"_____ refinery" Note: Emails are organized in the order received, with first received at the top. Dear Readers: The appeal for help I sent to the Paperitalo Publications master mailing list 1 1/2 weeks ago concerning the need for information to help the case of the Botnia Mill in Uruguay resulted in an overwhelming positive response. Respective of your already full email boxes, I was hesitant to embark on this path, but thought the subject important enough and of universal interest to us all. We had never done such a thing before, but the responses were from all over the world. Thank you again for all your help. Jim *** Jim, A biorefinery provides gas or liquid fuel out of agriculture or forestry biomass, not much to do with bioethanol. Taking your "let's stick a giant greenhouse in front of all power stations" concept to a logical conclusion, the size of it would need to be Earth-size. Well, that's what we have, don't we ? And it's getting to be a greenhouse, all right. But I loved the one about Rochambeu and like your newsletter! Regards, Martin *** Dear Jim, I read your Nip Impression every week and I like most of them a lot. This time I don't really agree with you about the carbon dioxide discussion, but that’s how life is, you shouldn't always agree. But the calculation can not be right. I think that the figure about how much air that is blown though the chimney must be wrong. 0,16 cubic miles/minute is 6,66*108 m3/min (I am metric) that is 1,11*107 m3/s at 1 GW At 10MW electricity production that is 1,11*105 m3/s and that is what we have at our little power plant. (37 MW thermal) Normal speed of air should be 10-20 m3/s (22-44 miles per hour) and then our chimney would be 5000-10000 m2. That is 1.2 - 2.5 acres !!! I think the area is about 1.5 m2 Our airflow for combustion is 15 m3/s and flu gas is 21 m3/s . Calculated from our power plant and 12,9 TW the power plants would need something like 1.16*109 m3/min or 0,279 cubic miles/minute. If earth air is 3,82 billion cubic miles this will take 13,7 billion minutes or 26 000 year to blow it though the power plants. You can see calculations in the attachment. Vänliga Hälsningar /Kind Regards Mikael Käll Holländaregatan 4 Mariestad Sweden *** Jim, I think there is a lot of hocus pocus science going on with all this biorefinery stuff and even bioethanol from cellulosic biomass. The trouble is there is a lot of hocus pocus stuff going on in every field of business also and it hasn't gotten to the point where people will say "enough". Thanks for the update. Eric Ellery --- Dear Readers: I had a lot of fun with you last week with the idea that the combustion based power plants in the world cycle the entire atmosphere every 12 days. I had one phone call and Mikail's letter above as the only disputers. If the circulation of air through the thermal power boilers takes thousands of years, as Mikail contends, then I am even more skeptical of global warming, for it tells me we are barely affecting the atmosphere. At 12 days, even I could get excited, but not hundreds or thousands of years. But the real point is this. The calculation here is merely one involving arithmetic, not even algebra, and it is in dispute in our little universe of readers here. Some accepted 12 days without a thought, a few had the energy to challenge it. But even Mikail got it wrong, for he forgot to subtract out the volume of the earth, the best I can tell examining his calculations. Many, many years ago, I operated a little engineering company that was in a miserable business--detailing structural steel. This is where one takes the drawings prepared by a structural engineer and turns them into shop fabrication and erection drawings with all the right cuts, bolt holes and so forth. Before computer aided design (the early 1980's), this job was still one largely done by hand. I figured that a typical high-rise building had between 15 and 20,000 bolt holes that had to be properly spaced and lined up. As a detailer, we were back-charged, to the tune of about $50 -75, for every hole we missed. It was impossible to be 99% correct--there was just too much data. Yet, 99% correct meant backcharges of $10,000 to $15,000 on a job you had won as the low bidder for about $40,000. Hard to make money that way. And the work was dangerous, too--the famous case of the collapsing skywalks at the Crowne Plaza in Kansas City in the early 80's, involving many fatalities, was directly the result of miscommunication between a structural engineer and a steel detailer. All of this perfectly illustrates my skepticism when it comes to global warming. As we have demonstrated here, a group of us, reasonably intelligent and well trained, can't get a simple arithmetic problem correct when it comes to power plants. Yet, if you take all data points in time and space and all the fancy algorithms that have been constructed to determine global warming, I for one can not get my head around the inherent inaccuracies in such a model. What I am really saying is I don't know what is correct, but the sheer volume of data makes the entire exercise suspect. Jim *** I would like to complement you on your newsletters. Out of all the newsletters and other e-mails I receive, I save all of yours, even if I don't have time to read them at that time. They are always very good and well written and contain some well thought out information that is helpful. Thank you...I also have a quote from you on thoughts on cleaning up your area posted on the wall. That helps me keep my area clean because I tend to collect clutter. Randy Gray Columbus, Mississippi USA ### Have a comment? Send your email to jthompson@taii.com. Unless you tell us otherwise, we will assume we can use your name if we publish your letter.

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