Carbon Capture for Coal Fired Power Plants

For many years now the world has been worrying about global warming and even though it has not been proven that it is happening or even that carbon emissions play a key role in it governments around the world have been pouring money to “fix” a problem that we aren’t even sure is there.  

One thing that people are now trying to do is to capture the carbon dioxide that is released from coal burning power plants.  Right now this gas is released out of the smoke stack without being treated.  This has been going ever since the beginning.  As of today no one has proven that this is harmful to the environment at all, but recently there has been talk about limiting the amount of this gas that can be released.

This talk has caused people to try and figure out a way to capture the carbon dioxide from the power plants.  The department of energy budgeted 41 million dollars last year alone.  Their goal is to capture at least 90 percent of the carbon dioxide emitted.  They say they want to achieve this while only raising the cost to produce the energy by 35 percent.  I don’t know about you but I don’t want my tax dollars to go to fund a project that will increase my electric bill by 35 percent to “fix” a problem that we aren’t even sure exists and what exactly is causing it.  That is like paying someone to rob you.  It just doesn’t make any sense.  But then again it seems like that is what the government is best at.

 

If they do decide to go ahead and try to capture the carbon dioxide, they are faced with another dilemma.  They have to find a place to store it.  One thought is to pump it deep into the ocean.  This might work but it would require a massive pipe network to get the gas out there.  Another problem with doing this is that it could potentially increase oceanic acidification.  They are also thinking about pumping it into deep underground geologic formations.  The problem with this is the risk that the carbon dioxide would leak from these formations and make it into the atmosphere anyways.  

One of the main benefits that the United States government keeps saying over and over again is that it will create new jobs and stimulate the economy.  They may be right that it will create new jobs, but what are these jobs actually accomplishing.  As of right now we are producing the amount of energy that is needed for this country with the amount of workers that work to do it.  If we decided to implement carbon capture at these power plants all that we would be doing is making it more expensive and more labor intensive to produce the same product.  I am no economist but I think that this would only hurt the economy and ultimately lead to less jobs.

 

Overall what I am saying is that this technology, however advanced it may be, has no function purpose or need and I don’t want my tax money to fund the research for it.  It would only increase energy costs and hurt the economy. 

The Devil's Lake Outlet

Devils Lake is the largest natural body of water in the state of North Dakota.  However this was not always the case.  It actually used to be relatively small and almost even dried up a couple of times in recent history.  The reason that it has become so large is the fact that it has no natural outlet.  So during wet years the water backs up in the lake.  Since the early 1990s we have been in a wet spell here in North Dakota which has caused Devil’s Lake to rise out of control.  This has caused massive damage to the surrounding area.

There have been many ideas on how to get the water off the lake, but the solutions always seem to have some sort of “snag” to them. One of the main reasons why the water is not removed from the lake is because the only place for the water to go is into the Sheyenne River which flows into the Red River and then the Red River flows into Canada.  Normally this wouldn’t be a problem, but Devil’s Lake is very high in nutrients and other solutes.  This could affect the other river systems in a negative way.  This causes the residents that live around these river systems to reject any proposal to remove water off of Devils Lake.

In the last couple of years however the situation has changed.  Devils Lake has finally risen to a level where it is threatening to overflow into the Sheyenne River naturally.  This would cause untold devastation downstream.  The amount of water that would be released would be massive.  This has caused the residents downstream to rethink the controlled release of water into the Sheyenne River.

As of right now there are two pumps that are pumping water from Devils Lake into the Sheyenne River.  I personally think that these pumps are ineffective and unnecessarily costly.  The amount of water that they pump in very minute compared to the amount of water that flows in to the Lake.  They make no noticeable difference in the level of the lake.  They also cost the tax payers a lot of unnecessary money in electricity costs and maintenance needed on the pumps. 

I believe the best thing that could be done alleviate the flooding of the Devils Lake basin is to construct a manmade controlled gravity flow outlet.  This has been proposed many times but keeps getting shut down for some reason.  The basic concept is very simple.  All that they would need to do is go to where outlet would be if the Lake got to the height where it would flow into the Sheyenne.  They would dig out a channel to the Sheyenne River and put in a water control structure.  This would let the water flow by gravity to the Sheyenne River, but would also be able to be controlled by gates or some other control structure that would work best for the situation.  This would cost relatively little money to build compared to the pumps.  It would have a much higher capacity to remove water from Devils Lake and there would be no electric bill every month that the tax payer would have to pay. 

Crash-Aborbing Concrete Review

Crash-Absorbing Concrete

On average there is an 42,000 road deaths in the United States per year.  These crashes causes untold amount of stress on families across the nation and costs the United States over 300 billion dollars a year.  Many of these deaths could be prevented with the use of the right engineering materials utilized in the correct way.  

One of ways that engineers try to reduce head on collisions, which usually result in fatalities, is the use of barricades to prevent traffic, that loses control, to enter into oncoming traffic.   In the past, engineers have utilized “hard” barriers to prevent this from happening.  The barriers could be anything from steel cables, metal guardrails, and solid concrete medians.  These approaches were affective at keeping vehicles from entering into oncoming  traffic, but they have on major downside.  This is that there is relatively no give when vehicles collided with them.  This causes more injuries and fatalities to occur to the vehicle hitting them.

This is where crash-absorbing concrete comes into play.  It is also known as aerated concrete.  It is made by using excess amounts of water in the concrete mix design.  This makes it very hard to form when putting it in place but once it starts to harden the excess water that is in the concrete begins to evaporate out.  This leaves a large amount of air voids in the concrete itself making it almost like foam.  With the air voids in the concrete it becomes very easily deformable so when vehicles crash into it a lot of the energy is absorbed by deforming the concrete instead of expending that energy back into the vehicle which causes the injuries and fatalities.  You can think of it this way, would u rather run into a solid concrete wall or into a wall of pillows.  I for one would rather run into the wall of pillows.

It has taken engineers quite a few years and a lot of testing to get the mix just right so that it can easily be formed while still deforming at the specified loads that are needed for all types of vehicles.  One of the main problems that they ran into was with the different types of vehicles that are on the road today.  A semi is going to take a lot more firm of concrete to stop it from going into head on traffic than say a geo metro will.  This means that they had to a lot of testing to get it right.  

Another place where engineers are thinking about using this product is at the end of airplane runways.  It would be used at the end of the runways to stop planes from overshooting the runway.  They would actually lay the crash-absorbing concrete just like you would the runway, but when the airplane rolled over it the concrete would give way absorbing the forward momentum of the airplane.  It would be the equivalent of driving into deep sand.  This is better than using the methods that they currently use because it requires no maintenance or upkeep once it is in place.

Overall I think that this is a very good product that should be implemented sooner rather than later so it can start saving lives and money.  It is a very simple approach to a very large problem, but most of the time simple is usually better.

What is Civil Engineering?

A lot of people always ask me what a civil engineer actually does.  A civil engineer is a professional engineer discipline that deals with the design, construction, and maintenance of the physically and naturally built environment.  Physically and natural built environment can be anything from roads, bridges, canals, dams, buildings, and other things along that line.  That is the technical definition of my profession though and I like to believe that it goes a little bit farther than that.  

I like to think that a major part of my job when I graduate is to help make people’s lives better without them ever really knowing it.  For example, there is a lot of time and effort that goes into making a sewer system function properly, and when it does a majority of the people that use it do not even really notice that it is there.  But when it malfunctions that is when everyone notices.  If I do my job correctly then no one will probably even give a second thought to my projects and that is how it is supposed to be.  

Most of the people that decide to go into civil engineering are usually interested in mathematics, as this is a heavily loaded mathematics degree.  When a civil engineer gets done with all of their required math classes for graduation they only need but a few more credits to get their math minor.  So that should tell you how much math we are required to take.  But what I think sets civil engineers apart from the other engineering fields is that for the most part we like to be outside.  Most civil engineers can expect to spend at least some part at work outdoors.  This is one of the main reasons that I chose to go into the civil engineering field, as I enjoy the outdoors very much.

Civil engineers also have to be in touch with what the public actually wants.  This most certainly true when they are designing public works projects, such as roads, bridges, dams, and so on.  These structures will have to be used by the public for many years to come and if the public doesn’t like your design then you are not doing your job properly.  I believe that some civil engineers lose sight of this and just design the way that they think it should be done without thinking how the general public will accept it.  As I said earlier if you are doing your job right then most people won’t even notice you did anything, but it will make their life a lot easier in the end.  

As a whole civil engineers are basically responsible for the entire infrastructure that basically everyone uses on a day to day basis.  Be it the road you drove in to work on this morning, the water that you used to take a shower with, and even the structure of the building that you are currently sitting in.  If it wasn’t for civil engineers civilized life as we know it would not be possible, and most people don’t even realize it.