Posted on 07/20/2004 9:27:15 AM PDT by Baby Bear
> "My county of birth in NORTH CAROLINA did not raise corn but rather manufactured it." <
Yes they did. They raised it to its highest and best use....
The largest hydrogen sink on the planet is its water, which is about 11% hydrogen. But breaking it out takes much more energy than its energy content as fuel. Gasoline, on the other hand, is more than 15% hydrogen, one of the most hydrogen dense compounds in existence. Even if we do change to a hydrogen economy, I suspect that the fuel vector will be gasoline. We certainly have the technology to use superclean gasoline as a fuel cell fuel. And when we run out, we will make more, as this article suggests.
I think the evolutionary path is through hybrid vehicles with on-board electricity generation, eventually combined with an ability to use externally supplied electricity, perhaps in towns or on major intercity routes. Using externally supplied electricity versus manufacturing fuel is far more efficient.
No, I don't know how to get all of this done, but perhaps some of you younger engineers can figure it out.
Just put windmills in front of all the seats in the Senate.
That will fuel the entire eastern seaboard.
Anything into OilGory refuse, from a Butterball Turkey plant in Carthage, Missouri, will no longer go to waste. Each day 200 tons of turkey offal will be carted to the first industrial-scale thermal depolymerization plant, recently completed in an adjacent lot, and be transformed into various useful products, including 600 barrels of light oil.
by Brad Lemley
There's work going on at the University of New Hampshire about processing algae to produce biodiesel, but there's also about 11 billion liters of waste vegetable oil in the US every year which can be converted to biodiesel through transesterification or simply heated, filtered, and used in a diesel engine.
There's also ways to produce ethanol from agricultural waste products.
Thankfully we live in America where people are used to thinking outside the box.
Jack Rich in Schuykill Co., PA has been trying to make coal into gas for number of years. Regulations, greenies and business problems have held him up.
I have heard that there are those who carry on that honorable tradition ;-)
11 billion liters/159 liters/barrel = 70 million barrels.
We use over 600 million gallons of diesel per year, so this would suffice, by itself, for less than a month. But diesel now powers only commercial transportation - planes, trucks, and trains - and virtually none of our private vehicles. If we replace gasoline powered private vehicles with diesel hybrids, even with higher efficiency, we would need three to five times as much, so that would be more like a week than a month. To supply ourselves, we would have to dedicate crops to the purpose - we simply do not produce enough out of our existing agricultural infrastructure.
Now I happen to agree with you about diesel, especially for indirect-drive (full-electric) hybrids. Diesel engines are much more fuel efficient, and could drive a rotary generator with significantly less fuel than a similar gasoline engine, although they might be harder to start/stop. It is my understanding that diesels operate efficiently over a narrower RPM range, but that is exactly how an electric generator ought to work best. But I am not aware of any manufacturer building such a powerplant, although it would seem an obvious thing to try.
Even offsetting a twelfth of our annual diesel fuel consumption would be a major accomplishment towards reducing our dependence on foreign oil.
But perhaps this sort of thing will proceed grassroots, as it has been - the last time my brother bought diesel fuel was 2 gallons on the way home to Berkeley from a trip to Los Angeles, after burning 40-odd gallons of used fryer oil that he took off the hands of a San Francisco restaurant during the trip.
That comes under the heading of "every little bit helps," but it is not transformative. Private consumption of diesel is negligible in terms of total consumption. Also, diesel alternatives cannot be used everywhere, and for some uses require considerable reprocessing.
We already run a VERY significant part of our commercial transportation on hybrid technology - every locomotive is primarily a set of electric motors to drive the wheels. Most of them also contain a large, diesel-electric generator to drive those motors, but in many places they run off of external power, supplied by a third rail or a trolley.
By the way, this is why I have to laugh when I hear about the difficulty of scaling up the small hybrid cars that are available today.
But suppose most of our cars were like this - electric powered, but with on-board generation capability to free us from the tether of external power. And now suppose that for intercity trips, or even for in-town driving by some means, you could tap into an electric grid for motive power. This would actually require little more power than our current grid can provide, and would provide a great deal of relief from dependence on oil. This would be truly transformative, and send the oil sheiks back into their tents in the desert, where they could use their oil to keep warm because we don't need to buy it from them any more.
Today, nearly 3/4 of all crude oil becomes transportation fuel, and over 95% of transportation fuel comes from oil. The lead article addresses some ways to change these numbers, but it will not happen overnight.
Far too logical for the doctrinaire ideologues on this forum. Anything that smells like applied technological solutions will send them into a frenzy of gnashing and wailing that only oil, liberated by military action, can ever be used as an energy source.
Odd attitudes for people who characterize themselves as being more insightful than knee jerk liberals.
The problem with the usual implementation of that approach is that it involves a massive, centralized electricity generating facility that disburses electricity through a grid to the end user.
Which is to say that this implementation, like all implementations of "mass transportation," is extraordinarily vulnerable to terrorism.
One of the ironies of 9-11 is that the United States is, maybe after Australia, the industrialized nation LEAST susceptible to terrorism, because our population is so widely disbursed [in the suburbs] and shuns mass transportation in favor of the family automobile.
Nations like England, France, Germany, Japan, and Taiwan [or, worse yet, Hong Kong] are just sitting ducks for terrorist attacks, because their populations are so highly concentrated, so highly dependent on mass transportation [compare Spain on 3-11], and because their power grids also tend to be highly centralized [think of the nuclear power grid in France]. Of course, the poster-child for a highly concentrated population that's highly dependent on mass transportation would be none other than Israel herself.
You could do electricity as a source of propulsion, but to shield it adequately from terrorist attack, you're gonna need a generator in every backyard across the United States, and judging from how loud those things can get, that could cause some serious insomnia.
Regulator: Far too logical for the doctrinaire ideologues on this forum. Anything that smells like applied technological solutions will send them into a frenzy of gnashing and wailing that only oil, liberated by military action, can ever be used as an energy source. Odd attitudes for people who characterize themselves as being more insightful than knee jerk liberals.
Ugh - this is even worse than what I replied to in #35 above.
Do you have any links for companies that you can recommend?
For a while I've been semi-seriously nursing this fantasy of going 100% offline - phone service from a cell phone company, internet connectivity off a satellite [e.g. DirecPC], and power from my own diesel generator [which would also power the well, for potable water].
The sorts of consumer-grade generators that they sell at e.g. Home Depot are almost as loud as going to a tractor pull, or a monster truck race.
Onan's a big name, their transfer boxes are pretty much the only ones used by the military at fixed sites. The military generators are built by different companies to specifications. At my next drill I'll try and get some more info.
I disagree. On-board generation using liquid hydrocarbon fuel provides an immediately available backup for the transportation electric grid in this plan. Yes, I understand that as soon as it went in there would be a clamor to make grid use mandatory inside cities, but an exception for grid outage ought to be part of the plan.
Good argument, though.
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