Well, this one is bound to upset everyone. But I have just figured out that Global Warming may actually be a blessing in disguise, or at least an opportunity to be taken advantage of. I know, you’re thinking I’ve completely taken leave of my senses, but bear with me a few minutes and I will explain. Ok?
Let’s begin with Hydrogen. Hydrogen is clearly the fuel of the future. It is an easy replacement for hydrocarbon fuel in many processes that would not lend themselves to Lithium ion batteries. Like cement production, steel production, and aviation. There is currently a debate among at least auto manufacturers, about whether the future belongs to Lithium or to Hydrogen. I say it’s not even close, the future belongs to Hydrogen. You can adapt internal combustion engines to run on it, you can even use it in a damn barbeque if you want. On the other hand, there is simply not enough Lithium on the planet to supply all the batteries needed to replace hydrocarbons. There is one small, teensy problem with Hydrogen, it doesn’t exist in a usable form.
Now, on to the Global Warming problem. Everyone says the problem is Carbon Dioxide trapping heat from the sun and warming the planet. I am not here to dispute that, nor do I have a solution to removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. The problem that I would like to address is the buildup of heat. Exactly where on earth is this heat accumulating? Well, we are certainly feeling it on land, but I would like to suggest that it is the oceans that are the greatest repository of heat. If only there was a way to remove that heat from the oceans, the effects of climate change would be at least ameliorated if not more. As it turns out there is a way to remove heat from the ocean. In fact it was invented in 1817. I’m talking about the Stirling Engine.
A Stirling Engine is designed to use the difference in temperatures from two different parts of the device to convert heat into rotary motion. It’s worth it to re-read that last sentence. It takes the heat accumulating in the ocean and converts it to rotary motion. Wow! Ok, you may say, so what? Useless information. Not so! Imagine dozens, hundreds, maybe thousands of these things on ships parked offshore with all these spinning Stirling engines. Again, I can hear you saying, “So what?” Well, now imagine hooking all those spinning engines to a generator and using the output from those generators to power an electrolyzer, which as it turns out, produces Hydrogen! Viola! You have the problem causing Global Warming providing the very solution to the problem! You would have considerable amounts of Hydrogen while at the same time cooling the ocean where the engines were operating! Imagine parking a bunch of these things off the coast of California producing Hydrogen and cooling the ocean. Then shipping that Hydrogen to Arizona or Nevada to produce electricity and just for fun producing lots of fresh water from Hydrogen produced in Salt Water!
So, would this actually work? I wondered if anyone else had thought of this. As it turns out someone has. Quite a bit in fact. If you're up on your Thermodynamics you can take a look at this paper from The World Congress on Engineering in 2012.
If we parked a few hundred of these things off the coast of Morocco we could cool that part of the ocean and spare the Caribbean and the East Coast billions in hurricane damage while shipping gobs of Hydrogen from there in the process.
See? Global Warming, the problem AND the solution. Now, why hasn’t anyone thought of this before? I have no idea.
Let the Conspiracy Theories commence!
Nuff said.