Free Republic

West Texas down IH20 is not an issue with a Tesla or any NACS compatible EV. Tesla has Superchargers every 50 to 100 miles all down IH20 from Ft. Worth, Cisco, Abilene,Sweetwater,Big Spring,Midland, Pecos, Van Horn, then El Paso none is further than 100 miles from the other. I took my Model 3 to Midland only needed 15 min at the SC just east of Abilene to make Midland with SOC to spare once in Midland I L2 charge to 100% the first night in town for a meeting about SWD drilling. I never charged again I took it after four days back to Abilene SC and then right home to North Texas easy peasy I wanted to use the FSD and not a pay 3.89 for diesel didn’t need the truck this trip as it was a in town Midland trip not a rig trip.

For those wanting to look this shows all the Tesla SC as red pins and any 50kw or higher if you filter it.

https://chargefinder.com/us/search

“Californians will go buy their cars in Arizona and Nevada. California might be able to restrict the sale of something IN THE STATE but it cannot restrict residents of California from buying something out of state.”

California already restricts its residents and business entities from registering or operating any diesel truck that is older than 2010 inside it’s borders. It doesn’t matter where you bought it or if you are trying to import it. They will not issue a title, plates or inspections for it. Without of state plates it is not allowed to operate for profit and most be removed from the state or crushed or it’s engine updated to a 2010 engine with 2010 or later emissions control. This law has already withstood Fedgov scrutiny so it stands as is. So no California absolutely will not allow out of state purchases to be on it’s roads even with out of state plates operated by a citizen of California. It’s already a crime to not register a vehicle in 30 days after bringing it into California by a California citizen. The vehicle can be impounded after the second violation and the person’s driver’s license suspended if they rack up enough points by citations. Both of those less would need to changed at the governors level or a veto proof referendum.

“The average person’s daily water consumption is estimated to be 80-100 gallons per day, largely attributable to faucets, toilets, showers and washing machines.”

80x22,000,000 = 1,760,000,000 PER DAY
That’s 9 decimals deep per day. That’s 5400+ acrefeet per day and 1.97 million acrefeet per year. And that’s just residential use which is usually half the water use in a city. Commercial and industrial can be half or more than residential.

So at 100% efficiency with no losses for friction to pump one acrefoot of water against gravity vertically not horizontally up an incline through pipes with friction over distance. Is calculated as 1 acre foot = 325,850 gal which weighs 2,719,226 pounds to lift that 7400 feet would require 20,125,972,400 ft lbs of work. Thats 20 billion ft lbs for one acre foot you need 5400 acrefeet per day so 108,680,250,960,000 ft lbs of lift per day straight up not also horizontally 200+ miles to the ocean. So how much power is that in kWh? 1 kWh = 2655223.74 ft lbs

1.08E^14/2.65E^6= 40,930,743.28 kWh per day just in vertical lift at 100% electric motor efficiency and 100% pump efficiency both are impossible. 70% is a good number for electric driven pumps overall eff. So 40.9 million kWh is also 49,930.8 megawatts hours per day or 1750 megawatt hours per hour. That’s the output of two one gigawatt nuclear reactors 24/7/365. Cost wise at $50 per megawatt hour which is cheap on the wholesale market is $2,046,537.16 per day or $746,986,064 per year just to move the water vertically. Without knowing the size of the pressure pipes to run up hill for 200+ miles the horizontal friction losses are not Calculable. Then add in the energy to desal the water itself. The very latest RO plants use 3 kWh per cubic meter and there is 264 gallons in a cubic meter or 1233.48 cubic meters per acrefoot. Since we need 5400 acrefeet per day that’s at least another 19,982,376 kWh or 19,982 megawatt hours per day that’s also 832 MWh per hour the output of a CANDU 900 reactor 24/7/365. At the same $50 megawatt hour that’s $999,118.8 per day and $364,678,362 per year for the energy to desal.

Adding just the energy costs alone together is a billion dollars per year without pipeline losses. The capex for three 1+ gigawatt reactors, a 1.79 billion gallons per day desal plant, which would be the largest desal plant in the world by a factor of six bigger than the largest ever built. 1.79 billion gal is 6.66 million cubic meters.

“Ras Al Khair, Saudi Arabia: 1,036,000 m3/day.”

plus 200+ miles of huge pipes plus pumps every 500 psi step. It takes 430 psi to lift water with no friction 100 feet. Your going up 7400 feet. Pipe size would be an issue you are moving 6.66 million cubic meters per day or 76.93 cubic meters per second. Water can be pumped at about 1 meter per second in speed economically through ppipes under pressure. So you need at least 76.93 square meters of cross section in your pipe. @5 meters in radius a pipe would have 78 sq meters of area so a ten meter wide pipe would do...that has to handle 500 psi over its length at each pump station.

UT Austin developed an ion exchange process that needs no evap ponds it’s meant for flowback brines from oil and gas wells but would work just as well with dedicated solution mined in situ brine leaching. I am a hydro geo and a UT alumni who worked with this tech in 2021-22 in the Permian Basin with a major industry partner doing the SWD drilling for the brine disposal after the ion exchange process.

There is no mining in this case. They are using UT Austin technology GO HORNS! To strip lithium out of flowback and production water from existing gas wells. This is an add on process between the production wells and the ultimate salt water disposal wells. This water was going to be produced anyways as a product of oil and gas production. I have drilled well over a hundred SWD wells in the Permian Basin and worked in this UT tech when it was in beta signed a NDA about it as well. There is massive amounts of lithium in most flow back and production shale water it is from the bottom of a prehistoric ocean after all and lithium chloride and carbonate is ubiquitous in seawater. Shale has a habit of concentrating salts lithium included.

Gasoline is going to be too expensive to just burn it to the sky. That’s a mathematical fact. There are people alive today that will witness the end of the fossil fuel era,not the end of petrochemicals the two are vastly different and it would be wise to know that critical difference. When not if 8 billion humans demand access and use of liquid hydrocarbons for fuel use the 47 years of technically recoverable resources not reserves again know the difference gets drastically cut.

Humans need to move as rapidly as possible away from burning liquid hydrocarbons to the sky and using them only for petrochemicals, medications, fertilizers,lubricants and polymers.

This is an urban planet most people now live in cities with very short daily transportation distances. There is no need for urbanites to have a 300+ mile range vehicle none at all on a daily or even weekly basis.

Most urbanites take two trips per year further than 500km the vast majority of trips are under 30km a day. There are no less than a half dozen battery technologies that can cover 100km per day or less. LFP and Sodium ion being the current leaders in cycle life and charge rates. The small group of people who live rural are not representative of what is urban reality. Rural is over represented in this board that much is obvious by the lack of knowledge of what real urban life is like. A lot of people don’t even own cars in NYC, London, Tokyo or Mexico City. Parking is a nightmare , and expensive to say the least about congestion tolls and super high insurance rates. When I am in those cities it’s all metro ,uber or taxis never rent a car that’s a fool’s errand in an urban core or megacity. You rapidly realize you don’t need a car in high density you time share a mode of transportation. Ebikes and as it down or stand up scooters makes the last few miles a breeze with a QR code and an app it’s seconds to timeshare an asset.

So the key market is the suburbs as urbanites have many tranpo options other than car ownership and the lower and middle class are priced out of ownership by design in the city cores. Suburbanites have 40 mile or less commutes on a daily basis here again no need for a 300 mile plus range. L2 home charging for a couple.hours per night covers 40 miles round trip. Having been to Shanghai where 85% live in condos or apartments and seen how 50% of new vehicles are EVs the argument that apartment and condos cannot have EVs due to charging is a flat out lie. L2 charge points are EVERYWHERE in China every apartment parking lot has L2 points by the dozens every other stall had a power pole and two cords so do condos and they have bucees sized HVDC state run supercharger stations wwith 50+ stalls in them. China is liquid hydrocarbons short and nuclear and coal heavy their electric grid is not some 1900s nightmare either they have 400v triple phase everywhere down to the individual condo units. The air is getting better over there as they phase out diesels and 2 cycles for EVs. Shanghai transportation system puts even NYC metro to shame it’s clean , efficient and on time all the time.

Good now ask the South Koreans to come build them. They build reactors in 60 months from first concrete pour to plant gate power for under $2800kw in capex no one other than the Chinese can touch them on cost or time built. While we are at it ask the Canadians for their CANDU tech so we can double the energy from every fuel pellet by burning them a second time in a CANDU reactor. The Koreans and Chinese both have built CANDU in 60 months or under on time and on budget. CANDU can put 1.8 cent per kWh to the plant gate no other tech can do that not even natural gas. Natural uranium fueled reactors as re the cheapest form of heat in a BTU basis in the planet and also the cheapest per kWh electric. Only roof top solar at 18 cents per watt capex is cheaper over a 20 year lifetime but adding in powerwalls for night time shifts is back to nuclear being cheaper on a 24/7 basis.

Check out Ray’s Drive In or Oscar’s Taco house that’s where the local sixth plus generation San Antonio native Hispanics eat.

Then check out Schilo’s downtown for the other hundred plus year old ethnic group native to San Antonio.

Enjoy :)

Mind you CATL is the world’s largest battery maker of all cells you know the ones in laptops,your smartphone used to type here, tablets, electric power tools and lawn equipment. Medical devices. It’s not just EVs none of modern electronics smart phones in particular could exist without lithium ion batteries. CATL just tripled the energy density and they are not some research queen tech. CATL brings things to market in a big way. The Chinese are kicking the world’s butt with energy technology of all forms especially nuclear power they have 150 reactors in the pipeline to be built, and they are full steam ahead on fast spectrum nuclear reactors. They also have a full reprocessing regime set up. They are decades ahead of the USA in fast spectrum nuclear reactors and reprocessing.

https://newatlas.com/energy/highest-density-lithium-battery/

This is UT Austin technology GO HORNS. The demo was done in the Eagle Ford Shale of Texas and the Permian Basin. As usual the journalists have no idea what units to use. 1200 tonnes total hardly more like 1200 per well per year.

Here is from the real scientists who created this tech.

“Just a single week’s worth of water from hydraulic fracturing in Texas’ Eagle Ford Shale has the potential to produce enough lithium for 300 electric vehicle batteries or 1.7 million smartphones, the researchers said.”

That’s PER WEEK not per year. Then think there are well over ten thousand active shale wells at any given time in the Permian Basin. With this tech the USA will never be out of lithium every basin is loaded with salty flowback water.

https://news.utexas.edu/2021/09/08/new-way-to-pull-lithium-from-water-could-increase-supply-efficiency/

Lithium is a stepping stone to sodium ion and sodium solid state cells. Both of which are coming to commercial production in a big way in the next few years. Sodium ion batteries have inherent fast charge rates 5C+ and the new cathodes have 50,000 cycle life to 80% energy density is the lagging factor 160when/kg is half of NMC high $$ cells. Sodium cells cost equal to lead acid or less 5x cheaper than lithium cells that’s why they are going first into grid storage energy density is not a doctor with shipping container sized batteries. There are two sodium ion makers that broke the 200wh/kg mark that’s on par with LFP cells and with 5C charge rates that’s 12 minutes 0% to 100% sodium cells also can go to zero volts and not be damaged plus they can take 100% every cycle two things lithium cannot. Even if EVs weren’t a thing the new sodium cells are going to make laptop, and electric power tools even better. 50,000 cycles is ten times what LFP cells.can take and NMC as t 1500 is then buggy whip technology.

North DFW here, my panels are fine and the Tesla is snug as a bug in the steel building next to the main house. We had marble sized hail and at least 60 mph winds. Power flickered but the grid in this area never dropped for a few seconds out I only knew it because the system went into island mode a couple of times alerting my app I was off grid then back on grid.

Vegas has already found the solution they will never be out of water they recycle every drop that hits a drain. Outlaw lawns, most water use in a household is not consumptive it’s washing laundry, dishes, showers and flushing the toilet. The amount of water a human drinks and then loses to evaporation is small in fact most of the water a human needs comes from the food we eat half of our water loss per day is from the food we eat as our bodies burn it into CO2 and water via the ATP cycle. By recycling all those in home water you get 95% back into the water supply only 5% or less is lost via human evap or laundry dryer losses. Vegas is the world leader in recycling Israel is right behind it by percentage. Vegas gets 300,000 acrefeet per year they use less and return to lake mead 200,000+ acre feet per year building up a reserve in excess to their 300,000 allotment. Ten years running now they a have put back more every year than they were allowed to take so they have banked over a million acre feet on lake mead for future use. NV as a state gets to keep every drop they add to lake mead from the Las Vegas wash and the Virgin River per the Supreme Court. They add more in every year due to rain fall in the basins as well. 4” per year added up when it’s hundreds of sq miles of area. The recent floods in Vegas show that in soades.

Mexico City is 7500 feet above sea level there is no way you.are pumping water uphill for 22 million people Bruce power the largest nuclear faculty in the world has 8 reactors and that would be about the power needed to pump enough water nearly two miles into the sky for 22 million people. They should ask Israel and Las Vegas to share their water recycling tech. That’s the answer toilet to tap. The Israelis recycle 90% of their water. Las Vegas recycles every drop that hits a drain in the basin. Use the existing water again and again. Outlaw lawns and any consumptive use every drop that hits a drain is cleaned, disinfected and returned to the water supply as reclaimed water. Texas has two toilet to tap in West Texas I worked on one as a hydrogeo they supplement with brackish water to 500ppm via desal that was my part. To replace losses via pipe leaks and yards. Yards should be illegal in arid regions.

“This is pretty strange to me. Mexico City was built over the capital of the Aztec empire which was in the center of a large lake.”

The capital of the Aztec empire which held 1.5 to 2 millions total citizens spread all over me so America. The city capital had 100,000 at most at any given time. There is 22 million living in the same area today...you can see the issue it’s self evident. Have you ever been to Mexico City it’s a megacity on par with any Asian megacity the only megacity in North America NYC is a backwater town compared to Mexico City in population and density.

Only 200 miles from the Gulf of Mexico but its 7500 feet up hill. The energy costs alone for moving that amount of water up gradient would be multiple gigawatts 24/7/365 you would need nuclear power just for the pumping alone. The you need 60kwh thermal or 8kWh electric per cubic meter just to make the freshwater from seawater again a slew of nuclear plants. 22 million is a lot of water at 45 to 100 cubic meters per year per person. That’s a couple billion kWh just for the water production alone.

This is the shallower storage only version not the deeper hybrid system I have been privy to. Note that a 500x500 meter sized geo-battery that’s already in technical feasibility due to oil fracing hold a gigawatt year thermal or more of energy. Thats one gigawatt of heat 24/7/365. They also are only using 250C to 50C delta T. Which means they are not getting great Carnot eff.

The deeper versions can use 550 to 200C that multiples you storage per cubic meter an other of magnitude as it’s logarithmic with delta temperature and you use supercritical CO2 turbines that are 45%+ eff. Double what steam turbines are due to the nature of compression energy and supercritical fluids.

This is how you stop burning coal and natural gas foolishly once to the sky and instead use those to make the concrete and, steel for reactors that give back 1000 times the energy you burnt to mine and make the raw materials for them. Even wind or solar EROI are 40+ that’s forty times or more energy back vs burning it once to the sky. This extends the use period for those resources into the centuries mark for all 8+ billion at that point.

https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/75125

“It has its drawbacks. Eventually, the pipes get clogged and the system fails.”

With water yes mineralization is a key issue it’s solvable with acid treatments. The best choice is new since we will have literally craptonnes<< a new word :) of supercritical CO2 due to CCS technology and the mandate to use it. All that CO2 will be $50 per tonne or less. It’s the ideal crack fluid and also working fluid for engineered geothermal reservoirs. CO2 doesn’t pick up minerals like hot H2O does. And it’s easy to separate completely the tiny fraction it does should your reservoir contain those .. you flash the CO2 to gas and the minerals precipitate out as solids in your cyclone traps.

I am a geologist and have worked in this very field for a couple of years now off and on contract. Geothermal energy storage is also going to be huge it’s the drilling tech to get down to 3 to 5 km that’s the breakthrough eating up PCD million dollar bits is never going to be economical at those depths. Thermal fracture drilling is ten times as fast and nothing to wear out it’s contact less. You can drill quartzite the hardest rocks on earth that only diamonds can drill at feet per minute using millimeter waves, or supersonic rocket exhaust which is what the burners are modeled after mini hydrogen oxygen 5000 degree rockets that heat and then blast away the rock dust leaving a perfect hole behind. Once humans decide that liquid hydrocarbons are too valuable to burn to the sky given there are 8 billion of us the powers that be have made that choice before resource depletion causes global conflicts. The real choice is move from liquid hydrocarbons as primary energy into using them as only material processes for all 8 billion or the standard of living crashes in 45 or so years for everyone when depletion happens. Humans have burnt 400+ million years of fossil sunshine in just under 200 and with 8 billion the last half will go not in 200 bit 50 or under. This is why global government has said transition they can’t tell people hey you have to reduce your standard of living so the 6 billion living in poverty can have access to burn out all those resources then what? The whole planet suffers including the elities. So the plan is make the pain over a transition period and move to a system that is sustainable for all 8 billion. Only nuclear, geothermal,solar and in some places wind can power 8 billion at somewhat of a middle class standard of living for centuries not just 50 years or less. Repeat all EIGHT BILLION not 5% of the world’s population using 25% of its resources every year. You don’t have to like it but the transition is in progress and won’t be stopped as a species we can’t and the world leaders know this. Largely it not up to the plebs never was most in the world are useless eaters how many bureaucrats,lawyers or peasant farmers do a species need? One engineer is worth a thousand of any of those prior three. Same for scientists or research doctors.

“This guy is a complete buffoon. He needs to tell how we will replace everyday products are made from Oil...”

You just answered why humans should stop burning liquids hydrocarbons to the sky. They are way to precious and limited to use them as fuel. They should be reserved exclusively for petrochemicals, medications, lubricants, polymers, fertilizer and be used only to make durable recyclable and reusable , steel, aluminum, and concrete, copper ect. Using those products you then make energy harvesting devices that return multiple times as much energy as it took in raw materials to make them. Wind is 40 to 100+ to one EROI , polysilicon solar panels are 50 to 100+ to one. Nuclear power plants are well over 1000 to 1. Geothermal what this article is about is also like nuclear over 1000 to 1 when you look at the steel pipes, stainless steel turbines needw for expensive super alloy turbines when the temps of geothermal are 300C. There is a million plus times as much energy flowing out of the earth’s core than all of humanity uses on a yearly basis it’s unlimited and inexhaustible.

The cost to drill hard rock is the stumbling block but modern drilling tech changes that. Specifically three technologies one of them as a multiple decade geologist I personally have worked on. The most promising is thermal shock drilling using lasers, millimeter waves or supersonic 5000+ degree hydrogen oxygen flames to literally explode the rock face into micron sized dust. The second is using cavitation bubbles produced by sonic emitters to do the same thing as the bubbles collapse in proximity to the rock face they produce shockwaves on par with dynamite detonations the rock just come apart into micron sized particles. The third is supercritical gas plasma to either melt the rock into magma and case the well as to push through it or again shock the rock into fracture and then splay the rock face. Any of these three will eat hundreds of feet per hour through the hardest rocks on earth. Geothermal is everywhere below our feet at 5km or more depth shallower in Colorado or California where magma is chambered below the continental crust. If you go deep enough anywhere on earth you hit 300C rocks then you use supercritical CO2 to frack the grantic rocks just like a shale well but on a larger area. Water strips too much minerals unless you want them such as uranium the better choice is supercritical co2 which picks up the heat and leaves the minerals behind. Loop that up spin a supercritical CO2 turbine and send it back down again.

For added grins you can pair engineered geothermal reservoirs with thermal energy storage if you heat that down going CO2 hotter than the reservoir’s downbore temps you heat the rocks up then rock thermal mass and inertia stores that energy for not months but years or decades. That heat is fully recoverable you already have the pipes and turbines up top. That heat storage is one hundred or more times cheaper than battery storage of any technology and the magnitude of geobattery storage is measured in thousands of gigawatt hours your geo battery measured in cubic kilometers of thermal mass between multiple wellbores. Where do you get the heat you ask? First choice is fast spectrum nuclear reactors in the gigawatt range they run at 550C outlet temps you have then a 250C delta T to store in your engineered geothermal reservoir. A cubic kilometer would store thousands of GWh. Second choice is curtailment power from solar or wind which is use it or lose it now. Joule heaters are dirt cheap wrap some Nichrome around the down going ppipes and insulate around that heating the CO2directly is also an option using electrodes inside the wellbore and the Bellmore itself as joule elements supercritical CO2 is barely conductive it’s resistance value is high making joule heating very efficient. You could dump hundreds of megawatts of AC current at high voltages directly into supercritical CO2 heating it to 700C before it starts to disassociate to C and CO again you only need to be above the 300C of the reservoir.

11 years small teams myself. We never worried about sealing a mask we knew we were dead if the enemy went NBC so why bother;fight till you drop and rig your body as a trap for those who find it.

VX and those classes of nerve agents don’t need to be inhaled. Your survivability of hit directly by a vapor attack is near zero even if you have MOP4 on hand. Unless you are already in the suit and only have to glove and mask up. How long have you stayed at MOP3 or above in 100+F? This why small teams and specops don’t even bother with carrying MOP gear your dead anyways. Same for helmets other than sticking out like a sore thumb Kevlars don’t do jack against the weapons small teams would face so why wear them.