
Floating solar farms could make fuel and help solve the climate crisis - onetimemanytime
https://www.nbcnews.com/mach/science/how-floating-solar-farms-could-make-fuel-help-solve-climate-ncna1020336
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ansible
This is a cute idea, but every part of it sounds impractical.

The sea brings with it storms and waves (as mentioned in the article) but it
also brings: saltwater corrosion, barnacles and other sea life trying to live
on your equipment, serviceability issues (harder to get to and work on), and
more.

There's also the energy needed to extract the CO2 from the water. If you want
CO2, we generate concentrated amounts of it on land (like from coal power
plants). Why not get that at the source?

We have plenty of flat land in the deserts around the world, and solar farms
there are easier to maintain than out on the ocean.

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08-15
> Why not get that at the source?

Because building a power plant next to a power plant so the power plant can
turn the waste of the power plant back into fuel for the power plant is
lunacy. It's easier and cleaner to simply turn the coal power plant off.

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antepodius
It just turns the power plant into a battery, is all. Doesn't seem too insane
to me- if you could synthesise methane or petroleum or so from the high-CO2
output of the plant using excess nearby-produced renewable energy, then
stockpile the chemical fuels to burn when the sun's not shining. You could
make the whole thing a closed loop.

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glenvdb
I really think we're just at the beginning of utilising the the seas/oceans of
this planet. Between things like this and seasteading with floating cities and
farms, the world is going to look very different and we're going to be living
in ways that seem strange in a few generations.

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baybal2
No they aren't because the idea described is nebulous and technically unsound

Just any electrochemical synthesis process is very inefficient, that's
thermodynamics and you can't do anything about that

The most dumb and simple electrochemical fuel production process —
electrochemical production of ammonia, is nowhere close to commercialisation
despite chemical industry trying to do that for _more than a century_

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ncmncm
Evidently you are not aware of

[http://www.greennh3.com/](http://www.greennh3.com/)

A much more useful ocean-going consumer of solar power would instead produce
ammonia, and release it into ocean currents flowing away from land. Releasing
iron oxide dust along with it would amplify its useful effect.

The useful effect would be hundreds or thousands of square miles of additional
photosynthesis downstream pulling carbon from the air.

If the unit were also to concentrate CO2 and release it dissolved into the
water along with the ammonia, that might speed uptake. The waste oxygen
produced along with the ammonia would also be useful dissolved into the
current.

Micro-organisms scattered throughout the biosphere are astonishingly efficient
at taking up dilute ammonia, and accelerating growth of everything around
them.

Ammonia production is the best-fit energy sink for rural wind turbines far
from an electric grid. The ammonia is immediately useful to farmers, on the
spot, as fertilizer, fuel, and cash crop. Intermittent power causes no
difficulty; produce when there's wind, wait when there's not. Kelp farmers
would find wind-powered ammonia production equally useful. Unlike solar
panels, wind turbines do not block sunlight.

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baybal2
Electrochemical direct synthesis of ammonia is not efficient.

Were somebody to do that, that somebody would assuredly be waiting for that
year's Nobel.

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ncmncm
There has been immense progress in ammonia synthesis catalysts, in recent
years. There should be a Nobel for them, but I doubt it will happen.

For small-scale production, practicalities of providing chemically pure
nitrogen and hydrogen may be gating factors, rather than actual synthesis.

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Havoc
Why floating?

Build it in a dessert with high voltage lines

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ncmncm
Solar-powered ice cream, with bonus electric shocks!

~~~
Havoc
>Solar-powered ice cream

:D

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kuu
More fuel? No thanks. We should focus on finding alternatives to fuel, even if
it is in some kind of renewable energy.

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yason
Fuel is just a name for matter that stores energy. Methanol ultimately
produced by the sunlight is fully renewable: it's just recycling atoms from
molecule to another and burning the produced methanol will eventually recycle
them back to square one.

The same thing happens with oil too. It's just that the recycling period is so
long that a massive portion of the carbon in the cycle effectively ends up
stashed away underground, and the overground ecosystem has time to adapt to
the amount of carbon in the atmosphere. When we talk about carbon emissions we
mean drilling oil and digging up coal increase the amount of carbon in the
active cycle and decrease the amount stashed. Yet it's the same carbon the
planet has always had, but just with different proportions of it in different
phases of the cycle.

