And curtailment with a renewable grid would be even greater than lost capacity factor with nukes. A mixed grid that had nukes, solar and wind would have even more electricity that could be produced but was not due to combined renewable curtailment and nuke unused capacity. So in any scenario without huge breakthroughs for low-carbon electricity we will have a lot of potential to produce additional electricity (provided the customer does not care about timing) at a super low marginal cost.

The processes which produce methane from electricity and CO2 can be automated. That has been demonstrated. So given a source of CO or CO2, it would be possible to run these only when surplus electricity is available without additional labor costs. And methane can be stored until it is needed. We don't need this now. Right now we get most of our electricity from fossil fuels, and in most of the world mostly from coal. But if we decide not to commit suicide as a civilization and do something about global warming this is a problem that will have to be tackled. Now it is possible to make methane from the CO2 in the air rather than from a CO2 source (or better yet a CO source). But the problem is that it has been demonstrated (continued...)

( continues...) that we can convert electricity to methane, given a concentrate CO2 source, with 60% efficiency (energy value of the methane ends up at 60% of the electrity that was spent). (Note that this has only been demonstrated in the laboratory. The best commercial process is around 40% efficient.) But if you don't have concentrated CO2 or CO this process has a theoretical maximum of 40% and in practice will be about 20% efficient. That may need a little more surplus electricity than even a nuke or renewable grid can provide. In addition to indusrtial procuts, you also need hydrocrbons for jet fuel. A Boeing Dreamliner (the most efficient jet plane ever built) would need to reduce its passenter space by 70% of it was going to run on hydrogen. By about 50% if it was going to run on Ammonia. (And you would have to modify a whole bunch of stuff aside from the problem of finding room to store fuel. Or you cut range by 70% or 50% and refuel twice as often - which does not work well for Atlantic crossings) If we don't want to give up jet planes, steel and plastic in the long run it is worth at least doing the math to find out how much energy we gain by spinning straw into jet fuel - assuming that the electricity required to run the process is electricity that otherwise would not be produced and requires no fuel costs (wind and sun) or almost no fuel cost (nukes) and in either case requires no additional generation capital cost. (Yes the conversion process does take capital. But so does extracting and processing fossil fuel.)

Well, one useful thing about global warming is that as the average temperature goes up, so does the average kinetic energy of the molecules in the atmosphere, so more wind for the windmills.

One countervailing factor. A lot of the power of the global winds comes from the difference between the temperature of the polls and the equator. That is going to be reduced. Climate scientists and meteorlogists are not 100% certain how that plays out. The extra energy has to go some where. But how much of that extra energy goes into making really bad storms stronger and more frequent? Could we end up with everyday winds getting weaker, and the storms getting worse and more frequent at a faster rate than expected? Nobody is quite sure. The second scenario is not "a most likely to happen" projection. But it has not been ruled out either.

Help! I'm trying to install Yosemite on my computer and it keeps telling me that that it can't install on my hard drive. I can't figure out why. First it said it was only used for backups. So I unlocked it and gave myself read and write permission. Still won't let me.

This was my sister's computer before mine and she's not a Mac person. I can't figure out if she did something that needs to be undone before I can do the update.

I'm not even sure anymore how to trouble shoot this stuff. It's like the hard drive is not the hard drive but an auxiliary drive.

For music hardware geeks:

The Tefifon

Laughing Squid sez:

Tefifon, A Little Known Cartridge-Based German Music Player From the 1950s

YouTube gadget channel Techmoan takes a look at the Tefifon, a short-lived German music player from the 1950s that uses a cartridges with plastic tape that have grooves similar to those on a vinyl record. The technology, which was invented in the 1930s, was completely discontinued by 1965, losing the format war to the much more popular phonograph.

quester, did you get it installed?

DCJ - No. I mucked around with trying to get control of the hard drive and screwed everything up. I can't find the Lion disk and my sister doesn't think she still has it.

I did find a backup and restored everything but it still thinks the hard drive of the computer is only for backups and won't let me install it.

Even when I signed on to the computer and Apple as my sister, still won't let me.

She;s not a Mac person, she teaches programing and is wholly PC. She got this Mac to see if she could learn how to program but got so frustrated she was ready to pitch it when I told her my Mac had died. So, I don't know what she did or how to undo it.

I tried to reload Lion via the internet, but it wouldn't work…not available. So I'm back to the way things were.

I have my own log on, but the computer still thinks it belongs to my sister.

Ok, I'll message you in the book of face.

Wordpress.org question. I'm writing a post that includes the string "x10" (I'm describing a box set of 10" vinyl records as 5x10"). Wordpress sees the "x10", decides that it's unicode(?) and converts it to a character that appears as question marks. I just want to to display the original 5x10". If I use a capital X, it works fine. Is there a filter or somesuch to prevent these substitutions?

On edit: Looks like it only does the conversion if there's a digit before the x10. So, 1x10 converts to 1�10, 2x10 converts to 2�10, etc.