1. Part 1
2. Part 3
3. Part 4

GEOCOGEN Project – Part 2

Some Basic Information and Some History

Now, you’re probably saying to yourself – “ah ha, another scam, producing quote – free – unquote energy with no fuel and no CO2. I wonder what the catch is to this one.”

Well, the “catch” to this one is that there are virtually no catches! Let me try to explain it to you piece by piece.

First, let’s look at the example of geothermal energy that you are probably familiar with – a household heat pump. What the heat pump does is use the soil near your house as a heat sink or as heat storage – in the winter, there’s enough heat there in the soil that it’s possible to extract some of it and use it to heat your house. Now, that’s not free, because the electricity to make the system circulate takes back some of the free energy you are using, but it’s still a good deal.

Now maybe you don’t understand the details, but I expect you do understand the general principles – you move heat from the ground to the house to heat the house. And what you use in the soil is a coil of pipe or tubing that lets the heat move from the soil to the fluid inside the pipe.

Okay, now let’s take that one step farther and go to a larger scale. Instead of going just a few meters down – let’s say 10 feet – let’s go down deep enough to where there is some real heat available – say 500 feet, or how about 1500 feet. But it’s all but impossible to put the pipe coils that deep – you would have to dig out the complete hole about two acres around the pipe that comes down and goes up to the surface.

Think about that – a hole about two acres on the surface that goes down 1500 feet! That’s some hole!

Well, the petroleum geologists came up with an answer that comes out of the oil fields. In some oil fields where the oil is very viscous, it is possible to drill a matrix of wells to put high-pressure steam down into the rock formation, and because the rock is permeable (that means it has small passageways in it that oil and gas and steam can go through), you can slowly heat up the oil to make it flow easier and push it through to other wells where you can pump it up to the surface.

These operations can be organised in fields that are anywhere between maybe 1000 feet deep and 1-1/2 miles deep. The value of the extra oil that is recovered this way makes it economically possible to do this.

To be continued…

Thanks for looking in,

Jimmy Craig
for
Sue & Craig Websites

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Note: The name GEOCOGEN and the GEOCOGEN trade mark are registered trademarks of ICEC Holding AG and GEOCOGEN AG – all rights reserved. Read more about GEOCOGEN at http://geocogen.net

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GEOCOGEN Project – Part 2

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Hi there!

I just ran across something that surprised me and pleased me at the same tîme. It’s a search engine that plants trees in return for using the search engine! And it’s not “just any old” search engine, it’s the Yahoo! search engine powering Ecocho’s engine. It’s also not that new (just new to me) – they’ve been doing this for four years.

How does it work? Well, it’s really simple – go to http://www.ecocho.co.uk/ecocho-tools.php (or test it out at the top of the sidebar here on our site first) and make it your search engine! It gives the same results as Yahoo! search, it’s as fast as Yahoo! search, and for every thousand searches, they will grow – notice the difference, not plant, but grow – two trees. This takes place in an Australian provincial government tree farm, and two healthy trees should be responsible for removing one metric ton (that’s about 1.1 US short tons) of CO2 from the atmosphere every year.

Here’s a quote from our common web hosting company:

Ecocho is a Yahoo-powered search engine that is working to help fight climate change. For every 1,000 searches made, the company plants two trees. To date, the company has planted more than 7,500 trees and helped neutralize nearly 4,000,000 kilos of CO2.

Think about the equation: you put in searches, just as you do it now, you get back results, just as you do now + two trees will be grown per 1000 searches! It’s difficult to do any better than that! Talk about practical greenology – this is it!

Here are the main links again – you can read more about the entire program there (their operation is also carbon neutral – big surprise? no, not really and they even have a low energy “black” online version that takes less energy to display on your computer )

and select your preferences – country version, and white or black versions.

We’ll be using it, hope you join us and help us grow trees!

Please note: Ecocho is NOT a non-profit organisation, but we (Sue & Craig Websites) feel that their effort is worthy of response, and we receive only “warm fuzzy feelings” if you click on any of their links here.

Jimmy Craig
for
Sue & Craig Websites

A Green Search Engine

I was just reading an article in the Yahoo! Green rss feed titled “Climate change: Acid oceans transform marine life, says study“, and I think I must have missed some of the logic. Typically, at least in my experience with tropical fish and algae, this is what I would expect to happen:
(1) more CO2 in the atmosphere => an increase in CO2 in the ocean waters
(2) more CO2 in the atmosphere => an increase in general temperature of the atmosphere (greenhouse effect) and probably ocean waters as well
(3) within certain limits (well within the changes that have occurred in the world’s oceans), small aquatic growing things tend to thrive on a warmer climate with a richer food (CO2) source
(4) => stronger foraminifera with thicker shells and a larger population.

This doesn’t jive with what the report is saying. I can only think of one reason (and this would mean that the experts got their cause-and-effect wrong, not the basic research), and that is that the most significant part of the oceanic acidification is being caused by the increases in nitrogen and sulphur compounds (and maybe the increase in surface atmospheric ozone as well) in the atmosphere, not the CO2.

What do you think?

Comments are welcome and appreciated, as long as they are polite and to the point (and without blatant advertising). Just click on the article title to see the comment box.

Ciao!

Jimmy Craig