An Unending Source of Energy from The Ocean

 

There were untold alarming claims circulating in the social media about radioactivity found in fish sold in Japan and exported elsewhere being circulated worldwide in social media, despite assurances from the Head of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) that fish caught in the Pacific Ocean around Japan is safe with hardly any radioactivity in them.

 

Now they even claim that vegetables from Japan are also radioactive even though I cannot understand their logic how ‘radioactive water’ from the ocean managed to climb up onto dry land where vegetables are grown. Vegetables are not grown in the Pacific Ocean for sure.

 

Personally, I have also written an assurance that water in the Pacific Ocean hardly contains tritium or and radioactive materials as an introduction under a separate title: “Why is the Ocean Waters Salty? Is it getting Saltier?” here:

 

https://scientificlogic.blogspot.com/2023/08/why-is-ocean-waters-salty-is-it-getting.html

 

But Japan and some other countries need energy to replace depleting fossil fuels like coal, gas and petroleum. It is for this reason they use nuclear energy. But because nuclear reactors require radioactive substances to fuel, they may leak out into the air, water and soil such as wastewater discharge from the Fukushima nuclear reactor following an earthquake and tsunami in Japan.

 

But Japan and countries all over the world need energy to drive their economy. But because of this relentless circulation on the Fukushima radioactive fear worldwide, I decided to pen this article below whether or not we can find an endless source of extremely safe energy for the entire world without using nuclear energy or depleting our fossil fuels of coal, gas and oil any further.

 

Here's my views and input.

 

Since the first human ancestors appeared between five million and seven million years ago, they have been burning wood, branches, leaves and even animal carcasses for fire and warmth. Thousands of years later they discovered fossil fuels such as coal, oil, gas to burn and use. When fossil fuels and biomass are now running out, they are now scrambling to find new ways to get energy.

 

With the help of their scientists, they now find wind, waves and tides, the sun and geothermal energy as their solutions for direct energy without polluting the environment. But they have one problem. 

  

They cannot put a sail, a windmill or a waterfall on the back of their cars, on their buses, trains, or on the top of their planes or even attach them in rockets to travel to the moon, mars or other planets, except putting sails on sailing boats and sailing ships.

 

The powers from the sun, wind, tides and waves are pure energy that we can only use on the spot. We cannot carry them about or put them inside some container just like we put petrol inside our car petrol tank, or cooking gas inside a cylinder in concentrated form and carry them about and use them only when needed. We cannot do this with the sun's energy or with the wind. We cannot carry a windmill everywhere. It has to be something convenient and practical where we can store the energy inside a container just like we do in batteries. The only way is to convert pure energy like the heat of the sun or electricity into chemical energy where we can store inside containers and use them when required like cooking gas inside cylinders in a kitchen or batteries in a car.      

 

We may put a reasonable sized solar panel on a small bicycle to travel any distance in the daytime, perhaps even at night if we also have a small solar storage battery installed on the bicycle and use muscle power to pedal it at the same time. But we cannot go further than that for long distances with large and massive vehicles such as locomotives and trains.

 

Electric cars are noiseless and non-polluting, but they are slower than petrol or gas fuelled cars. Furthermore, batteries take a long time to charge, and battery-run vehicles cannot go far. But it is okay if we are not in a hurry or need not travel far or fast such as on bicycles, which is the most efficient and cheap machine humans have ever invented.

 

Even if we use electric batteries on heavier vehicles, it is not possible to electrify everything such as ships, planes and even rockets. It has to be practical and convenient.

 

Fortunately, we have a fuel that can never run out, and that is hydrogen, and this is something we can store inside a gas cylinder with some risk of fire or explosion. 

 

Alternatively, we can store the hydrogen inside some inert substances to be released later as required. We shall explain this shortly.    

 

The most common and abundant element in the universe is hydrogen. It accounts for about 75 percent of its normal matter and was created in the Big Bang. In fact, all the energy generated by our Sun and the stars in the entire universe comes from hydrogen by fusion reactions when two nuclei come together to form one atom.

 

The sun fuses two hydrogen atoms together to produce helium. As a main-sequence star, the sun generates its energy by nuclear fusion of hydrogen nuclei into helium. In its core, the Sun fuses 620 million metric tons of hydrogen and makes 616 million metric tons of helium each second. The sun fuses two hydrogen atoms together to produce helium.

 

In this fusion of hydrogen into helium, the sun each second releases energy equivalent to 384.6 septillion watts (3.846×10²⁶ W).

 

Of course, we cannot create an artificial sun on Earth for long-term practical use.  China's "artificial sun" has set a new world record after superheating a loop of plasma to temperatures five times hotter than the sun for more than 17 minutes, smashing the previous record, set by France's Tore Supra tokamak in 2003, where plasma in a coiling loop remained at similar temperatures for only 390 seconds. That was the best we could achieve, but not for long term supply of energy.

 

Here on Earth, we have coal, oil and gas as the main sources of our energy needs. But these resources as I have said are fast being depleted.  

 

Fortunately, with the blessings from God, we have oceans of water on Earth with hydrogen inside. It is an unending source of energy, very clean and non-polluting too. Allow me to explain.

 

Weight for weight, hydrogen stores 3 times more energy than petrol and 4 times that of coal. We have roughly 1.335 billion cubic kilometres of water in the oceans. But if we consider all the waters available on Earth it would be about 1,386 million cubic kilometres. This is 1.39 x 10 ²¹ litres, or 139 billion trillion litres. (One cubic km = 10 ¹² litres). We can harvest all the energy stored in these horrendous amounts of water on Earth. But how? Allow me again to explain further.

 

One litre of water produces 1235 litres of hydrogen since 1 mol of water produces 1 mol of hydrogen and 1/2 mol of oxygen according to Avogadro's law, the volume of hydrogen is about twice that of oxygen.

 

When hydrogen is burned, 286,000 joules of energy is released per mole of hydrogen. One litre of hydrogen under standard pressure and temperature is 1/22.4 mol, so a litre of water can give about 13 kilojoules of thermal energy.

 

Under practical circumstances after thermal loss during conversion, this can result in between 4 and 6 kilojoules of electrical energy when 1 litre of hydrogen is burned.

 

Since there are 1.39 x 10 ²¹ litres of water on Earth, calculated out, the total amount of thermal energy we can get out of water is to the tune of 5.6 x 10 ²¹ to 2.2 x 10 ²⁵ kilojoules or when converted into electrical energy with losses it amounts to 6.8 x 10 ²⁴ joules to 10²⁵ kilojoules (6800 billion trillion to 10 trillion, trillion kilojoules).

 

Wow! This is a whopping, whopping lot of energy, far, far more energy than the entire Earth needs for tens of thousands of years to come, and renewable too without ending. They provide us cycles after cycles of free-wheeling energy.

 

But there is a catch and a big problem here.   

 

Water is two parts of hydrogen and one part of oxygen. But the chemical energy that binds them together are strongly held by chemical bonds, and it would require the same amount of energy such as using electricity through electrolysis to break them apart into two parts of hydrogen and one part of oxygen something we know since 1800 when English scientists William Nicholson and Anthony Carlisle used it to electrolyse water. In 1806 Humphry Davy reported the results of extensive distilled water electrolysis experiments. (Electrolysis is the process of using electricity to split water into hydrogen and oxygen. This reaction takes place in a unit called an electrolyser).

 

But this problem has an easy solution in my eyes. We can generate electricity by using wind in windmills, solar energy in solar panels, water as tides or even using geothermal energy as a promising alternative for carbon-free hydrogen production other than using nuclear power to generate electrolysis. We can then use these sources of energy to split water. But how much?

 

The surface area of Earth is given by 4 x pi x radius squared. The radius of Earth is 6 378.1 kilometres (6,378,100 metres). Hence its surface area is 5.11 x 10 ¹⁴ square metres (511 trillion m²) approximately since the radius of Earth is not the same all over - the radius of Earth at the equator is 6,378 kilometres, and polar radius is 6,356 km — a difference of 22 km according to NASA's Goddard Space Flight Centre in Greenbelt, Maryland.

 

Of the 511 trillion m² area 70 % is ocean, the remaining 30 % land. Out of the 30 % land, about 33% is desert and about 24% is mountainous, leaving us with 15.77 billion acres or about 63819 billion square metres of habitable land to place all our windmills and electricity-generating devices including solar panels to collect solar energy directly from the sun where the half the earth receives sunlight 12 hours a day and the other half, sunshine for the remaining 24 hours on an average. The amount of energy earth receives, called solar constant, is 1.361 kilowatts per square meter (kW/m²) at solar minimum (the time in the 11-year solar cycle when the number of sunspots is minimal) and approximately 0.1% greater (roughly 1.362 kW/m²) at solar maximum. 1 Watt = 1 Joule per second (1W = 1 J/s) which means that 1 kW = 1000 J/s. These are the areas on land where we may collect solar energy, except for the oceans where we can use the waves and tides.

 

On land we can also burn the hydrogen from water harvested from the ocean, and when hydrogen is burned, it yields energy and turns back into water and nothing else that is polluting is left. It is absolutely so clean and 100 % renewable. The water returns to the oceans from where it came.

 

However, we have one problem. The electrolysis of water requires a minimum of 237 kJ of electrical energy input to dissociate each mole of water and this is the amount of energy we can get out of water by burning the hydrogen as we get out of water by electrolysis. It also requires energy to overcome the change in entropy of the reaction. Therefore, the process cannot proceed below 286 kJ per mol if no external heat/energy is added. The disadvantage with water electrolysis is that it is a very energy-intensive process.

 

So, we would be back to square one, trying to get something out of nothing. How shall we solve this problem?

 

Fortunately, as I have already mentioned, we have the wind and waves to generate electricity to break open the water molecules into two parts of hydrogen and one part of oxygen. We can then also store the electricity generated by wind, water, solar power or even geothermal power inside batteries to run our cars, buses and even trains. They are non-polluting and this source of energy is better than using coal, oil and gas.

 

Electrolysis of water for energy in hydrogen storage is being very actively pursued. Once generated, there are numerous uses for hydrogen too, as in electrical and natural gas grid, mobility, biogas, and in fertilizer applications.

 

One new approach that is being studied is photo-electrolysis, the generation of electricity using photovoltaic cells to split water molecules. This technique is still in the research stage, but this too appears to be a very promising source of power in the future.

 

What is even more delightful when using water electrolysis to tear the water apart for hydrogen is, the oxygen that it also liberates to burn the hydrogen is exactly in the same amounts it releases into the air.  

 

But one disadvantage is, hydrogen is the lightest gas known and this occupies a lot of space to store, and it is also very difficult to compress or liquify it to put them into small containers for cars or buses. It is also very easy to catch fire and can cause an explosion if there is a leak in the storage tanks.

 

But there is one way we can overcome this problem. We can store the hydrogen in metals and alloys. For instance, scientists found that iron-titanium alloy or ferrotitanium with between 10 and 20% iron and 45–75% titanium and sometimes a small amount of carbon which when cold can store large quantities of hydrogen, and when moderately heated up will release all the hydrogen.

 

So are many other metals and alloys, such as magnesium that can theoretically absorb hydrogen up to 7.6 percent of its own mass, but in practice the capacity of magnesium hydride to store hydrogen does not exceed 5 to 6 percent. However, by adding nickel and palladium to the magnesium hydride, we can obtain a material that can accumulate about 7 percent hydrogen by weight.  

 

These hydrogen storage alloys will release large quantities of hydrogen bit by bit as required when slightly heated to give us a new type of hydrogen storage batteries.  It can be used in large batteries, especially for large electric vehicles, hybrid electric vehicles, and high-power applications. These will solve our problem about fire and explosions if hydrogen tanks are used.

 

Fortunately, there is yet another way we can tame hydrogen as an alternative fuel. We can combine hydrogen with carbon dioxide to produce methyl alcohol and methane although less energy weight for weight, but the advantage is they are less explosive. Methanol (methyl alcohol) and methane would be convenient and plentiful sources of energy. The conversion of hydrogen and carbon dioxide into methane, or the methanation of carbon dioxide is called the Sabatier reaction.

 

Yet another possibility we can think of is to use only hydrogen and carbon dioxide and a catalyst to produce propane, butane, petrol or other hydrocarbon fuels by manipulating a series of chain reactions as Stanford scientists have done "by changing carbon dioxide into gasoline (petrol) 1,000 times more efficiently”.

 

Petrol contains a chain of 5 to 12 carbon atoms in each molecule that can be obtained from carbon dioxide. The oxygen in the carbon dioxide to produce petrol is again left out in the reaction and released into the air. 

 

This means whatever we use up will finally be released into the atmosphere, plus energy we only want. What a beauty, at least in my eyes!

 

We will after all be able to synthesize petrol without needing to find them from beneath the ground or under the sea, what more such a synthesis is non-polluting. We leave nothing when burnt as fuel except we get back the carbon dioxide and water we started with, leaving nothing else.

 

What a beauty in chemistry without needing to know physics and nuclear physics to produce nuclear energy in reactors that has caused us so much anxiety on radioactivity as in the Fukushima, the Chernobyl, the Kyshtym disasters and the Windscale fire.

 

In summary, all we need is the energy from the sun to drive the winds and waves, and from gravity of the moon for tidal energy to get electricity, and from electricity to split up all the waters in the oceans and all the waters available on Earth into hydrogen and oxygen,  plus energy as well as a bonus  which will last for as long as  mankind needs them, while the Sun and the Moon are still around.  Our sun will be with us for an estimated 7 to 8 thousand million more years, while the Moon will be receding from us at the rate of 3.78 centimetres per year to conserve angular momentum due to tidal forces that make the oceans bulge and cause Earth’s rotation to lose momentum. But that shall be long, long after humanity no longer exists on earth from the way we produce, consume, congest and pollute. But that’s another story.

(A 2,866 worded essay in 11 pages by this blogger dedicated to all who cherish their existence)