What? I think you're confused.Originally posted by: OffTopic
There aren't enough hydro, wind, wave to produce the energy that we consume, and we have utilizes most of what we can get from hydro at the present. Solar is about the only source that would make a significant contribution to our energy needs, and I hope that the spray-on solar-power cells come online soon to quench our thirst for energy before our reliance switch back to coal.
Pig waste to oil is not a new novelty, because animal/human waste/methane had been utilize for hundred of years in Asia for cooking and warmth. And, dry animal dung has been use as a fuel source for thousands of years in human history.
Fossil is the main fuel source presently & for the near future. And, it will be use to produce/harness alternative energy sources.
1. We currently need 83.5 million barrels per day
2. We are projected to need 120 million barrels per day by 2020
The prediction is that we are going to be at peak oil production in the next few months, and then there will be a rapid drop of supply/production. That means alternative power sources such as nuclear/solar have to come online to make up the different of 44% energy deficit in 15 years if we can maintain current oil production. However, high oil price will impact our economy and conversion to alternative energy sources as suggested in the OP article.
Originally posted by: Looney
Well with technologies like this emerging (link) i'm not too worried.
Originally posted by: meltdown75
Originally posted by: Looney
Well with technologies like this emerging (link) i'm not too worried.
This is an example of some of the technology mentioned in the article linked to in the OP. Not to take you to task, because I love to see new innovations too - but the "retro-fitting" of society with these new products seems to be even as big of a problem as the oil problem itself... it's one thing to see it in developmental stages, but... will it ever be mass-produced? perhaps only the rich will be able to afford these new innovative products...
Originally posted by: Looney
Originally posted by: meltdown75
Originally posted by: Looney
Well with technologies like this emerging (link) i'm not too worried.
This is an example of some of the technology mentioned in the article linked to in the OP. Not to take you to task, because I love to see new innovations too - but the "retro-fitting" of society with these new products seems to be even as big of a problem as the oil problem itself... it's one thing to see it in developmental stages, but... will it ever be mass-produced? perhaps only the rich will be able to afford these new innovative products...
People said the same thing with fuelcells as little as 10 years ago. This year, how many fuel cells vehicles are there? Certainly only a handful of models, but in the next 5 years, most manufacturers will have at least one fuel cell model, and probably more.
Are we going to get these kind of technologies next year? Next 5 years? No, but the fact that we can do this now, chances are, we can probably do it better in 20 years.
Dam causes environmental damage like flooding, destroys fish habitat, and change water level which affect farming/irrigation.Of course we have "utilized most of what we can get from hydro". When was the last time we built a new dam?
The Chinese and Vietnamese had use gas for cooking/warmth for years and has converted the gas into liquid for combustion motors for the last 20-30 years, however liquid conversion is not widely use because the return value isn?t anywhere near the efficiency of fossil fuel/price.Turning wastes into oil IS a new novelty. It's not a new idea, but we just now have the technology to actually do it.
The current method is not as efficient as the spray-on solar-power cells (hope that the scientist can make it access able and inexpensive to produce), because current method only use 1/2 of the light spectrum with heat loss. The SOSPC process utilizes the full spectrum with very little heat lost which is 5X more efficient than the current solar cell technology.Solar isn't a viable alternative in reality as it stands. We would have to cover the entire united states with panels.
"According to the Clean Air Renewable Energy Coalition, a group of corporate, environmental non-governmental organizations and municipal governments, wind power costs range from 8 ? 10.2 cents/kWh, depending on the location and resource availability. This exceeds the wholesale price of electricity in all Canadian jurisdictions by 1.2 ? 7.8 cents/kWh."Engineer: What the EROI on "free energy" is taking into account, is the energy it costs to build the generator in the first place. When they put up wind farms, it takes X years to make the energy and dollar investment back.
Originally posted by: AmdEmAll
This is extremely interesting. Lets keep this bumped up.
Originally posted by: Calin
Have you seen? When the production dropped 5% (in some 1970 I think), the price skyrocketed to 400%.
There won't be any cheap oil, but the price will go up faster than you think. It might be double of what is now in a year, or two years
Originally posted by: archcommus
I wonder why anyone would want to take the time to create a site like that. Does he think he's really helping the world by having people read that site? No, all it accomplishes is scaring people. The situation is out of the common person's hands, so why should they be fearing it and worrying about it. Live your life and see what happens.
The site's probably to make money more than anything. Don't be concerned.
It would take 10,000 of the largest nuclear power plants to produce the energy we get from fossil fuels.
Originally posted by: Vertimus
It would take 10,000 of the largest nuclear power plants to produce the energy we get from fossil fuels.
Ok, I did my own calculation to how many nuclear plants is needed to power the US.
According to here, the energy usage is close to 100E15 BTU per year. That's 2.73E14 BTU per day, or 1.1415E13 BTU per hour. Converting to watts gives us 3.345E12 W. Now, the largest nuclear plants produce 1000-megawatt-hour of electricity. Assuming that we can increase this to 50,000-megawatt-hour within the next one or two decades, which is pretty likely, we only will need 66 nuclear power plants to power the current nation.
Where in the hell did they get 10,000?
QED
Originally posted by: Cuda1447
Originally posted by: Vertimus
It would take 10,000 of the largest nuclear power plants to produce the energy we get from fossil fuels.
Ok, I did my own calculation to how many nuclear plants is needed to power the US.
According to here, the energy usage is close to 100E15 BTU per year. That's 2.73E14 BTU per day, or 1.1415E13 BTU per hour. Converting to watts gives us 3.345E12 W. Now, the largest nuclear plants produce 1000-megawatt-hour of electricity. Assuming that we can increase this to 50,000-megawatt-hour within the next one or two decades, which is pretty likely, we only will need 66 nuclear power plants to power the current nation.
Where in the hell did they get 10,000?
QED
Why will it be so easy to up our production of megawats by 50 times?
The article also have alternative to oil solutions, such as natural gas, sand tar, coal/Fischer-Tropsch process, nuclear power, fusion power, and renewable energy.The Hubbert peak theory, also known as peak oil, is an influential theory concerning the long-term rate of conventional oil and other fossil fuels extraction and depletion. It predicts that future world oil production will soon reach a peak and then rapidly decline. The actual peak year will only be known after it has passed. Based on available production data, proponents have predicted the peak years to be 1989, 1995, 1995-2000, or, according to one influential group, 2007 for oil and somewhat later for natural gas...
...In March of 2005, the International Energy Agency raised projections of annual global demand to 84.3 million barrels per day ([1]), which means over 30 billion barrels annually. This puts consumption equal to production, leaving no surplus capacity. Even if there are temporarily sufficient oil reserves that could be used to meet rising global demand, there is an unknown limit on the increase of oil production capacity, absent additional investment in oil production, transportation and refining facilities. Also in March of 2005, the Algerian minister for energy and mines stated that OPEC has reached their oil production limit...
Originally posted by: 733SHiFTY
There has to be oil on the moon and mars too, right?
Ummmmmmm...... No.Originally posted by: 733SHiFTY
There has to be oil on the moon and mars too, right?
Originally posted by: bthorny
Originally posted by: Yossarian
as Civ 3 has taught us, you can't do jack without oil.
thats a schweet reference
Originally posted by: Jawo
Suprised there hasnt been more mention of hydrogen or fuel cells...Did a massive report about hydrogen fuel cells a learned a great deal.
The fuel cell has been around for 150 years, believe it or not, but the problem has always been one of carrying enough fuel around in the tank to supply the fuel cell. With the recent rise of crude oil, the technology ahs only come into the limelight.....it has been around for decades, just not receiving any press. It is quite a sound technology, if it was not; Ford, DaimlerChrysler, GM, and virtually every other car manufacturer in the world have been pouring billions into hydrogen R&D.
Furthermore, in several documents, most notably the one from the nonbiased Rocky Mountain Institute, state, that hydrogen could be much cheaper than what we pay for gasoline currently.
Some helpful links below....basically depending on who you believe, hydrogen powered cars could be here in 15 years or so...sooner if the government allocates more money.
http://www.rmi.org
http://www.actransit.org/environment/hyroad_main.wu
http://www.ch2bc.org/
"What About the Hydrogen Economy?"
Hydrogen fuels cells aren't the answer either. As of 2003, the average fuel cell costs close to $1,000,000. Unlike other alternatives, hydrogen fuel cells have shown little sign of coming down in price.
Even if the cost is lowered by 98%, placing the price at $20,000 per cell, hydrogen fuel cells will never power more than a handful of cars due to a worldwide shortage of platinum.
A single hydrogen fuel cell requires 20 grams of platinum. If the cells are mass-produced, it may be possible to get the platinum requirement down to 10 grams per cell. The world has 7.7 billion grams of proven platinum reserves. There are approximately 700 million internal combustion engines on the road. Ten grams of platinum per fuel cell x 700 million fuel cells = 7 billion grams of platinum, or practically every gram of platinum in the earth.
Unfortunately, as a recent article in EV World points out, the average fuel cell lasts only 200 hours. Two hundred hours translates into just 12,000 miles, or about one year?s worth of driving at 60 miles per hour. This means all 700 million fuel cells (with 10 grams of platinum in each one) would have to be replaced every single year.
Thus replacing the 700 million oil-powered vehicles on the road with fuel cell-powered vehicles, for only 1 year, would require us to mine every single ounce of platinum currently in the earth and divert all of it for fuel cell construction only.
Doing so is absolutely impossible as platinum is astonishingly energy intensive (expensive) to mine, is already in short supply, and is indispensable to thousands of crucial industrial processes.
Even if this wasn't the case, the fuel cell solution would last less than one year. As with oil, platinum production would peak long before the supply is exhausted.
What will we do, when less than 6 months into the "Hydrogen Economy," we hit Peak Platinum? Perhaps Michael Moore will produce a movie documenting the connection between the President?s family and foreign platinum companies while following the plight of a mother whose son died in the latest platinum war?
If the hydrogen economy was anything other than a total red herring, such issues would eventually arise as 80 percent of the world?s proven platinum reserves are located in that bastion of geopolitical stability, South Africa.
Even if an economically affordable and scalable alternative to platinum is immediately located and mined in absolutely massive quantities, the ability of hydrogen to replace even a small portion of our oil consumption is still handicapped by several fundamental limitations:
1. Hydrogen is the smallest element known to man. This
makes it virtually impossible to store in the massive
quantities and to transport across the incredibly long
distances required by our vast global transportation
networks. In her February 2005 article entitled,
"Hydrogen Economy: Energy and Economic Blackhole,"
Alice Friedemann writes:
Hydrogen is the Houdini of elements. As soon as
you?ve gotten it into a container, it wants to get
out, and since it?s the lightest of all gases, it takes
a lot of effort to keep it from escaping. Storage
devices need a complex set of seals, gaskets, and
valves. Liquid hydrogen tanks for vehicles boil off at
3-4% per day
2. A hydrogen economy would require massive retrofitting of
our entire global transportation and fuel distribution
networks. At a million dollars per car, it would cost
$350,000,000,000,000 to replace half of our current
automotive fleet (700 million cars) with hydrogen fuel cell
powered cars.
That doesn't even account for replacing a significant
fraction of our oil-powered airplanes or boats with fuel
cells.
The numbers don't get any prettier if we scrap the fuel
cells and go with straight hydrogen. According to a recent
article in Nature, entitled "Hydrogen Economy Looks Out
of Reach:"
Converting every vehicle in the United States to
hydrogen power would demand so much electricity
that the country would need enough wind turbines
to cover half of California or 1,000 extra nuclear
power stations.
Unfortunately, even if we managed to get this ridiculously
high number of wind turbines or nuclear power plants built,
we would still need to build the hydrogen powered cars, in
addition to a hydrogen distribution network that would be
mind-boggingly expensive. The construction of a hydrogen
pipeline network comparable to our current natural gas
pipeline network, for instance, would cost 200 trillion
dollars. That's twenty times the size of the US GDP in the
year 2002.
How such capital intensive endeavors will be
accomplished in the midst of massive energy shortages is
anybody's guess;
3. As mentioned previously, solar, wind, or nuclear energy
can be used to "crack" hydrogen from water via a process
known as electrolysis. The electrolysis process is a simple
one, but unfortunately it consumes more energy than it
produces. This has nothing to do with the costs and
everything to do with the immutable laws of
thermodynamics. Again, Alice Friedemann weighs in:
The laws of physics mean the hydrogen economy
will always be an energy sink. Hydrogen?s properties
require you to spend more energy to do the
following than you get out of it later: overcome
waters? hydrogen-oxygen bond, to move heavy
cars, to prevent leaks and brittle metals, to
transport hydrogen to the destination. It doesn?t
matter if all of the problems are solved, or how
much money is spent. You will use more energy to
create, store, and transport hydrogen than you will
ever get out of it.
Even if these problems are ignored or assumed away, you
are still faced with jaw-dropping costs of a renewable
derived hydrogen economy. In addition to the
200 trillion dollar pipeline network that would be necessary
to move the hydrogen around, we would need to deploy
about 40 trillion dollars of solar panels. If the hydrogen
was derived from wind (which is usually more efficient
than solar) the cost might be lowered considerably, but
that's not saying much when you are dealing with numbers
as large as $40 trillion.
Even if the costs of these projects are cut in half, that
makes little difference over the course of a generation, as
our economy doubles in size approximately every 25-30
years. In other words, by the time we will have made any
real headway in constructing a "hydrogen economy", the
problem will have already compounded itself.
If the "hydrogen economy" is such a hoax, why then do we hear so much about it? The answer is simple when you "follow the money" and ask "who benefits?" (Hint: GM, Shell, et al.)