fossil fuels expire soon,

crude oil wont be around for much longer, so what are the plans for the given time when the supply runs out?. howcome buisnesses and government arent already manefacturing mass amounts of machinery that dosent rely on fossil fuels?. why isnt a bigger effort going into this obviously serious situation, everyones transportation will just have to be scraped or converted?.

 

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How much longer, do you think?

 

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wasnt it estimated at about 40 years or so awhile back?, but i think at the expinencial rate the military is consuming fuel for its tanks/planes/and other mobile machinery, and the amount of drivers on the road these days, i personally think we have about 20 years maximum, and about 10-15 years minimum,

 

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Peak oil is not the end of oil. The price will rise. The most profitable years for the oil industry may be in the future when the total oil produced globaly in a year is half what it is now.

The desires of the oil industry are the most important force shaping American energy policy.

There is a limmit to how high the price of oil can go. That limmit is reached when alternative fuels are cheaper than oil.

It will be interesting to see how much cheap dirty coal we choose to burn when we are stuck between rising oil prices and global warming.

Unbelievably we are still "flaring" off natural gas as a waste product in oil production. We need to build much more LNG transport capability.

 

Much longer than that, actually. I believe you've forgotten (or perhaps didn't know?) about tar sands and oil shale. There are tremendous deposits of those in the U.S. alone. They are much more difficult to process (at present) and that alone will drive the price to over tripple what is is now. But we're a very long way from running out.

Naturally, that big of an increase in price will help to nudge other alternative sources of energy. It just remains to be seen how much of a nudge it will be.

 

we are an intelligent society right? then why are we bieng so primative burning so much fuel even if there is alternate types of oils to burn why burn anything atall and fuck up the world with pollution, we have the ability for electric powered cars with no pollution levels atall!, why arnt we bieng wise with the choices of fuel we have at our disposal.

 

Burning something to make electricity to power electric cars would create more global pollution than having the car burn something because when energy is converted from one form to another form some energy is lost.

Hydro power is nice but the dams have changed the evironment and hurt salmon.

Wind is good but nobody wants to live next to it because it's noisy and ugly. It kills birds. It does not seem to be as cheap as burning coal for electricity. Also, the wind may not be there on a hot summer afternoon.

I thought maybe we could use tides and the motion of buoys to split water into hydrogen and oxygen out in the ocean and then bring the hydrogen back to the cities to burn, but hydrogen burns too hot and creates Ozone. Fuel cells cost too much for now.

How does bio diesel compare with gasolene for pollution?

We should look at genetic engineering to see if we can create a fuel producing algae. That will take time and scare enviromentalists.

Nuclear power has never paid for itself and could not be economically viable if it had to pay for any of the following: liability insurance, an endowment for 10,000 years of babysitting for spent fuel, plant decommisioning.

Future cities should be based on the bycicle. We should build covered bicycle paths, elevators for bycicles to get them up hills, and trains for bycicles for the long parts of commutes. But this is for the future.

We are going to burn a lot of stuff for fuel the next fifty years and the prices for burnables will rise.

 

Nirakr answered this question well. The energy to run electric cars still has to come from somewhere. Right now, that "somewhere" is power plants fueled primarily by coal and natural gas (and some oil).

The truth is that at the moment there isn't any other source of energy that's more abundant or cheaper than petroleum to power automobiles. And until it crosses over that magic line of economics (costs more than something else), it will continue to be used.

So we're back to what I said in the beginning. Until we have to depend on expensive oil from tar sand and oil shale, there's not enough economic driving force (read that as "money") to make any changes. People just aren't interested in paying $200 (orconsiderably more for the equivalent of filling up the car's gas tank with what is now about $60 worth of gasoline.

 

yes i agree but you do realise we need to look for alternate fuels aswell but i just dont see why governments arent all pulling together on this 1 and solving this (wich could be done if all the majour governments started participating in a group effort o solve this fuel dilemna, seriously we could fuel everything with a non pollutant if we really tried hard enough. if they put as much time money and effort into things like this and medicine, as they do with military weapons we would go far.


greed will enslave us all.

 

Very well. Then just what IS this non-polluntant that we could use? If you know something that all the rest of us don't, we'd sure like to hear about it.

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yeah man i do know of a source of energy and you all know it aswell, but maybe i think differently, use the elements of the earth do you know of the 5 elements.? well i have a little something here to put forward to everyone, i know there are alot of clever intelligent people who post on this forum, with alot more credentials and degrees than me, im just a martial artist who is 21 years old living in a crappy area, but i have good ideas for mankind,


ok everybody knows that the moon controls the tides, so this means we use this to our advantage, we know the water patterns, we could globally devise huge worldwide turbines to actually reap all of that hydro power from the whole ocean itself, not a mere river or stream, im talking full scale ocean power harvesting with every modern government participating and at every coastal area that has these hydro generators this also means that we know the wind will be blowing the same direction of the tide so we could also harvest that huge wind source with gigantic never seen before windmills, and ontop of this, we could construct the tallest structures on earth at every critical lightening osition, to act as huge conductors wich could pick up the majority of lightening that strikes earth to be routed. if we construct thousands of these we could gather much energy and store it in some kind of huge conservation batterys.


i have many more ideas that involve the whole world getting involved in, i will present my ideas to leading government reaserch teams once it is properly set out, and after consuting alternate ideas with other great minds, on that note i will start a new thread about this actual topic soon and would greatly appreciate it if people cooperated with the progress of these ideas and not critisize because this is serious to me and the earth i think as a whole.

 

radiation for you and radiation for me,
radiation for us, we love,
radiation is our god, we go nuclear,
don’t care - two eyes of three,
radiation kicks my ass,
radiation I radiate

 

Big ocean dams and turbines would create environmental problems.

Think big buoys with a whole in the middle sliding up and down a pole as the tide rises and falls. The pole would rise out of the sea up into the air on one end and would be anchored to the sea floor on the other end. As the Buoy moves it spins a gear attached to the pole.

 

there are many types of sea generators that each country could develop and then decide wich is most effective then all incorperate those designes into each of there turbines, then advance from there, same with the lightening conducting method, also with the wind powered source, and i dont mean do this on a small level it should all be connected together, programmers should make programs simular to Sim City computer game simulations to test theorys and methods out, and all modern countrys contrabuting would easily fund this type of energy creating, yes it could cause problems ofcourse, but i know for sure less problems than we are causing now with how things are going. and problems can be sorted out with proper effort and dedication atleast its a step forward in maintaining our moder societys without damaging nature, also people will be healthyer and generally live in nicer cleaner conditions in cities. a new type of universal battery that can fit into things everywhere that all comes from this natural energy harvesting method could be an option,

 

have huge gears that the tide and waves itself spin around creating energy, just like a hydro dam system but on a mch more epic scale, hey could people give input into this idea of mine, some flaw seekers would be helpfull to see loop holes and flaws in the theory and design, also posative thinkers to help the progress of the idea maybe we could together make a realistic proposal to the governments to get this idea looked at by top scientists and designers of the government,


im serious by the way helping the world is very impotant to me and i think its something we should all work on as a collective,


peace

 

We have fish ladders at hydro plant but still fish are disrupted. Sitlting and flood cycles are changed. Every new on land hydro plan is fought by environmentalists because we understand the problems now.

Building walls in the sea that segment the oceans into smaller peices is a more serious intrusion into the environment than the land based hydro is. Sea life migrates.

They are probably crackpots but there are people out there who claim that extensive use of tidal power would slow down the earth's rotation.

 

Yeah, well you know the way ballet dancers make themselves spin faster and faster by drawing their arms closer in to their bodies. Physicists call it conservation of angular momentum. So as we chop down the trees in the topical forests, that will have just the same effect, and make the earth spin faster. Think about it! So that will offset the tidal power making the earth spin more slowly.

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First of all you never will run out of oil. why?
IF you start and A and plan to go to D but for each step you only go half way, how long will it take you to get to D????

Second:
What about magnetic power??? Is that feasable?

 

I did some serious thinking about this topic a couple of years ago, to the extent of starting a thread on another forum, getting down to the maths and physics involved, and corresponding with the UK Liberal Democratic Party's spokesperson on environmental affairs. Here, very briefly, is my idea.

A most overlooked form of power is BAROMETRIC power! Air pressure at around sea level averages about 1 bar (or 1000 millibars). However, consider a point around the low tide mark in Britain's Severn Estuary. At low tide, pressure = 1 bar. At high tide, under 30 feet of water, pressure = 2 bars. (The weight of a 30ft column of water is about the same as that of the column of air, from sea level to the stratosphere, above it.)

Now, if an economic means of generating power from changes in barometric pressure were feasible, this would be very good news for countries with long coastlines and big tides. So how might this be done?

Well, imagine two connected air-filled tanks, one rigid, the other flexible, each of 100,000 litres capacity, moored just below sea level at low tide. At full tide, pressure has doubled and the volume of gas has halved -- so the flexible tank is now empty.

Suppose we put a turbine, capable of generating electrical power, between the two tanks. We allow it to operate when the pressure differential between the two tanks is greatest, modified to some extent by the timing of demand for electricity.

I have made things simple so far. Thirty foot tides are exceptional; and we do not need to be near the shore to tap barometric power -- an increase from 3 bars to 4 bars can be harnessed just as well.

In the calculations I made a couple of years ago, I considered an area of 1 square kilometer of the Bristol Channel (a tiny fraction of the overall area available) experiencing a twice-daily change in sea level of 8 metres. Covering this area of seabed with "pressure pods" of 33% efficiency would harvest 60,000 kilowatt hours of electricity per day, enough for a small town.

The feasibility of this scheme would be down to the economics of the large-scale manufacture of "pressure pods".

However, AND THIS IS WHERE THE REST OF YOU COME IN, I cannot help thinking that there must be other, and cleverer ways, of harvesting barometric power. I have outlined only the crudest and most obvious. Any ideas?

 

Peak oil is the same as running out. Even though only half of the world's oil will ever be recovered, most of it would take more energy to remove than it would give back. Sand and shale deposits can be mined, but at great cost and environmental damage.

There are alternative sources of power, but none will replace oil, at least not anytime soon. When oil becomes too expensive, alot of these grand construction projects people suggest may become impossible.

Magnetic power? Where's that?

What about lightning?