OTEC (Ocean Thermal

Energy Conversion)
Earth? It might be better called Oceanus: most of it is, after all, covered in
water—much of it very warm water. The really interesting thing about the
ocean is not how hot it is, but the difference in temperature between the
surface (where the Sun keeps the sea relatively hot) and the depths (where
the water, never warmed by the Sun, is considerably cooler).
As any engineer knows, a temperature difference like this is very useful indeed
if you're trying to make power. So why not use the heat in Earth's vast oceans
to generate useful energy?
That's the basic thinking behind OTEC (ocean thermal energy conversion),
first suggested in 1881, which involves extracting useful energy from the heat
locked in the oceans. How much energy are we talking about?
According to some estimates, there's enough heat in the upper layers of the
oceans to meet humankind's energy needs hundreds of times over. Sounds
great! So... how exactly does it work? Let's take a closer look!
 How does this work?
• The greater the temperature difference between the hot steam and the
cooled water vapor it becomes, the more energy can be extracted (and the
more efficient the engine).
• In OTEC, we use the temperature difference between the hot surface of the
ocean and the cooler, deeper layers beneath to drive a heat engine in a
broadly similar way—except that no fuel is burned: we don't need to create a
difference in temperature by burning fuel because a temperature
gradient exists in the oceans naturally!
• Since the temperature difference is all-important, we need the biggest
vertical, temperature gradient we can possibly find (at least 20° and ideally
more like 30–40°). In practice, that means a place where the surface waters
are as hot as we can find and the deep waters (perhaps 500–1000m or 1000–
3000ft beneath ) are as cold as possible. The best place to find such a
combination is in the tropics (between the latitudes of about 20°N and 20°S).
How much power could OTEC
make?
• Considering how big and deep the oceans are, it comes as no surprise to find
they soak up and retain vast amounts of solar energy. Some years ago ocean
engineer Richard Seymour estimated that the oceans and atmosphere between
them "intercept... about 80 trillion kW, or about one thousand times as much
energy as used by man globally." How much of that could we recover from the
sea? According to the US Department of Energy's
National Renewable Energy Laboratory (DOE/NREL), on a typical day, the
tropical oceans mop up heat energy equivalent to 250 billion barrels of oil.
Converting a mere 0.005 percent of this into electricity would be enough to
power the whole of the United States!
• However, impressive-sounding estimates like this don't take account of the
tremendous practical difficulties involved in harvesting ocean energy.
A basic closed-cycle OTEC plant is
shown in the figure Warm seawater
passes through an evaporator and
vaporizes the working fluid,
ammonia. The ammonia vapor
passes through a turbine which
turns a generator making electricity.
The lower pressure vapor leaves the
turbine and condenses in the
condenser connected to a flow of
deep cold seawater. The liquid
ammonia leaves the condenser and
is pumped to the evaporator to
repeat the cycle.
 Summary of Closed Cycle OTEC
system
• Ammonia (or another low-boiling, heat-transport fluid) flows around a closed loop at the heart of the system. That's the white square in
the center of this illustration.
• Hot water enters a completely separate pipe near the surface of the ocean and is piped toward the central loop containing the ammonia.
• The hot water and the ammonia flow past one another in a heat exchanger, so the hot water gives up some of its energy to the
ammonia, making it boil and vaporize.
• The vaporized ammonia flows through a turbine, making it spin.
• The turbine spins a generator, converting the energy to electricity.
• The electricity is carried ashore by a cable.
• Having left the turbine, the ammonia has given up much of its energy, but needs to be cooled fully for reuse. If the ammonia weren't
cooled in this way, it wouldn't be able to pick up as much heat next time around.
• How is the ammonia cooled? In a third pipe, cold water is pumped up from the ocean depths.
• The cold water and ammonia meet in a second heat exchanger, which cools the ammonia back down to its original temperature ready to
pass around the cycle again.
• The cold water from the ocean depths, now slightly warmed, escapes into the ocean (or it can be used for refrigeration or air
conditioning).
• The hot water from the ocean surface, slightly cooled, drains back into the upper ocean.
Timeline
• 1881: French physicist Jacques d'Arsonval suggests extracting heat energy from the oceans.
• 1926: Georges Claude, a student of d'Arsonval's, builds a prototype, on-shore energy-extracting machine on the coast of Cuba. In 1935, he tries and fails
to construct an experimental off-shore OTEC plant on a cargo ship. With Paul Boucheret, Claude receives a US patent for an open-cycle OTEC system
(number 2006985) on July 2, 1935.
• 1927: OTEC gains first widespread publicity when Albert G. Ingalls writes up the idea in an article "Inexhaustible Power from Sea Water—a Dream or a
Prophecy?" in Scientific American (May 1927, pages 339–342).
• 1960s: American engineer J. Hilbert Anderson (a specialist in refrigeration and heat cycles) and his son James Anderson, Jr. begin studying ocean thermal
energy. Having identified major shortcomings in Claude's OTEC plant, they propose using a closed loop of "working fluid" to remove heat from the upper
ocean in a similar way to the mechanism of a refrigerator. They're granted US patent 3312054 for their "Sea Water Power Plant," based on closed-cycle
OTEC using propane as the working fluid, on April 4, 1967.
• 1974: The United States opens the Natural Energy Laboratory of Hawaii (NELHA) on 130 hectares (322 acres) of land at Keahole Point on the Kona coast
as its primary test laboratory for OTEC. Using closed-cycle technology, it successfully builds a prototype, offshore, "mini-OTEC" plant on a US Navy barge.
• 1980: India begins a long series of research studies into OTEC, currently led by its National Institute of Ocean Technology (NIOT).
• 1982: Tokyo Electric Power Company and Toshiba successfully construct a small (100kW) OTEC plant on the island of Nauru, though much of the
electricity is used to operate the plant and only 30-40kW is successfully fed into the power grid.
• 1993: The Natural Energy Laboratory sets a new record for open-cycle OTEC of 50kW. Six years later, it successfully tests a 120kW closed-cycle plant.
• 2008: Tamil Nadu Electricity Board is operating an experimental 1MW plant at Kulasekarapattinam, near Tiruchendur in the Tuticorin district.
• 2009: US Navy contracts Lockheed Martin to develop a 5–10MW OTEC plant (currently budgeted at $12.5million).
• 2015: Lockheed Martin opens its OTEC plant in Hawaii, connects it to the US power grid, and announces plans for a much more ambitious 10MW plant in
China.
Advantages
OTEC sounds immensely attractive: it's clean, green renewable energy that doesn't
involve burning fossil fuels, producing large amounts of greenhouse gases, or releasing
toxic air pollution. By helping to reduce our dependence on fuels such as petroleum,
OTEC could also help to reduce the "collateral" damage the world suffers from an oil-
dependent economy—including wars fought over oil and water pollution from tanker
spills. It could also provide a very useful source of power for tropical island states that
lack their own energy resources, effectively making them self-sufficient. As we've
already considered, open-cycle OTEC can play a useful part in providing pure, usable
water from ocean water. OTEC can also be used to produce fuels such as hydrogen; the
electricity it generates can be used to power an electrolysis plant that would split
seawater into hydrogen and oxygen, which could be bottled or piped ashore and then
used to power such things as fuel cells in electric cars. The waste cooling water used by
an OTEC plant can also be used for aquaculture (growing fish and other marine food
such as algae under controlled conditions), refrigeration, and air conditioning.
Disadvantages
The biggest problem with OTEC is that it's relatively inefficient. The laws of physics
(in this case, the Carnot cycle) say that any practical heat engine must operate at
less than 100 percent efficiency; most operate well below—and OTEC plants,
which use a relatively small temperature difference between their hot and cold
fluids, have among the lowest efficiency of all: typically just a few percent. For
that reason, OTEC plants have to work very hard (pump huge amounts of water)
to produce even modest amounts of electricity, which brings two problems. First,
it means a significant amount of the electricity generated (typically about a third)
has to be used for operating the system (pumping the water in and out). Second,
it implies that OTEC plants have to be constructed on a relatively large scale,
which makes them expensive investments. Large-scale onshore OTEC plants could
have a considerable environmental impact on shorelines, which are often home
to fragile, already threatened ecosystems such as mangroves and coral reefs.
Some Visual!
https://youtu.be/LJV4d4XtHuo