You may want to read this VERY carefully! Why? Because if EACH of us 75 million American families chooses to use (both uses of) this system, and we can each reduce our family's Carbon footprint from our current average 10 tons per year down to around 3 tons per year (which is mostly from our vehicles), that means "we", on a Grass Roots level, can eliminate (75 million * 7) over 500,000,000 tons of carbon dioxide emissions from the United States each year! This is a 25% National reduction from the two billion tons that the U.S. currently sends into the atmosphere (due to burning fossil fuels). Isn't that great? Politicians HOPE to reduce our National emissions by a few percent by the year 2050, but WE citizens and homeowners could reduce it by 25% by the winter of 2008-09! (I LIKE that!)
It seems likely that governments will love the fact that WE can create that 25% total reduction in the United States' total carbon dioxide emission without needing a DIME of any government's money or any money from any giant corporation! (I REALLY like THAT! No "billions of dollars of our taxpayer money" are necessary; not even a dime!)
Some of us live in milder climates, but if we 75 million American families now average $1,500 for winter and hot water heating, then please note that "WE" will collectively pay around $110 billion THIS winter, which goes to giant corporations and Mid-East countries, where NEXT winter, we could pay them ZERO! This should all appear as a win-win-win-win-win situation, except for those Mid-East countries and the Execs of those giant corporations!
By the way, we 75 million Americans currently average using up around 80 million Btus each of heating oil or natural gas each winter. Multiplying, this is around 6 quadrillion Btus of fossil heating fuels. Noting that the U.S. IMPORTS around 26 quadrillion Btus of fossil fuels (mostly petroleum, around 70% of all the petroleum we use up in this country is imported) each year, our individual decisions to heat our homes at minimal cost even has MORE benefits, regarding substantially reducing our dependence of imported fuel supplies!
This is an overview presentation. If you wish to see the scientific and mathematical basis for these statements, please see the much more comprehensive version of this same page, at http://mb-soft.com/public3/globalzc.html
Described below are several very practical devices that you can make (with the instructions which are included), which will allow you to GREATLY reduce your contribution to Greenhouse Gases and Global Warming, while also saving you a lot of money, and even being absolutely Green! It can provide a method of entirely heating your home, to a comfort level that you have come to expect, and with a simplicity and ease that is also now expected, with potentially no cost and no usage of any fossil fuels, to be absolutely Carbon Neutral.
Here is a "teaser" for you!
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It is extremely likely that WITHIN 60 PACES OF YOU RIGHT NOW, there
is a MASSIVE energy source which is absolutely FREE! It is on the scale
of 67,000 horsepower-hours of (heat) energy! Or 50,000 kilowatt-hours
(again, of heat energy). Or 170,000,000 Btus. That's an astounding
amount of heat energy! It is totally free AND it replenishes itself
NATURALLY every year!note 1 You probably collect and bag grass cuttings when you mow your lawn, as millions of others do. You call it Yard Waste! And you rake and bag leaves in the Fall. What if we told you that as all those leaves and cut grass blades decompose, they NATURALLY give off heat. A LOT of heat! In a single acre of lawn, forest or even weeds, the total amount of heat which IS NOW being released (over about a six-month period of decomposition) is around that 170,000,000 Btus. That's an astonishing amount of heat energy! YOUR innocent-looking yard has available an immense amount of absolutely NATURAL and GREEN heat energy, which is NOW being constantly released by simple natural decomposition of organic materials. All this while YOU are paying billionaires in Saudi Arabia for heating oil??? Take a look out your window at your yard! What if we now told you that every one of those bags of leaves or grass is therefore worth $3 or $4 or more? You probably now pay giant corporations around $2,000 every winter for fossil fuels to heat your home. Consider this: A 20-pound bag of ANY organic matter contains around 180,000 Btus of chemical energy, which was captured from sunlight by the photosynthesis of carbon dioxide and water vapor, and which will ALL necessarily be released as heat as the material naturally decomposes! We have Engineered a method of CAPTURING a large portion of that heat, to either heat your home or to heat your domestic hot water! You probably now pay at least $4 for heating oil or $3 for natural gas to heat your home - as much as one bag of that Yard Waste could easily provide. Do you still want to pay someone to haul those bags away? And ... the biggest bonus of all, by eliminating your need for fossil fuels, you will be contributing toward solving the global warming catastrophe. |
The REALLY interesting part is that it is the EXACT SAME CHEMICAL PROCESS of oxidation that is occurring as we do in burning our fossil fuels! It creates the same carbon dioxide and water vapor and energy. It's just that it occurs much, much slower. So slow that virtually no one ever even notices it. But it NATURALLY creates around FORTY TIMES all the energy that all humans now use up!
Do the math! You mow your lawn each week, for maybe 25 weeks. Even if you only get ONE bag each time, there's your 500 pounds! You certainly have far more than that available, if you actually collected it all.
That heat is not noticed because it is created slowly, over months, and over a large area, and winds and rain carry away and distribute that heat so that no one can tell it is there. But it IS there!
Gardeners and farmers will say that the composting process takes between six months and two years to complete, and that only around half of the weight of the material disappears. The remaining material is the humus or compost that they actually want, the material they then spread in their gardens or fields as a sort of fertilizer. However, most gardeners and farmers are not aware that there are "fast" ways to do composting. Some operations use an assortment of ways of tumbling the material in rotating drums, (such as what is referred to as In-Vessel processing) or with other devices (such as Tunnel Composting), and get the entire composting process to complete IN JUST 48 or 72 HOURS! They have also found that with certain conditions, it is possible to have the decomposition process proceed to nearly completely consume ALL the material rather than just half.
Actually, our process does NOT actually resemble what is called Composting, except for the fact that the basic chemical decomposition reaction is the same. Other than that, there are hardly even many similarities! We do NOT have significant material (humus) remaining and we do not need six months or two years to accomplish the process!
We do not see great value in having our home heating system perform quite that well, although it definitely can and has been experimentally proven to do so. A rather small system could be made that could only hold around 300 pounds of organic material (not much larger than a recliner chair), with that highest performance built in. The 2.7 million Btus of heat energy created is sufficient to entirely heat a fairly large home for the three days that it would be producing that heat (the 72 hours), but then that would mean that another 300 pounds of material would have to be loaded in every three days during the coldest part of the winter. That seems undesirably labor intensive.
Therefore, we describe systems below that are (generally) larger than that, with capacity for around 1500 pounds (for several weeks or a month of whole house heating before maintenance is needed) or capacity of around 9,000 pounds to provide all the heat needed for the entire six months of winter. A high-performance system IS included in the choices of what you can make.
Here is a graph of one of the first careful scientific experiments I did
on this concept, early in 2007. It truly impressed me, and I immediately
recognized how amazing this concept is! Grass was mowed in the early
afternoon on April 12th, when the outdoor temperature was around 80ºF,
and it was immediately dumped into a bin, which happened to be in my
basement, which was then around 61ºF. (all temperatures were
accurate to 1/10 degree Fahrenheit). Insulation of around R-20 was
placed around (and under) the bin. I expected to see SOME rise in
temperature, as I knew that composting gets the central pile temperature up
to over 100ºF after a few weeks. I did NOT expect to see the temperature
of the entire bin cross 100ºF in just 9 hours, BEFORE MIDNIGHT of
that very same day!You can see that the grass continued to rapidly rise in temperature, all because of lots of very active bacteria, and just 24 hours after I had dumped that newly-mown grass in the bin, the average temperature of the bin crossed 120ºF! I still find that mind-blowing!
That particular experiment was intended to be a preliminary one, and no source of additional oxygen was provided, which is what caused the curve to start flattening out. Other than the naturally moist cut grass, only a handful of black dirt was tossed in, as a reliable source for bacteria, nothing else! In the modest bacterial activity that I had expected, I thought they would have plenty of oxygen for at least a few weeks. They used up most of the oxygen in the bin in a day and a half! Later experiments where a tube was added that supplies air (oxygen) show that the graph stays straight longer, and only then levels off in the 140ºF to 150ºF range. THAT leveling off is actually because that excess heat starts to kill off some of the bacteria doing the work, so I make a point of keeping the bin temperature under around 150ºF.
In case it is not clear, THIS is a "carbon-neutral" situation. Plants live and grow, and REMOVE 300 billion tons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere every year, naturally, by photosynthesis, in forming the glucose and other organic molecules of life. When that material dies and decomposes, it completes the cycle, what is called the Carbon Cycle. Fossil Fuels cause a problem because they had removed their carbon dioxide from the atmosphere many millions of years ago. The fact is that we are now mining and pumping all the fossil fuels we can find, and then burning them at very high rates. That now releases huge amounts of carbon (dioxide) that had been trapped in those fuels for those millions of years. The carbon dioxide itself is not a problem! The fact that we are RAPIDLY ADDING a lot of "new" carbon dioxide to the atmosphere IS! The organic-decomposition-based concept here is entirely different, simply keeping the EXISTING carbon in the biosphere and atmosphere in circulation. Totally NATURAL and Carbon-neutral.
Those materials were going to decompose NATURALLY anyway! We are just causing that natural process to occur where we can capture the heat it creates.
Of that home gas consumption, around 4/5 is toward heating the house with the other 1/5 going toward providing domestic hot water. We have provided a separate page regarding the providing of hot water An Earth-Friendly Water Heater you can make, which will also eliminate that $200 you spend every year for heating water! If you should become interested in THIS concept (heating the entire house) we really suggest that you first build the smaller and simpler water heater version of the same basic concept.
It might be useful here to present a graph from another early
experiment, also from April 2007. In this run, only leaves were used (no
grass) and so it is to be expected that the bacterial activity would take
longer to develop (for what farmers call BROWN compost material,
rather than GREEN). This run was actually to compare the performance
WITH and WITHOUT the excellent insulation around the bin.
Notice that WITHOUT the insulation, the bin temperature rises, but rather slowly. This is actually the situation of a conventional compost pile, where it takes months to get the CENTER of the pile up to the most productive hotter temperatures. In six days, it only rose by about 3 degrees! WITH the insulation, we can see that the leaves rose by over 20 degrees, around seven times as fast.
The high level of insulation is a critical component to why this system works so amazingly well.
Say we arrange a BIG pile of dead plant (leaves, grasses, weeds, crop residues, straw, hay, corncobs, feed corn, etc) (and even animal) materials which is around ten feet square by eight feet high, or 800 cubic feet. (THIS is the size of the largest chamber that we are going to discuss below!) That material is not packed very well, so it is common that it only weighs around 20 pounds per cubic foot, or a total of 16,000 pounds of matter involved.
For reference sake, in case this sounds huge, it is approximately the total amount of plant growth (and death) that occurs on a single acre of lawn, forest, cropland, meadow, or weeds, per year.
A quick estimate of the chemical energy in that pile of organic material as being 7,000 (to 9,000) Btu/pound times 16,000 pounds or around 112,000,000 (to 144 million) Btus of chemical energy (which will eventually ALL be released as heat).
This amount of energy is actually more than the amount of energy that a gas- or oil- or electric-furnace produces in around a six-month period of winter. So we know that we have a large enough pile of material to decompose to provide all the heat we will need, to entirely heat the whole house and its hot water, for an entire winter! Note that we are really only considering the organic matter created each year by just ONE ACRE of lawn, field, forest or weeds. So even though the pile might seem large, it is easily LOCALLY available, and probably for free!
We are therefore going to enable that entire pile to decompose, essentially naturally, over maybe six months (or faster), where the glucose (C6H12O6) oxidizes aerobically [chemically combines with oxygen from the air] ( the 6 O2 molecules) and therefore breaks down to create ONLY molecules of water (H2O) and carbon dioxide (CO2) and a MASSIVE release of energy!
Get 8 sheets of 1" thick BLUE foam building insulation, each 4' x 8'. You could get more sheets as well, or some bundles of standard fiberglass home insulation of at least R-19 rating. Place the 8 sheets on the floor, two sheets at a time to cover an area of eight feet square, and stack them four high. (This creates a bottom insulation of R-20.) (around $80 cost)
Get a standard (plastic) tarp, either 16' square or 20' square, and place it centered on top of the stack of foam sheets. (around $30 cost) It should be a TARP (reinforced) and not just thin plastic sheeting, in order to reduce tearing and to last longer.
Get (a) around 40 bags of cut lawn grass and 40 bags of leaves (should be free); or (b) 15 to 25 standard bales of straw ( at around $2.50 each) or hay (at around $3 each); or (c) one of the giant round bales of straw or hay, (at around $35) and dump them/stack them/place it on the center of the tarp (for the second two, you still need grass (or other green compost material) or chemicals to provide enough nitrogen for the desired 30:1 C/N ratio to the carbon) (max total cost $0 to $80) A few handfuls of black dirt should be tossed into the mix to provide plenty of mesophilic bacteria.
You are going to raise up all the edges of the tarp to create a giant "airtight and watertight bag" which will enclose everything. It will resemble a really large, tied-closed garbage bag when you are done! But first there are some pipes that need to be placed in the very center, standing vertically. They will be described below, but they will provide the air/oxygen needed by the bacteria, with a small blower; provide any added water needed by the bacteria; remove the carbon dioxide created in the decomposition, and also in that bundle will be the sensors for digital thermometers and a digital hygrometer (humidity).
Once all the edges of the tarp are securely attached to the bundle of tubes, and any gaps are sealed, it is pretty much in operation! If WET grass is used, water may not need to be added, but if DRIED BALES are used, a LOT of water must be added to get everything soaked inside the bag.
The fiberglass insulation is then placed so that it surrounds the entire bag, on all sides and the top. This creates at least an R-19 level of insulation on all sides of the tarp/bag. When we mentioned MORE sheets of blue foam insulation before, it was to possibly line two walls of a room corner with four layers thick of that insulation, where the bag would then be placed in that corner. In that case, less fiberglass insulation would be required.
This simple and crude version allows the bacteria to quickly get the INSIDE of the bag up to their desired 130ºF to 150ºF. Some experimental runs have gotten up to that 130ºF internal temperature within two days! The heat generated gets the ENTIRE pile up to those temperatures, which then also makes the surface of the tarp/bag be at that temperature. Heat would make its way through the insulation to heat the basement around it, and the heat from the basement would rise and heat the floors of the rooms above it, thereby providing much of the needed heat for the house above.
The temperature inside the bag would be monitored. If it started getting near or above 150ºF, some of the fiberglass insulation would be moved away, allowing the 150ºF bag surface to conduct and convect more heat out to the room, which would also cool the interior of the bag down. If the inside temp dropped below 130ºF, that could mean that the material had all decomposed; that your insulation was not thick enough; or that some other problem had developed.
This very crude version would contain around 1500 pounds of material to be decomposed, which contains roughly 13 million Btus of chemical energy in it. It is clear that the heat created cannot really get lost anywhere, so most of that heat should therefore provide heating for that basement. (There is a tiny amount of heat loss in the 150ºF exhaust, but that airflow rate is quite slow and the total heat loss there is nearly insignificant.)
This crude version is NOT intended as a long-term heating system, but mostly as a rather inexpensive arrangement where you can prove to yourself how well it works! (In Third World countries, it might represent a quick and simple heating system.) You would either use free cut grass and your leaves or buy $35 or $70 of straw or hay from a local farmer, and spend another $130 or so for insulation and PVC pipe, for a grand total cost of around $130 to $200 (max) for this whole thing. Since its size is such that it should supply around 1/4 of your winter heating bills, this experiment should save you maybe $400 in natural gas or $500 in heating oil. Not bad for "an experiment!"
We will describe here an arrangement that will generally resemble a (separate) conventional small, bedroom-sized frame-built building. It will be highly insulated and it will include several other unique features. There are MANY variations from this specific plan possible! This general theme provides warm air which is blown into the house rooms by the existing furnace blower, primarily using existing furnace ducting (with some additional ducting needed). It enables the standard wall thermostat to control that blower and therefore provides very accurate control of the temperature of the house. Occupants should not even know that the house was being heated by anything other than the old conventional fossil-fuel-burning furnace.
You will make it of common, locally available materials. It will be sturdier than normal small buildings, partly because it has to be able to contain and support around 16,000 pounds of material in its bin! The floor structure will therefore be made of 2x8 lumber, while the side walls will be made of 2x6 lumber. The top will again be 2x8, mostly so that more insulation can be used.
NOTE: There will actually be two structures here. You HAVE to make the inner one (the bin) absolutely airtight! (this is the equivalent to the airtight, watertight bag discussed above). Inside the bin, the conditions will be extremely hot and extremely humid, where virtually anything will quickly disintegrate and decompose (which is actually the whole idea!) By making that bin absolutely airtight, you will be able to keep the moisture/humidity inside the bin, so that the space OUTSIDE the bin will become hot but actually have extremely LOW relative humidity! (It is where a conventional humidifier should be installed.)
These guidelines related to thickness of insulation are related to the local climate. These dimensions are generally universally useful; they are actually calculated for the climate of Chicago, Illinois; however, in very southern climates, less insulation might be used, while in Alaska, thicker insulation might be appropriate.
The existing standard wall thermostat would now simply turn on the furnace blower. It would blow house air out through the one large duct into the space between the bin and the highly insulated building walls. This creates a pressure which pushes some of the warm air in that chamber into the other duct, and back toward the house. That heated air (actually hotter than normal furnace air normally is, commonly near 150ºF instead of the 125ºF of most conventional furnaces) then goes into the existing duct system and is distributed to all the rooms of the house. Wonderful warm air comes out all the registers in the house!
Our research is actually starting to suggest that this version has some real advantages over the others presented here, as well as being fairly small, about the size of an upright piano.
The bin temperature sensors allow constant monitoring whether the bin temperature is correct or not, as whether more air/oxygen needs to get blown into the bin.
You can probably see that there are an immense number of variations possible in using this system!
There is a wide range of organic materials which is ideal for this process, all of which is normally considered annoying trash which needs to be disposed of! Consider the following energy contents, remembering that we have generally been using a very conservative energy content of glucose as around 6,900 Btu/pound:
| sawdust | 8,660 Btu/pound |
| corncobs | 9,300 Btu/pound |
| coffee grounds | 10,000 Btu/pound |
| wheat straw | 8,500 Btu/pound |
| rice straw | 6,000 Btu/pound |
| cattle manure | 7,400 Btu/pound |
| bagasse | 8,390 Btu/pound |
There are also entirely different processes that occur if the decomposition is done without sufficient air/oxygen. In that anaerobic decomposition, the process is always slow, and there are often foul-smelling gases produced. There is a way to produce a small amount of methane gas, essentially natural gas. If you are properly doing aerobic decomposition, with moderately close C-N ratios, there should be virtually no smell created.
This whole-house-heating system should produce an average of around 47 cubic feet of carbon dioxide every hour. It can only be around 4.4% of that air. This indicates that there could be around 20 cubic feet per minute of air saturated with carbon dioxide available, air which has a carbon dioxide concentration of around 110 times that in the natural atmosphere (44,000 ppm rather than 380 ppm). With a very small (20 cfm) fan, this carbon-dioxide-rich air can be sent to a nearby greenhouse.
There have been thousands of research experiments which have shown that virtually all plants grow far better, faster and larger in an atmosphere of excess carbon dioxide. For example, Chen, K., G.Q. Hu, and F. Lenz, in 1997, (published in a German Journal) found that strawberry plants (fragraria x ananassa Duch. cv. 'Elsanta') grown in 1995 and 1996 had remarkable improvements in an atmosphere of excess carbon dioxide! For the two-month growth season, those strawberry plants were constantly in atmospheres of 300, 450, 600, 750, and 900 ppm CO2. (The highest of these was around three times natural concentration, with the first being relatively near natural). They found that flowering and fruit ripening started earlier and lasted longer where the higher carbon dioxide was present. Second blooms generally also developed. Fruit productivity was enhanced by increased pedicel number per plants, fruit setting per pedicel, fruit size, and dry matter content of the fruits. They found that the average fruit yield was (considering the 300 ppm as 100% yield): 450 ppm gave 170%. 600 ppm gave 370%. 750 ppm gave 460%. 900 ppm gave 510% yield!
They found that fruit quality was improved as well, and the total sugar accumulation in the fruits, especially sucrose, was increased and that titratable acid content was reduced. Essentially five times as much fruit which all tasted better, all wonderfully desirable results!
This seems to suggest that if the discarded carbon-dioxide-rich air is sent into a nearby greenhouse, where the carbon dioxide concentration might be increased to three times natural, maybe five times as much fruit and vegetables might be grown from the same plants!
Note that the carbon-dioxide-rich air provided to the greenhouse is also around 150ºF so that it can even provide natural heating for the greenhouse, reducing the need for artificial heating!
Thousands of other research experiments have been performed regarding a wide range of plants, which have all had similar results. Even crops like wheat and soybeans, and trees like cherry and spruce and white oak, have similar growth benefits.
Yet another possible Green benefit from this system!
You might note that this combined system actually collects the carbon dioxide that is NATURALLY generated anyway, and then it allows those greenhouse plants to REMOVE IT FROM THE ATMOSPHERE!
There are also some existing technologies, such as those based on the Seebeck Effect (discovered in 1821) which are thermoelectric generation. Semiconductor materials seem capable of decent potential efficiency levels, even at these very low temperatures, but new research would probably be required.
This could be created above ground or in the ground. In a remote Third World location, the bag version might be created INSIDE the building, with bales of straw used as the surrounding insulation, or many other locally available materials. The chambers should be resistant to rats and larger animals chewing through, either to get to food scraps or to a heated location during a winter. A thermometer is very useful because there is a common tendency to cause too great an airflow through the bin, which then does not allow the material to get up to the most effective operating temperature. Also, given the extreme amounts of heat energy which gets generated, overheating and killing the thermophilic bacteria can occur without knowledge of the temperature actually within the decomposing material.
This concept has only very recently been invented (February 2007). We hope that people will try variations of what we have described and will later e-mail us regarding any potential variations or improvements, and the actual results achieved. If a thousand people each do this during this coming winter (07-08) and the next (08-09), we think we may be able to rapidly greatly refine the system.
We are figuring that those first thousand people who make these will each have slightly different configurations, or they will have tossed in different organic materials. Some will discover brilliant insights in the process. It may actually turn out to be a wonderful thing if some bacon grease is included, or food scraps, or a small amount of used motor oil! No one will really know until someone tries such things! If this sounds potentially exciting, I think it is, because if YOU happen onto some awesome variation, this site can enable millions of others to also benefit from YOUR findings!
We note that the "high performance" version of this system (Version 3a, the tumbling one) produces an easy 45,000 Btu/hr to heat a home and has experimentally shown to produce about double that, around 90,000 Btu/hr. We also note that 2,544 Btu/hr is the same as one horsepower of power. See where this is going? That fairly simple unit can CONSTANTLY produce around 45,000 / 2,544 or over 17 horsepower! And it has been shown to produce over 35 horsepower. Granted that it is as simple heat and not as mechanical power. But given that we have millions of active minds in our country, maybe someone can figure out a way to EFFICIENTLY convert that "low grade heat" into mechanical power???
So, just before bedtime, you take your car to a store to get a "bin" filled with bales of a high-performance variation of this decomposing material. Noting that we have already done some experiments with standard mowed lawn grass, where just 24 hours after being cut, it was already impressively producing heat from bacterial decomposition, say that someone discovers even faster ways to get this process rolling. So you get your (5?) compressed bales of this organic material of maybe 200 pounds total weight. We learned above that each pound of the organic material contains at least 8,000 Btu of chemical energy in it, so we are talking 1.6 million Btus of chemical energy total (in a fairly small bin). For comparison, a gallon of gasoline contains around 126,000 Btu of chemical energy, so we are talking here of the equivalent of around 13 gallons of gasoline. Starting to see why thing seems interesting?
It really does NOT seem to be much of a stretch to think that the 200 pounds of material that you put in your bin might be able to completely decompose in say, 12 hours. After all, in-vessel composting already nearly accomplishes that, certainly in 24 to 48 hours! So we would have 200 pounds of material decomposing in 12 hours which is about 17 pounds per hour. That is around 155,000 Btu/hr or the equivalent to 61 horsepower. That may not represent sports car type of power, and it would tremendously depend on whether an efficient way to convert that heat energy into mechanical energy could be found, but we are here discussing driving for 12 hours, at highway speed, (where a medium sized vehicle generally requires around 40 horsepower (mechanical) to push its way through the air and against tire friction), all potentially from a bin full of cut lawn grass???
Yes, a bin that can hold 200 pounds of this stuff would be much larger than a car's gas tank, but still! This is an approach that involves NO FOSSIL FUELS and therefore no global warming effects! AND there would certainly be that delay of some hours while the rather slow decomposition process was working, to build up enough stored energy for you to actually drive somewhere the next morning!
Now, it may not be possible to actually DO this! During that night while you slept, it would be necessary for the bacteria to totally go berserk in generating heat, and then somehow that heat would have to be captured and saved for when you wanted to drive somewhere. Could anyone find some very unusual bacteria that could work that fast? Or, could some really ideal mixture of decomposing materials be found where the effect is fast enough? Like in a compressed, Swiss-cheese structure where oxygen could get everywhere fast enough? Could someone find some way to efficiently collect and save and store that much heat? Hard to say! But it certainly seems like an interesting idea to think about! IF someone actually comes up with something like that, EVERY vehicle on the planet would soon be built to use that method. Somebody probably has an opportunity to get fairly famous!
As to capturing and storing the heat, we mentioned above the Seebeck Effect and the possibility of a low pressure steam engine as being possible ways to produce some amount of electricity from this general effect. Neither of those is probably able to convert more than a few percent of the heat generated into electricity, though, so the idea of using electrical batteries might be a non-starter. But there are an immense number of very creative people out there (maybe including YOU) and someone might find a way to accomplish this process!
By the way, such an approach would almost certainly completely end the problem of smog in cities, and NOx pollution would also no longer occur.
However, it IS true that no present technology is remotely efficient at capturing low-grade heat to convert it into electricity. But it sure seems to me to be worth giving a lot of thought to!
The house-heating and hot water heating work great, and they have extremely high overall efficiency. That might NOT be possible with the idea of trying to convert that low-grade heat energy into either electricity or motive power. The reason is that there is something called the Carnot Cycle Efficiency, which is believed to always apply to all "thermal processes". Unfortunately, low-grade heat sources have extremely low Carnot Efficiencies (around 11% for this situation). This situation may therefore NOT allow the "efficient conversion" of those 40 or 60 horsepower of thermal energy discussed above into other forms of energy. But, the incentive seems to be there, so maybe someone can find some method of conversion that does not have the Carnot Cycle limitations. Note that the Carnot Cycle is actually a statement of the Second Law of Thermodynamics, which should indicate that it is very reliably true! A vehicle propulsion system where only 4 to 6 horsepower would be available might not be very attractive! But an electricity generation system which converted 11% of 13 kilowatts would provide a family with a constant supply of around 1.4 kilowatts of electric power, 24 hours each day, which DOES seem very attractive, even complying with Carnot Cycle Efficiency. Better yet, the remaining 89% of that low-grade heat energy could probably then still go to heating the home and domestic hot water. An interesting possibility!
The 170,000,000 Btus of chemical energy is simply sitting there! It no longer has any function regarding the biological operation or development of the living plants of which it used to be part. It is simply sitting there, as the organic materials are waiting to (slowly) NATURALLY decompose, which releases all that chemical binding energy as heat energy. It can be equally accurately described as 67,000 horsepower-hours of (heat) energy or 50,000 kilowatt-hours (again, of heat energy). They all mean the same thing. They are NOT mechanical energy or electrical energy, or even heat energy, but rather a potential energy of the chemical binding energies of the atoms in the complex carbohydrate molecules in organic materials. However, Newton told us that Energy must be Conserved, that is that such energy cannot simply disappear. It MUST continue to exist, but it can be changed in form from one type of energy to another, as long as the total energy does not change. All REAL processes do not have perfect efficiency when changing from one form to another, where all the energy that might appear to be lost had simply been converted to heat energy, possibly as frictional losses or radiation or convention losses.
In this case, that 67,000 horsepower-hours of energy gets released very gradually and slowly, spread out over that entire one acre area. But still, during that six-month period (4,400 hours), there is an average of over 15 horsepower continuously released, although it occurs very irregularly in reality. That can also be described as being an average of around 11 kilowatts for that entire six month period! This seems impossible since no one has ever noticed it! After all, we don't have to run across the yard in winter because it is so hot!
We can see why this is the case if we consider it as the 170 million Btus of energy. Again, this is released over 4,400 hours, so we would have an average of around 39,000 Btu/hour. Keep in mind that this is normally spread out over the area of an acre, or 43,560 square feet. This is therefore around 0.9 Btu per square foot per hour, a rather small amount when we stick space heaters under our desks which produce 5,000 Btu/hr! Is there any wonder that no one has ever noticed a heat source which is less than 1/5000 of that of a lowly electric space heater?
The actual natural heat production is very irregular, as the mesophilic bacteria which operate at the lower temperatures are very affected by the temperature of the material they are trying to break down for energy. On intensely cold days, there is extremely little activity, while on milder Spring days, substantial decomposition occurs.
Note that the technology which we have developed generally relies on entirely different types of bacteria, the so-called thermophilic ones. They are far more efficient at the process BUT they also require an environment which is around 125ºF to 150ºF. This means that they rarely get a chance to do much, except on really hot sunny summer days when inside a pile of animal dung or similar compost materials. This actually explains why the thick and effective insulation is so centrally important in the operation of this concept. If there should ever be found some bacteria which thrive on even warmer temperatures, like 170ºF to 180ºF, it figures that they might be even more rapid in accomplishing these functions. If there were ever to be any future in using this approach for vehicle fuels, that might a likely way to accomplish the rapidity needed in the energy release.
For the record, the first Footnote in the first Global Warming presentation of this series discusses that around 893 watts of incoming sunlight arrives at each square meter of area (due to the Solar Constant and the Earth's Albedo). Our one acre is around 4010 square meters, so the acre can receive a total of around 3.6 * 106 watts of sunlight. Due to day and night and other geometric effects, the actual daily average is 1/4 of this or 9.0 * 105 watts. Multiplying by 86400 seconds in a 24-hour day, this is 7.7 * 1010 watt-seconds, or 2.15 * 107 watt-hours each day. If we consider a growing season in the middle US to be half a year or 182 days, that means that roughly 3.9 * 106 kilowatt-hours (kWh) of sunlight energy had arrived on that acre during a single growing season.
We have just determined that the actual plant growth absorbs around 50,000 kWh of energy into the chemical binding energy of the organic molecules. We have just mathematically confirmed that the photosynthesis process has around 1% overall thermal efficiency (50,000 / 3.9 * 106). The second Footnote in our second Global Warming presentation provides the complete analysis of where all the thermal efficiency losses are in the natural photosynthesis process.
The Earth's Rotation as a Source for Energy
Waste Nuclear Power For Making Electricity And Heat?
The Physics of Efficiency In Electric Power Plants
Individual Ways of Reducing Your Energy Usage
Methods of Storing Energy for Later
How Much Energy Comes From the Sun? And Why is there Global Warming?
How does the Sun create so much energy?
Inventions Which Might Help Deal With Coming Energy Catastrophes
An Invention to Efficiently Make Electricity from Solar
Enormous Heating of the Atmosphere by the Alaska Pipeline
Air Conditioning without Huge Electric Bills and without Freon
A Method of Storing Summer Heat to (Nearly) Entirely Heat a House all Winter
An Extremely Highly-Efficient (and Fast, 200.0 mph) Transportation System for People and Products
The Sophisticated Woodstove I Invented in 1973
The Physics of Wood as a Heating Fuel
Why is the North Pole Heating Faster than the rest of the Earth?
A Possible way to greatly reduce Aerodynamic Drag of Airplanes
( http://mb-soft.com/public/index.html )
C Johnson, Physicist, Physics Degree from Univ of Chicago