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Cake day: March 31st, 2025

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  • people see strait closed and think of oil because of course there’s a lot of oil going through it, but oil can be routed through pipelines outside gulf so impact on oil is less than that 20% commonly cited

    the bigger impact is on gas, because it can’t be transported that easily and it’s closer to 40% of supply. because gas is so hard to transport you can try to avoid doing that, so it’s turned into fertilizer and diesel and aluminum, whose transport is easier, and isn’t as constrained as LNG transport. byproduct of gas mining is helium and it can’t be mined on its own, and while valuable enough to be flown out of qatar supply stops when gas stops. gulf royals have seen that world tries to get rid of oil, so this energy intensive manufacture was intended as a sort of hedge or insurance, but this too stops without transport

    so, yeah. things that can be expected to directly get more expensive are energy in general and gas in particular, plastics of all kinds, aluminum, nitrogen fertilizer and to some degree phosphorus fertilizer (uses sulfur as input). and everything that depends on them, which is broadly everything. the only winning move is not to play ie use renewables for energy. these chinese officials who backed renewables buildout are probably the most vindicated people in hemisphere

    that said, you can make fertilizer from other fuels, and in other places too, so it’s likely that it will “just” get more expensive, and lower nitrogen use might work about as well because many farmers overapply it. if you are a westerner i guess you might not see it hitting you too hard, but in places like sudan that will be a problem










  • fullsquare@awful.systemstoScience Memes@mander.xyzAll mixed up
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    4 days ago

    this advice is specifically about sulfuric acid. it’s denser than water, so if added to it it will sink diluting itself along the way, while also heating water around and making it float to the surface. if done opposite way, water won’t mix immediately because of large density difference so neutralizatio heat will be deposited on surface between these two boiling water and throwing acid around. this matters less with other acids because less heat is deposited, and in some cases acid is less dense than water. but if you stir the acid quickly, you can do it either way as long as you control temperature. this also is the case when you need to mix two different acids

    tldr you can do whatever you want as long as you know what are you doing

    e: i’ve checked and heat of dilution is greatest for sulfuric acid, liquid HF is similar per gram, gaseous HCl and HBr are half of that per mol, other common acids 5-10x less esp as aqueous solutions and not neat. also the same happens when diluting acids with other solvents, like alcohols or ethers, these might be even worse because they boil at lower temperature








  • Stirling engines are woefully inefficient tho, PV panels are better unless you’re intending to supplement heat source with biomass or such. In a climate where most of energy is used for heating and little to none on AC, it just makes more sense to use solar collectors instead of PV because most of energy use will be in form of heat anyway, and per square meter collector will deliver much more. If you can couple excess heat production to seasonal energy storage, this gets you most or all of heat needs year round covered by solar, if you don’t there’s still free hot water in the summer and seriously lowered gas bill through the year. Small PV panel might make sense to keep pumps running or cover some of the rest of needs but won’t shift balance heavily either way. In a place where major use of energy is AC this approach makes no sense and PV panels with daily or a bit longer lasting storage of energy, be it in batteries or thermal (tanks of cold glycol or ice or whatever) would be the way to go, because the most sunny day is also the day when you need AC the most and this way you get most of your energy needs covered