| Author |
Message |
Mark R. Obtinario (Cowlitzcoach)
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Wednesday, May 17, 2006 - 11:57 am: | |
It has been a very long time since I was in a science class, and to be frank all I got was a passing grade.
So I am coming to you folks to see if anyone out there can explain what Brown's Gas is all about.
I have done some reading about Brown's Gas and it all seems to be too much like turning straw into gold--almost too good to be true.
But if the claims are true, adding a Brown's Gas injector could increase your fuel mileage 20-50%.
You are supposed to be able to weld anything to anything without having any off gasing. It is particularly useful for welding on aluminum, stainless, and cast iron. Supposedly you will no longer need a tig or mig welder.
The flame can get hot enough to weld tungsten but won't boil water.
The two websites I visited (www.watertorch.com and www.eagle-research.com) were very informative. The problem for me is all of the information raised more questions than answers. And I don't have enough knowledge or experience in this area to even know what questions I need to ask.
So I am coming to you folks to see if any of you might be able to shed some light on this subject.
Thanks in advance for your help.
Mark O. |
Connel (Connel)
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Wednesday, May 17, 2006 - 9:16 pm: | |
What is the ole saying "A fool and his money are soon parted". Believe I would pass on this one. |
gabby
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Wednesday, May 17, 2006 - 11:42 pm: | |
If it sounds too good to be true it probably is. |
Phil Dumpster2
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Thursday, May 18, 2006 - 4:54 am: | |
"Brown's Gas" is a mix of two parts hydrogen to one part oxygen.
Easily obtained by electrolysis of water. It's the same matter, just at a higher energy state.
What this is good for is open to a great deal of debate.
So many people get locked into the idea of an "energy source." What they fail to realize is that all of the energy we have available on the planet, with the possible exception of geothermal, is solar. It came from the sun. It can be stored in many different substances (oil, coal, natural gas, biodiesel) but these are only storage mediums.
When you dig fossil fuels out of the ground, you are tapping into energy that came from the sun many many years ago. This energy was captured either directly or indirectly by extinct life which decomposed back into molecular elements of organic chemistry after death.
Also remember when energy is converted from one form to another there is always some loss. If you take 10 megawatts and use to make "Brown's Gas" you may end up with 6 megawatts worth of gas and 4 megawatts worth of heat. If you burn this gas in an internal combustion engine, you may get 1 megawatt of energy out of the crankshaft, with 5 megawatts of heat. All this for 10 megawatts of electricity.
Lead acid batteries are far more efficient than this. |
Casper4104
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Thursday, May 18, 2006 - 6:57 am: | |
Thermodynamics 101 blows a hole in a lot of this stuff, don't it Phil.
Here's a neato piece - Browns gas generator for $6,995. If it really works, it might be useful for a small welding shop - saving all those trips to the gas store for Oxygen & Acetylene.
http://hytechapps.com/index.html
Casper4104 |
Marc Bourget
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Thursday, May 18, 2006 - 7:43 am: | |
Correcting Phil's comment on the origin of "fossil fuels", The oil in the ground didn't come from decomposed life. It's part of a very thick carbon layer far below the surface that originated before the Earth coallesced into the planet we reside on today. The oil "leaks" its way up. Two of the factual things that support this conclusion, one the presence of helium in the "mix" (a product of nuclear reactions, like from stars or the Earth's core) and the fact that previously believed "depleted" (and therefore "abandoned") fields in the Gulf have "magically" been discovered to have "re-filled" themselves.
We used to construct a "brown's gas" generator from $2 worth of wires and test tubes in high school chemistry. Look inside the $6K machine and you'll probably see multiple such elementary generation "set-ups" with a gas collection system.
I'm not persuaded by the reference to a "patent". I'm guessing it's only a design patent and the "novelty" is probably in the approach to how the gas is collected
Onward and upward |
Tim Hoskinson (Tdh37514151)
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Thursday, May 18, 2006 - 10:26 am: | |
Hey Mark where do you suppose all that carbon came from? Maybe from carbon base life forms? There are many scientists who have different opinions on how things came to be and as we live into the future we find more and more of these theories to be incorrect. I would prefer to error on the side of caution when condemning one theory over another. |
Gary Stadler (Boogiethecat)
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Thursday, May 18, 2006 - 4:18 pm: | |
Tim, "all that carbon" probably stems from methane, CH4, which is very plentiful in the universe and quite involved in planet-forming.
The stuff I've read tends to propose that methane trapped under our planet's crust during its birth, under the tremendous heat and pressure that's still down there, reacts and turns to oil which then seeps up to be scarfed by buddys of our president and our kindly friends in the middle east.
It's been analyzed a lot lately and the interesting thing about the "refilled" oil fields is that the oil in them is not chemically the same as oil born of rot; contains helium as Marc mentioned (which also is not present in organic rot); and even a more interesting clue is that it's chemical composition is unlike that of neighboring pockets of oil, strongly suggesting that it's not coming sideways from existing pools, but up from underneath.
Yup, it's all just theory, and we may never know the truth, because if it is being continually produced, the big guys certainly wouldn't want us to know about it... much better to keep the fear and lies going that we're gonna run out so they can continue suckering us into paying more for it...
..and Browns gas? Basic laws of physics say you ain't gonna get out more than you put in unless you're a star or some giant whacko fusion reactor... the energy required to split water is going to be about the same, minus inefficiencies, as you'll get back when you recombine that browns gas again (ie burn it). Thus far no free rides...
(Message edited by boogiethecat on May 18, 2006) |
niles steckbauer (Niles500)
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Thursday, May 18, 2006 - 4:25 pm: | |
If the "big guys" didn't know it was down there in huge supply - you can bet your sweet bippy that they would be on the "leading edge" of new fuels/technology - they only continue to buy up patents and rights to other fuel sources/sytems to keep the competition down - they're only greedy (not that there is anything wrong with that) not suicidal - JMO |
Richard Bowyer (Drivingmisslazy)
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Thursday, May 18, 2006 - 5:01 pm: | |
I have never been a believer that there were enough dinosaurs to produce the tremendous amounts of oil and gas that is available.
An interesting thing is happening right here in WV. People quit drilling in the 40/50's because they were not hitting any new wells. I know, I was here.
Well guess what, my SIL now works for a drilling company, they are drilling one new gas well a week and they are hitting gas every time since he has worked for them. Only a few months, but still significant. And these are not the deep wells. only 3-4000 feet.
Richard |
Ron Walker (Prevost82)
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Thursday, May 18, 2006 - 5:41 pm: | |
The Russians have drilled over 300 wells in excess of 40,000 ft. and hit oil. I doubt that the dinosaurs and rotting plants got that far down
Ron |
David Hartley (Drdave)
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Friday, May 19, 2006 - 8:54 am: | |
And if "The Big Guys" were so sure that the wells were dry, why did they hold on to those "assets"?
They knew..And always did..
They also say tecKnology has improved to extract oil.. Sure and I have a 600 mpg carburator for sale!
They just uncapped the wells and started pumping... |
niles steckbauer (Niles500)
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Friday, May 19, 2006 - 7:25 pm: | |
The reason that Big Oil is laughing so hard is because most of the cost of their infrastructure has already been written off - they watch MSN quote the price of $70+ light sweet crude while they pump low grade crude for less than $5 creating a very profitable margin - the only problem is that the low grade crude takes up more refinery capacity to distill - we could process and deliver much more fuel within the current refinery capacity if we started with light sweet crude - but there would go their tidy little margin - what has become a concern to me of late, is the future entrance of Russia into the energy equation - if the Ruskies get their act together they could eclipse the mideast production of crude and could dominate the Natural Gas industry - transference of that massive amount of energy capital (read:power) back to a government so fragile and corrupt as Russia could have major geo-political ramifications - our demands for cheap fuel could have the unwanted effect of a possible revisitation of the cold war - all the savings resulting from this new production/competition would most likely be spent on increased militarisation and DOD expenditures - I prefer the higher fuel cost than that possible scenario - FWIW |
Stan
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Friday, May 19, 2006 - 8:02 pm: | |
Aside from all the questionable facts and figures about the oil industry, I don't understand why so few people believe in the capitalist system.
You have the choice of buying shares in the big multinationals and getting rich on the dividends or going into opposition to them by buying shares in one or more of the hundreds of smaller oil companies listed on the stock exchanges. You could even start your own company and put Exxon out of business by undercutting their price.
After you get all that money you will be in good shape to ride out a 30% drop in price as occured in natural gas in the last three months. In case you hadn't noticed, the stock price of natural gas companies has tanked in the last month. |
truthhunter@shaw.ca
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Friday, May 19, 2006 - 11:37 pm: | |
It could be said that only a few believe in the capitaliest system as it has only made a few ultra rich. But that is not what I am saying! |
niles steckbauer (Niles500)
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Saturday, May 20, 2006 - 12:19 am: | |
Don't confuse the "stock" market with the "capitalist/free" market - they have no connection
We don't have a true capitalist system - we have a politically skewed capitalism based system with volumes of "protections" restricting free trade
******** The following is from the WSJ (a generally respected business periodical) and authors of a fairly respected book on the subject - in order to 'defend' my statements
*********
ECONOMICS
Oil, Oil Everywhere . . .
Why is it expensive? Because it's so cheap.
BY PETER HUBER AND MARK MILLS
Sunday, January 30, 2005 12:01 a.m. EST
The price of oil remains high only because the cost of oil remains so low. We remain dependent on oil from the Mideast not because the planet is running out of buried hydrocarbons, but because extracting oil from the deserts of the Persian Gulf is so easy and cheap that it's risky to invest capital to extract somewhat more stubborn oil from far larger deposits in Alberta.
The market price of oil is indeed hovering up around $50 a barrel on the spot market. But getting oil to the surface currently costs under $5 a barrel in Saudi Arabia, with the global average cost certainly under $15. And with technology already well in hand, the cost of sucking oil out of the planet we occupy simply will not rise above roughly $30 a barrel for the next 100 years at least.
The cost of oil comes down to the cost of finding, and then lifting or extracting. First, you have to decide where to dig. Exploration costs currently run under $3 per barrel in much of the Mideast, and below $7 for oil hidden deep under the ocean. But these costs have been falling, not rising, because imaging technology that lets geologists peer through miles of water and rock improves faster than supplies recede. Many lower-grade deposits require no new looking at all.
To pick just one example among many, finding costs are essentially zero for the 3.5 trillion barrels of oil that soak the clay in the Orinoco basin in Venezuela, and the Athabasca tar sands in Alberta, Canada. Yes, that's trillion--over a century's worth of global supply, at the current 30-billion-barrel-a-year rate of consumption.
Then you have to get the oil out of the sand--or the sand out of the oil. In the Mideast, current lifting costs run $1 to $2.50 per barrel at the very most; lifting costs in Iraq probably run closer to 50 cents, though OPEC strains not to publicize any such embarrassingly low numbers. For the most expensive offshore platforms in the North Sea, lifting costs (capital investment plus operating costs) currently run comfortably south of $15 per barrel. Tar sands, by contrast, are simply strip mined, like Western coal, and that's very cheap--but then you spend another $10, or maybe $15, separating the oil from the dirt. To do that, oil or gas extracted from the site itself is burned to heat water, which is then used to "crack" the bitumen from the clay; the bitumen is then chemically split to produce lighter petroleum.
In sum, it costs under $5 a barrel to pump oil out from under the sand in Iraq, and about $15 to melt it out of the sand in Alberta. So why don't we just learn to love hockey and shop Canadian? Conventional Canadian wells already supply us with more oil than Saudi Arabia, and the Canadian tar is now delivering, too. The $5 billion (U.S.) Athabasca Oil Sands Project that Shell and ChevronTexaco opened in Alberta last year is now pumping 155,000 barrels per day. And to our south, Venezuela's Orinoco Belt yields 500,000 barrels daily.
But here's the catch: By simply opening up its spigots for a few years, Saudi Arabia could, in short order, force a complete write-off of the huge capital investments in Athabasca and Orinoco. Investing billions in tar-sand refineries is risky not because getting oil out of Alberta is especially difficult or expensive, but because getting oil out of Arabia is so easy and cheap. Oil prices gyrate and occasionally spike--both up and down--not because oil is scarce, but because it's so abundant in places where good government is scarce. Investing $5 billion over five years to build a new tar-sand refinery in Alberta is indeed risky when a second cousin of Osama bin Laden can knock $20 off the price of oil with an idle wave of his hand on any given day in Riyadh.
The one consolation is that Arabia faces a quandary of its own. Once the offshore platform has been deployed in the North Sea, once the humongous crock pot is up and cooking in Alberta, its cost is sunk. The original investors may never recover their capital, but after it has been written off, somebody can go ahead and produce oil very profitably going forward. And capital costs are going to keep falling, because the cost of a tar-sand refinery depends on technology, and technology costs always fall. Bacteria, for example, have already been successfully bioengineered to crack heavy oil molecules to help clean up oil spills, and to mine low-grade copper; bugs could likewise end up trampling out the vintage where the Albertan oil is stored.
In the short term anything remains possible. Demand for oil grows daily in China and India, where good government is finally taking root, while much of the earth's most accessible oil lies under land controlled by feudal theocracies, kleptocrats, and fanatics. Day by day, just as it should, the market attempts to incorporate these two antithetical realities into the spot price of crude. But to suppose that those prices foreshadow the exhaustion of the planet itself is silly.
The cost of extracting oil from the earth has not gone up over the past century, it has held remarkably steady. Going forward, over the longer term, it may rise very gradually, but certainly not fast. The earth is far bigger than people think, the untapped deposits are huge, and the technologies for separating oil from planet keep getting better. U.S. oil policy should be to promote new capital investment in the United States, Canada, and other oil-producing countries that are politically stable, and promote stable government in those that aren't.
Messrs. Huber and Mills are co-authors of "The Bottomless Well: The Twilight of Fuel, the Virtue of Waste, and Why We Will Never Run Out of Energy," just out from Basic Books.
******* The following is an exerpt from BusinessWeek (another fairly respected business periodical)
*******
The problem is that the world can't just switch from one to the other. "Heavy, sour" oil is more complex and costly to convert into useful products such as gasoline and heating oil. And much of the world's refining capacity, particularly in Asia, simply can't process it. "There's no shortage of crude oil today," says Thomas D. O'Malley, chairman of Premcor Inc. (PCO ), a refiner based in Old Greenwich, Conn. "There is a shortage of light sweet."
The result is that the price of oil -- and of products made from it -- is higher and more volatile than it might be if there were more capacity for handling the heavy, sour stuff. In the meantime, refiners that specialize in the cheaper grades -- such as Valero Energy, Premcor, and Frontier Oil (FTO ) -- are reaping rich rewards. Valero Energy Corp. (VLO ) figures that lower-cost oil, together with higher refining volumes, helped boost its third-quarter income by $480 million. "It's a way we can increase our profits, but it doesn't cost consumers a penny more," says Valero spokeswoman Mary Rose Brown.
These higher profit margins are beginning to cause refiners to switch over existing capacity to handle the growing flow of lower-cost crude. New oil coming to the market from such places as Saudi Arabia, Russia, and Canada is increasingly of this type. But upgrading existing refineries to handle low-grade crudes can cost hundreds of millions of dollars per facility and take several years. That's a tough sell in a historically low-margin, cyclical industry. Timothy M. Donohue, a principal at Booz Allen Hamilton Inc., figures the $8 to $10 per barrel discount for heavy crude would have to remain for up to seven years to justify a large-scale shift.
>>>>> Hope this explains where I'm coming from |
truthhunter@shaw.ca
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Monday, May 22, 2006 - 1:06 am: | |
Yes that summarises some aspects of the petroleum logistic very well, those were enjoyable excepts and well worth sharing as well as reading. Thanks!
While reading your articles my memory kept flashing back to the pre Kuwait invasion era (when oil was hyper-inflated in that last high cycle) TO A CBC TV broadcast meeting of the US foreign secretary Madeleine Albright (from the original Bush presidency) negotiating with the Iraqi minister of foreign affairs on how the US would condone and not intervene over the impending armed Iraqi annexation of the oil fields in Kuwait that had slant wells drilled into the Iraqi claimed oil fields PROVIDE those wells were caped off and keep out of production every time the price dropped to $34. It was a well know fact that the large oil holdings of the Bush friendly oil investment cartels could not make a profit on there oil holdings below $34 a barrel mark. Well 10 days after that interview was broadcast on CBC ( I have seen it twice since), well we all should remember what happened to Kuwait and the scripted show that is still unraveling over two decades later.
The Cargill investment group sure has diversified it portfolio from the original oil windfalls of the 1980's and I am sure old grampa bush has had his WWII war profits restored to the family tree many times over. Now I am not trying to make a commentary on capitalism in the hands of the finest or about complex cross (funded by taxpayers) subsidiary between industry on what should be consider public property (the resource, not the service to extract, refine or market it, although the Alberta Oil sands started out that way with Petro-Canada until it was sold off a great loss to taxpayers just before it became very profitable )or even a direct indictment such as Eisenhower's chastisement/warning about the Industrial Military Complex taking over again.
I am just wondering if the Apple ever falls far from the bush, or I mean tree and what that really has to do with what this tread started out as- Brown Gas indeed. |
Mark R. Obtinario (Cowlitzcoach)
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Monday, May 22, 2006 - 2:25 pm: | |
So now that quite a few of you have chimed in about the oil industry, does anyone have any experience or knowledge about Brown's Gas?
Mark O. |
niles steckbauer (Niles500)
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Monday, May 22, 2006 - 10:09 pm: | |
Mark - sorry for the sidetrack - I will go on record as saying its pure bunk - unless I have missed something (and you can point it out to me) there is no verifiable patent # or patent application # - there are plenty of BS claims on the web, but w/o some reference in a credible 3rd party publication its just net 'rumor' - sorry if I'm naysaing - but let the cards fall where they may - absent any true science you have no other choice - |
niles steckbauer (Niles500)
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 (Vote!) | | Posted on Monday, May 22, 2006 - 10:59 pm: | |
Here is a link for an actual patent for the company I posted on a while back - total different project and verified with a DOD contract - no smoke and mirrors though - FWIW
http://patft1.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO2&Sect2=HITOFF&p=1&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO %2Fsearch-bool.html&r=2&f=G&l=50&co1=AND&d=PTXT&s1=Klein.INNM.&s2=electrolysis&OS=IN/Klein +AND+electrolysis&RS=IN/Klein+AND+electrolysis |
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