Ways to clean up pollution and live in a good climate.

[William Gaatjes]

Hi all, I though it would be a good idea to place some good information here.
Over the years i learned al ot about how life works form microscopic to macroscopic... The planet , the climate.
How the weather changes because of all kind of events that come up in daily life all over the planet and below and high above...

I will be adding posts here. It is amazing how little some people know about nature.
And how easy it seems to be to create some hype or mentality by means of modern communication means.
Anyway , i am going to add posts here with some amazing discoveries and common knowledge that is not often known but very handy to know.

The first will be :

World’s first large scale Accelerator Driven System : A subcritical nuclear reactor you can turn on and off​

World’s first large scale Accelerator Driven System : A subcritical nuclear reactor you can turn off.
The system can in principle also be designed to use also spend fuel rods and even discarded nuclear warheads.

Imagine that, to generate energy and also turn extremely radioactive material into far less radioactive material with a shorter half life.
And also use thorium.

The system works by applying a particle beam form an accelerator to a subcritical nuclear material. The material turns critical and the fission reaction starts.
Without the particle beam, the fission reaction can not be sustained and will fade away. Very handy to prevent runaway reactions and the not wanted explosions.
Although a meltdown can occur, a runaway fission reaction should not be able to happen since the nuclear material is sub critical on it's own.
So no longer any awful Three mile island , Chernobyl or Fukushima events.
I say if this really works, go for it.
Imagine that, no more dangerous nuclear power plants where we desperately are trying to keep the reaction under control and preventing runaway fission reactions.
We are way better of with a nuclear reactor system that we need to actively keep going then a system we actively need to surpress.
No particle beam is within a short time no fission reaction, simply described.
The particle beam accelerator can be turned on and off.

For more information read about it, the research station is being build in Belgium, i really hope it works. It would be a great way to reduce the global nuclear waste pile and generate energy.
It is called MYRRHA : "Multi-purpose hYbrid Research Reactor for High-tech Applications".

MYRRHA

MYRRHA is the world’s first large scale Accelerator Driven System project at power levels scalable to industrial systems. MYRRHA offers unparalleled research opportunities in spent nuclear fuel, nuclear medicine and fundamental and applied physics. The MYRRHA consortium welcomes international...

www.myrrha.be

 

[William Gaatjes]

Biogas is generated by methanogens , bacteria that convert certain carbon and hydrogen rich matter into CH4, AKA methane.
It is not often known that natural gas is just that. Natural gas. It is mostly comprised of Methane, a single hydrocarbon. And some other substances.
As it seems, the bacteria that for example live in the rumen of Ruminants like cows or sheep can be found almost everywhere where there is a low oxygen environment and enough matter to consume by these methanogens.
"Methanogens are microorganisms that produce methane as a metabolic byproduct in hypoxic conditions.".
You can often find these bacteria in ponds and swamps and marshes.
Marshes are as it is one of the biggest natural sources of methane. That is of course not just a concindence. It seems there is a natural carbondioxide - methane cycle going on.
Where land, sea and air are equally important. As studies seem to show.

And our pollution and medling created a problematic offset. And that is why everybody tries to find a solution that keeps the global economy going and keep the peace as much as possible and also clean up the earth.
Some people mean well, however kind of are missing the long term goal...

Ruminants are animals that use bacteria to digest the tough plantmaterial they consume. Ruminants have four stomachs.
As it seems and is mentioned a cow can burp over 500 liters of methane daily. I do not know if this is true but imagine this :

So if one would be able to build a stable where the air inside the stable can be ventilated and monitored for these gasses, these gasses may be collected and used as a power source. You would have a controlled and monitored atmosphere in the stable.
An added advantage is that if you build a stable with a controlled atmosphere, one can also constantly and in an automated way check for pathogens and proactively prevent awful outbreaks that worst case may lead to decisions to kill all live stock in that stable.
Think for example, certain flu like viruses or Q-fever caused by Coxiella burnetii. And that is certainly not wanted.
Also an outbreak of pathogens that normally in current usuall stables would originate and spread towards human habitats can be prevented by actively monitoring the atmosphere in a stable.
It is just an idea...

The ruminant digestive system

The digestive tract of the adult cow

extension.umn.edu

Creating methane from carbon, a useful wat to also be able to survive in space.

Creating Methane From Captured Carbon Dioxide And The Future Of Carbon Capture

There’s something intrinsically simple about the concept of carbon (CO2) capture: you simply have the CO2 molecules absorbed or adsorbed by something, after which you separate the thus captur…

hackaday.com

 

[William Gaatjes]

Issues that happen with windturbines.

It is not for everyone common knowledge but depending on the geographical location where the windturbines are placed, the aging of the windturbine is severly affected.
This simply means that wind turbines do not always reach the usable lifetime that is presented through marketing. Also often, more maintenance is needed than initially was calculated depending on the geographical location.

Near the coast in salty seawater, precautions must be taken because the metal housing of the wind turbine will be literally eaten up. Not just standard corrosion but also microscopic life from the ocean loves them some metals.
I read even once that in low oxygen coditions hydrogen gas is produced inside the windturbine tower by microscopic life : Material degrading bacteria. And that can create dangerous explosive situations. And that certainly is not what is desired because the maintenance area will also be flooded with hydrogen gas.
And in the maintenance area, oxygen will be plentyful as us humans need to do maintenance there. Imagine 1 electrostatic discharge spark happening in such a situation....

So extra precautions must be taken but of course as always...
There is an added cost.

Imagine the situation : A windturbine in a dry desert where there is a constant flow of air, a desert wind... Will require less headaches to solve than a windturbine close to or even in seawater.
Of course, when a desert wind is strong and there is a lot of sand, the windturbines get kind of sand blasted as well. That may also affect lifecycle. Perhaps bearings when the enclosures start to fail . I am just guessing here.

So, the conclusion is that windturbines are really an engineering feature on their own. And specific choices must be made according to the geographical location of the windturbine.
But at the end of the usuefull life of windturbines, a lot can be recycled. But the blades of the turbine are made of composite materials and very hard to recycle, very expensive as it seems. It would be great if more research would be spend on how to break down left over windturbine blades.
From research it is known that sunlight and bacteria are able to degrade even the toughest plastics. But how this will hold up with composite materials. That is the big question and needs to be answered with dire need. As the windturbine blade landfills are getting troublesome...
Some ideas like using part of the blades as covers for bicycle storage facilities or parking lots for bicycles or mopeds is an idea but there are a lot of windturbine blade landfills over the world now and for example the USA and also in the EU politicians are stirring up questions how to solve these windturbine blades landfills.

Picture from bloomberg, it is to be found in the article. See link below.

Wind Turbine Blades Can’t Be Recycled, So They’re Piling Up in Landfills​

Companies are searching for ways to deal with the tens of thousands of blades that have reached the end of their lives.
Excerpt from the text :
"
A wind turbine’s blades can be longer than a Boeing 747 wing, so at the end of their lifespan they can’t just be hauled away. First, you need to saw through the lissome fiberglass using a diamond-encrusted industrial saw to create three pieces small enough to be strapped to a tractor-trailer.
The municipal landfill in Casper, Wyoming, is the final resting place of 870 blades whose days making renewable energy have come to end. The severed fragments look like bleached whale bones nestled against one another.
“That’s the end of it for this winter,” said waste technician Michael Bratvold, watching a bulldozer bury them forever in sand. “We’ll get the rest when the weather breaks this spring.”
Tens of thousands of aging blades are coming down from steel towers around the world and most have nowhere to go but landfills. In the U.S. alone, about 8,000 will be removed in each of the next four years. Europe, which has been dealing with the problem longer, has about 3,800 coming down annually through at least 2022, according to BloombergNEF. It’s going to get worse: Most were built more than a decade ago, when installations were less than a fifth of what they are now.
"

Wind Turbine Blades Can’t Be Recycled, So They’re Piling Up in Landfills

Companies are searching for ways to deal with the tens of thousands of blades that have reached the end of their lives.

www.bloomberg.com

About bans on windturbine landfills :

Wind industry calls for Europe-wide ban on landfilling turbine blades | WindEurope

Today WindEurope called for a Europe-wide landfill ban on decommissioned wind turbine blades by 2025. Europe’s wind industry actively commits to re-use, recycle, or recover 100% of decommissioned blades. This comes after several industry-leading companies announced ambitious plans for blade...

windeurope.org

​

 

[sdifox]

They should make decent building materials no?

 

[William Gaatjes]

They should make decent building materials no?

Analyzing and creating a list of wants and not wants, AKA specifications.

That would be the first point on the list. It is the market. Some have ideals. Some want to make money. Some have ideals and money. Some want to create a market in order to be able to make money by creating or using misconceptions. But what can we do ? We trust people giving us a better world by believing their better world preaches. While instead when we look around we see the opposite. The pollution is still there and now even in greater numbers. For example, selling an oil well and then claiming to be green by buying the oil and placing the responsibility now with the new well owner... That is not being green. Because no stimulation or help is given, to make that oil well or gas well less polluting. Every drop of oil lost, is money lost. That is how we should think. But now we often think : The maintenance or cleanup is more expensive then the loss of money from the lost oil... To filter the gas released from oil wels and gas wells is more expensive then just flairing it. And that is the wrong mentality... Methanogens have always been around... They are part of the reason the planet is habitable for us. That Gaia theory is not that far off.
Luckily there are still people on the planet doing their best. Even though they are sometimes vilified. History of man has always been like that...

 

[William Gaatjes]

Turning Ammonia into hydrogen.

Ammonia has as chemical formula : NH3.
A startup called Amogy is able to convert ammonia into hydrogen and let a full size tractor drive on it by means of a fuel cell and electrical motor.
The tractor does not use a combustion engine no longer but an electrical motor for the drive train.

Excerpt form the text from arstechnica :
"
The world's first ammonia-powered zero-emissions tractor successfully completed its first demonstration run at the Advanced Energy Center at Stony Brook University in New York last week. The midsized John Deere tractor had its diesel engine replaced with an "ammonia to power" system developed by a startup called Amogy. The system converts the energy-dense chemical into hydrogen, which then powers a 100 kW hydrogen fuel cell.
Although most EV coverage is devoted to consumer-oriented passenger cars and light trucks, medium- and heavy-duty vehicles represent more than a quarter of US vehicle emissions and are important targets for decarbonization. The low-energy density of batteries and their long charging times make fuel cells an attractive zero-emissions solution, and we've looked at the potential uses for hydrogen fuel cells in trains, trucking, and mining in the past.
But even the greenest hydrogen still isn't very energy-dense, and outside of California, there's little hydrogen infrastructure to rely upon.
Anhydrous ammonia, on the other hand, is widely used in farming as a fertilizer. It's not the most pleasant chemical in the world to work with, but given its energy density, people have looked at it as a potential fuel for farm equipment. In the past that has meant combustion engines that burn a mix of ammonia and diesel, which emits less carbon dioxide than a purely diesel-powered tractor, but still emits some of the pollutant.
"

World’s first ammonia-powered zero-emissions tractor starts testing

Ammonia is already a widely used fertilizer, so the infrastructure is in place.

arstechnica.com

 

[sdifox]

Turning Ammonia into hydrogen.

Ammonia has as chemical formula : NH3.
A startup called Amogy is able to convert ammonia into hydrogen and let a full size tractor drive on it by means of a fuel cell and electrical motor.
The tractor does not use a combustion engine no longer but an electrical motor for the drive train.

Excerpt :
"
The world's first ammonia-powered zero-emissions tractor successfully completed its first demonstration run at the Advanced Energy Center at Stony Brook University in New York last week. The midsized John Deere tractor had its diesel engine replaced with an "ammonia to power" system developed by a startup called Amogy. The system converts the energy-dense chemical into hydrogen, which then powers a 100 kW hydrogen fuel cell.
Although most EV coverage is devoted to consumer-oriented passenger cars and light trucks, medium- and heavy-duty vehicles represent more than a quarter of US vehicle emissions and are important targets for decarbonization. The low-energy density of batteries and their long charging times make fuel cells an attractive zero-emissions solution, and we've looked at the potential uses for hydrogen fuel cells in trains, trucking, and mining in the past.
But even the greenest hydrogen still isn't very energy-dense, and outside of California, there's little hydrogen infrastructure to rely upon.
Anhydrous ammonia, on the other hand, is widely used in farming as a fertilizer. It's not the most pleasant chemical in the world to work with, but given its energy density, people have looked at it as a potential fuel for farm equipment. In the past that has meant combustion engines that burn a mix of ammonia and diesel, which emits less carbon dioxide than a purely diesel-powered tractor, but still emits some of the pollutant.
"

World’s first ammonia-powered zero-emissions tractor starts testing

Ammonia is already a widely used fertilizer, so the infrastructure is in place.

arstechnica.com

so you would first have to make NH3, which involves producing H in the first place...

 

[William Gaatjes]

Other fun stuff to know is that 4 female teenagers form Nigeria were able to convert compounds present in every day (human) urine into hydrogen gas to power a small gas powered electrical generator. This was a newsitem in 2012.
These young ladies are now mature but i hope there invention done when they where around 14 years old really is developed and used in practice. The simplicity of there invention is what makes it so unique. And hard to understnand that no company in the world use it to produce hydrogen from waste...

excerpt form the text from forbes.com :
"

Teens Create A Way To Use Urine As Fuel​

Matthew de Paula
Former Contributor
I offer thoughtful coverage of the auto industry.
Nov 8, 2012,02:18pm EST

Here’s some news from Africa that will be of interest to all of the people waiting in line for gas to use in their generators after Hurricane Sandy.
Four teenage girls figured out a way to use a liter of urine as fuel to get six hours of electricity from their generator. Fourteen-year-olds Duro-Aina Adebola, Akindele Abiola, and Faleke Oluwatoyin, and 15-year-old Bello Eniola displayed their invention this week at Maker Faire Africa in Lagos, Nigeria, an annual event meant to showcase ingenuity.

Here's how the urine-powered generator works, as explained by the blog on the makerfaireafrica.com website:
• Urine is put into an electrolytic cell, which separates out the hydrogen.
• The hydrogen goes into a water filter for purification, and then into a gas cylinder, which looks similar to the kind used for outdoor barbecue grills.
• The gas cylinder pushes the filtered hydrogen into another cylinder that contains liquid borax, in order to remove moisture from the gas. Borax is a natural mineral, commonly used in laundry detergent.
• The hydrogen is pushed into a power generator in the final step of the process.
A big drawback is that hydrogen poses an explosion risk. But the girls used one-way valves throughout the device as a safety measure.
The idea of using urine as fuel is not new. The girls have come up with a practical way to put the idea into action, though. Their method for using urine to power a generator is one the average household can appreciate.
"

Teens Create A Way To Use Urine As Fuel

Four teenage girls who used urine as a source of hydrogen to power a generator are a long way from solving our energy challenge, but scientists are working on more sophisticated variations of the same idea.

www.forbes.com

 

[William Gaatjes]

so you would first have to make NH3, which involves producing H in the first place...

Like the Merovingian once said in the movie the matrix : We need to take a piss. And of course livestock pisses a lot too. So, the ammonia can be taken from there and from the manure... It is common knowledge. For example : Anybody who ever designed electrical or electronic stuff for stables, knows that all plastics and other material needs to be able to be ammonia resistant.

 

[sdifox]

Like the Merovingian once said in the movie the matrix : We need to take a piss. And of course livestock pisses a lot too. So, the ammonia can be taken from there and from the manure... It is common knowledge. Anybody who ever designed electrical or electronic stuff for stables, knows that all plastics and other material needs to be able to be ammonia resistant.

you could capture ammonia from animal waste I guess. I just don't know the conversion rate.

 

[William Gaatjes]

you could capture ammonia from animal waste I guess. I just don't know the conversion rate.

Me neither. But al we here is that moaning about how we need to do something about global warming. But nobody ever talks about global pollution by man which is the cause of man made global warming. There is a lot of waste high in ammonia. It is probably also a byproduct and it is a commonly used industry material. It is also a common fertilizer so i am sure there is enough on hand.

What the USA needs just like every country in this world, a dedicated unprejudiced independent governement department (My country certainly does , dumbass dopeheadius maximus over here in the government...) that makes a list of what is possible to clean up the waste and the pollution and use that waste as a source to make clean fuel. everybody know we need to think in closed loops. Not just throw the stuff in the yard, bury the stuff or just throw it in the river. We have seen what C8, PFOA and PFAS has done since they decided to just throw the chemical waste into the rivers and sea... And all those honest chemical engineers did warn the executive not to do dump PFOA ,C8 and PFAs about 70 years ago if i remember correctly...

Excerpt from the NYtimes story :
"
The story began in 1951, when DuPont started purchasing PFOA (which the company refers to as C8) from 3M for use in the manufacturing of Teflon. 3M invented PFOA just four years earlier; it was used to keep coatings like Teflon from clumping during production. Though PFOA was not classified by the government as a hazardous substance, 3M sent DuPont recommendations on how to dispose of it. It was to be incinerated or sent to chemical-waste facilities. DuPont’s own instructions specified that it was not to be flushed into surface water or sewers. But over the decades that followed, DuPont pumped hundreds of thousands of pounds of PFOA powder through the outfall pipes of the Parkersburg facility into the Ohio River. The company dumped 7,100 tons of PFOA-laced sludge into ‘‘digestion ponds’’: open, unlined pits on the Washington Works property, from which the chemical could seep straight into the ground. PFOA entered the local water table, which supplied drinking water to the communities of Parkersburg, Vienna, Little Hocking and Lubeck — more than 100,000 people in all.
"

The Lawyer Who Became DuPont’s Worst Nightmare (Published 2016)

Rob Bilott was a corporate defense attorney for eight years. Then he took on an environmental suit that would upend his entire career — and expose a brazen, decades-long history of chemical pollution.

www.nytimes.com

 

[William Gaatjes]

This is a documentary about the PFAS scandal and PFAS coverup in Dordrecht the Netherlands.
The company Chemours, formerly known as Dupont, has been dumping PFAS in the open air for years now.
The responsible government department once convinced people that there was nothing to worry about when it comes to PFAS.
Now at the moment the PFAS scandal has a lot of attention in the Netherlands. There is also a part about the scandal with PFOA , commonly known as C8 in Parkersburg, West Virginia.

It is partially in English with dutch subtitles and partially in dutch with English subtitles.

 

[William Gaatjes]

There are new combustion engine technologies upcoming. The ones i personally like, are from the USA and from Spain.

Both motors are based on opposing piston technology. The opposing piston engine is an invention from around 1882 by James Atkinson if i remember correctly ( I had to look it up and verify this time because i was way wrong).
Anyways, the videos will be about the Achates power : Opposed piston engine and the INNengine opposed piston engine.

I think a good idea would be to start with diesel powered or gasoline powered electrical generators that need to charge batteries for events to build momentum and production experience.
Then also methane powered and hydrogen powered would be a great idea as development. LNG is methane based, so that would be good. All technologies here described are of course based on combusting a fuel with oxygen.
There will be always be situations where a combustion engine will have some advantage, being range or pure (combustion) fuel efficiency.
Such an engine running constantly in the optimal torque/rpm/fuel efficiency point of the curves. That would be ideal for an electrical generator that needs to be portable but works stationary. Like for dance events or other situations.
Building lots of experience.
And then move on for the automotive part of the world like for example cars, trucks and boats.

https://innengine.com/

Industry Leading Engine Solutions - Achates Power

Achates Power enables radically improved internal combustion engines that are efficient, clean and cost-effective.

achatespower.com

 

[William Gaatjes]

Video about electrical motors from Tesla and Koenigsegg with a basic explanation how these motors function :

 

[Ken g6]

They should make decent building materials no?

Maybe, in some cases...

A Swiss startup is mounting solar panels on used wind turbine blades

A Swiss startup is using reclaimed wind turbine blades instead of metal beams as horizontal supports for solar panels.

electrek.co

 

[William Gaatjes]

I am not sure they ever got the (fusion reactor) polywell to function but this (Google Tech talk) video from the late Robert Bussard is a great watch.
Robert Bussard, A physicist whos name is even used in the startrek series : The Bussard collector...

Is very interesting to watch if you are eager to learn the basics about fusion and what to do, and not to do :

 

[William Gaatjes]

Lake Kivu on the borders of Rwanda and Congo is known for its massive methane resources. And also CO2 resources. But let just focus on the methane for now.
The methane, just alike the CO2 is dissolved in the water and extracted to prevent the sudden release of the methane into open air. Lake Kivu can be found on the Albertine Rift.
There are of course worries about seismic activity.
This would be a waste as methane can be a powerful greenhouse gas, and al this methane would be released and would also be a danger for the people and other lifeforms.

Think about a similair scenario as what happened in lake Nyos, an vulcanic lake in Cameroon in the year 1986.
When a large cloud of CO2 that was released after an landslide was the suffocating cause of the death of many innocent unaware people and other mammals and other lifeforms.


Anyway, methane is a very abandunt and clean energy source when used properly.
So to solve these 2 problems, protect life and have an energy source, the methane is distracted from the water. Sort of free to be used.
Possibly there are below the bottom surface of the lake many methane reservoirs to be found but it is all very near the Albertine rift.
So, very dangerous to just meddle with without knowing exactly what the situation is.

As we all know, bacteria live abundant around us and also in water, if that may be deep waters or shallow waters.
The truth is that it is kind of a layered closed loop system.
Some bacteria produce methane (CH4), others consume methane and produce CO2.
Algea and other photosynthetic life consume CO2 , sunlight and H2O and produce with this carbohydrates and oxygen = O2.
Carbohydrates, we all know as sugars, aka food (if we do not eat too much of it).
This is a known fact, ask any biologist.

But because of several reasons i will mention, there is an imbalance with bacteria consuming methane and CO2 production and CO2 consumption by larger lifeforms.
Part of the problem is that we humans with our pollution and deforestation, accelerated the inbalance. But that is not the only reason, The other reason and the main source of the inbalance is tectonic behavior and crashed meteorites in the past, volcano's and LIPS (large igneous province) .
The inbalance that is sold as global warming, so it is part true but human pollution is the big problem we as humans create. So global pollution is the correct name we should keep in mind in the human world and should be mentioned on the news.
We as humans need to also make closed system energy systems. And we need to go into space. Because we ourselfs are getting too large in numbers. Which is natural behavior.

As a difference and a big reminder :
carbohydrates: hydrogen, carbon and oxygen.
hydrocarbons: hydrogen and carbon.

KivuWatt Project, Lake Kivu, Kibuye

The KivuWatt Project involves the construction of an integrated methane gas extraction facility and independent power plant in two phases.

www.power-technology.com

Excerpt from the text :
"
September 2 2015

The KivuWatt Project involves the construction of an integrated methane gas extraction facility and independent power plant in two phases. The project will extract methane from Lake Kivu to generate electricity.
Construction works for the 25MW first phase of the methane gas-fired power plant began in August 2011 and the start-up and commissioning were initiated in June 2015. Construction of the second phase, which will add an additional 75MW, is expected to start six months after the full commissioning of phase one.
The project is being implemented by KivuWatt, a subsidiary of ContourGlobal. The combined investment for the two phases is estimated to reach $325m, of which $142m has been earmarked for phase one.

One of the world’s deepest lakes, Lake Kivu is estimated to hold 60 billion cubic metres of methane gas (CH₄) and 300 billion cubic meters of CO₂ at a water depth of 350m. The harmful gases are expected to saturate the lake in 50 to 200 years, which poses a gas eruption threat to more than two million people along its shores.

KivuWatt gas extraction project details
The offshore facilities are situated 12.5km from the city of Kibuye, while the power plant is located on a 5.5ha site in the outskirts of Kibuye.
Project activities for the first phase primarily involved the construction and installation of a 750t floating barge integrating a gas extraction and treatment facility, a submerged, floating pipeline to transport the fuel gas ashore, an onshore gas receiving facility and power plant, and a temporary marine landing site (MLS) where the gas extraction facilities were assembled.
The extracted gas will be processed and pumped ashore for use by the power plant via a submerged floating pipeline. The power plant will produce electricity using three 20-cylinder Wärtsilä 34SG gas-powered engines that have a combined capacity of 25MW.
The second phase will involve the installation of nine additional gensets with a combined capacity of 75MW, additional barges, gas extraction and treatment facilities as well as submerged pipelines.

Benefits of KivuWatt project​

The project will mitigate the dangers associated with the release of CH₄ and CO₂ from the lake, as well as providing an environment-friendly and sustainable source of power generation. It will decrease the country’s use of diesel to generate electricity, reduce electricity costs and enable the country to achieve its target of reaching 563MW of installed power capacity by 2017.
As of 2011, Rwanda has an electrification rate of just 9% and 68.4MW of installed capacity. The KivuWatt project will provide power to 30 village electricity systems. It is also expected to generate approximately 200 construction jobs and 60 permanent jobs.
"

Government welcomes successful KivuWatt gas testing

THE Government has applauded news of the successful testing of the first gas samples on the Kivu-Watt Methane Gas plant, a project on Lake Kivu expected to add some 25 megawats to...

www.newtimes.co.rw

Excerpt from the text :
"
Kenneth Agutamba
Friday, September 18, 2015

THE Government has applauded news of the successful testing of the first gas samples on the Kivu-Watt Methane Gas plant, a project on Lake Kivu expected to add some 25 megawats to the national electricity grid.
“This is a welcome development. It will add value to our energy mix,” said energy Minister James Musoni, in a brief text message to Saturday Times.
Testing of the gas was done Thursday night after the successful re-installation of the first of four pairs of separators and subsequent extraction of the first samples, according to Jarmo Gummerus, the country director of ContourGlobal.
Gummerus said in a phone interview yesterday that the second pair of separators will be installed by end of the month while full gas production and subsequent commissioning of the plant will take place before the end of October.


American energy firm ContourGlobal was given a 25-year concession to produce 100 megawatts from Lake Kivu, the world’s only methane rich water body, and the successful completion of the first phase will be received as a major boost to the investor.
The multi-million dollar project is only in its first phase which was used as a pilot study for engineers to gain experience since nothing of its kind had ever been done before.
“We had no luxury to copy and paste because everything here was being done for the first time, it’s a learning phase,” Gummerus said in a previous interview.
As a result, several deadlines in the past were never met, starting with one in 2012 as complications kept emerging.

It has taken engineers over three million man-hours to witness the first gas flare since works begun seven years ago, and they will now have the luxury of copying and pasting on the next phases of the project.
Gummerus believes works on the second, third and final phases of the venture will be accomplished much faster because of experience and lessons obtained from the first phase, which he described in an earlier interview as a ‘lake-breaking.’

Earlier this month, The New Times was granted access to the plant located on Lake Kivu in Karongi District and found engineers in a head scratching mood as they tried to fix last-minute technical malfunctions that had cropped up involving the ‘separators’.
The separators, long and wide metallic pipe drums weighing several hundred tonnes, separate gas from water before it’s processed into electricity.
But after sinking the first pair of separators into the lake, two months ago, it emerged that they were not functioning as expected and had to be reinstalled, a process that required flying in expert divers from South Africa and engineers from Germany.
The past few weeks have been spent troubleshooting; and the successful gas flaring exercise Thursday night means that the problems have finally been fixed and that the plant is nearly ready for fulltime production – a relief to both the investor and government.
“We should expect to have electricity from the plant to the national grid in mid-October,” Gummerus said.


When that happens, it will be an important milestone in Rwanda’s quest to conquer its energy inadequacy as pressure continues to mount from an ever-growing manufacturing base.


Powering Rwanda


Rwanda is currently being powered by an installed energy capacity of 161.2 megawatts but the country’s target is to have 563 megawatts by 2018; the addition of 25 megawatts from KivuWatt next month will be a firm step towards that goal.

"


This is an old image from the chicamod website describing the situation in Lake Kivu :







As a sidenote : Article about seismic activity in lake Kivu :

Volcanic activity and hazard in the East African Rift Zone - Nature Communications

New observations of volcanic and magmatic activity in Africa are changing our views of continental rifting and raising awareness of the associated hazards. However, despite a shift from crisis response to reducing disaster risks, limited capacity means mitigating geohazards remains challenging.

www.nature.com

Excerpt from the text :
"

Abstract​

Over the past two decades, multidisciplinary studies have unearthed a rich history of volcanic activity and unrest in the densely-populated East African Rift System, providing new insights into the influence of rift dynamics on magmatism, the characteristics of the volcanic plumbing systems and the foundation for hazard assessments. The raised awareness of volcanic hazards is driving a shift from crisis response to reducing disaster risks, but a lack of institutional and human capacity in sub-Saharan Africa means baseline data are sparse and mitigating geohazards remains challenging.

"
and

"

Eruption style​

Volcanic rocks erupted along the EARS are invariably rich in alkali elements with a reduced oxygen fugacity89,90, resulting in a viscosity up to two orders of magnitude lower than their calc-alkaline counterparts for a given temperature89,91. This relatively low viscosity combined with high volatile contents18 has important implications for the outgassing potential of the magmas and thus eruption dynamics19. The effect of low viscosity of the magmas is most pronounced in the extreme mobility of the melilite-nephelinite lava flows of Nyiragongo, which have recorded speeds of up to 100 km/h92. The potential of fractures opening on the volcano’s southern lower flanks, as happened in 1977, 2002 and 2021, especially puts the urban area of Goma at risk25,93 and could potentially also lead to phreatic explosions from lava entering Lake Kivu or highly explosive phreatomagmatic activity if ascending magma were to interact with shallow groundwater and/or lake water94.
"

 

[William Gaatjes]

Methane, stuck under ice.

Under the Fairbanks lakes of Alaska and more at the northpole, massive amounts of methane is also disolved in the water there and it is a good thing to start tapping that gas.
It is bad for the planet if there is a sudden release of all that methane gas and a waste because it is so useful. And when burned properly, next to the exothermic energy release : Only CO2 and water remains. Both can be captured to be recycled or used. We all know that the main component from natural gas is methane.
On average between 80% to 96% depending on the well.
And getting that methane gas out from beneath the permafrost ice may be very easy. Easier than drilling very deep into the Earths crust and when done properly, always cleaner than fracking which imho is polluting the environment.

Easy money to be earned and also reduce the CO2 and CH4 footprint to reduce global warming by man made global pollution.
All this at the same time by making sure the naturally released methane which always happens and have happened for millions of years is captured to create a positive offset in favor of global warming reduction.
In the meantime we can clean up our waste and man made pollution, reduce flaring by oil and gas companies that seems to account for 33% of the global CO2 emitters and CH4 emitters.
Recycle our sewer material and turn that into methane by use of methanogens.

As an example to solve the livestock pollution issue :
Build better stables to filter the methane produced by ruminants from our livestock. The result is free but captured methane to use for energy production or heating.
While at the same time monitor the air quality and monitor for microbes and pathogens, fungi. This is a whole new market ready to be exploited.
Because then we can predict in advance disease outbreaks before they happen.
We all know about for example Q-fever.
Q fever is a disease caused by the bacteria Coxiella burnetii. See CDC website below for more information.

We all know about influenza.
Flu is a respiratory illness in various animals.
Influenza viruses affect several different animals, such as; horses, cats, dogs, birds, swine, and people. It is contagious and spreads rapidly among susceptible animals. Many influenza A viruses infect poultry
See See CDC website below for more information.

I guess that perhaps this makes the claims on the north pole a bit more easier to understand.

Denmark: A Claim to the North Pole (Published 2014)

Scientific data show that Greenland’s continental shelf is connected to a ridge beneath the Arctic Ocean, giving Denmark a claim to the North Pole and any energy resources beneath it, Denmark’s foreign minister has said.

www.nytimes.com

"
By The Associated Press

• Dec. 15, 2014

Scientific data shows that Greenland’s continental shelf is connected to a ridge beneath the Arctic Ocean, giving Denmark a claim to the North Pole and any energy resources beneath it, Denmark’s foreign minister has said. Foreign Minister Martin Lidegaard said Denmark would deliver a claim on Monday to a United Nations panel in New York that would eventually decide control of the area, which Russia and Canada also covet. The five Arctic countries — the United States, Russia, Norway, Canada and Denmark — all have areas surrounding the North Pole, but only Canada and Russia had indicated an interest in it before Denmark’s claim. Mr. Lidegaard said he expected no quick decisions. From 2007 to 2012, Danish scientists, with colleagues from Canada, Sweden and Russia, surveyed a 1,240-mile-long underwater mountain range that runs north of Siberia, concluding that Greenland, a semiautonomous Danish territory, is geologically attached to the ridge. That prompted the Danes to claim the right to exploit an area of 345,600 square miles.
"

Site about q-fever.

Q fever home | CDC

Information about Q fever from the U.S. CDC.

www.cdc.gov

Site about influenza.

Influenza in Animals

Influenza A viruses are found in many different animals, including ducks, chickens, pigs, whales, horses, seals and cats.

www.cdc.gov

 

[William Gaatjes]

This thread will also be about what not to do to save the climate, to save nature.
This post is an example of what not to do, to save nature.

As people who might know the situation in the Netherlands a bit : Dutch Farmers are under constant attack from the government.
The Dutch farmers where over the years first forced to increase agriculture yield and livestock yield and then forced to scale down again. This forcing of the government, causing losses in finances, farmers going broke and reducing good alternatives to save the climate and nature. That is why there are so many angry farmers. Which is easy to understand.
The police even shoots way faster at farmers in tractors than at real criminals with guns blazing. Which is a disgrace for the Dutch people.

And when the Dutch farmers propose many useful contributions to reduce the impact on the climate.
The farmers where blatantly ignored or weird regulations were proposed by the government to make sure the Dutch farmers were unable to show their innovative ideas like producing methane from manure and agriculture waste...
Reduce nitrogen emissions and nitrogen polution. Which reduces the high levels of nitrogen in local rivers, ditches and other water stream. High levels of nitrogen causes issues like unbalance in the diversity of microbial life in the water.
Regulations by the government to ensure that foreign companies can force their way in to the Netherlands to present the same ideas as the farmers but in a way more costly manner and often with a reduced advantage for reducing climate and pollution issues. Which ends up as an expensive bill, the Dutch people have to foot.


Ideas that are known all over the world. Ideas to use methanogens to produce clean methane from waste. Like in many countries almost happened on a grand scale during and after the oil crisis of 1973.
But these ideas soon faded away again after the price drop of oil barrels..

The crazy idea to feed cows bromoform. Which many people in the USA also are very much against it. For good reason as bromoform is a known carcinogen and highly toxic.
Ruminants like for example cows have 4 stomachs. The first stomach contains methanogens, bacteria that convert tough cellulose material through fermentation inside the rumen into carbohydrates and through the whole digestive process lots of other nutritional components as well that are essential for the ruminant survival.
The methanogens help the cow digest very tough plant material like grass, but also produce methane as a metabolic byproduct in this hypoxic condition in the rumen as well.
What i read, is that this methane production can be up to 500 liter a day, which the cow belches up. Would it not be great if it was possible to capture all that belched methane in stables ?
Stables for livestock really need constant fresh air delivery and old CO2 rich and methane rich and even ammonia rich air extracted. This to maintain an healthy environment.

Sometimes it makes me wonder if cows and other ruminants not just run on methane (which is a hydrocarbon) instead of carbohydrates.

A lot of Dutch farmers and researchers are against the use of feeding cows seaweed containing bromoform, seaweeds like : Asparagopsis taxiformis.
For a simple reason : The bromoform is a know carcinogen and inhibits the methanogens but other research also shows bleedings sores in the stomach of the cows.
And the bromoform ends up in the milk of the cows and even in the urine. This bromoform containing urine often ends up in the ditches and the ground beneath the stables.



Read all about it :

Seaweed as a methane inhibitor is not free of risks

Cows exhale the strong greenhouse gas methane. One of the possible ways to limit methane emissions from cows is by feeding them the seaweed Asparagopsis taxiformis. This seaweed contains high concentrations of bromoform, a substance that counteracts the formation of methane in the cow's rumen...

www.wur.nl

Excerpt from text :

"
Cows exhale the strong greenhouse gas methane. One of the possible ways to limit methane emissions from cows is by feeding them the seaweed Asparagopsis taxiformis. This seaweed contains high concentrations of bromoform, a substance that counteracts the formation of methane in the cow's rumen. Research by Wageningen University & Research (WUR) shows that bromoform can then end up in the milk and urine of the cow.

“Bromoform inhibits the formation of methane in the cow's rumen. However, it is also toxic. ”, says Wouter Muizelaar, researcher at Wageningen Livestock Research. Previous research linked A. taxiformis to abnormalities in the rumen wall of sheep. “That is why we wanted to know what effect A. taxiformis has on cows. Does bromoform end up in milk, urine, manure or animal tissue? What happens with it? This research shows that bromoform from A. taxiformis can end up in milk and urine. A clear indication to reconsider whether it is desirable to feed this type of seaweed to cows.”
"

 

[William Gaatjes]

Another post about not to use bromoform to prevent methane forming in the rumen cows :
The images show lesions and uclers in the rumen of a dissected cow that has been fed the red seaweed called : Asparagopsis taxiformis and Asparagopsis armata

It is hard to find but i think the bromoform method is primarily used in Australia and New Zealand if i am not mistaken. I read about the use of bromoform containing seaweed , like 6 years ago. Awful stuff.
News is hard to find but does exist. It does makes me wonder where the milk from these cows is sold.
Conscious farmers and village folks and city folks who have love for nature all over the world but do like meat and milk are all against the use of bromoform by feeding cows seaweed containing bromoform and other halogenated compounds.

Safety and Transfer Study: Transfer of Bromoform Present in Asparagopsis taxiformis to Milk and Urine of Lactating Dairy Cows

Enteric methane (CH[4] ) is the main source of greenhouse gas emissions from ruminants. The red seaweeds Asparagopsis taxiformis (AT) and Asparagopsis armata contain halogenated compounds, including bromoform (CHBr[3] ), which may strongly decrease enteric ...

www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

Small excerpt form the text :
"
Safety and Transfer Study: Transfer of Bromoform Present in Asparagopsis taxiformis to Milk and Urine of Lactating Dairy Cows
"

and
"
Enteric methane (CH4) is the main source of greenhouse gas emissions from ruminants. The red seaweeds Asparagopsis taxiformis (AT) and Asparagopsis armata contain halogenated compounds, including bromoform (CHBr3), which may strongly decrease enteric CH4 emissions. Bromoform is known to have several toxicological effects in rats and mice and is quickly excreted by the animals. This study investigated the transfer of CHBr3 present in AT to milk, urine, feces, and animal tissue when incorporated in the diet of dairy cows. Twelve lactating Holstein-Friesian dairy cows were randomly assigned to three treatment groups, representing the target dose (low), 2× target dose (medium), and 5× target dose (high). The adaptation period lasted seven days, and subsequently cows were fed AT for 22 days maximally. The transfer of CHBr3 to the urine at days 1 and 10 (10–148 µg/L) was found with all treatments. On day 1, CHBr3 was detected in the milk of most cows in the low and medium treatment groups (9.1 and 11 µg/L, respectively), and detected in the milk of one cow in the high treatment group on day 9 (35 µg/L). Bromoform was not detected in milk and urine at day 17, nor at concentrations above the detection limit in feces and collected animal tissues. Two animals (low) were sacrificed, and their rumen wall showed abnormalities. Upon histological examination, signs of inflammation became visible. Animals regularly refused the feed or distinctively selected against AT. In conclusion, within the confines of the present experiment, CHBr3 does not accumulate in animal tissue, but can be excreted in urine and milk.

"
Click the spoiler for a picture of the rumen of a dissected cow, where the rumen is full of lesions and ulcers.
This image is from the research text linked above.

Spoiler

 

[William Gaatjes]

Today not a means to provide clean energy, but a means to save energy.

On the hackaday site, I read a few years ago a very informative article that provides history about the MTU size and the research done on MTU size. MTU stands for Maximum Transmission Unit.
The figures Benjojo's blog provides, show an interesting conclusion that relates to the energy consumption of our global internet data traffic, especially when it comes to the overhead of sending data.
And I am not even talking about all the phishing emails and the often unwanted and unnecessary advertising emails that are continuously sent.
Often you can almost always cancel or unsubscribe, unnecessary advertising emails from unwanted companies. Which is a start to a better climate because of energy reduction consumption saves power.

When computers are connected to each other via the internet, the data is almost always sent around via packets of data with a maximum size of 1500 bytes.
A byte is just digital unit to indicate 8 bits. But I won't go into technical digital lingo too deeply.
If the file is larger than 1500 bytes, the large file is therefore simply split into smaller manageable separate parts each with its own unique identification number with a maximum 1500 bytes.

I will use a metaphore instead.

1500 Bytes packets
See those 1500 bytes packets as cardboard boxes with data, cardboard boxes of certain fixed sizes that are processed one after the other. Being sent away or received.
Example :
Imagine you ordered a sofa from Ikea and you got 15 packages to receive.
This is also how it works with large files sent through the electrical wires or glassfibers of our internet.
Back to the sofa example :
Because the packages are smaller, and more manageable the person who has to carry the packets can be smaller and less strong (not like a weight lifting strongman) and therefore use less calories.
I ignore here, partially the effect of the genes of the person.

Of course. it also works the other way. If you have too small cardboard boxes, it is not longer convenient either. The delivery person has to walk the stairs like 100 times for you and your sofa, swearing and all. Cursing you to a hell nobody ever knew was possible...
And you as the proud owner of the sofa have to do a lot of assembling (And a lot of swearing) .
And you got a lot of cardboard waste. And in essence the ratio of cardboard box to sofa for each package becomes rather huge and useless, low efficiency.

The point here is the amount of calories consumed and the muscle mass the person has to have.
Translate this to the technical side : Early internet and we see limits in available costly memory and costly available logic inside chips and at the time physical limits. And back then relevant and still today relevant, the amount of power consumed.

Those 1500 bytes are for legacy or compatibility reasons because when the Internet started, all the connecting devices just didn't have that much memory.
So it was a price/performance/efficiency ratio choice, in other words they chose what was convenient.
Only the data packets must be identifiable from each other and this is done with a header.
I don't know the latest status of the MTU packet story, but it seems that it has been going on for a long time now and the article is from 2020 but still relevant today 2024.

The MTU of 1500 bytes has become such a limiting factor that data transfer over the Internet has become enormous inefficient when it comes to data transfer and also power consumption.
At least the datatransfer can be improved by a factor of 6x with what seems little effort.
Now for a long time there has been an option to use jumbo frames of 9000 bytes, but not all internet equipment can handle these 9000 bytes jumbo frames.

Time for a William Gaatjes opinion piece :
Now I'm not an expert in it, but given the enormous amount of electrical energy required for the internet and data transfer and we like to stream video and audio...
And we would like to be energy efficient and environmentally conscious.
Then we should have a lool to see if there is anything that can be improved...

And maybe we can take a look to the video and audio codecs, because when everything was still analog, a little noise didn't matter, it was not a problem for audio and video reception. Just a tiny momentary spek in the image or some audible background noise in the desired sound.
These days , if anybody ever noticed, if one bit is inverted we're in trouble and we are looking at a green block image and sometimes things freeze or the radio reception is gone like som DAB (Digital Audio Broadcasting) receiver do. Or the image on the screen just goes black and no sound either.
Imagine if we could have a smarter machine learning algorithm for error detection ? And of course correction, we could have the crisp sound and image of a digital transmission and the fault tolerance of an analog transmission combined.
Because 1 or 2 pixels with the wrong color in, for example, a 30fps or 60fps video, no one will notice. Certainly not at full HD and higher. The video codecs already do prediction, if you know how they work.

Just research and imagine how much information really changes in a video image when you watch a movie scene and compare how much of the image really changes over time, like for exaple a few seconds. Almost always only the changes are sent using very advanced mathematical calculations.
But perhaps there is something wrong with the entire system to make it even more tolerant.
And sometimes sticking to old habits, it is just misleading marketing and quick and easy acceptance or patent problems.

As another example of a better compression but with the same or better audio quality :
At the time MP3 was just coming out around 1990-1995, Yamaha from Japan also had an audio compression technique that is many times an improvement in terms of sound quality when compared to the MP3 standard for the same data compression.
Namely SoundVQ invented by Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corporation and was originally called TwinVQ (transform-domain weighted interleave vector quantization).

I had a classical piano piece at the time and also a converted song from the beegees CD I have.
Converted to MP3 and TwinVQ.
And TwinVQ was really much better and cleaner than MP3 has ever been.
Why a piano? If you look at the waveform generated when a real pianokey is hit on an oscilloscope and do a Fourier analysis graph of the waveform, MP3 has a lot of trouble with that, wide frequency spectrum namely and TwinVQ has much less trouble, to the point that you don't hear it.
Another example is to take a triangle music instrument. All my songs with a triangle instrument sounded better in SoundVQ.

Unfortunately, i could only play TwinVQ on my PC. So at some point I switched to 320kb/s in mp3 format and could live with that. But today, with today's computing power and yet more energy efficient and current insights in mathematics in embedded microcontrollers
TwinVQ a good choice. Surely for streaming purposes...
I do have to admit that I do not know which audiocodecs these days are currently used.

But in all honestly, I also prefer good old fashion forum software over facebook.
Much more tranquilo for the mood and way less power consumption because of way less datatraffick.
And also forum software can be made much more private than facebook will ever be... IMHO of course.

The links :

Just How Did 1500 Bytes Become The MTU Of The Internet?

[Benjojo] got interested in where the magic number of 1,500 bytes came from, and shared some background on just how and why it seems to have come to be. In a nutshell, the maximum transmission unit…

hackaday.com

Small excerpt form the text :
“
[Benjojo] got interested in where the magic number of 1,500 bytes came from, and shared some background on just how and why it seems to have come to be. In a nutshell, the maximum transmission unit (MTU) limits the maximum amount of data that can be transmitted in a single network-layer transaction, but 1,500 is kind of a strange number in binary. For the average Internet user, this under the hood stuff doesn’t really affect one’s ability to send data, but it has an impact from a network management point of view. Just where did this number come from, and why does it matter?

”
This site also contains a lot of graphical images showing the low efficiency of the internet when it comes to datatransfer.

How 1500 bytes became the MTU of the internet

blog.benjojo.co.uk

Small excerpt form the text :
“
Feb 19 2020
How 1500 bytes became the MTU of the internet.

The MTU (Maximum Transmission Unit) states how big a single packet can be. Generally speaking, when you are talking to devices on your own LAN the MTU will be around 1500 bytes and the internet runs almost universally on 1500 as well. However, this does not mean that these link layer technologies can’t transmit bigger packets.
For example, 802.11 (better known as WiFi) has a MTU of 2304 bytes, or if your network is using FDDI then you have a MTU around 4352 bytes. Ethernet itself has the concept of “jumbo frames”, where the MTU can be set up to 9000 bytes (on supporting NICs, Switches and Routers).
However, almost none of this matters on the internet. Since the backbone of the internet is now mostly made up of ethernet links, the de facto maximum size of a packet is now unofficially set to 1500 bytes to avoid packets being fragmented down links.
On the face of it 1500 is a weird number, we would normally expect a lot of constants in computing to be based around mathematical constants, like powers of 2. 1500, however fits none of those.
”
and

“
This shows a great deal of bandwidth being spent on headers for the largest packet class. Since the peak traffic shows the biggest packet bucket reading at around 246GBit/s of overhead we can assume that if we had all adopted jumbo frames while we had the chance to, this overhead would only be around 41GBit/s.
But I think at this point, the ship has sailed to do this on the wider internet. While some internet transport carriers operate on 9000 MTU, the vast majority don’t, and changing the internet’s mind collectively has been shown time and time again to be prohibitively difficult.
”

About TwinVQ :

ReallyRareWares - NTT TwinVQ encoder

 

[sdifox]

You could use flac...

 

[William Gaatjes]

You could use flac...

Nooo.
TwinVQ is really much better...
Flac is really huge. The post is about making the data transfer more efficient by also using compression.
Both formats use compression but TwinVQ sounds really good for the resulting data size and for speech one gets tiny chunks of data.
Ideal for flash memory controlled by an embedded microcontroller.
The Japanese are good in that kind of stuff...

 

[sdifox]

Nooo.
TwinVQ is really much better...
Flac is really huge. The post is about making the data transfer more efficient by also using compression.
Both formats use compression but TwinVQ sounds really good for the resulting data size and for speech one gets tiny chunks of data.
Ideal for flash memory controlled by an embedded microcontroller.
The Japanese are good in that kind of stuff...

Err it's still lossy. And memory is cheap. I have 256gb in my phone plus 256gb sd card. Way more than enough to carry flacs. The sd card came with the phone. Currently I have 146gb of music on my phone, mostly flac.

And TwinVQ is proprietary.

 

[William Gaatjes]

Err it's still lossy. And memory is cheap. I have 256gb in my phone plus 256gb sd card. Way more than enough to carry flacs. The sd card came with the phone. Currently I have 146gb of music on my phone, mostly flac.

And TwinVQ is proprietary.

I can understand that the telephone is the most obvious choice to think about first.

But there is a lot of embedded material where every penny counts.
The CPU inside these microcontrollers are capable enough for the calculations, even the lower budget cortex-m ones.

Yeah, TwinVQ is proprietary but i am sure that a license is possible.
But do not forget country borders. I noticed if i look at what is technically feasible that Japan is very much ahead but we hardly see it here in the EU with respect to license.
I guess that is about trade agreements.