Quote:
Originally Posted by Scott R
They offered me 5k per acre and 15% on royalties, oh and free gas for the life of the well. Still don't want it on my land. Big trucks, lots of noise, not what I pictured my mountain property to be.
It is however attractive given the new home fuel cells coming out that use cng. I could finally drop the solar and my sub-par heating system.
|
Having been down the CNG fuel cell road and back, you need to ask yourself - do I want a furnace that makes electricity or a fuel cell generator that makes heat? An efficient fuel cell generator only makes enough heat to sustain itself. If it is making more heat, it is combusting excess fuel and becomes a furnace and is no longer efficient.
Despite the fact that SOFCs run at 600 - 800C, if you are capturing any heat from the exhaust for heating your home or water, the thing is not efficient. Our 5kW units were only ~30-35% efficient but to get there almost all of the heat in the exhaust was used to preheat the intake air and overcome the heat consumed by reforming natural gas into hydrogen, CO, CO2, and water (steam reforming is an endothermic reaction).
I guess my point is that if you want a furnace that makes electricity or a generator that makes heat there are better ways to do this including running a diesel generator and using the engine cooling circuit to heat your home. If you put thermoelectric generators in your furnace, you could extract some wasted heat to make electricity but barely enough to charge a cell phone.
If you want to save the world, extract power from tidal currents (not the up and down of the tide) but the lateral movements of water through narrow passages. There is a huge energy flux, it is predictable, and you can extract this power without upsetting the gods and destroying the environment. Of course Greenpeace and The Sea Shephard Society may take a different view.