The responses to my original note are not being ignored. I have just been busy with work on other projects including updating that Energy Islands report.

This isn’t an amateur effort. An earlier version of that report has probably now been read by some of the highest level U.S. government Energy Policy experts. And some news reports indicate to me that U.S. Energy Department and White House personnel are actively considering some of my recommendations concerning this general subject.

Regarding aluminum and hydrogen for use in transporting energy, more might be said about that in future reports. However, for the moment,

ENERGY TRANSMISSION

One of the main problems with working with energy is moving it from where it is generated to where people need to use it.

When electric transmission lines are used there is a power loss that is dependent on factors such as distance and the frequency and voltage of the transmission wave. Nuclear power plants presently need to be built within some reasonable distance of the city where the power will be used. Otherwise the transmission losses become excessive. But, no one wants a nuclear power plant in his or her backyard.

One way to deal with that problem is to build the nuclear power plants at locations far from where they could cause problems if small amounts of radiation were released. However, that transmission loss problem then has to be addressed.

ALTERNATE ENERGY TRANMISSION RESOURCES

If electric power lines cannot be used to move the energy then some other transport medium has to be used. Liquid hydrogen is a popular one because it can be easily generated by converting water to hydrogen and oxygen. And when burned it generats water, not some dangerous greenhouse gas. However, there can be problems associated with the fact that it can be physically difficult to build plants that can convert water to hydrogen on a massive scale. Additionally, hydrogen is quite dangerous to work with. The gas is one of the most difficult to contain. And small leaks in transmission and storage facilities can result in devastating fires.

Aluminum looks so attractive (to me anyway) because it can be easily generated by converting aluminum oxide powder or something like that in a liquid form into pure aluminum metal. And fashioned into giant blocks of pure aluminum or even aluminum pellets the metal can be stored indefinitely without safety and decomposition problems and transported by ship, train, truck, and even aircraft with virtually no safety concerns.

It would probably not be practical to use aluminum metal directly to power cars etc. But large blocks of aluminum could be “burned” in power plants near cities and used to generate electricity. There are also some chemical systems where aluminum in a liquid form could be used to generate the electricity without the need for a “flame.”

Several of the other reasons that aluminum looks so attractive to me as an energy transport resource are the following:

I believe that if you compare it with any other energy source such as coal, oil, natural gas, and hydrogen, when you “burn” one gallon of aluminum or equal weights of the fuels, there is much heat generated by the aluminum than any of the other materials. So, it can be very “cost effective” to use transportable aluminum versus other fuels.

Another advantage is that fact that when “burned” it does not produce any greenhouse gasses. The aluminum oxide power that is generated can be recycled indefinitely. And the heat generated during the burning process would also quickly radiate off into space if it were not for the existing greenhouse gasses that trap heat near the Earth’s surface.

And finally along those lines, aluminum is one of our most abundant elements. It is generally mined in the form of bauxite and is available from quite a few countries. Once converted to pure aluminum it can be recycled endlessly just as hydrogen can be.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bauxite

ENERGY CONVERSION LOSSES

As far as energy losses related to converting from one form of energy to another are concerned,

Safe nuclear power plants would be much easier to build if it were not necessary to worry so much about even tiny radiation leaks or the need for them to have the ability to increase or decrease their power output depending upon demand from industrial and residential customers.

To deal with that aluminum metal conversion power loss problem, if the overall conversion and transport efficiency were only 25 % for nuclear power plants located in remote areas, then the easy way to deal with that would be to build 4 times as many small nuclear power plants in those areas or plants that were 4 times as large. And except for scheduled maintenance times, the plants would run at full capacity 24 hours a day, 365 days a year converting aluminum oxide to aluminum. Plants like that would not be expensive to build or maintain. And because of their remote location, safety and security problems would not be so serious. Consumers could then “burn” whatever amounts of aluminum that were needed, when they were needed instead of having to have a local nuclear power increase its power output at different times of the day and year.

We constantly transport coal, oil, and natural gas from one part of the world to another. In my opinion, aluminum would be a much better candidate for transport.

Finally, all of this will be acted on or not acted on by people who formulate our global energy policies. The information in these reports is simply conversational.

These are personal opinions.