Posted on 08/13/2004 10:47:51 AM PDT by spetznaz
The thing is with that 30 years is that anything longer than 20 years is as good as forever for engineering projects. They told us the same thing in 1955, 20-30 years of reserves.
Fuel cell? Hydrogen? nope...do your basic physics!
Hydrogen is a energy sink.... exactly the opposite of petroleum. Takes more energy to get the hydrogen than you get when you use it for work.........
Fusion? pipe dream
The Peak Oil theorists talk about what constitutes a resource. A resource is something that is worth a lot more than it costs to produce. Hydrogen doesn't meet that definition, so it won't be a resource in itself.
My point is that the pure hybrid car that I projected here would be, essentially, an electric car with an on-board diesel rotary or fuel-cell electric generator to enable off-grid operation. In rural areas, it would be off grid 100%, in town or on major intercity routes perhaps never. To return to the railroad analogy, the long-haul routes use on-board diesel generation, while many in-town short haul trains run on trolleys or third rails, without any on-board generation.
Today, almost 3/4 of all crude oil becomes transportation fuel, and more than 95% of transportation fuel comes from crude oil. A massive and efficient infrastructure is already in place, source to market, and will not easily be supplanted. But as I said above, gasoline components are just about the most hydrogen-dense compounds in the universe. If hydrogen becomes the fuel of the future, I believe that its transportable form will resemble gasoline. Perhaps it will be synthesized, high purity iso-octane. And I think that most cars of today (or instead, most diesels, if we go that route) could run on it without a problem.
I am fully aware of inductive charging, but you have to put your toothbrush in the stand, or have your car parked in just the right place, for it to work. And that place is expensive to build, so the infrastructure cost for the technology as it exists today would be prohibitive. Also, whatever you invent to transfer power will also have to include a foolproof billing system.
Manufacturing costs for hybrids will come down sharply with volume manufacture, and as I said, between the tiny toy cars and the massive locomotives, I really have to laugh at the idea that a proper sized hybrid vehicle would be hard to design. Diesels are more efficient, particularly over their narrower power range, so a constant-speed diesel generator in a hybrid seems a natural application for high efficiency while we wait for fuel cell prices to come down far enough to compete.
And all the people wanting clean fusion rather than dirty fission don't realize that any fusion reaction we even have a distant possibility of using in the near future will make neutrons.
Fission is it, but the KGB-funded anti-nukes in this country ruined it politically. If we ever get a president that allows reprocessing, a whole slew of problems can be solved.
Oil age will last until it runs out. Or until we learn how to extract oil directly from Alaskan Caribou.......
Has anyone heard that one guy who's convinced oil is produced biologically and is infact a renewable resource ?
Don't have his name handy.
Actually, I thought about it and I may have found the perfect place for the gigantic algae pond that can produce biomass for motor fuels: the Salton Sea in California's Imperial Valley. They can section off a 10 x 10 mile part of the Salton Sea and turn that into the gigantic algae pond I suggested.
Hydrogen is a energy sink.... exactly the opposite of petroleum. Takes more energy to get the hydrogen than you get when you use it for work.Well put. Besides the storage problem (for vehicles; and in terms of density, for a gas grid), hydrogen has to be made from something else for the most part. That system that "just uses batteries" (smirk smirk; I guess battery mines are commonplace) may rely on the hydrogen gas that can generally be found in water, and doesn't have to be released using electrolysis.
Once we harness the wind power of the Dems all shouting "Bush lied", we'll be sitting pretty.
A goodly amount of oil shale is in the Rocky Mountains, up around Rifle, Colorado. Imagine drilling and blasting these mountain sides, then putting them back 33 percent higher (not to mention the difficulties with the angle of repose with broken rock). Nice topic for next Wednesday's Sierra Club meeting, eh ?
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