What about a 'green' gaseous cooking fuel?

Hey, maybe I've been brainwashed by Hank Hill, but I do like cooking with gas.

There are plenty of excellent electric ovens, and even some nice oil (vegetable oil?) fired ovens. But all of the electic cook tops I've seen leave alot to be desired.

So, when the resource wars are over, and we surviving members of the DU E/E forum have led humanity to a bright new day, what kind of gas fired cooking fuel will we use? I feel that I'll have to lead a splinter faction into the hills if I don't get to cook with gas.

I'm guessing TDP of portions of the waste stream might be manageable for the amounts of fuel needed for cooking.

a compact compost to methane unit for rural houses and central units for villages, cities, etc., where natural gas lines are already in existence.

On edit: I'm a cook with gas person also.

a little chemistry. I worked in the seventies at a place that was turning coal into a gas. I'm partial to a vegetable oil based economy in the short term to get us off of the fossil fuel addiction. I don't have any info, but I bet veggie oil can be gasified. I am using an electric stove for the first time in my life. I sucks. Maybe a newer model would be more controllable.

most of your older backpacking stoves, as well as the high end ones designed for foreign travel, cook with liquid gas. (Seems airlines don't like compressed bottles of gaseous fuel in their cargo hold). Plus, you can generally get kerosene or diesel anywhere in teh world.

The physics involves pressurizing it, heating it, and atomizing it.

It's messy, and involves a few steps, though I suppose it could be automated. But, you know when your gas stoves fails to light, and you just let the gas dissipate? I imagine this would spray a fine mist of hot oil everywhere.

the current natual gas pipelines.

It's a bottled gas much like propane.

http://vs.ag/ida

DME is also a pretty good transportation fuel.

Where gas pipelines are already installed, methane is still the best.

Thanks for the link.

Should humanity survive global warming, this will be one of the most common forms of stored chemical energy.

How much greener can we get? I like cooking with gas also, and I don't see any reason not to use hydrogen, once the storage problems get weorked out. Oughta work great in all existing gas stoves, with re-jetting of course.

Bruce

The transportation issues alone, even by pipeline, should eliminate this option from serious consideration.

The only feature to recommend hydrogen is that its combustion product is pure water. Every other property is essentially disadvantageous.

such as are used in NI-MH batteries. TexacoChevron has a program on this.

I will correct my statement to read "Hydrogen gas is a lousy fuel."

"Cooking with gas," is unlikely in the future to involve hydrogen. Generating a current with energy stored in batteries in which hydrides are oxidized may become more common in the future.

-- as long as you don't heat them under reduced pressure (to evolve H2 gas) the particles are like sand blasting grit. And heavy!

Store hydrogen as the hydride solid alloy, then a little bit of heat - under reduced pressure - gives off the H2.

If the hydride storage metal is heavy, how much will I have to pack along to be able to drive economically?
Or can I do it with a gas cylinder of DME, or is it liquid?
Just wondering.
Thanks

Bruce

in a Ni-MH battery. It's heavier then a Li battery or an old NiCd battery.

I know TexacoChevron was "fooling around" with pumping NiH "sand" into cars, and vacuuming out "depleted" NiH "sand" to recharge it. But I haven't been following where they went with it.

In this respect it is similar to propane and butane.

It is superior to propane and butane inasmuch as it's critical temperature (the highest temperature at which there can be a distinction between a liquid and a gas) is higher. This has important consequences in storage and shipping. Also DME has a short atmospheric lifetime, meaning that if it leaks into the atmosphere it does not linger as a greenhouse gas; it decomposes in a short time.

Lacking carbon-carbon bonds, DME cannot for particulates, an important constituent of air pollution. In this respect it is much like natural gas, which is mostly methane.

DME is an oxygenated fuel, meaning that it burns even cleaner than natural gas, producing less methanol, less formaldehyde and less formic acid than does natural gas.

Some of the physical properties are given in this document:

http://www.jfe-holdings.co.jp/dme/pdf/ronbun07.pdf

Note that DME is considered (unfortunately from coal) competitive in Japan if the price is $4.60/MBtu, which is much less than half of the post-Katrina price of natural gas. The production cost in Australia for DME (for export to Japan) is given as $3.65/MBtu.

I do not advocate the production of DME from coal. I do advocate its production from CO2 and hydrogen, where the hydrogen is produced by nuclear and/or solar means. I am willing to accept - for the short term - captured CO2 from either natural gas or coal fired powered plants.

Ever look at a gas stove and have trouble seeing if a burner was on due to light? A hydrogen flame is basically invisible in daylight and normal room lighting conditions. If it's really thick and hot you can just barely see some of the OH excitation lines under room lights.

So, yeah, it'd make a lousy stove. And it won't produce just H2O in a burner, but also NOX and so on.

I'll see if I can find a link, I think it could be viable.

Here it is:
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2005/09/050907102549.htm
Bruce

However it is also corrosive and toxic. An ammonia leak from a fuel tank in a vehicle might well be tragic.

DME is far superior. Like ammonia and unlike hydrogen, it is realitively easy to liquify. It's boiling point is actually higher than that of liquid ammonia, and it has a critical temperature above that of boiling water. DME is also non-toxic: It is currently the propellant in hair spray cans.

find cow...heck, we waste lots of methane at sewage plants...

Seriously, back in the 70's a high school science teacher of mine had a drawing of an anaerobic sewage system which would create methane gas and fairly clean fertilizers as byproducts. It was an in-ground unit and worked like a septic tank, except the tank had a variety of anaerobic bacteria that would completely digest the waste. I am not sure anyone ever tried the system, which had been designed to be used in the then-third world. It sounded interesting, as the whole process was passive: add sewage, wait for it to digest, get gas and fertilizer.

Mother Earth News ran a couple of stories on it. I don't know what became of the program, but it was being promoted by one of the agricultural and economic development organizations in India.

The only real drawback was that methane had a low "octane". (Yes, chemists, I DO know how utterly stupid that sounds, but I'm fishing for understandable terminology here! :) ) But the local farm villages used it for light and for cooking fuel, which reduced their "draw" on the electric supply. The system worked quite well, and reduced smell and disease from handling raw manure and sewage.

Has anyone else heard of this?

--p!

resulting from the cutting of trees for firewood. It slowed, but did not stop this deforestration, since the bulk of sewage and manure can provide only a small fraction of the energy needs of a human being.

Many, but not all, sewage treatment facilites do pretty much the same thing.

One problem with this gas is that it is often highly contaminated with CO2, which reduces its heating value and in some cases, even its flammability.

The same problems arise with landfill gas.