Frank

First image looks goofy to me, but might actually make seeing the cut easier. The tool might get in the way in some circumstances and the weight should be on the held piece, not the cut-off piece.

CO2, but it might work as a general pressure vessel compared to rolling your own?

The reformer can work, and the combination is currently more efficient, as you say. Work is still being done on DMFC and SOFC, so it depends on the outlook of your idea - near future or further down the road. I was responding to the PEM in all FC vehicles question, answer is that it is currently most efficient, developed and cost-effective I guess. I don't see hydrogen as a viable automotive solution due to storage and energy density and even methanol isn't strictly GHG free, though portability and energy density work in its favour.

And paintball was too small?

Methane the same way hydrogen can be "created" from a wall-mount unit in your garage. Well, there are direct methanol fuel cells, so a reformer would not be needed. Efficiency might not be there yet. Methanol is easy(tm) to store, compared to hydrogen. There's a whole "methanol economy" movement (a vision at least). Home Hydrogen Fueling Stations - Overview | Hydrogen Cars Now: http://www.hydrogencarsnow.com/index.php/home-hydrogen-fueling-stations/

Methanol is certainly easier to handle. Wonder if a methane to methanol gizmo that fits in a garage exists or can exist. That would get around the availability start-off problem. A way to use water to convert methane into methanol: https://phys.org/news/2017-05-methane-methanol.html

Did you look at SCUBA diving tanks? e.g. http://www.carbondive.com/

A good point has been made that oxygen is certainly available on the moon, so that a kickstart process might go for the perhaps more straightforward but more energy intensive path to resources than trying to figure out how to extract water from a resource of unknown state, ice or hydroxyl, concentration etc... So land solar panels, a chariot rover bulldozer, maybe a robot arm + android (cherry picker and human analog) and extra batteries, plus an oxygen extraction "machine". If this machine can either make bricks or sinter the regolith surface in place, while extracting oxygen, we can tele-robotically prepare the landing pad, habitat foundation, and roads while extracting oxygen. Hydrogen would have to be sent from earth. delta-v to EML1 or EML2 is 2.52 km/s, so it would take less than 1/5th the mass in hydrogen to bring lunar oxygen to EML points. Assuming 450s Isp and 5% ship mass (rough estimate). At the very least, oxygen won't need to be sent from earth. Hydrogen instead of water (8:1) mass savings or 11% the mass. Fuel for a return trip is 6:1, so 15% the mass compared to bringing hydrogen AND oxygen. Once humans land on the moon, tele-robotics lose the 3 second delay and 3d printing can be used to adapt machines to extract resources. Transportation Architecture for Cislunar Space ssp2015-sowers.pdf: https://www.mtu.edu/ece/department/faculty/full-time/zekavat/pdfs/ssp2015-sowers.pdf

A search of "sweden ground-source permafrost" brings up links about permafrost melting due to climate change. Do you have a link about them being banned?

Just to expand on the points you brought up, heat pumps are a key component of going fully fossil free. Especially in colder places, ground source heat pumps make some sense. District heating was common in USSR IIRC, and converting large plants to ground-source should be easier than trying to do each individual home. (If I were king, emperor or ruler) I'd like to see large new buildings built to be fossil free in this manner and large subdivisions built with shared ground-source loop access run through individual heat-pumps. A search on distributed ground-source came up with this link: heating - Why aren't Geothermal heat pumps more common? - Home Improvement Stack Exchange: https://diy.stackexchange.com/questions/7565/why-arent-geothermal-heat-pumps-more-common

If I understand the process, gases are blown by solar winds from the earth to the moon, so it's trapped earth gases and not a finite resource. Also, if we don't use it, who will? Is there any benefit to anyone not using lunar ice? I have to admit, this wasn't something I gave much thought...

Oh, hydrogen boil-off and insulation requirements - gotcha. Methane helps there too.

Losses? I'm a bit confused, can you elaborate a bit? A process for extracting oxygen while sintering regolith into bricks exists, as does a process while smelting regolith for its resources IIRC. Oxygen is also the heaviest part of 6:1 in a hydrolox propellant, so even extracting oxygen might kickstart the process. Methalox is interesting because the amount of hydrogen needed is reduced, replaced by Carbon, CH4, and COx is also found in the lunar ice.

Extracting Oxygen from lunar dust (regolith) is possible. I was assuming that we will have confirmed accessible water in the deep craters of the (south) pole, making water, air and some other gases available on the moon. Here is a pretty good paper on extracting lunar water for propellant. It's a 16 year plan. http://www.spudislunarresources.com/Papers/Affordable_Lunar_Base.pdf Interesting to note, this 2010 paper pegs launch cost at $5m/t. OK, it's not my understanding, but I'm happy to use $1.4m/t as a baseline. With competition, prices may drop further. Putting propellant directly into LEO costs a certain amount. Presumably, it is cheaper to send propellant from the moon, because delta-v is much lower. So the question was, how soon and how would this be accomplished? Another way to look at it is, instead of building another space station (Deep Space Gateway) in low lunar orbit, it might be better to build a moon base so that water, oxygen, etc. don't need to be sent from earth to it and at a later time, propellant can ALSO be returned to LEO reducing the cost of sending people and cargo to the Moon and Mars. So, what's the fastest way to get this chicken-egg thing going?

It's $90m for a reusable falcon heavy (landed boosters) which has a reduced payload capacity because fuel must be reserved for landing and also legs and grid fins must be lifted, taking away payload capacity. We can only guess at the price, but $2.3m/t is a conservative and known number. I was using $2m/t, but even $1m/t isn't out of the realm of possibility, given reuse ability, better performance and enhancements.

Getting stuff to space is very expensive, about $2 million per ton to LEO (currently). ~$150 million for 63.8t, so ~$2.3 million per tonne on falcon heavy expendable. Capabilities & Services | SpaceX: http://www.spacex.com/about/capabilities Assuming we don't want to wait for BFR or SLS, what CAN be done with Falcon Heavy, lowest budget, fastest kickstart of propellant mining and delivery to LEO? Do we NEED to have people ON the moon or can robots do the job? I haven't seen robots that can do this yet, so is it faster/better to start on a moon base or work on robots, or do both? Are there pieces of infrastructure that can be laid down right away, machines that can be operated tele-robotically? How would you do it?

The honda one is an ICE, no surprise. The whispergen is a sterling cycle engine. Regular heat pumps are electric motors. All of them mechanically compress gas into liquid, so they all have moving parts. There is an absortion cycle which runs off of heat so no moving parts (except the fluid), but efficiency is low. Unless there is a "free" heat source, it's hardly worth it (COP <2 IIRC). Efficiency is good with the mechanical heat pumps if the "waste" heat is used for space heating. But they still burn fossil fuels.

Googling "heat stores" came up with the idea that electricity is often cheaper at night (it is here) so solar to heat-pump has that disadvantage. Shower drainwater came to mind as a preheat source (can also simply preheat incoming cold water as in a powerpipe). Other sources may have diminishing returns. I've always liked the idea of efficient combined water and space heating.

Use solar thermal panels instead of a ground loop. Is there enough solar energy during cold, short days? The system below seems to rely upon air temperature as well as solar heat, plus an electric heater... SunPump pumps new life into solar thermal heating : TreeHugger: https://www.treehugger.com/clean-technology/sunpump-solar-powered-heat-pump-sort.html https://www.sunpump.solar/

Right. It would have been a vertical loop if anything and cost the same as a lower end car to install. There has to be a better way. You already had a radiant heating system, so that's a plus. Forced air needs an even hotter hot side which eats into efficiency. That's where the confusion came in, usually, around here, it's air to air heatpump or water to air and air to air doesn't cut it. Glossed over both the spelling and the reversed order...

Hey Studiot, What sort of ground source do you use? Was it expensive?

Needing ground source heat is a big problem - tends to be expensive no matter where it is, worse where space is limited. It would be nice if the city could supply it from a nearby basin or river. Air heat pumps tend to equal energy put in as heat at the bottom end of their usefulness which is above the lowest outdoor temperatures in cold regions, so that other means are necessary to supplement when temperatures are coldest. Basically, we need two systems, again expensive. There are heat pumps that run off of fuels (natural gas) from whispergen, honda and others, but they all have their issues - noise, vibration, oil changes, expense or efficiency... I'd love to find a solution to this, looking at solar heat as potential since there is a lag between coldest temperatures and shortest days, but it's a cumbersome system.

Maybe? Fresnel Lens Solar Power Foundry Obsidian Farm 3800 ˚ F 2100˚ C Fresnel Optics greenpowerscience - YouTube:

http://lmgtfy.com/?q=wind+energy+subsidy-free

Other factors are initial air humidity and a heated bed creates a convective air flow - otherwise where does the water vapour go? I guess this knowledge is needed to compare to other methods. Another method came to mind: Use a geothermal heat pump to heat the soil and cool/dry the incoming air then the dry air absorbs moisture as it is blown/drawn across the soil and out again, assuming electricity is used for heating. Interesting company, biowon, they even talk about Mars soil potential, though wet soil isn't likely a Mars issue.