Replies

This is not likely to accomplish a reduction in petroleum use. Most of the oil is used for transportation fuel, and virtually all transportation is powered by oil. The reason is that oil is a VERY dense, compact, convenient, and inexpensive way to store and transport energy. Of course, the energy is only available in combination with oxygen, usually from the atmosphere.

I suspect that even if it can be made to work, continuously, and produce more energy than it requires for operation, the energy that it produces will not be sufficiently concentrated to be useful unless it is scaled up to mammoth proportions. In other words, the fusion powered wristwatch, computer, car, home, or even industrial plant is unlikely.

The form of energy it will produce is almost certainly just heat. That will either boil water for steam or perhaps produce steam directly in the reaction chamber somehow. The steam will power a conventional turbine for electricity, with waste heat used for water purification, chemical processing, and eventually space heating.

But for transportation, we will have to produce an energy dense chemical fuel such as gasoline, diesel, or alcohol, or find an efficient way to isolate, store, and transport hydrogen. Today, oil is the cheapest source of transportation fuel available, primarily because it already contains all of the fuel energy. It just needs a little tweaking (reforming) to become the uniform, standardized fuels we are used to.

But we are using it faster than it was created, and at some point its use will become uneconomic. And by the way, the only place that pure hydrogen can be obtained in large quantities in an exothermic reaction is also from oil.

Will we "run out" of oil? Not no but HECK NO! We can manufacture the molecules by synthesis if necessary. Proved oil reserves is a concept based equally on resources and economics. Higher prices encourage exploration - there are more drill rigs active today than at any other time in history. They also make marginal production profitable, both from smaller, more remote, or more difficult to extract sources and from old fields using newer or more advanced (and expensive) recovery techniques. And they encourage substitution - direct substitution, like alcohol, or indirect, like using electric heating instead of heating oil. Or even by using nuclear sourced electricity to manufacture fuel in a large, combined-cycle plant.