Talk:Liquid nitrogen economy

message: It's not good Wikipedia form to cite your own website as an external link.  There's no analysis of the practicalities of the proposed system. What is "L2N" supposed to mean, anyway?  This article is seriously flawed until it gets some facts, not just hypothesizing. --Wtshymanski 04:32, 18 July 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Validation needed

message: This article is intended to be a summary of research, of which there is plenty.  Please refrain from expressing your empire building plans.--Pete 19:03, 15 August 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Research

message: Thanks to all for the interesting discussion on Liquid Nitrogen, it seems it has some efficiency or power density issues. But I'm not solving vehicle power here. Let me introduce a problem from another field: How to store energy generated by wind turbines.
I'm just thinking about base load for the electricity grid. When the wind blows, create lot of LN (or even liquid air) as efficently as you reasonably can, and store it in large insulated tanks. When the wind stops, use the LN to run stirling engines to geneate power. 
The size of the tanks is big enough that NH losses due to warming up are small over say a 3 week period while the wind doen't blow (Such a long period is very rare.)
Thank you for opening this discussion. The logic for the use of liquid nitrogen as an energy transfer medium is primarily political, time will tell if the economics make sense.
1. It may be the demand for air conditioning that will push the world into an energy and global warming crisis.
2. Emerging nations will demand air conditioning next in their development. Can you imagine how much energy it would take to provide air conditioning to homes and workplaces in India whose middle class is larger than the population of the US?
3. How is it possible to provide air conditioning without use of fossil fuels and, better, without generating waste heat (which also would need to be removed from the building)?
4. The answer is to use the energy in its final form. Liquid nitrogen is liquid coldness. How can liquid nitrogen be created without the use of fossil fuels?  The answer is remotely, where free renewable power is available. There are many orphan sites which have no grid to connect to, offshore Canadian Islands, and Iceland, for instance.
5. I imagine a future day when a tanker of liquid nitrogen enters New York harbor in June, having harvested a winter's produce of liquid nitrogen from windfarms in Labrador. The tanker fills thermal reservoirs where chillers used to sit in the basements of office towers. A simple heat exchanger takes the place of the old chiller and attaches directly to the existing chilled water lines.
6. Yes, liquid nitrogen may not be an efficient way to store energy, but consider the inefficiency of conventional cooling: Coal is transported, burned, water is boiled, turbines are spun, electricity is generated and, then, re-converted to mechanical rotation, and a coolant is compressed and reexpanded. Chemical energy is converted to mechanical, to electrical back to mechanical back to phase change. If all of the conversion energy losses in the conventional cycle are added up they may exceed the carnot inefficiency of creating and then vaporizing nitrogen. I cannot do the math but, when the whole picture is looked at, there is some engineering logic to this idea.
7. The economic logic is a) green cooling will sell at a premium in the future and b) on a hot humid day in Manhattan, in the midst of a brown-out, having stored coolness in the basement of your building would be priceless. 
-Great idea, BUT, what is the actual cooling capacity of 1 kg of liquid air?
 195(Celsius)* 1000(gram)=195,000 cal or 195 kcal when 1 ton of refrigeration is equal to 3011 kcal...
so, 1 kg of liquid air is actually 0.064 TR. mmmm if this calculation is any close to the correct one (is it?), that really not effective. 
Comments by Mechanical engineers are welcome
K casbel 08:27, 20 January 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: If you cannot do the math, you have no base to assert there's any "engineering logic" to this Rube Goldberg or Heath Robinson concept. --Wtshymanski 16:17, 20 January 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Liquid Nitrogen Economy: throwing in another factor. 

message: There appears to be a POV in this article that petroleum is better. I don't see any sources to say so, but more importantly it's an incorrect comparison. No one is proposing that any alternative energy form is better than petroleum in all respects. If we're going to compare LNE to other topics then hydrogen fuel cells, electric batteries, etc. are the correct comparisons.  ·:· Will Beback  ·:· 22:03, 13 November 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: There's point of view and then there's the laws of physics. A jerry can full of gasoline will run a very comfortable automobile at high speeds for hundreds of kilometers, whereas the same volume of liquid nitrogen, vaporized in some grad student's nightmare of Stirling engines and multiple heat exchangers, will propel a glorified golf cart no more than once around the course. There *is* no liquid nitrogen economy, it's a Wiki fiction, and the promoters of this badly conceived notion won't do the math to understand *why* this concept can't work.  I, as an aged and cynical engineering type, understand why of the last 10,000 vehicles to pass by my office today, none of them were propelled by vaporizing nitrogen. But the proverbial bright 12-year-old user of Wikipedia MUST be informed that there's a severe issue with the horrendous energy cost of liquifying the stuff in ton lots in the first place. Also, every "...economy" or "...as energy currency" article must distinguish between a primary energy source like oil, and media useful only for transmission (like hydrogen, and the various further-out proposals here in the Wikipedia). It's not POV, it's physics. This article should have been deleted years ago. --Wtshymanski 22:35, 13 November 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: A jerry can full of plutonium carries even more energy. So? This article isn't about plutonium or petroleum. The competitors to liquid nitrogem as an energy storage medium aren't plutonium or petroleum or coal. They are batteries, hydrogen gas, and a few others.  ·:· Will Beback  ·:· 23:33, 13 November 2007 (UTC)
replies: text:  This article would be much better if contributors understood why we don't have jerry cans full of liquid nitrogen or plutonium to fuel cars. --Wtshymanski 00:04, 15 November 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: We presently carry lead-lined boxes full of acid to provide energy for cars. There are proposals to carry liquid hydrogen, compressed air, or molten sodium to fill the same role. Those are all energy storage media that convert electricity into a form that can be carried and released gradually. Petroleum is not an energy storage medium. We either drill for it or convert coal into it. Once it is uneconomical to obtain, or the carbon concerns make it unwise to use in large quantities, technologies that store cleanly-created electricity will become more and more important. The current cost of building a hydrogen fuel cell car is around $1 million, so other despite the endorsement of President Bush other techniques remain potentially competitive. Liquid nitrogen one of those techniques. It is easier to create and safer than liquid hydrogen. The purpose of this article is to provide a neutral summary of the current engineering and economic status of as an energy storage medium, not to show the advantages of using petroleum over an energy storage medium.  ·:· Will Beback  ·:· 00:49, 15 November 2007 (UTC)
replies: text:  And of the last 10,000 cars to pass by my window, none of them were propelled by batteries, either. Why is this so? And what are the reasons that liquid nitrogen will never become economically important as an energy storage medium? Petroleum is important precisely because it is not only a primary energy source but because it can be processed, piped, shipped, and stored with low losses. The present liquid nitrogen article is quite uninformative about the energy losses in each step of the proposed cycle. Until this article faces up to the engineering limitations of boiling cryogenic liquids as energy storage means, it is nothing but pseduoscience. --Wtshymanski 15:00, 15 November 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Do you think that in 100 years every car is still going to be powered by petroleum? It's possible, but the assumption of scientists and policy makers appears to be that petroleum will be in short supply and that global warming will severely constrain the use of hydrocarbons in combustion. Of course petroleum is better than hydrogen, batteries, or LN in many respects. Whale oil had many advantages as a fuel too, but even so we stopped using it for lighting a hundred years ago when whales became scarce and another fuel became plentiful. Is LN competitive and practical now compared to petroleum? Of course not. Is fusion a competitive and practical source of electricity? Nope, but even so scientists and policy makers invest billions of dollars and thouaands of man-hours on it, and Wikipedia has many articles on the topic. To get back to the point of this thread: huydrogen, LN, and other technologies aren't competitive with petroleum while gasoline sells for $3 or even $10 a gallon. But when gasoline sells for $20, $40, or $100 a gallon then the picture will be different. If a full tank of LN costs $5 and goes 30 miles in a vehicle costing $30,000 that may be competitive with a hydrogen-fuelled vehicle that has twice the range but costs $300,000, and would certainly be competitive with a gasoline-powered vehicle that costs $25,000 to buy but takes $100 worth of fuel to go 30 miles. Or do you believe that petroleum will last forever and that there will never be limits on carbon emissions?  ·:· Will Beback  ·:· 19:33, 15 November 2007 (UTC)
replies: text:  Not the point. As is typical for this article, there's more analysis and thought in the talk page than is represented in the article itself. If you look at the edit history you find the original major contributor never did address any physical limitations to the scheme; basically the originator ran away with a couple of papers about a grad-student stunt for propelling a vehicle and in a stunning and un-Wikipedia like burst of original research, extrapolated this stunt to a whole world using vaporizing N2 for energy conversion. --Wtshymanski (talk) 01:42, 18 November 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Petroleum 

message: I have removed this section which reads like confused waffle. It does not even mention the subject of the article . Please redraft if you want it included. Lumos3 (talk) 12:23, 30 December 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Political Argument section