Oil Alternatives!

[Philly]

Current war, not about oil. General hands on approach to the Middle East, about stability and protecting the international infrastructure, aka oil.

Personally, I think it will cost us less to kill some caribou and drill Alaska.

That makes me wonder. Why would Bush go and piss off 75% of the population with a war when they could have just angered a few tree huggers? Do the environmentalists have enough of an impact to turn the entire population?

 

[FoolKiller]

That makes me wonder. Why would Bush go and piss off 75% of the population with a war when they could have just angered a few tree huggers? Do the environmentalists have enough of an impact to turn the entire population?

Well, this war was about stopping terrorists, we can argue bad intelligence all day. Right or wrong, that's my honest belief, because if it was about oil we could focus all our attentions there and not in the cities and be keeping attacks on the oil infrastructure down by at least half. Instead we are more busy protecting people and training police with very minimal security near the oil infrastructure.


That said, did you watch NBC last week? With, at the time, about half of Congress and two of the biggest corporations in the world (GE and Microsoft) on the green bandwagon it is a tough nut to crack.

 

[Philly]

Well, this war was about stopping terrorists, we can argue bad intelligence all day. Right or wrong, that's my honest belief, because if it was about oil we could focus all our attentions there and not in the cities and be keeping attacks on the oil infrastructure down by at least half. Instead we are more busy protecting people and training police with very minimal security near the oil infrastructure.

I do believe we have just changed this into an Iraq war thread.

I beg to differ on what you said. If the war was about oil, would the White House publicly position all of the troops near oilfields and ignore cities and still try to say that the war was against terrorism or whatever it is now? And do we know where all of the troops are? All I had heard is that we were heavily fortified down in the oil areas. I haven't heard of many attacks on oil structures. And why invest in making Iraq a safer country? Easy. We get out sooner. They are more willing to give us what we want. We don't have to deal with it ourselves.

That said, did you watch NBC last week? With, at the time, about half of Congress and two of the biggest corporations in the world (GE and Microsoft) on the green bandwagon it is a tough nut to crack.

I am sorry, but I am pretty much disconnected from the news aside from the occasional browsing of BBC. And I tend to ignore the Iraq stuff because I feel it's getting a little old.

 

[FoolKiller]

I do believe we have just changed this into an Iraq war thread.

I believe you are correct. I suggest we agree to disagree on thsi point and let this thread get back on topic.

I am sorry, but I am pretty much disconnected from the news aside from the occasional browsing of BBC. And I tend to ignore the Iraq stuff because I feel it's getting a little old.

I wasn't referring to the news, rather NBC's Green Week on their network, where every show, even when it doesn't make sense, had an environmental theme and commercial breaks showed actors from that show doing volunteer work to "help" the environment.

Two shows decided to point out exactly how this was done. (paraphrasing)
My Name is Earl:
Earl: But an environmental theme doesn't really fit in with the rest of the show.
Warden: I don't care, just make it happen!

30 Rock:
Head of NBC: The head of GE is offering a challenge to all the subsidiaries to see who can push environmental issues while increasing sales and maintaining profitability.
Liz Lemon: So, we are going to force environmental themes on all our shows, have guests that have no relevance, and make no sense whatsoever?
Head of NBC: Exactly!

 

[Famine]

"EU Admits Famine Was Right About Biofuel".

 

[Azuremen]

"EU Admits Famine Was Right About Biofuel".

Can you add Azuremen in there as well?

 

[FoolKiller]

"EU Admits Famine Was Right About Biofuel".

Look at that, bureaucrats discovering they made a rash decision that only makes things worse.

 

[GT4 genius]

How many hundred of times were those issues talked about here. And i doubt any of us are EU government scientists so why didnt they forsee this before the rushed it in stupidly.
Do u think they read this thread and then realised what they had done!!!

 

[buickgnx88]

This is a bit late in the thread, but if they made solar energy fields it would be cool to have some really tall towers that can go above the clouds and collect the energy, be in the protection of the atmosphere, and have a direct energy line down to earth. Course they would need to be designed so they aren't tippy/sway alot and so they are appealing.

 

[V1P3R]

Here's something interesting. Saw it on Attack of the Show.

 

[Keef]

You have to grow crops to make biodiesel. We've already got a limited amount of room for crops, and if we apportion more (much, much more) to fuel, then there's less for food. Which means we have to get food from elsewhere. Biodiesel is a crappy large-scale idea. However, it's a great idea for farmers themselves and people who live in farm country. There's not many of them, and they live close to the source. Farmers could use a small portion of their crops and make their own biodiesel to fuel their truck or whatnot. Maybe large plantations could spare enough to fuel the whole fleet and only pay a small "fee" in having slightly less product to sell. It wouldn't be as hurtful on a very small scale.

Where's everybody at on the Pickens Plan? It's a stepping stone. Natural gas is relatively cheap and relatively easy, and that would buy time to find fuel sources not just for cars, but for the whole country. There's a lot of countries out there relying on foreign oil and this plan was made to help the U.S. specifically.

Apparently natural gas (methane) has a price vs. energy ratio of about $7 per 1million BTU. And since regular gasoline has 125,000 BTU per US gallon, that's... $24 per 1million BTU, with gasoline at $3 per gallon.

But, liquid natural gas only has 90,800 BTU per gallon, which means you won't get as much power and you won't get as far on the same amount of fuel. But that's okay because it'll cost a third the price which means we can use three times as much! Right?...

 

[V1P3R]

Yes yes... But this is a filter for the fuel no? What this is could be an easy way for the typical consumer to get used oil from places or oil they used and convert it to gas for their bio diesel vehicle.

 

[Bones Brigade]

Could vertical farming be used for the crops needed for biodiesel?

 

[Keef]

If it could, then all those crops would need to be bed and fed the way high-production plantations do now--with synthetic fertilizers. Lots of them. The soil can't recuperate its natural minerals and whatnot just over the winter--it takes years. So they've got to mix in all sorts of fertilizers with the soil to make it livable, and keep pouring it on the plants to keep them growing huge. Plus, the runoff from all those fertilizers is pretty nasty stuff. They'd have to design a pretty nifty plumbing system to keep that runoff separate from a city's water supply and sewage and surrounding bodies of water and the ground and everything. It's already poisonous, and it could have devastating effects on a large population of people if something went wrong with controlling it.

But I'm a pessimist. Feel free to innovate. I'll just let you know what could go wrong with it.

How about natural gas? Did I mention it burns cleaner than fuels from crude oil and plant matter? And if you implement an air-sucking device into every toilet you can gather methane for free every time you take a dump? Cows fart a lot, and they also get hooked up to machines that milk them. What's one more sucker stuck in their ass, eh?

 

[Joey D]

How about natural gas? Did I mention it burns cleaner than fuels from crude oil and plant matter? And if you implement an air-sucking device into every toilet you can gather methane for free every time you take a dump? Cows fart a lot, and they also get hooked up to machines that milk them. What's one more sucker stuck in their ass, eh?

Yes it's slightly renewable but it still has an impact on the environment when used in mass quantities. It can be used as a short term solution but the long term solution should be eco-friendly and able to be harvested in mass quantities efficiently.

 

[Rotary Junkie]

Here's something interesting. Saw it on Attack of the Show.

Yep and it's a load of bollox.

The only reason you'd HAVE to do any of what they describe as advantages is because you're a lazy hack...

 

[Keef]

The point of the Pickens Plan is to use that and wind power as short-term solutions, simply to give us more time to come up with other stuff. Ten or twenty or thirty years, who knows. At the rate technology is moving today we might only need it for 5. But yes, they're only short term solutions and yes we need something that will be much cleaner and last longer. It'd be nice if it was also a more powerful form of energy. I'm kinda digging that whole space microwave idea. Or the really high-in-the-sky windmill kinda things that roll in the fast winds like big barrels. Doing barrel rolls.

EDIT: The one microwave thing I'm worried about is the fact that the reciever thing here on earth has to cver an enormous area, which means that it would disrupt the wildlife in the area greatly. Also, it would have to be very far away from civilization. Ultimately I think the wind holds the most untapped energy of any resource on earth besides water. There's lots of nifty wind ideas out there, like the barrel roll things.

 

[GT4 genius]

In my opinion all we need is something to tide us over for at most the next 30-50 years. Hydrogen Fusion will almost certainly take over as the main form of energy then, as electricity. And between now and then I can see a lot of different forms of energy being common. I like the idea of bio-diesels in the countryside and then possibly electric cars in the big city, and maybe natural gas or hydrogen for the outer city suburb commuters. As for electricity, I think that too will be a combination of things, wind, nuclear fission, oil, peat, coal and wave. I dont think anyone will ever risk putting an enormous about of money into space just to have someone buy the energy and then pull out after a few years or something, and if something goes wrong, they arent the easiest thing to fix!

@ Keef; with regard to the fertilisers, here at least I know there is a massive about of restrictions so as no water ways are contaminated by them. Run off is not/should not be a problem at all. A farmer is only aloud spread so much so that it is absorbed by the land and doesnt make its way to rivers or stream or ground water tables. And most educated farmers obey this. Because its no advantage to them to see their extremely expensive fertiliser help grow algae in their rivers.

 

[Joey D]

The point of the Pickens Plan is to use that and wind power as short-term solutions, simply to give us more time to come up with other stuff. Ten or twenty or thirty years, who knows. At the rate technology is moving today we might only need it for 5. But yes, they're only short term solutions and yes we need something that will be much cleaner and last longer. It'd be nice if it was also a more powerful form of energy. I'm kinda digging that whole space microwave idea. Or the really high-in-the-sky windmill kinda things that roll in the fast winds like big barrels. Doing barrel rolls.

EDIT: The one microwave thing I'm worried about is the fact that the reciever thing here on earth has to cver an enormous area, which means that it would disrupt the wildlife in the area greatly. Also, it would have to be very far away from civilization. Ultimately I think the wind holds the most untapped energy of any resource on earth besides water. There's lots of nifty wind ideas out there, like the barrel roll things.

My god that would be expensive, who is going to pay for that? I mean yes building any form of power plant is going to cost a large amount of money but what you are talking about hasn't really even been prototyped yet.

I think wind energy is our best bet for sure, especially here in America where we have a ton of space to build these. Put a wind farm out on the Great Lakes, put a couple up in the mountains our west, where ever we have massive amounts of room...Montana would probably be ok.

 

[Keef]

My god that would be expensive, who is going to pay for that? I mean yes building any form of power plant is going to cost a large amount of money but what you are talking about hasn't really even been prototyped yet.

The microwave thing actually has been prototyped on a very small scale. They featured it in Discovery's series Project Earth. They build a small prototype of the microwave beam itself. They took electricity and converted it to microwave energy, beamed it a short distance through the air to a contraption which converted it back to electricity. They did in fact power a panel of LEDs and they also charged a cell phone. I don't know the specifics, but it did work. They actually moved energy without wires. It's exciting. It may be ridiculously expensive, but I think natural gas and wind power--which have been around for a very long time and are pretty cheap and easy--would give us a huge buffer of time that would allow scientists to make crazy things like that microwave stuff feasible.

Also, people aren't just taking windmills when it comes to wind power. They want to get up hundreds or even thousands of feet into the air where the wind is very powerful and never stops. Obviously that will take development. For now, windmills work and are readily available. Ramping up their production would spawn new companies for that purpose and many new employees to build them. It could bring great development to the Great Plains states.

 

[Keef]

...

 

[GT4 genius]

Regarding what you said about moving electricity without wires, it is possible. And has been for awhile. I'm sure you've seen electric toothbrushes that charge on little plastic stands. They use a process called electric induction. There is talks that in the very near future similar large scale models of the same thing could be installed in the attic of a house, then anything in the house, with the proper technology, could feed electricity off it, such as laptops, mobile phones etc..

What I'm getting at is this, a huge version of the same thing in a city, and have electric cars be able to charge continuously off these things. In theory, not much thought behind this yet but still, you could essentially never have to purposely charge your car. Possible, or crazy??

 

[Philly]

I think wind energy is our best bet for sure, especially here in America where we have a ton of space to build these. Put a wind farm out on the Great Lakes, put a couple up in the mountains our west, where ever we have massive amounts of room...Montana would probably be ok.

We could probably develop plenty of wind power without needing that much space by just putting up wind turbines on existing farmland. Then we could have the whole Midwest producing the stuff for at least part of the time. And they probably wouldn't take up much room at all for the farmers. Plus farmers could make a little extra money if they "owned" that wind turbine, or if they were just renting out the rights to produce wind power on their land to other prospectors.

I find that hydro is one of the better prospects in the West. Washington already generates 70% of their power through dams. Having powerful rivers running from the mountains to the Pacific certainly helps there. The only thing I would be worried about is just how much more we can develop a hydroelectricity grid there before all the rivers become too cluttered. Plus having a huge lake always creates for an excellent place for resorts and such. I know dam lakes like lake Chelan, Ross Lake, Lake Roosevelt and others have become popular places to go. Plus you can irrigate surrounding land with the resulting lakes.

Also, people aren't just taking windmills when it comes to wind power. They want to get up hundreds or even thousands of feet into the air where the wind is very powerful and never stops. Obviously that will take development. For now, windmills work and are readily available. Ramping up their production would spawn new companies for that purpose and many new employees to build them. It could bring great development to the Great Plains states.

Instead of just building super tall ones that would require lots of development to withstand the wind and get in the way of lots of flying things, what about putting them up in the mountains? There's going to be a good wind pretty high up on mountain ridges, and nobody is living there anyway. Basically, it would be like a natural extention to get the turbines up to the altitudes that you are suggesting.

As a business case though, wind power might not be a great option for replacement. First, for every kilowatt created by wind power, we have to make one less kilowatt somewhere else. A good number of people are employed by our current power grid, and the jobs you are talking about creating would just be replaced by the production of wind power. Or, because wind power doesn't seem like a labor intensive endeavor, those jobs would probably just be lost.

Second, wind isn't very reliable. So wind may end up not replacing anything at all. We would still need a good sized work force to ensure that when the wind is down, there is still electricity being created. So at least for the near future, we would probably need to keep a workforce probably similar to what we currently have working in power plants on standby to jump in when they are needed. and I doubt that anybody would be able to live off a job where they aren't needed that often, but they have to report to work when they are needed.

What I'm getting at is this, a huge version of the same thing in a city, and have electric cars be able to charge continuously off these things. In theory, not much thought behind this yet but still, you could essentially never have to purposely charge your car. Possible, or crazy??

Slot cars? Wouldn't it be cool to have electric cars that just ran off currents in the arterial roads? So driving on a main street would provide enough electricity to keep your car running. And then every car could have a little battery pack to run it for the short trips when you don't need to be on a major road.

 

[ExigeEvan]

There's going to be a good wind pretty high up on mountain ridges, and nobody is living there anyway.

If what's happening in my area is anything to go by it's more hassle than it's worth. People don't like seeing wind turbines built on unspoilt areas of natural beauty, or where they like to walk every so often on a sunny day.

 

[Keef]

Some ideas for high-altitude "windmills" have been helium-filled balloons and high-altitude kites all tethered to the ground. A team in Discovery's show tried a huge prototype that was shaped like a barrel. It had flap to catch the air that would collapse on the return side of the spin so as not to cause too much drag. It turned generators on each side and it actually did feed electricity down a tether to the ground.

Here's the thing's website. You would be able to tether this almost anywhere. Out in the field, on top downtown buildings, close to the ocean to take advantage of winds blowing in from the sea. On the TV show they did extensive (if low-budget) tests to see what altitude the wind is most powerful and most stable, and of course most practical. They spent tons of time with prototypes in the wind tunnel. This thing isn't a joke--it works. It just needs to be refined.

 

[GT4 genius]

UFO sightings to double in the near future!

No seriously, I doubt that these will ever really 'take off', (I couldnt resist). The problems are that the energy wouldnt be enough from one, they'd need hundreds to run a small town even, that will lead to the obvious problem with air traffic and if people find turbines eye soars, then what will they think of these artificial clouds? If the are huge they'd even shade areas.

They arent a bad idea. It just that there is so many new innovations 'floating' around (last one) now that obviously some will fail, and I think that this will be one of the many that wont see mass production.

@Philly, your point about building wind turbines on mountains is a bit sort sighted, no offense meant. It is extremely difficult to build anything on a mountain let alone a 50-100 foot turbine. Even the vehicles the use to transport the pieces are huge 18 wheelers that need dedicated leading warning jeeps. These arent things you could easily drive up through the hairpin turns on the side of a mountain.

 

[Joey D]

That large blimp wind generator isn't practical at all. You can't have things way up in the atmosphere held down with a giant electrified cable.

Also it wouldn't be hard to build up in the mountains, with modern engineering building something on just about any terrain is possible. Plus there are a ton of mountains which are easily scaled with equipment.

 

[Keef]

That large blimp wind generator isn't practical at all. You can't have things way up in the atmosphere held down with a giant electrified cable.

Also it wouldn't be hard to build up in the mountains, with modern engineering building something on just about any terrain is possible. Plus there are a ton of mountains which are easily scaled with equipment.

They won't be way up in the atmosphere. Their test goal was 300 feet, and it worked. They came up with a special tether that had more tensile strength than a steel cable (they tested that, too, by hanging six stripped-down 2000 pound cars off it) and also conducted electricity well. The cable would be no more dangerous than the cables hanging between poles right now.

The Great Plains states are some of the windiest habitable areas on the planet. Those blimp turbines have the potential to produce much more power than a normal mill. It just needs to be refined. But that's okay, because we already have windmills and natural gas. The point of those is to allow us extra time to perfect the other stuff.

Here's some other stuff we already have:

That's the first operational solar tower in the EU. It's in Spain. The mirrors move with the sun and focus its rays on a specific place near the top of the tower. It turns water to steam, and uses the steam to spin turbines to create electricity. They're building another one right next to it as we type.

We've got some, too.:

The coal industry is huge. Let's export it to poorer countries and make money! We'll save the fancy solar stuff for us.