Posted on 08/06/2008 4:58:21 PM PDT by djsherin
A modern society such as that in the United States requires personal transportation — cargo trucks, planes, and cars — to make a market economy work. Any serious effort to move our country to mass transportation, such as trains and buses, for everyone and everything all the time — or even most of the time — would destroy not only our economy, but the American way of life. To provide our personal transportation for the foreseeable future, the United States needs oil or an oil substitute.
Electric vehicles, the proposed solution by many for America’s transportation problems, have serious drawbacks generally ignored by a pliant news media. Besides being automotive weenies, their batteries don’t hold a sufficient charge for many everyday trips, and require hours to recharge — unless you want to charge them quickly (thus shortening their life span) and pay the $3,000-5,000 price for replacement batteries. One might also ask: “Where is the electricity to come from if electric cars become ubiquitous?” It is estimated that it would require a dozen 1,000-megawatt power plants to replace the petroleum fuels in Los Angeles alone.
The “hydrogen economy” is a total farce. Hydrogen-powered cars are about as practical as licorice submarines.* Their only reason for being is to prove to a naïve public that the manufacturer is in on being “Green.” No, we need oil or something like it for the foreseeable future.
(Excerpt) Read more at thenewamerican.com ...
I guess I would like to hear from a Brazilian mechanic about the durability and maintenance history of vehicles running on ethanol. Anyone have a suggestion?
Algae is as much as 50% oil by volume and you’d be talking about 20,000 gallons/acre/year from desert land vs 18 from farmland for ethanol for corn so that the oil from algae idea is totally believable.
Better algae than corn.
People think that Oxygen only grows on trees.
Those poor underrated algae.
The article is mainly about oil from algae.
I think algae actually can create the equivalent of crude oil, or at least biodiesel, as opposed to ethanol.
From the article:
“The end product is crude oil that is almost chemically indistinguishable from light, sweet crude oil, except that it is green in color.”
There is some talk about gene splicing that would cause algae to emit more complex hydrocarbons such as an oil that can be burned in diesel engines with little or no processing. Now THAT would be cool.
Cool and is certainly the focus of a lot of research going on right now. Pretty much any plant other than algae is already obsolete for fuel.
It makes sense. Plants already manufacture oils. Why not splice a gene that makes soybeans or canola produce oil onto an algae cell. All you need is just a bit of warmth and sunlight.
They’ve already bred algae that doesn’t need light to produce. They also think they can jack it up to 100K gallons per acre.
And someone’s going to have to show me how algae is ethanol.
If the algae doesn’t use sunlight for energy, then it will have to use something else, probably biomass. Yeast uses sugar to produce ethanol. But why use biomass when sunlight is free? In the summer, practically the whole US could make bio-oil from algae. All you need is an uncovered tank with water in it and a way to skim off the oil so the algae doesn’t suffocate.
If soybeans can produce oil, why can’t that gene be spliced to a algae? BTW, oil and ethanol are both hydrocarbons with ethanol being the simpler.
Uncovered tanks weren’t working out so now they’re trying closed systems. If this was so easy we’d all be using algae diesel. As for splicing genes and making new types of algae, that may be what we end up doing, but that scares me a little. If some super hardy new strain of algae gets out in the wild, and it would get out in the wild, it could cause all sorts of unintended problems.
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