Posted on 11/17/2004 10:25:10 AM PST by cogitator
Ping!
If someone can perfect a methane powered car, we will serve beans and rice, cabbage and noodles and broccoli before every trip back home to Cleveland!
35 years ago there was a Scandinavian fellow who asserted that oil and gas were not from dead dinosaurs but were from ongoing biological activity in the lower crust. My college housemate at the time was studying this stuff (later worked in the oil industry and became a state geologist in an oil state). The theory wasn't well received - he was basically looked on as a Chariots-of-the-Gods-type nut. More and more recent evidence seems to be suggesting he was right. For the life of me, though, I can't recall his name.
Can't drill there, we'd be killing those precious coal-eating microbes.
enery alternative ping
ENERGY (sp) alternative ping
Wow, how can I buy shares??
This may sound strange, considering that I was 10 at the time, but I do remember my Dad talking about that theory.
He was a Science nut and read tons. He told me that he felt that in his lifetime he would see cars powered by something other than gasoline. Pitifully he only lived until 1982. He would be geeked out about this find.
Can anyone help me out and explain the difference between methane and propane?
I thought natural gas = propane. The article talks about methane though.
Thanks!
Interesting, and potetially devistating to the Man-made Global Warming Junk Science Industry.
But curious minds want to know what happens to convert CO2 into CH4. Where's the O go and where the H come from?
Any chemists on board?
---maybe Tom Gold?
no prob...
All of the petroleum gases are "Natural gas".
Methane = CH4
Propane = C4H8 (or is it C3H6, cant remember.)
For the record, natural gas in your house is mostly methane, if not all. Other gases have higher heating values and may be added to increase the heat value. Propane that you buy in bottles for your grill is all propane. Also, the gases are odorless. The smell is a leak detector added.
I currently work in the PRB as an engineer and can tell you that there is not a lower impact on the environment natural resource that I can think of. Now if only Montana would let us drill.
Methane is CH4, with the single carbon atom bonded by its 4 covalent bonds to 4 hydrogen atoms.
Ethane is C2H6, with two carbon atoms bonded together and the remain 3 electrons on each carbon bonded to three hyrdogen atoms.
Propane is C3H8, with the three carbon atoms bonded together and the remaining 8 bonds bound to hydrogen atoms.
Butane is C4H10. Since you can hook 4 carbons together in many different ways, there are many different isomers of Butane.
Pentane is C5H12. Isomers here, too.
Etc.
Methane = CH4, propane = C3H8. Here's a detailed discussion:
http://techreports.larc.nasa.gov/ltrs/PDF/NASA-96-tp3572.pdf
Possibly like this:
CO2 + 2H2O = CH4 + 2O2
This would also explain the oil fields that were thought to have been empty suddenly being able to produce again.
This is NOT good at all. We will now have to find some other way to insist that people change their habits and submit to a global socialist command economy.
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