Can a new fuel solve climate change?
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- Опубліковано 8 лис 2021
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What do you mean you can't get water from the air? I've seen some very convincing kickstarters for self filling water bottles.
LOL - made my day!
Ok, that was actually funny! xD
Angry upvote
Yeah, but he's ignoring those solutions bc he's an arrogant anti-science misogynist.
@@jessicatriplev9802 What makes you think he's a misogynist?
I love how these videos still look like they were made in 2008, at this point it is an aesthetic.
all powerpoint like
Tfoots too busy solving the world's problems... He could eventually get an editor
@@silverhawkroman nah im good with this, this works
I think its the 2nd quarter of 2011 memes he still uses. Im a retard compared to tf though so im in no place to condescend
It works well, is TF's style and most importantly, it explains things in a great and "easy" way.
A problem with adding sodium into the engine is that sodium loves to form alloys with pretty much every metal (especially at high temperatures) which will damage the structural and mechanical integrity over time...
Which is great, because it creates and maintains jobs that would deal with that. It might also lead to those same people to come up with ideas to make the process more efficient, since they'd know how it workes due to their jobs.
That's why you use ceramic-based engine blocks.
@@NUCLEARARMAMENT beat me to it
@@NUCLEARARMAMENT while we’re at it we might as well re-design the whole engine and then call it just a fuel change... crazy folks
@@mblend27 Engine has been re-designed every year by multiple companies for about 120 years now champ, Im sure its possible with government law, when forced to do it to make money, corporations do it.
So sent this to my sciencey friend. His comment was as follows and I’d love to hear Thunderf00ts response on it...:)
“One main issue as I see it...The carbonate/bicarbonate buffering system of the oceans. Once you add more carbonate, you shift the equilibrium of the system and end up converting aqueous HCO3- into CO2.”
Commenting to boost. Long live the algorythim
+1
And the cycle repeats itself.... CO2 as ultimate byproduct of life itself
+1
My main concern is that it seems this would kill all sea birds, and probably decimate marine life in general. Sailors would have to wear respirators too, but I guess they'd get used to that.
Heads just exploded at the TLDR; 15:42 Chemtrails can solve climate change!
As a person who shares a first name with Alex Jones, AAAAHHHHH NOOOOO AAAAAH MAKE IT STOOOOOP
Yeah... but think of the Frogs, Dave! Their populations will crash! 🤣
Hmm, it said reduce global warming. Climate change can still occur because we don't know what the impact of increased CO2 plus increased aerosols would be.
Probably makes more sense to make huge floating reflective sheets to shade the ocean. Jet smoke might stay aloft for a few days, but those sheets would last for years or decades.
@@FourthRoot Stuff up there may stay up there for decades. Thats how the nuclear winter works. One event bringing a lot of stuff in the upper atmosphere to reflect sunlight into space and that needs a very long time to disappear again.
“It’s a ball spinning in space about once per day”
Beautiful, just art
Locals call the sunny side 'day' and the dark side 'night'
Here at thunderf00t, we know what we’re saying!
LMAO if that's all you think is going on please remove your head from your body , That's the best you can do for the gene pool.
@@ossiedunstan4419 I’m concerned by how aggressive an individual you are after all I did was make a call-back to Phil’s own pun? You okay pal?
Man, you are easily impressed, arent you?
Looking up properties of sodium carbonate, what caught my attention is that it melts starting from about 400C, and decomposes into CO2 and Na2O when it melts, especially if there are other particulates (breaking up droplets, speeding up the thermal decomposition). Given that most uses of this (engines, turbines, boilers, etc.) involve much higher temperatures and pressures, typically in the 1000C to 2500C, it might be an issue that the carbonate is not going to remain stable. If it changes phase (which absorbs energy) and decomposes into CO2 (and also absorb energy) due to the high operating temperature, this might all be for nothing (or ends up wasting some the fuel's energy to produce sodium hydroxide, after the Na2O reacts with the water). I think the open air tests of exploding sodium in water creating a cloud of sodium carbonate might only work out due to the rapid dispersion and cooling. But by definition, to make use of that energy in some way, you need that reaction to operate in a confined and hot environment (e.g., push a piston, turn a turbine, produce steam, etc.). So, that would probably be the next thing to test, a sustained combustion in a furnace at ~1000C temperature, and see if you get sodium carbonate or CO2.
The reaction temperature would be extremely high, 30MJ/KG sounds comparable to fossil fuels, but the Heat capacity of Gases is usually much higher than of Solids.
Without all of the additional N2 from the air regular engines would heat up more. Is some configurations they would also have less power, because there is less Gas to expand.
I don't really understand what such an engine would even look like, you need a liquid water tank, a Methane tank and a Sodium tank. A SOLID fuel? That's new.
And the Cl2 from electrolysis would need to be stored away somewhere.
For me this sounds like a more convoluted way to do carbon capture. Theoretically interesting, but nowhere near an application.
Na2O can react with CO2 to form carbonate. If the endothermic decomposition happens after the exhaust, that's better, more efficient engine.
@@richardhauer8391 You would just carry molten sodium and methane, water is produced by their reaction with atmospheric O2, the Cl2 from electrolysis is already used in industry for making plastics (PVC), medicines, bleach and rocket fuels.
@@domvasta
No, you would need to store the Cl.
If you use it, it will just leak back into the environment later and reverse all you tried to achieve.
That is why I called it a convoluted way to do carbon capture.
That's why I think this reaction should stop at NaOH, which should be carried around, pumped out and used later in slower reactions with atmospheric CO2 to produce energy for industrial processes - like making pure sodium
I'm writing my PhD on aerosol coud interactions right now. When it comes to the aerosol effect for light scattering, absorbtion and acting as nuclei for cloud droplet activation, normal combustion engines already produce plenty enough aerosols. Most of them are smaller, in the range
Isn't carbonic acid (CO2 gas dissolved in water) the primary concern with the ocean? Things like Calcium Carbonate have fairly low solubility so I would expect them to precipitate out and fall to the bottom where the CO2 would be sequestered indefinitely.
according to this video we are adding extra 2 parts per 1000 of heat to the planet.
just imagine your cooker going from 1000 to 1002 watts of heat, your food will explode in a ball of flames! over 97% of idiots agree.
@@echelonrank3927 More like you have a cooling system that can dissipate 1000 watts of heat and you put in 1002 watts, eventually it's going to melt from the extra 2 watts of heat it can't dissipate.
@@novadea1643 alternatively you could insulate 0.2% of the of the surface area.
but its difficult to imagine everything starting to melt because of that.
it will maybe get more hot by 0.2% ?
how much is that in degrees? lets take oven temperature 230C which is 500K on the absolute zero scale. next we add 0.2% to get 501K which is 231C.
the only thing melting will be the cheese.
@@MikeM8891 ancient egyptians eventually signed the COP2000BC agreements and began sequestering CO2 in calcium carbonate in limestone blocks the pyramids are built from, but this didnt help them beat climate change into a pulp and egypt turned into a desert. what a bunch of suckers. RIP, amen and goodnight.
First impression, sounds amazing. What are the big issues to overcome?
1.) Making and storing the fuel in a safe but ready-to-use way.
2.) Getting it to the engine at the correct mixture.
3.) Actually getting a complete reaction in the engine.
4.) Dealing with any residue in the engine/system.
5.) Exploring any effects on the environment from the exhaust.
1. Should be doable though overall it seems like a dangerous fuel to handle. Basically self-ignites with moisture. Does Sodium oxidize if exposed to air? I guess you'd keep it stable in a methane atmosphere but would you need liquid methane or are pressure tanks energy dense enough? I guess for ease of mixing it'd be best to have the Sodium powder in a lower pressured methane tank and a separate higher pressure/liquid methane tank that is used to push the final mix towards the engine.
2. + 3. is more interesting, no idea how fine a powder you can make from sodium so it aerosolizes well with the gas for the reaction. Since it's a soft metal would it clump together as it sits in the tank? But I guess once you get it all into the engine all reactions are quick enough.
4. I guess we'd be getting some sodium particles stuck in the tank/fuel line. Can't have anything there that would react with it. Then we have potential of leftover NaOH in the engine/exhaust as well as the final Na2CO3. I guess the NaOH would react with any leftover CO2 but that might damage the exhaust system over time. As for the Na2CO3 while most of it is aerosolized, some of it I assume would build up. Ultimately though I guess you can just clean it out with water.
5. Say you have a big engine on a feighter and it rains, do we basically get a bunch of -chlorine- *bleach* in the ocean?
You could always use liquid sodium instead of powder. They use it as a coolant in fast breeder reactors.
you basically laid out everything I was thinking. Point 5 hit me when Thunderfoot said reversing the acidification of the oceans, which of course we don't want to go too far into basic, which will have as many problems.
Where is all the chlorine going to go from the sodium processing from NaCl?
Sodium is mostly stored In kerosene which is a hydrocarbon
Not to mention the chlorine problem. Kind of a big one.
Hello. I would like to see the whole energy calculation including the energy needed for the Na electrolyses. From an engineering perspective it would be a tall mountain to climb. You have to basically invent a completely new engine system, from start to finish. But please continue your work on this topic.
Not really. A combustion engine is a combustion engine is a combustion engine. Nothing new there. The engines might need some adaptation similarly as you don't burn diesel in a gas engine, but all the pre-work is basically done already, all of the knowledge exists already. It is just a shovelful of dirt to climb on to engineers. The mountain lies before logistics and politics. Especially politics.
Logistically it would not be a trivial task to make adaptations in the scale of what would actually matter. Politically this would be a political suicide. Wery much a hill to die on but a hill that would require a lot of deaths before being conquered.
@@anteshell its not as trivial as you think the biggest issue is that this is a explosive fuel. Detonation is a problem with engines especially when it comes to using in expensive materials like cast steel or even aluminium. It could be adapted only if we can control the speed of the expansion
@@masha_kasha5061 Diesels inject to start the flame and then continue to inject into the cylinder as it burns, this might be an option to control the speed.
@@masha_kasha5061 "explosive fuel" ... yes.. just like petrol... what do you think petrol does in an engine when it meets with the spark? it explodes:)
@@anteshell a combustion engine burns gasses, at best it burns mists, but it never burns solids, a combistion engine would have to be a molten sodium combistion engine at best, molten sodium explodes when in contact with air, solve that
I had begun to think this channel was a satisfying exercise in schadenfreude, but I should've known better. Here you've offered a novel, perhaps almost unexamined, solution to the problems others claim to be trying to solve with fancy 3D animations and kickstarter campaigns. Consider this shared, hopefully someone with much more meaningful reach will do so as well!
Sorry, Thunderf00t, but applying your own standards of debunking to this the BS factor is extremely high:
1) You conveniently skip over the Na production. Great, Chlorine or hydrochloric acid as a waste product on an unimaginable scale. Storing this safely is a massive challenge.
2) The carbon capture aspect is irrelevant. As you pointed out correctly in the beginning. You need the combined energy output of all of this for a century to recapture the carbon dioxide in the .
3) Leaves is with the geoengineering part. Producing your nano-particles at ground level from fuel engine is a bad idea. Not much will reach the middle stratosphere where we want it for long term cooling.
In short - if you want geoengineering there are more feasible ways. E.g. sulfurdioxide. Needs far less material, can be injected into the upper atmosphere. Cut the Sodium as energy crap go straight to the problem.
He also said burning ethanol "releases carbon dioxide", which is not really true because growing the plants that were turned into ethanol in the first place required doing removing CO2 from the air to turn it into sugars, so the fact that this thing loses to ethanol in energy density is a serious flaw. Ethanol-powered cars are a mature technology that require very little modification of existing infrastructure and doesn't present any nightmares like solid sodium waste gunking up engines.
Yeah, so much bullshit here. If this was made by anyone else, he would be shitting all over it.
I guess you didn't read enough Jules Verne as he had Captain Nemo using sodium to power the Nautilus
Nemo somehow uses the sodium to produce electricity... he doesn't burn it. And Nemo burned coal, a LOT of coal, to produce the sodium
I guess you didn’t read enough Douglas Adams, as a cup of tea is somehow able to power interstellar space travel.
Jules Verne was a Sci Fi writer doing what Sci Fi writers are supposed to do, blame whoever told him it was a good idea. Having said that, even he probably realised that sending people into space in a cannon shell would kill them. Other then that little detail it was a nice story.
@@AlcoholicBoredom That is highly improbable and as such exactly why it worked I presume...
whoa, that's cool!
Another issue to consider: Extracting Na from NaCl produces Cl and/or HCl waste products.. so much for de-acidifying the ocean, and trashing the ozone layer as well.. SLIGHT problem.
This was my own gut reaction when Phil mentioned getting the sodium from electrolysis! Kind of a big issue...
HCL isn't a waste product it is a highly valueable chemical the solution here is to just sell it to anyone who wants an acid.
@@markchip1 we have literal salt lakes and salt deposits everywhere. Like Utah.
@@thegoatking9506 and then you will have to watch what they do with it
Don't run the extraction over the ocean, and sequester the Cl / HCl during the extraction?
Very interesting. I especially like how he didn't build our hopes up and then yank the rug out at the last moment. I'm wondering if that weird, light feeling in the back of my head might be a last bit of leftover hope.
no that's hypertension
UA-cam is fucking incredible sometimes, you can find lectures from top universities, videos that take minutes to show the results of centuries and billions in collective research efforts. But I can't think of one with a single idea that might mean more for our future generations. Dyson spheres can't help a community hell bent on destroying itself, and the enormous problem will only become more expensive to address as it's effects take hold & wreak havoc on the salvageable future. Thank you so much for showing life in the ball pit all these years!!
Out of curiosity ... how much energy would it cost to produce that sodium from salt, and where would you put the chlorine byproduct?
drink it to cure a certain something that's been going around latelty
They could store it in Musks hyperloop tunnels - might as well put them to some use!
It'll take about 700 kJ to melt 1 kg of sodium chloride, and then about 500 MJ to electrolyze that into pure sodium. The chlorine byproduct is probably gonna get sequestered into hydrochloric acid with some hydrogen if we are being practical. But yeah that's a lot of energy for this.
@@emp5352 Yeah, the production of this "fuel" required 15 times the power it contains, way to go. Given the magnitude of the plan which of the ocean we gonna replace with all that HCI?
@@thetaleteller4692 I took this video as an elaborate joke ...
I can't wait to see the white paper! Elon would be jealous that you've got a fuel that's carbon neutral and more energy dense than batteries.
eh, I doubt elon would care
@@willharrison3740 He would, he plans on using methene to power his rockets, if it were shown that you could add sodium and make it carbon neutral he would take note at the least
@@QueueWithACapitalQ the last thing you want to do is lower the energy density of rocket fuel by adding sodium to it.
Unfortunately, this will never be a rocket fuel. I expect you've all heard of the 'tyranny of the rocket equation,' yes? The point of that is, for every extra amount of fuel you add to a rocket, you also need to add more fuel to be able to carry that extra fuel that you just added. But in doing so, you added more fuel to carry the extra fuel that you wanted to burn, so you need to add even more fuel to carry the extra fuel... and so on and so forth...
This CH4 +Na fuel will never be a rocket fuel because even a 10% decrease in energy density of a fuel for a rocket, can (depending on the type of fuel you're comparing it to) translate to a 40-60% increase in the amount of fuel needed to carry that same rocket to the same altitude and velocity. In the case of this particular fuel, it's closer to 40 or 50% LESS energy dense than typical rocket fuels (though in this specific case, it's 30% less dense than just methane alone) meaning that the rocket would need to carry 200-500% more fuel (I don't have the rocket equation in front of me, so those are best guesses based on my familiarity with said equation).
All of the above is damningly obvious when you consider that the most dense rocket fuel available today is liquid hydrogen, which burns to produce water. No CO2 involved at all and yet Musk still chose Methane over the H2+LOX combo. I think the only reason Musk is interested in having methane powered engines is - If he ever gets one of these rockets to Mars, methane (CH4) can be synthesised in situ, from locally acquired CO2 and H2O. It's also far easier than electrolysing H2O into H2 and O2 gas and then pressurising each gas into H2 and O2 liquid.
@@willharrison3740 E-loon would immediately get his top engineers working on trying to figure it out, and take all the credit as if it were his own idea!!
The video raised some questions which further down the you answered. And while it's not a full answer to Live, The Universe and Everything I highly appreciate out of the box thinking. It's a hard problem but if only one out of 1000 ideas is helpful it's worth it!
Smart, fun, educational and no ads, there is nothing else we can ask for!
Cool, that sounds like it has enough potential to get a research budget.
Ugh. No. This is a dead end. This would necessitate producing billions of tons of chlorine. There's no viable way to sequester that.
@@FourthRoot I missed the part where they needed chlorine for this reaction
@@ericpatten6204 chlorine would be a byproduct while getting sodium by breaking down NaCl
@@ericpatten6204 The only viable natural source of sodium is sodium chloride. When you reduce the sodium you oxidize the chlorine producing chlorine gas as a biproduct.
@@FourthRoot didn't he say u could use electrolysis?
I did my ChemEng PhD and looked into absorbing CO2 into calcium hydroxide using spinning disc reactors. The thesis looked at making calcium carbonate rather than sodium carbonate but essentially it is the same thing. I did use sodium carbonate to react with CaCl2 to make chalk as a precipitate. I did do some experiments using sodium hydroxide but they didn't make the thesis. That was nearly 20 years ago. I didn't see it NaOH/Ca(COH)2 as being a viable route to any form of carbon capture back then (even though there is a concept large scale sketch of what one might look like in the back end of the thesis). However, if you can argue that you can make a huge amount of sodium or calcium cheaply using electrolysis from renewables (especially if being able to co-gen H2), then that might have legs for larger scale power gen carbon capture and storage. There may also be a sodium or calcium battery technology out there that would benefit as an aside. Since then, I've worked with sodium safety issues in the nuclear industry - some real challenges! I feel the idea of burning it in aircraft is a none starter given the extra mass involved and the complexity of jet/rocket engines - however it might work in ships if you can safely store, heat and pump/atomise the sodium into the flue gas from the marine diesel engine. It's possible the ship could electrolyse as it journeys.
Then there is the issue of where the chlorine goes from the electrolysis of brine. Do you substitute/neutralise with a cheap material say limestone to make CaCl2? Oh no, CO2 is produced - no net gain! I can't think of another way of dealing with the chlorine other than pump it down into the Earth to dissolve/precipitate deep in the strata.
Another challenge is what do you do with the discharge of large volumes of alkali solutions into the sea/fresh water courses as this would have an effect on marine life local to the discharge.
Happy to chat more. Good luck with this concept in the meantime, interested to see how for it goes as a now grizzled process design engineer.
Is it possible to neutralize chlorine and then sequester the CO2 cheaply? (Cheaper than just doing it at a power plant)
@@guncolony I would imagine the current methods of carbon capture designed for power plants are much cheaper than using a sodium based method. They can be regenerated by stripping the CO2 out of the media thus reducing the resources needed to effectively do it over decades.
Could you link your thesis?
@@noepeckham9648 Sorry, its paywalled by scholar lol
@paulhetherington8927 could you link your thesis?
That is definitely the most interesting approach to solving climate change I've heard so far.
Thanks for sharing your thoughts on this topic and for your continouus work on the channel.
The problem is that it probably won't work.
1. Creating more clouds is dangerous if the greenhousegas concentration keeps rising. Because if for some reason you can't continue to create those clouds we'd have an abrupt and potentially large increase in radiative forcing, which will increase the temperature of the planet relatively rapidly. So to continue to emit CO2 by burning fossil fuels isn't an option (the ocean would also acidify further, which is a problem by itself).
2. The goal is to take CO2 not just out of the atmosphere but out of the carbon cycle. This proposed solution doesn't seem to do that.
And with all that in mind the whole "putting sodium in fossil fuels"-thing will be pointless as well. So i don't really see this working. And i wouldn't want to bet on it, when we already have everything we need to stop global warming i.e. transitioning away from fossil fuels and towards mainly photovoltaics and wind turbines (and some geothermal, some biomass, some hydropower, some nuclear for those, who want it).
We're now technologically so advanced that a CO2 neutral energy system is already possible with already existing technologies. We don't need fossil fuels anymore - many people just don't understand it yet. And if you think about it this transition is unavoidable anyway since fossil fuels are limited and it will become more difficult, more costly and dirtier to extract fossil fuels. So it's unavoidable that we'll run out of it and that before that point they will become a lot more expensive and dirtier. So i really don't see why anyone would want to continue to use fossil fuels.
More good news: Guess what the two cheapest sources of electricity are. Yup, solar and just recently become the two cheapets ways to produce electriciy. In 2020 the IEA even called Photovoltaics "the cheapest electricity in history". This has been largely unnoticed by the media and most people as well.
And this isn't my opinion. There are dozens of studies that show that a 100 renewable energy grid is already technologically and economically possible. I can give you links to those studies, if you're interested.
@@stauffap solar and wind are unreliable and can vary vastly. So it's impossible to use only those. Nuclear is the way
@@julianatlas5172
Yes, everyone knows this. What very few people understand though is that the problem of the variability of wind and solar has been solved in the scientific literature long ago.
It's just not something that prevents us from building a 100 percent renewable energy grid - not technologically and not economically. The scientific literature is quite clear about this.
And it's easy to understand why that's the case once you've heard it. After all there are a lot of renewable sources of energy that are dispatchable(such energy sources can be used to fill gaps between demand and production):
-Biomass
-Hydropower
-Geothermal energy
-etc.
Then there are a lot of ways of storing energy as well. A lot of it is already in the system and currently unused (heating buildings as buffers) and some of it has to be built:
-Power-to-gas or Power-to-X
-Batteries
-Pumped hydro
-Thermal energy storage
-Compressed air energy storage
-etc.
Then there are also more ways to reduce the required storage:
-Playing with the angle of PV-panels
-Changing the proportion of Wind to solar energy
-Connecting grids over large areas
-etc.
You don't even need all of those measures to create a stable working and economical energy grid. There are more measures that i haven't mentioned yet. But you can find them in the scientific literature (or ask me about studies).
Interesting doesn't mean its good. Honestly, the whole Climate Change topic is disinfo and a campaign to get people to pay more money on stuff and live in worse conditions. If the Climate Change people really wanted to end climate change once and for all, they'd advocate for a Sun Shade/Mirror that could block off ~2% of the solar intensity and end the topic once and for all. But what do they preach? Stupid solutions.
@@xDarkomantis
"Honestly, the whole Climate Change topic is disinfo"
I studied the physics and chemistry of global warming for over a decade now. I can assure you that it's not a joke. Global warming is real and it's caused by us (mainly by burning fossil fuel) and it's actually quite easy to prove that part, if you're into physics.
So close to 1 million!
"The origin of the current chlorine crisis can be traced back to the year 2021, when someone thought that global warming could be reversed by burning sodium obtained by electrolysis of salt".
Cl can be "stored" as a salt of some metal, for instance CaCl2, so no free Cl2 in the atmosphere to worry too much. Maybe at a very hi scale other options might be required.
Forests are actually healthier around oil refineries. Humans are temporary. Earth is fine.
Did I miss the part where he said he was going to use sodium chloride? I thought he was just gonna mine out some sodium...
@@pluto8404 do you have a source for that little pearl of wisdom?
At least it's an idea from a non-politician. Need more of those.
Why does that matter?
@@seanwhitehall4652 if you can't see the advantage of pure science over "science" twisted to advance some political narrative, no amount of explanation from me will help you.
@@tom23rd The source of an idea is irrelevant to it's merit. However, in the absence of time to verify all ideas, that is where we can judge better and worse sources as shortcuts to sort better and worse ideas. This idea, from a politician, would be the same idea.
When you realize how much energy that is. THIS SHIT IS INSANE
You had me at Chemtrails…hahaha!
This could be revolutionary for ships, for cars maybe not. But the impact of ships alone is already brilliant.
And planes!
Maybe even powerplants on the oceans
@@PerfectAlibi1 Perhaps not planes if smoke is a big issue. I could see airports getting pretty bad. Maybe hybrid engines though?
@@Chaosian perhaps limited to planes crossing oceans and switching to traditional fuel when they get near a landmass.
@@gobblox38 yea hybrid. Once they get into they sky where the albedo affects actually work nicely sodium might be good there
(Most) ships end up having the same problem as planes, any byproducts that have a bonding or solid basis that need to be expelled end up requiring a more expensive and inefficient system to make sure it doesnt brick everything.
Shout out to all my laymen who feel like they actually understand what's happening; and props to TF for making science content a laymen can enjoy!
Only laymen enjoy this. Us chemists know it's stupid.
@@FourthRoot please explain, I think most of us on this channel are skeptics. But I can only speak for myself when I say, this sounds too good to be true, as desperately as I want it to be. Where are the holes at?
@@ajsproductions3400 The biggest problem in my eyes is chlorine. I go into more detail in other comment threads. read one of those.
We see the reasons why it is wrong. If you have finish middle school, you should be able to see what part of this calculation is correct and what is wrong. Just because you don't understand 7th grade chemistry doesn't mean everyone is as stupid as you.
For instance, at 7:25 he says "this is exactly the amount of water we need for second reaction". No, that's bs. That 2 in front of h20 means that you will have twice as many molecules of water in the end of the reaction as you had molecules of CH4 in the beginning of the reaction. These numbers in front of molecules are relative to each other. If you have CH4 in the beginning and 2H20 in the end that means that there will be twice as many water molecules as there were CH4 molecules. You can't say, oh look we have 2H20 in the end of the first reaction and 2H20 in the beginning of the second reaction, therefore the first reaction produces just enough water for the second reaction.
OK, so that's the wrong part about that part of the video. What' s the correct part about that part of the video? The two chemical reactions were written correctly.
Hello Mr ThunderF00t :) There once was an engine running on gun powder rounds. It was used to experiment with combustion engines in the 1800s. But it actually address allot of the problems you are facing.
This is the Thunderf00t I signed up for years ago, welcome back man.
Building an engine that could continue to run for more than a few months while having lots of alkali build up in the pistons without it just burning itself out could be tough.
The motion of the piston would scrap the cylinder clean, but the piston head would be tough, maybe the explosion would get it of to be removed. The exhaust system would need a major reworking for sure
Perhaps this would actually be best used in a Wankel rotary type engine? I think it would suffer far fewer long term friction issues than a traditional piston combustion engine.
I don't think it's proper for piston use. I'm not anywhere near enough qualified to speak about it, but given how TF is showing it, it could act more as an afterburner in a plane engine than as gas in a conventionnal engine.
As for wankel, they still have carbon deposit problems, so I guess it'd be similar, even if slightly better, to the piston engine.
A jet-engine could probably be adapted to that kind of fuel more easily.
Your missing an obvious method, just like in a nuclear powered ship use the heat to create steam and use that to give Motive power. Either directly or electrical.
Okay... I'm getting ahead of the crowds, kick starter for snow piercer :D
Nice idea! I work in a similar field and see two big problems:
1. When making sodium in electrolysis, you generate hydrochloric acid. You can't really dump that anywhere, and if it gets near natural water sources or the ocean or bedrock it will react with any carbonates present to give you sodium chloride and CO2 back. I am not aware of a way to dump that acid anywhere on a global scale.
2. The chloralkali process is not terribly energy efficient. It is fine for making chemicals, but for a fuel not so much. After all, the value of a fuel is just its energy content, so you really need that energy efficiency.
Thunderfoot busted.
I'll just copy this from another comment I made on another video:
I managed to come up with something, though this is more for land-based power generation and marine applications.
Instead of burning metallic sodium as fuel, you introduce the sodium into the exhaust stream after the combustion process in the form of sodium hydroxide. On marine engines, oil-fired plants, and natural gas power plants, the exhaust gases first pass through a selective catalytic reduction (SCR) system (which uses ammonia or urea to reduce nitrogen oxides into nitrogen and water), and then a scrubber. On coal-fired plants, an electrostatic precipitator comes before the SCR system which helps to remove fly ash (particulates).
The scrubber is basically a giant vertical cylindrical tank with racks near the top. Those racks have nozzles mounted on them which spray a solution (typically limestone slurry) into the exhaust to remove unwanted substances (often sulphur oxides) from the exhaust before it enters the atmosphere. The waste products settle to the bottom, and the waste water is then sent to be treated.
The scrubber is where the sodium hydroxide is introduced. Sodium hydroxide pulls CO2 out of the air very well, and it also helps to remove sulphur oxides as well. The reactions between sodium hydroxide and carbon dioxide are:
CO2 + 2 NaOH → Na2CO3 + H2O
Na2CO3 + H2O + CO2 → 2 NaHCO3
When sodium hydroxide reacts with CO2, it turns into sodium carbonate and sodium bicarbonate. And this is where the excess chlorine comes in.
On a land-based power generating station, the waste water is sent to a separate reaction chamber. The excess chlorine generated during electrolysis of brine can then be used to make hydrochloric acid, which reacts with Na2CO3 and NaHCO3 to form sodium chloride, carbon dioxide, and water. By doing this, you recover the captured CO2:
Na2CO3 + 2 HCl → 2 NaCl + H2O + CO2
NaHCO3 + HCl → NaCl + H2O + CO2
It should be mentioned that these two reactions are done in a controlled environment, because otherwise the CO2 could end up being released to the atmosphere, making the entire thing pointless.
The CO2 is then refined to increase its purity, after which it can be compressed and stored or sent down pipelines for use in other applications, such as making synthetic hydrocarbons.
Then, what remains is mostly sodium chloride and water, which can then be electrolysed back into sodium hydroxide. It's a repeatable cycle. CO2 and waste-to-energy biocrude would become kind of like what petroleum is today.
Alternatively, calcium hydroxide can also be used, in which you'd get calcium chloride instead of sodium chloride, and so on.
On ships, the waste water from their scrubbers would be stored onboard for the duration of the trip and offloaded at shore.
Issues: first you're trying to use a gas. The costs associated with using gasses are INCREDIBLY high with regards to transport. Frankly if it were viable we'd be using electrolysis of water and then using the hydrogen-oxygen reaction and be using those hydrogen fuel cell cars (but they didn't work due to issues transporting or creating the necessary hydrogen). So it's just stupidly expensive. And then from that you do have to somehow mix a solid into a gas, and then you have to somehow separate the sodium from the compounds which it naturally resides in.
Edit: no that is NOT the cost of getting sodium. The cost of getting sodium is storage, lubrication to keep it from reacting with other substances, keeping chlorine gas from poisoning everyone, transportation (arguably the easiest part), heating, and then getting the filaments to both not melt and also facilitate the movement of electrons. Oh also making sure CHLORINE doesn't react with a bunch of stuff.
Also please don't advocate for putting particulate matter into the atmosphere.
Great content, ThunderF00t! Been a patron for several years and you never disappoint! Thank you for all of your hard work.
Thank you for paying, from someone who can't.
It might be interesting as a reheat stage in gas turbine engines, which could mean that you wouldn't necesserily need to design an entirely new engine - just add a variable exhaust nozzle and a sodium injection system into the hot exhaust gas. This gives you the power you need on takeoff and landing, then the ability to switch to chemtrail mode over the oceans.
i cant see it working as well in the air, just by energy density you would need a whole lot of it, could be viable for boats and shipping though, maybe some rail.
Duuuude I know
@@shroomiestshroom3655 bring back the locomotives!!
@@shroomiestshroom3655 The reduced energy density would definitely reduce range, but airliners like the b737 and a320 are rarely operated near the limits of their range...
And it certainly is nowhere near as bad as the energy density of batteries!
@@lluch13 They'd look like steam engines with the white smoke :D
Really interesting, looking forward to seeing the series
Wow, this IS really cool...looking forward to T-foot's videos like I haven't in a while
These are the videos I love fromThunderfoot. I always find it sad but admirable that he makes time for debunking stupidity.
Thunderf00t, please make a video about your personal view on future nuclear reactor concepts, say molten salt reactor, candu-reactor, etc. I believe you once said you're a big fan of nuclear power. 💡🔎
Interesting...
At this point we have nothing to loose, why not give this a go? Our looming catastrophe is inevitable, it's only a matter of timing and scale:
-Now or over the next half century?
-A mass extinction event that does / does not include our species?
When you realize God never intended man to go on like this forever, it will make sense.
Question. Why did he not just wipe us out then. Save either the christians or the jews and start over. Or pull an enoch on them. Dont noah me here he never said he wouldnt do genocide again, he just said he wouldnt do floods again
Vertical Take Off and Landing Hypersonic Sodium Powered Jets sometime next year. We are pretty confident.
IN A VACUUM TUBE
So, what is the plan for using those megatonnes of chlorine gas that we get when producing Na from NaCl at scale?
Vacuuming them away using a Hyperloop, i guess. Could be next video's title will be: "How thunderf00t cooperating with Elon Musk changes everything", and the thumbnail might show the words: "game over!"
I’m split between water parks and world wars. 🤔 Both?
use it as an oxydizer in rockets
last time ive checked halogens were a useful asset, not like some more will hurt(also its not like chlorine is difficult to cool down into liquid)
@@user-fq6to8cq8n have you also checked then how that asset can be consumed at a scale of million tons, rather than "some more"? I would be happy to hear suggestions for that.
This reminded me of a time I gave a ride to a hitchhiker and he told me about his job, he said he was a physicist and he was working on the developement of planes that spray aerosols and other things in the sky over antarctica to make unwanted chemicals in the atmosphere drop to the ground. It was a long time ago and I'm not smart enough to understand all of it but if I remember correctly he told me about spraying silver to catch chlorine and other chemical combination that make the molecules heavier, also how the gases used for ventillation in cars were very harmful to the ozon layer but people always ignore it.
Anyway I might not remember it all correctly but I do believe this will be used in the future to mitigate the effects of climate change and will be more helpful than elon musk (and other brands) EVs that just take the responsibility of polution away from the buyer and outsource it to african mines. very nice video and well explained. Thank you
Glad to see you taking initiative on this sort of testing. Comment section is also on it with the potential downsides
If the results would be anything like a cargoship sized chunk of metallic sodium in the ocean, then I'll start the popcorn maker right now.
Yeah transporting large quantities of sodium over the ocean might be terrifying. So many safety protocols
@@Nabikko Why transport it when you can get it from the ocean?
It's obviously granulated particles inside the fuel. Similar to how sodium is stored today, in oil.
Nah just put a salt→sodium converter right next to where it burns
@@G27pat won't that hurt the oceans?
You would want this to be a two-stage burner with the sodium introduced afterwards to avoid fouling/seizing the engine. It would be a type of after-burner scrubber.
The main problem is I'm not sure how the second stage could even make power, sure, thermodynamiclly it may have a -Gibbs but engines typically produce power by turning that heat into expanding a gas. This would do the opposite by taking a gaseous combustion product and precipitating a solid powder.
This is very unconventional but quite interesting and I'm not suggesting it's unworkable
Internal combustion engines might not work, but turbines might, and would be practical or are already used in the applications proposed (ships and planes), and possibly also in power plants in the right places.
My main concern would be with the chemical causing problems when it becomes too dense, de-acidifying the oceans too much in a local area, or when it spreads too much, where people and animals breathe it in. I suspect that is the insurmountable problem here that would limit its application too much to be effective.
@@Bacteriophagebs im afraid that turbine driven engines would be completely out of the question. If you introduced it in the combustion chamber you would start seeing very high rates of NOx producuction and the solid carbonate byproducts would start directly impinging on the turbine blades causing them to fail very rapidly. Introducing it as an afterburner would both be pointless and dangerous. A commercial airliner typically only passes around 10% of the airflow through the combustion chamber and the energy extraction on that gas in the turbine is sufficiently high that it would not have the enthalpy needed to restart a reaction in the nozzle. Even if you could use it as an afterburner the additional thrust would be negligible for the aforementioned reasons and the problem of sooting causing asymmetric thrust is just asking for trouble.
Besides that if your reducing the energy density of the fuel you already have a non starter because around 40% of the max takeoff weight of an airliner is fuel. You then end up burning more hydrocarbons for the same distance travelled and your reducing the efficiency of the aircraft by a significant margin.
The best place for this type of fuel would be on marine transportation as their engines are really rugged and could take the punishment from the sooting but they are also first and most viable candidates for SMR replacement making the whole thing moot
Sterling engine?
@@lewispowell1681 Good points. I admit I was glossing over the aircraft aspect, focusing mainly on the gas/steam combination turbines used in some powerplants and ships.
@@Bacteriophagebs yea i think in diesel piston engine based marine engines its viable as they are very forgiving by deaign. General compressor-combustion-turbine stage engines operate on much finer tolerances. Saying that i would love to be proven wrong, i just think this is another case of science showing its possible but the engineering limitations showing its either not feasible or not practical.
Happy to be part of the experiment
Absolutely brilliant. Which do you think is more pragmatic/likely: Hybrid Sodium Carbonate engines or Nuclear Fusion powered CO2 capture and decombustion?
isn't solar cheaper than nuclear? The main problem with solar is its reliability but i don't think that's much an issue for CO2 capture. Also I wouldn't go the route of reversing combustion, then you have to figure out how to store those hydrocarbons and hope people of the future don't just burn them again, and it takes a ton of energy. Instead i'd go the route of calcium carbonate, easier permanent stable storage and much less energy required. There's plenty of calcium in the oceans.
@@the1exnay No, by energy unit solar is not cheaper then nuclear, in fact just about nothing other then hydro and thermal in a few geographically isolated areas are cheaper then nuclear (same for cleaner too)
Neither are likely to be practical in the long run. For the sodium carbonate idea, he mentioned lowering the acidity of the oceans but overlooked that eventually that will shift the balance too far in the other direction and lead to conditions where CO2 will be start being generated as a byproduct (thus defeating the purpose.) As for anything fusion related, count on it perpetually being twenty years away as it has been for the last 60 ish years or so for at least an additional 60 years.
@@possumverde if ITER doesn't produce promising results, count on it being perpetually never years away
@@possumverde It'll take decades for that to become an issue, by which time we'll be able to use a carbon neutral fuel source.
Sadly any engine running on this cycle will produce fouling similar to trying to run it on black powder. In addition such microparticles are well known to be bad for lung health. To me this is a classic case of good on paper but runs afoul of engineering reality.
Can you provide stuff for me to read? I'd like to see what Thunderf00t would say to this, as I'm very ignorant (and high) to this stuff.
I know this will sound a bit insane on scale of ships (and it's 10 second idea I got through listening to Thunderf00t's video) - but what about DPF like approach, i.e capture microparticles of Ca2CO3 prior to exhaling them into environment (end effectively exhaust only H2O). I'm not sure whether such solution even exist (it's unlikely as of now).
i thought of fouling as well, it could be resolved by introducing the sodium on the back end, like a reverse preburner (that might be what TF meant by "flamethrower"). As to the chemicals harmful to people as a by product? if it was done far away on old oil rigs I dont see the problem. it would be come harmless fairly quickly. all heavy particulate would fall into the ocean, and aerosols would quickly rise and immediately began calcifying in the air. seems pretty good geo-engineering to me lol.
Just use a constant flame front external combustion turbine or heat exchanger similar to a closed cell bioreactor. There is absolutely no reason to use a reciprocating engine assembly for this application.
Sodium is liquid at relatively low temperatures meaning it can be atomised or used in some form of fuel injection, forget about the lack of lubricity for the moment. The exhaust may contain particulates briefly but they are hygroscopic and highly soluble. This fuel may work in a gas turbine provided the hot section runs above the melting temperature of the oxide and can withstand the corrosive effects.
Wow, a tech that would make...
Oil companies happy (their product will still have use in the energy sector).
Shipping/Cruise companies happy (no longer have to be accused of having some of the biggest carbon footprints).
Airlines happy (reduced carbon footprint, keep high energy density fuels around for long haul flights).
Make water desalination more profitable.
Seeing a basic prototype of these reactions in an engine could be revolutionary for the green movement. So many companies would have something to invest in other than disinformation and lobbying.
People around the Airports, DEAD
People working at Airports, DEAD
People Living around Harbors, DEAD
I see a lot of Dead people, you might be onto something there. Lemme call Klaus Schawb, and tell him there is a better solution than covovaxokilling.
@Michael B Ships already switch between different fuels to meet regulatory requirements. An engine that can run with the sodium added would likely have no trouble running without the sodium. Planes are more difficult because keeping the weight down is more important.
@@Finder245 So how exactly would the Same Combustion engine, that currently uses 2 different types of fuel to operate, all of a sudden have the capability to operate this NEW Combustion, which creates Solids. Note how Thunderfoot admits that a New Engine has to be developed for this Fuel System. And for this system you need 2 different fuels to be carbon neutral, and have twice the quantity of fuel, never mind that the engine has to probably be twice as big to produce the same torque.
Watch his video's on his debunking the Tesla Vehicle as well as all other fuels. Strangely he does the same deceptive marketing (by not applying his mathematics) as all those companies he so vehemently attacks.
Furthermore, get to grips how big a Ships engine is, and then imagine how Big this Engine has to be, never mind the complexity of feeding solids into an engine from a storage bunker.
I dont now, for ships its realy good idea, but planes have two little drowback. Fuel must be realy hight energy dense and people like sonny days. Cittys with bigger airport turn 19st century London mode....
@@michaelb9385 Look, this was offered as a potential solution to be both a carbon-neutral energy source and a way to reduce the high acidity of the oceans. In the items he's debunked, he shows how the other things can't work. Here, he's showing a new, different, and potentially useful solution to our constant pumping of carbon into the atmosphere creating energy. The question is, in extracting sodium, and the energy to transport it (if not made on site), and to refine and transport the methane, is less than the energy gotten out? If so, then it could work.
15:40 while i am not questioning your scientific expertise, that moment right here gave me major Snowpiercer(2013) vibes :)
The chemtrail plot twist is the best part.
I hear Thorium Powered Cars would be great for the environment!
Actually, they could be the best thing for the environment. But the current suggested use case wont make it so. My suggestion, launch Thorium powered cars at polluters from helicopters. They'll soon get annoyed/perplexed enough to change their ways.
Killing everyone with radiation would be great for the planet... but no seriously, batteries are already dangerous enough in cars, nevermind miniature nuclear reactors.
@@PlatinumAltaria We should definitely find a way to have nuclear fusion powered vehicles. LHCs in every vehicle! All the particle explosions consequences be damned! Least then it'll be a bang, not a whimper.
As long as the thorium isn't kept in the car.
@@FourthRoot - And we should probably lose the car part of this too. I think we are onto something.
Sodium carbonate will cause faster erosion of the engine? will it clog up the engine cylinders? "Sodium carbonate dust is harmful if inhaled, according to the Iowa State University. It irritates the respiratory tract and can cause burning pain in the nose and throat, coughing, wheezing and shortness of breath. Inhaling sodium carbonate dust can even cause pulmonary edema, or fluid accumulation in the lungs. Repeated inhalation of sodium carbonate or prolonged exposure can lead to tooth erosion, nasal congestion, nosebleeds, damage to the nasal septum, bronchitis and chest pain."
So no death. Its cool then eh ?
@@milijanovcic4479 tbh its probably not much worse than the NOX poising you get from engines anyway.
You will still get nox poisoning from his engine as well, since he burns air for his combustion. Majority of air is nitrogen, so during combustion to could get more sodium nitrates then sodium carbonate as he theorises, since air is obviously going to be the majority in the combustion chamber
@@moeron9172 WIll there be enaugh air left in the car for me to inhale, if so its cool.
This would be a useful process for a methane jet engine with a sodium catalyst type setup, turning plane exhaust into energy, and the heat from the engine could be used to melt sodium for some injection system
Brilliant, now we have shifted this into an engineering problem! Thanks 🙏
Call him Elon now! Praise Chemical Jesus and his Hyperfuel!
My first though was, If this pans out, go low-tech and then figure out the high-tech stuff. "Keep it simple stupid" is something i try to live by. Steamboats comes to mind as a proof of concept. First as model ships then possibly full scale. Interesting idea.
Except you’ll have to put babies in the room while that thing and mitts poisonous drain cleaner into the air
@@mblend27 Repeat what you just said but in english please.
I have a couple of ideas that are more basic, yet interesting as a suggestion for your channel or just to look into.
1. Butane gas. It vaporizes at -0,5 Celcius, meaning any lake, see, ocean or river can boil it. Expansion is about 700x, driving a turbine. As long as the condenser on the opposite side of the turbine is below freezing (air), it turns into a liquid again. It drips into a vessel, and from there a tube goes down to the boiler again. The column of liquid butane in that tube provides low pressure from gravity, ensuring the butane cycles in the right direction.
The boiler is below sea level; you merely circulate the water costing close to zero energy. The condensor exchanges heat with the cold air, which is also in unlimited supply.
One can fiddle a bit with the pressure or composition of the coolant, but in general it only works in cold climates or during winter. That´s the only downside.
2. Garbage. We can either store garbage in landfills, or burn it to power generators. Landfill means wasting a lot of land, burden the next generation with our junk, and I think the emission of CO2 is no less. Next to CO2, garbage emits other harmful gasses and leaks into the soil.
Am I correct to state there´s hardly any difference in pollution between piling our refuge and let it oxidize, and using it to power the grid? No matter how good we reuse and recycle, there´s always garbage. The more people, the more garbage, the more energy we need. It´s a circle, and the energy is free.
The emissions are similar, whether we burn it or oxidize it slowly.
I wonder what your take is.
1) you would basically harvest the heat energy from the body of water until it's completely frozen all the way through
2) thats what we do already
This could be useful capturing CO2 in power plants or factories and then storing it. While there are better ways to be carbon-neutral, this could be a better way to make advanced biofuels carbon negative and drawing down atmospheric CO2.
Using sodium on ships or planes could work.
A problem I see with this is that is you get your Na from elecrolysis of the salt from sea water, you're left with huge quantities of Cl as a byproduct. What to do with billions of tons of Cl?
Which will form HCl with any water vapour in the air - acidifying the oceans back again?
sell it for money
@@markchip1 Water and chlorine react to make hypochlorous acid, which then disassociate into hydrogen and hypochlorite ions (bleach). You need to calm down.
@@thegoatking9506 are chlorine and hydrochloric acid in such high demand? and would their uses not revert the deacidification effects of this process?
@@bensblues i don't exactly know how large the demand for HCL in the market is but since it has such a wide amount of applications i predict that it could be used up in some ways.
Yeah, not holding my breath. The reason is metallic sodium's reactivity and the electronegativity of CO2 vrs Na2CO3. The sodium is going to immediately react with oxygen to form an oxide or hydroxide layer, which is going to screw with combustion. This is why elemental alkyoids are such a pain to work with. In order to get the sodium to react like gasoline, it would have to be aerosolized in something like ethanol, but that strip off hydrogens. Maybe mineral oil? but you wouldn't have the 1-1 you have here. In addition, the electronegativity of carbon dioxide is lower than that of sodium carbonate, so post combustion, your products would more likely be sodium hydroxide than sodium carbonate. In addition, breathing this stuff would be pretty deadly to a ship's crew, let alone anywhere populated. Alkaloids will poison watersheds just as readily as acids or saltwater will.
Points for actually thinking outside the box, but the fact the sodium is a solid and reacts so damned well with oxygen makes this pretty impractical. You might as well mass produce sodium hydroxide and just dump it directly into the oceans. That'd react with the carbonic acid in the ocean, preventing the oceans from returning the carbon to the atmosphere. The oceans would then sponge up more CO2 from the atmosphere to reach equilibrium. Honestly, when we do get serious about fixing the problem, we're probably going to have to do that anyway to prevent the atmosphere from just reuptaking the CO2 released by the oceans.
So it will also reduce the population of the planet, there will be less cargo and less carbon emissions. I know, shooting 50% of population would be quicker and more humane (getting shot is quite quick death compared to slow poisoning), but that would do the trick too.
CO2 is food for plants. Solution looking for a problem.
@@otofoto
It's not that simple.
@@otofoto Yes. Would it not just be ideal to forest up the planet so plants would deal with it. Now let us start the culling of population first to get some fertile land for that.
@@frozenrabbit5641unless the humans are the fertiliziers, most of the land will still be in the hands of a few
Politicians will never go for it.
It's neither easy nor possible to see results within their term in office.
I'm all for brainstorming on how to combat climate change but there are a few problems to note about the process of refining and burning sodium as fuel.
1) Electrolysis of salt would release chlorine as a waste product that would need to be immediately be captured above the heated electrolytic cell to avoid release into the atmosphere and this would take additional energy.
2) The process of preparing atomized sodium-hybrid fuel would require infrastructure
3) Sodium couldn't be used in a standard internal combustion engine due to the needs of a special fuel pump which wouldn't clog and the risk of formed sodium hydroxide from incomplete reactions in the combustion chamber attacking the pistons and walls of the engine, this would be especially risky at the high temperatures of combustion.
4) One comment noted that at elevated temperatures the sodium carbonate could simply decompose back into Na2O and CO2 but other sources suggest this doesn't happen.
It might be best if we look into other environmentally friendly aerosols released in the right layers of the atmosphere.
Very interesting concept! I'm actually working on a very similar project for my Ph.D., so I am interested in seeing how you solve some of these problems you mentioned in your video. Once I get my paper published, I can direct you to some of the work I have done if you'd like.
Sodium isn't viable. Where goes the chlorine?
@@vcuberx It appears that some people think a salt and sodium are the same thing.
@@vcuberx Elemental sodium doesn't exist in nature. It's all carbonates and chloride salts. To get sodium metal you need to produce chlorine gas or CO2 in the process.
Sodium can also be formed through what is called the Castner process which uses NaOH instead of NaCl. You are right, however, if you do use NaCl, you need to find a way to deal with the chlorine. This can be a challenge, but it isn't impossible.
If you are interested, here is a video by NurdRage that goes over another process of making sodium that doesn't involve electrolysis of molten salt!
m.ua-cam.com/video/jCrFFVVcPUI/v-deo.html
@@vcuberx It requires energy. Not fossil fuels necessarily. Sure, you could generate that energy with solar panels, but those solar panels could offset CO2 in any number of alternative ways. There's nothing special about sodium that makes the solar panels more useful.
Last time I was this early, Anita Sarkisian was still grifting money.
Edit: Watched the whole video. What a refreshing new possible solution that takes into account the logistics, economics, and reality of where we stand as a society. Not some pipe dream, vaporware, CGI grift. I've never been a patreon to any UA-camr, I think you just convinced me to become one.
VenomFangX was still wearing clown makeup
ua-cam.com/video/Ye1Aj_WQp7I/v-deo.html
ua-cam.com/video/E9SbbtOSV9M/v-deo.html
idk why ppl still talk abt anita sarkisian like she was even a big deal
Recently came across an article that read,
'The US military is a bigger polluter than more than 100 countries combined.'
*'Shudders'*
Those are rookie numbers. China(10,065M tons) releases more CO2 than the US(5,416M tons), India(2,654M tons) and Russia(1,711M tons) combined.
You're welcome.... keep up the good work & we'll keep up the patreon! ;)
Great video Phill.
I've been subbed for years. Love the content, but especially the busting videos can get a bit repetitive. This is an amazing breath of fresh air. Well thought out and optimistic. Looking forward to the follow up videos
I would love to try and develop an engine that does what Dr. Mason suggests!
The biggest challenge I see is dealing with any buildup on the valve seats.
Also, we have to consider what effect it will have on the oil.
There are challenges here, but I think this is worth it!
no valves required. Just heat water and run a steam turbine like every single thermal power station.
Think simple - stirling engine will do) Isolated piston solves all problems and leaves you with a static-volume reaction chamber, which makes it simpler to control the combustion. There are available 100kW class generators on them already AFAIK. Mostly used for geothermal power generation though
The application is not replacing gasoline in cars.
Maybe you use it in ships
The real application is large scale storage of renewable power.
The fuel cycle itself is probably endothermic. You spend more energy heating and separating Na than you can extract by burning it. There has to be input power. Solar/Wind is a good option.
No, the biggest problem is that it doesn't work at all. Asside from the fact that this only an energy storage medium, not a source of energy, it ultimately doesn't sequester carbon at all. This is because the chlorine you necessarily would generate as a byproduct ultimately must be neutralized with carbonate.
I think a piston engine might not be able to do it. But a turbine, sound very plausible.
Really cool stuff man!
I can already imagine the issues with making an engine out of this stuff, I think a turbine would probably be the best thing, you definitely won't get it working with a carburetted Otto cycle engine, you might get it working with a preburning or direct injection diesel engine, it could work with a staged combustion cycle rocket engine, but that kind of defeats the energy density if you have to carry the oxidizer with you. A turbofan could work, an afterburning turbofan might work better, with a sodium lean mixture just after the compressor, with a sodium rich mixture for reheat, neutralizing the CO and CO2 in the exhaust, but you couldn't have a high bypass or you'd lose too much power and afterburners don't make sense, also a fighter plane with sodium lines visible in it's exhaust would the easiest thing to shoot down. Just lock on to anything at 589nm.
what if I'm trying to shoot down a normal passenger jet, and they're just using normal fuel with normal exhaust
I wouldn't exactly burn it in an internal combustion engine, but heating a stirling engine with it should work
With cold ocean water on the cold side that could work. I don't know enough to know good or bad but I love sterling engines. I want to build one for my pontoon boat to generate electricity when we light the on deck fire pit. It's more of a mobile cabin/camp site but it's comfortable. And it's electric.
I would put it in rocket fuel. With all the launches Elon has planned, imagine the amount of aerosols he can make.
steam turbine.
@@kcdook153 but that firepit certainly ain't carbon neutral! 😅
To what end?
Looks like a very promising concept, it will take some serious work though as well need to create different airplane and boat engines to run this.
I can see shipping being the more accessible market as the tolerances will much higher.
999k subs, congrats man!!
My idea is to use scrubbers that spray sodium hydroxide into a ship's exhaust stream.
Ships already have scrubbers on their main engines' exhaust systems. They spray a slurry of limestone in water in order to remove sulphur oxides from the exhaust, but this does little to remove CO2. If they switched to spraying NaOH solution, they could remove NOx, sulfur, and CO2 all in one go.
Sodium carbonate would almost certainly build up inside of the engine and exhaust.
Engineering the engine to use it will be a hurdle. But gear heads love a challenge.
@@dracdrum Some sort of steam engine which makes use of the reaction between water and sodium might actually be more practical.
@@PistonAvatarGuy a Stirling engine then ? :-)
The carbonate byproducts are water soluble so rather than it building up it could be constantly flushed by the water that's also produced. Now when you go to a fuel station you have two pump lines to plug, one for fuel in and the other for waste out.
The main problem with this is that this requires condensing the water vapor in the system which will make the engine far less efficient, perhaps instead just have a secondary system just for that kinda like DEF on diesels ...
I recall us speaking before in the comment section about use of metal fuels inside the engine. My proposal was based on an idea to use nano-particulate metals coated with an atom-thick layer of oxide so that they can be combusted due to the very high surface area and fine division of the particles, but while also being storable without self-igniting because of the protection offered by the atom-thick oxide layer surrounding the nanoparticles. They would also be easier to pump through engine valves and injectors. Tanks could be pressurized with nitrogen to further provide protection from self-ignition.
I kept waiting for the part where Thunderfoot would say there's some critical problem and debunk this idea. Maybe next video :P
I'm guessing since we're talking about big engines on ships here and not cars, engines that work steady for long periods of time and don't accelerate constantly, that we could use some sort of steam engine instead of diesel-like combustion engines.
Big brain time han ??? How will you produce steam? By praying to God?
@@thegamerguy1801 are you serious?
It's called a steam engine and ships had them for over a century.
Oh you mean how to heat the water? Well using the sodium fuel ideas.
@@thegamerguy1801 let me copy you something:
If you examine the vast majority steam engines still in commercial use today, large electrical generating steam turbines, obtaining as much as 42% thermal efficiency, and compare them to the vast majority of internal combustion engines, the automotive and trucking types the answer is yes. but if you take the example of the largest, most efficient internal combustion engines, probably in numbers similar to large steam power generating plants, then the answer is no.
Let me explain: The very large diesel engines in container ships can be as much as 55% thermally efficient when in continuous use at sea. These behemoths are rare even among such ships, and I expect the smaller ships using diesels probably average close to the same efficiency as the stationary power plants.
There is a newer type of stationary power plant that exceeds those mammoth diesels though. It combines the two types using natural gas. A gas turbine is an internal combustion type of engine, and electrical power generation sometimes uses them as peaker plants because they can be brought on line quite quickly. They are not as efficient as the steam plants that they augment, so they are just as quickly taken off line once the peak demand is satisfied. But combine a very large stationary gas turbine with a method of heating steam using its very hot exhaust gasses and it is possible to surpass the thermal efficiency of those monster diesels used at sea. around 58% is what I have read.
Of course, if you do not have to burn anything to get power to the grid, even higher efficiencies are at hand, with even less maintenance. Remember, all of those engines I have described are the culmination of improvements during the age of fossil fuel exploitation that took almost 200 years to get from 5 to 6% thermal efficiency to the numbers I describe here. Most of that time those heat engines were used at much lower percentages.
@@Albtraum_TDDC if you use sodium to get steam, that's good. But if we resort to coal to generate it, I don't think we are achieving anything.
Anyways cheers mate
Probably. Maybe he just wanted to prove that his fans are as bad as Musk's fans when it comes to eat shit just because their master served it. Maybe he'll surprise us all like Carlin did when he said to his audience that they are all diseased!
I like this. I figured one of the best ways to capture CO2 would be in a carbonate substance and at the point of CO2 production (instead of trying to pull it out of the atmosphere). The cost and by products of mass producing an alkali metal were my biggest concern. Salts are a great source but the by-product would be lots chorine gas. Is there a market for that much chlorine?
ask russians 😅
Superb video. Very intersting and ingeneous. Thanks...
I kind of want to see this used in practice; very curious how it will turn out in terms of engineering and power ratio
It will turn out absolutely trash. Sodium forms unreactive oxide layers instantly (much worse when it's finely divided because of the very high contact area); despite being an aerosol the solid byproduct will very quickly gum up any engine you can think of; finely divided elemental sodium is extremely dangerous; metallic sodium is soft, meaning that the particles will quickly stick together and stop flowing; sodium chloride melts at 800°C and you'd have to electrolyze it at that temperature... personally I wouldn't want to work somewhere with such a high concentration of scalding elemental chlorine (WWI poison!) and molten sodium (extremely explosive! love to have it splashed on you!).
Better off just making NaOH like usual and spraying it with Canadairs.
Could be an interesting alternative to pure kerosene as a jetfuel and the aerosol would be high in the atmosphere.
EDIT: derp I should have watched the video to the end before commenting.
Thankfully I watched the whole thing before commenting because I was about to talk about drain cleaner not being ideal for lungs!
@@DemonXeron Yeah, thankfully, planes land on water and never come near people in any way, whilst being in Operation!
@@michaelb9385 well, some do land on water, but with a hybrid engine you could burn without sodium or have an aerosol capture system when there is risk of harming living creatures. At cruising altitude though it will disperse very high up. This is at very very very pre alpha phase though, so no harm yet!
All potential harm will be considered.
as a post-grad student of Environment Social Impact assesment with the university of London...I don't know what the hell to say!!!
I like that you have a tangible idea for helping the world for the better, and you're trying to solve how to make it practical and effective before doing what every other shitty Kickstarter does and just ask for money first then solve the problems later
We need all the good ideas we can get, thanks for working on this
No, we need GOOD ideas. This idea is actually terrible and wouldn't work at all for multiple reasons.
@Fourth Root Can you list a couple of them?
@@Finder245 How about 6 major problems.
1. The only abundant source of sodium is sodium chloride in sea water. Electrolyzing this would produce as much Cl2 and/or HCl as the CO2 the sodium is supposed to sequester. Sequestering those byproducts is even more challenging than CO2 sequestration.
2. Metal additives to jet fuel are a bad idea. Metals cause combustion instability due to their propensity to detonate. This can trigger DDT in the combustion chamber.
3. Sodium residues would be extremely damaging to jet engines.
4. There are other, much more practical energy storage mediums than sodium. Methanol is an example. Ammonia is another potential fuel. There are many many others as well.
5. Even if you WERE to use metal additives to fuel, aluminum is a much better choice. It has higher specific energy by both weight and volume and its production only yeilds oxygen as a byproduct, no chlorine.
6. Cooling the planet by increasing the albedo is not a good idea. Blocking sunlight reduces photosynthesis, mitigating the capacity of the biosphere to naturally sequester carbon.
Amazing. Salaries make me think of the phrase, "Time is money." God damn it, sodium.
And you dare criticise a car tunnel.. this has so many showstoppers it's hilarious.
I need a thunderfoot to make a video debunking this idea. Where do I go now???
It's very much like the Project Hail Merry - and I mean the latest book by Andy Weir (the guy who wrote The Martian) - So much on stake, seems impossible to fix, and solution is genius - Big thanks Thunder!!
Really great book!
Climate change alarmism. The politics of climate change makes discussing it impossible.
@@christo930 Put on your big boy pants.
@@illustriouschin The comment that proves my point.
@@christo930 Please elaborate.
That WHY I regret not studying chemistry more thoroughly when I was studying it.
Brilliant video.
Actually exited.
I'm a chemist. Your excitement is misplaced.
@@FourthRoot nobody cares. Hush
@@charlespanache7047 can't handle reality? Waaaaa
@@charlespanache7047 Cope
acid rain to alkali rain....cool...literally ! Anyway, I love it when I see a new TF vid coming out, because I just know it's gonna be good. It's so refreshing to have an uploader who you know will entertain you and never try and blow smoke up your ass, he is always spot on with the logic
Boom, my head exploded, will share it with my Friends
So you want to mix a bunch of fuel with sodium (which reacts strongly with water) and put it on a boat (in water). I feel like there might be some potential safety concerns.
Yeah, and how's this boat gonna float when it's made out of metal? Metal's heavier than water so it'll sink! /s
Oil also explodes, that's literally the point of using it.
To be fair, there is a hull between the fuel and the water.
Some nuclear power plants pump high temperature liquid sodium through high pressure boiling water as a heat exchange medium. And they've been doing that since the 80's. It's certainly not going to work in a Honda civic but could be done on a cruise ship or similar...
@@InfernosReaper Have you ever been on a boat? Humidity is everywhere. Matter of fact, how do we transport Sodium anyway? I'd guess we'd have to basically do the same for storage
@@mikelord93 Ya store it like ya store anything else you don't want getting moist. Part of why sodium's been hauled on boats safely before no problem.
At most, might want to add a dehumidifier to the process for added safety.
Aren't plants and algae already consuming CO2 on a vast scale that humanity cant even get close to matching?.
Yeah, they are. But only because we haven't started counteracting our emissions.
Well, no. Humanity matches it and more. That's why there is an excess of CO2
We keep doing mass deforestation and excesive fishing so we are leaving our planet with less CO2 consumption capabilities
Greenhouses function better at a high level of CO2, up to 1600 ppm (background is typically around 400).
Coincidentally, that's also the concentration used for pest fumigation and can be life-threateningly toxic.
Thunderf00t's Apollo 13 videos will shed light on how quickly CO2 kills things that aren't plants.
No, because plants are mortal and don't keep that CO2 for long.
A lot of the 'we must fix the climate' argument lost its weight with me, because in 2019 there was a massive decrease in the amount of energy used and the climate activists said it was a bad thing.
Seems someone isn't aware how exponents work. It wouldn't be a bad thing for the climate if carbon emitting energy production remained that low.
That's not what's bad about it. What's bad is they need to use substantially more energy on average than before to make up for that lull in productivity.
Which is exponentially worse than if they sustained their previous average.
Unless they substantially increase use of renewable energy sources, it will be catastrophic when full production returns.
given the list of requirements up front, i super expected the conclusion to be "grow more trees"
Needing the "energy needs ot the planet" to resequester the carbon sounds like a lot, but you've got to remember the sun is hitting the whole planet allowing plants to do that.
Plants don't capture that much co2
@@pedrolmlkzk They do not, but diatom and other algae do, which is one of the reasons why the lowering pH in the oceans because of increased CO2 in the atmosphere can be disastrous.
@@pedrolmlkzk how so... The entire plant or tree... Or almost all of it, is made of carbon from the atmosphere.
@@xpusostomos ~60% or more of the mass is water
@@pedrolmlkzk That still leaves up to 40% though.