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George W. Bush will be reelected by a margin of at least ten per cent

There is as much recoverable oil locked up in oil shale deposits that have been exploited the old way up to now. It will require new technology to get at it but never fear there's plenty left to find along with coal gassification extraction potential, fossil fuels are still plentiful, just harder to break up and get at them!

We'll keep using oil as long as it's cheaper than anything else or Jesus comes. I'm pretty sure the latter is much closer than our exhausting cheap oil sources.

Some old links, probably deceased and well on their way to becoming coal:

World oil and gas 'running out'
by Graham Jones
October 2, 2003
CNN

Global Warmers Admit No Solutions
by Steven Milloy
Friday, November 01, 2002
Fox News

Pipe Dreams Draw Environmental Fire
by Sam Olukoya
Tuesday April 17, 2001
The pipeline will tap Nigeria's estimated 124 trillion cubic feet of natural gas - 2.6 per cent of the world's reserves - and divert gas wasted by gas flaring in the oil-rich Niger Delta. Nigeria currently burns off unwanted gas left over from oil extraction, a process that emits carbon dioxide and methane into the environment - two of the greenhouse gases that cause global warming. Nigeria flares more than 70 per cent of its natural gas, compared to less than 20 per cent by other oil-producing countries, sending tens of millions of tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions into the air each year.

Niger Delta environmentalist Isaac Osuaka said a project of this magnitude will worsen human rights violations in the Niger Delta, where local communities are agitating to wrest control over local natural resources and to stop environmental degradation from oil exploration. Environmental groups and human rights organisations from Europe and the US -- Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth, Oil Watch Europe, Transnational Institute, Project Underground and Sierra Club -- are focusing their attack on the World Bank, which is drafting a financial management plan to make the pipeline profitable. The groups, through a joint protest letter drafted in December 2000, are asking the Bank to withdraw.
Nano fuel additive enters efficiency trials
by Barry Fox
15 October 03
New Scientist
[A] British firm says it has developed an additive that makes diesel burn more efficiently, producing fuel savings of 10 per cent. And the UK's largest bus operator is running large-scale tests to find out for itself if the claims are true. The diesel additive, called Envirox, has been developed by Oxonica, an Oxford-based spin-off company from the University of Oxford. It consists of tiny particles of cerium oxide, which catalyse the combustion reactions between diesel and air. The cerium oxide functions as a kind of oxygen store. It releases oxygen to oxidise carbon monoxide and hydrocarbon gases to form carbon dioxide, and also absorbs oxygen to reduce the quantities of harmful nitrogen oxides. The result is a cleaner burn that converts more fuel to carbon dioxide, produces less noxious exhaust, and deposits less carbon on the engine cylinder walls.
Carbon dioxide turned into hydrocarbon fuel
16:00 02 August 02
New Scientist
Nakamichi Yamasaki of the Tokushima Industrial Technology Center in Japan says he has a process that makes propane and butane at relatively low temperatures and pressures. While his work still needs independent verification, if he can make even heavier hydrocarbons, it might be possible to make petrol. It has carbon chains that are between five and 12 atoms long - butane is four atoms long. The work suggests the tantalising prospect that CO2, the main greenhouse gas, could be recycled instead of being pumped into the atmosphere.
Fusion experiment disappoints
Thursday, 25 July, 2002
BBC
[F]resh research from Kenneth Suslick and Yuri Didenko, of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, now suggests the temperatures inside a single imploding bubble fall several million degrees short of that needed for fusion. If confirmed, this would be a disappointment. Science is desperately looking for a practical fusion approach that would eliminate the need to use the far dirtier fission process currently employed in the world's nuclear reactors... Instead of the millions of degrees Celsius that are needed to drive a fusion event, Professor Suslick said the temperature inside the cavitating bubbles was only reaching 15-20,000 Celsius... Professor Suslick stresses that cavitation will have many practical uses. Possible applications include making catalysts to clean fuels, removing sulphur from gasoline, and enhancing the chemical reactions used to make pharmaceuticals. The process has already been used to make new chemical catalysts for industrial use and biomedical agents for magnetic resonance imaging (MRI).
Nuclear fusion gets quadruple boost
by Eugenie Samuel, Boston
New Scientist
In experiments at the US National Fusion Facility in San Diego, researchers have quadrupled the rate of fusion in superhot deuterium gas.
Non-metallic magnet could be dream computer memory
by Justin Mullins
New Scientist
A transparent, flexible magnetic material made from an exotic form of carbon could turn out to be the dream computer memory. The substance, which was discovered accidentally by a Russian physicist hunting for high-temperature superconductors, is the first non-metallic magnet to work at room temperature. Organic magnets could be important because they are much lighter than their metallic cousins. Exactly why the material is magnetic is not yet clear.
Nanotubes hint at room temperature superconductivity
by Adrian Cho
New Scientist
Guo-meng Zhao and Yong Sheng Wang of the University of Houston in Texas found subtle signs of superconductivity. It wasn't zero resistance, but it's the closest anyone's got so far. At the moment no superconductor will work above about 130 kelvin (-143°C). But if a material could carry current with no resistance at room temperature, no energy would be lost as heat, meaning faster, lower-power electronics. And electricity could be carried long distances with 100 per cent efficiency.
Warm up
by Justin Mullins
New Scientist
The claim, from researchers in Croatia, comes just a few weeks after the discovery that the simple chemical magnesium diboride superconducts at temperatures up to almost twice those needed for other metallic superconductors to work. The Croatian scientists say that current will flow effortlessly through their material, a mixture of lead carbonate and lead and silver oxides, at up to about 30 °C. But because of numerous false alarms in this field, researchers are treating the announcement with caution, especially as no one has yet managed to reproduce the results.
Simpler superconducting
by Duncan Graham-Rowe
New Scientist
A previously ignored "off-the-shelf" chemical compound has been found to superconduct at far higher temperatures than believed possible for simple metallic compounds. Until now such metal compounds have only been found to operate at around 23K. But Jun Akimitsu and his colleagues at Aoyama-Gakuin University in Tokyo, Japan, have made magnesium diboride (MgB2) superconduct at 39K.
Down in Motown
by Peter Fairley
July/August 2001
Technology Review
A gritty section of Detroit surrounds one of the city's oldest electric power stations. But the technology that Detroit Edison is installing at the Frisbie substation is pure 21st century—underground superconducting cables that can transmit immense currents of electricity with near perfect efficiency.

While increasing energy demands are putting more and more stress on the nation's long-distance power transmission network, cities are suffering their own version of electric gridlock; in many locations, underground transmission lines are fast reaching capacity and are literally burning up. Superconducting cables, like the ones being installed in Detroit, could safely triple the power moving through existing conduits, avoiding the need to dig up the streets—even making room for fiber-optic communications lines.

The Frisbie demonstration marks a milestone in electricity know-how—one of the first commercial applications of high-temperature superconductors. These ceramics, first fashioned by IBM researchers in 1986, now transmit alternating currents with nearly zero resistance at temperatures as high as -139 °C (the materials can be cheaply cooled to that temperature using liquid nitrogen). In contrast, conventional copper cables dissipate as much as 10 percent of the power they carry because of resistance; that lost power escapes as heat, which limits just how much juice can flow before the cable melts.
Thermoelectric Clathrates
by George Nolas and Glen A. Slack
American Scientist
Abstract: Certain substances allow heat to be pumped from one place to another using electricity. Such thermoelectric materials also allow electricity to be generated from heat. Yet the promise of solid-state refrigerators and air conditioners has never been fulfilled, in large part because the efficiency of these materials is comparatively low. Thus thermoelectrics are restricted to specialized applications: thermocouples, radioisotope power generators and thermoelectric coolers for image sensors, for example. The fundamental problem is that a good thermoelectric must have high electrical conductivity and low thermal conductivity, but in most solids these two physical properties go hand in hand. A promising solution is to use semiconducting clathrates. These compounds have cage-like crystal structures in which the spaces are filled with atoms that can effectively rattle around. This motion interferes with the conduction of heat but not electricity, making them ideal candidates for the next generation of thermoelectrics.

Good night all.

"Life does not cease to be funny when people die any more than it ceases to be serious when people laugh." -- G.B. Shaw

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137 posts and I did not see this mentioned anywhere:

DRILL A.N.W.R.

Probably a dead link, I haven't checked. BTTT.

The Subatomic Assembly of H2
by Theodore Gray
December 2003
My first exercise in hydrogen production was to drop a 9-volt battery into a cup of water. (Hey, I was only 12 -- what do you expect?) Amazingly, it worked: I had managed to assemble pure hydrogen gas out of subatomic particles! The protons came from the water itself, which always has a bunch of them running around loose (naked protons are also called hydrogen ions). The electrons came from the battery. When I injected (well, plunged) the electrons into the water, they latched onto the protons to form a few small bubbles of hydrogen gas... From there I added salt to the water to increase its conductivity, thereby increasing the flow of current and the number of electrons available to pair up with all those wild protons. I crimped wires to the battery terminals for the same reason... I now use graphite rods: They last forever and are wonderfully cheap... Once they're sanded clean and soldered to a 9V battery clip, they produce great billowing clouds of hydrogen (and oxygen -- one gas from each electrode) for the life of the battery (which is only a couple of minutes -- there's a serious amount of current flowing now)... The gas bubbling off the negative electrode crackles and flashes: That's hydrogen.

Energy crisis ping / BTTT -- the process described isn't electrolysis, it's just a way to corral the atomic hydrogen present in most water, adding an electron (and no oxygen), and making it into molecular hydrogen (H2).

Most of us who have taken junior high science classes have seen electrolysis of water to turn it into oxygen and hydrogen gases. Those contraptions are glass, shaped like a big "H" (appropriately enough), with electrodes in the crossbar immersed in water. The current can only be run while the electrodes are submerged, or *kaboom*.

George W. Bush will win reelection by a margin of at least ten per cent.
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