As usual, Willie, you are easily refuted. Applies to your train fetish too.
Posted on 08/16/2005 6:23:06 AM PDT by ex-Texan
Of course it goes without saying that others will buy his oil and we'll just buy from other sources that they didn't buy from. The best thing to do about Chavez is just ignore him, that and keep these South Americans (who will soon be fleeing Lula and Chavez by the hundreds of thousands) from immigrating here so they won't change our country into the sort of clown colleges their countries are. Keeping them out might also force the few of them that are decent and capable into starting some sort of reform.
As usual, Willie, you are easily refuted. Applies to your train fetish too.
Ignorance is curmudgeonness.
I think the Karrick process of converting coal to oil, natural gas and coke would be the best bet for our energy independence.
But the technologies I mentioned could be part of the overall solution.
Here is an excerpt from a website I found about the Karrick Process....
The Karrick process involves low-temperature carbonization (LTC) of coal. This means heating coal at from 680 to 1380 degrees F., in the absence of air to prevent combustion, so as to distill out all the oil and gas. When you treat a ton of coal by LTC, you get back about a barrel of oil; 3,000 cubic feet of rich fuel gas; and 1,500 pounds of smokeless solid fuel. But if you harness the process to an integrated energy plant, using the off-peak steam, the same ton of coal can produce 100 kilowatt-hours of electricity besides. The Karrick process would combine a carbonizer, a refinery, a city gas works and a central electric station so as to produce oil, gas, smokeless fuel and electricity under the same roof at the same time. If an LTC plant produced more smokeless fuel than it and the community could consume at the moment, you could convert the surplus to water gas. And the water gas can be converted into four barrels of oil by the (Fischer) synthesis process. Geologists tell us there are enough latent heat units (BTUs) in America’s coal reserves to last us for a couple of millenia, give or take a few centuries. The LTC process is all it would take to dispel the monopoly myth that we must depend on Arabian princes to regulate our thermostats until world petroleum prices have broached some unspecified hole in the sky where it would pay us to begin using it. The energy crisis is really only an information crisis. The cartel is blocking LTC with help from Washington and Wall Street. These three monopoly powers—Big Oil, Big Bureaucracy, and Big Banking—oppose LTC because an integrated LTC energy industry would be amen-able to private enterprise initiative.
Yep. Take the nuclear subs we have. Very safe. Very dependable. And can be mass produced for a very decentralized power grid.
This would be beneficial for preventing the massive blackout we had a few summers ago.
As far as home heating, I live in an earth bermed home. I heat my whole house with a heater called the safehearth. It is the size of a small end table and has a thermostat. It is electric and my heating bills are about 30 dollars a month in the dead of winter.
I often do not even have to run any heat until around the last week of February. I have 4 heat sources.....wood burning stove, safehearth ( the main heating device), propane backup and passive solar.
My home faces south with big windows. When the sun is shining even on one day when the temperature was 12 below, my home was stable at 69 degrees for all the time the sun was up. My home has mass, so the thermal transfer kept the house between 66 and 69 degrees during that 24 hour period. The outside temperature never went above 1 below.
I believe that our current housing is vastly inadequate for the conservation and use of fuels.
We need government intervention like the speech Kennedy made about sending a man to the moon.
We need to have a leader that will untie our attachment to unstable areas of the world.
Oil is a global market. Assuming Chavez sells to somebody, the impact should be short term. The US will just have to pay some more shipping costs, a minor factor.
Your home, very interesting, I've only dreamed of such. I'm looking at building a small retirement home in the near future. Heating and cooling will be a large consideration.
Yes, all the small things we could, when multiplied by millions of homes would contribute greatly to national energy savings. How many of us leave our personal computers and lights on all day long - at several hundred watts per household?
By all means use all the solar produced energy you can.
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