A Comprehensive Energy Revolution

Off shore drilling?

Alternative fuels (that starve millions...)?

How about cutting down on the number of polluting "power plants" by turning the nation's (US) highway infrastructure into an electromagnetic energy delivery system?

Every car on the road (and there are millions) is a self-contained power plant. Fuel is pumped out of the ground halfway around the world and shipped at great expense to refineries, then hauled via very large and inefficient trucks to gas stations where we refuel our private power plants at increasing personal cost.

So I propose a revolution not only in energy delivery, but in thinking about energy and how it is used in the world. Direct delivery.

Right now our highways system (in the US) is decaying at an alarming rate. Bridges are collapsing and potholes are appearing faster than road crews can deal with them. Simultaneously the aging electricity infrastructure is overburdened and no Engineer worth a nickel will deny that it needs to be replaced.

Why not replace both?

If we could deliver electricity not only to every house and business in this vast expanse of land, why not provide electrical energy to every vehicle?

The way I see it there are two ways of utilizing this energy:

Electric cars could harness the power directly through the roadway, turning a simple motor that would drive the vehicle FUEL FREE along the vast proportion of the major highway infrastructure. The vehicle, probably a hybrid, would revert to fossil fuels in town. A trip to the store would cost about as much as it does today in real dollars. But a trip from New York to California could cost pennies to the dollar what gas costs us now.

Electromagnetic propulsion could literally propel us down the road without any need for a motor or engine at all. We would simply sit in our cars and be shot across the landscape by powerful electromagnets, arriving at our destination without producing any carbon other than that which comes from respiration - the bulk of our carbon footprint would escape from the doors when we stop to get out.

All of this would be powered in the traditional way, by coal, nuclear, geothermal, wind and eventually solar power. Hopefully solar would ultimately replace the bulk of our energy production infrastructure.

This is a thought I had and it's one I have not heard anyone talking about. Electric cars as we think about them today still rely on a design first proposed in the early 1900's. Internal combustion is virtually unchanged since the Model T!

Surely we can do better. Billions spent on space propulsion technologies for NASA, like electromagnetic propulsion, could now be utilized instead of the heavy, inefficient and wasteful means we currently employ.

Even better, to those who think, "oh but this will mean we will have to poke along in geo-buckets traveling at 55mph," with intracontinental travel losing all of its sexy appeal...

Imagine doing so at 200, 300 or even 400 mph!

...and enjoying a cold beer while you're at it. Leave the driving to GPS.

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Yes please.

Hydrocarbons can never be replaced. The reason why we use hydrocarbons for literally everything is because Earth is an oil planet.

Offshore drilling for the win.

 

A Comprehensive Energy Revolution: Apollo Alliance

 

Oh, you're right.

I forgot how much (fossil crude) oil was burned by aboriginal peoples before the Industrial Age.

You win. I'll go away now with my tail between my legs.


...oh, and I forgot to mention all the oil we've discovered on Mars and other planets. (still none, smart ass)

 

Being a natural part of the Biological Carbon Cycle, animal and plant oils used in cooking and for products such as soap simply return the degraded matter to the environment.

It other words, eating, cooking and washing yourself with animal fats is sustainable.

Burning them, however, is not... unless you want to wait around a few million years.

 

Actually yes. Humans have been burning hydrocarbons since the stone age. And volcanoes have been combusting hydrocarbons for 4.5 billion years.

Allow me to educate you.

http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/2005/2005GL022691.shtml

http://www.nasa.gov/centers/jpl/news/cassini-20080213.html

Unfortunately for your religion we only have to wait less than 3 to 10 years.

http://www.rense.com/general63/refil.htm

Read it and weep...:bawl:

 

All unrealistic solutions. I propose a renewed investment in rail. Rail right of ways could be used for electric power transmission lines, thus getting around the problem of locating new power lines. We could electrify our existing rail fleet. We could build spur lines to wind power sites, so that the cranes can be more easily transported there, and power can be more easily fed back to the grid. Combine that with renewed investments in dense development, combining industrial, retail, and residential space in livable communities instead of sprawl. This would enable greater bicycle use, for which dedicated roads should be reserved. Cars should be excluded from downtown areas. Forget about using energy at the scale we have been, that was a one time historical anomaly.

 

An idea that appeals far more to us introverts than to the extroverts who prefer chatting by the water cooler to working

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Bravo.

I was not implying that this idea was the only way, simply hoping to spur intelligent debate, which you have given us.

The idea that volcanoes, or for that matter Inuits, somehow produce as much carbon as an industrialized nation is absurd. Indeed I misspoke in saying "oil" as I meant Petroleum, which indeed is relatively new to the overall energy picture in geological/evolutionary time. Some burning of fossil fuels has always occurred whether by natural means (wildfires igniting an oil deposit), or by humans, say using charcoal to cook meat, but until recently these were ecologically negligible quantities.

Here is a little fact I learned today: a form or solar power exists which relies entirely on the thermal effect of sunlight by reflecting light into containers of oil and water which become super-heated and drive a simple turbine.

This is a technology that could replace a significant portion of our current electrical production, and it is simple enough that a savvy homeowner (okay, maybe a rancher with some acreage) could set up. Given the right climate (a desert), one could rely solely on the heat from sunlight to power everything in the home, and this without a single gram of fuel or nuclear fissile material.

Why don't we already use this? Kinda makes you wonder.

 

As for all of this:

Methane is not Petroleum. It has nowhere near the energy density and is not equivalent to fossil fuels.

I'm reading and not weeping. Neptune's atmosphere is almost entirely methane, the simplest hydrocarbon one can synthesize in a High School Chemistry lab.

Or by eating a McDonald's cheeseburger...

Cow farts and light crude petroleum are not the same thing.

I will concede lax terminology on my behalf. Where previously I have stated "oil" I was implying Petrol, which indeed does not exist anywhere in the known Universe except Earth because it is a bi-product of millions of years of sustained and highly complex Biological activity.

Period.

 

:thumbsup:

 

All of the above. Seriously.

Why are the answers to "What should energy policy be?" turn into mutual recriminations? My answer is -- try everything, and discard what does not work. Corn ethanol demonstrably causes more problems than it solves -- drop it. Otherwise, all of the above.

More solar power, AND more wind power, AND more nuclear power plants, AND subsidies for hybrid cars, AND plug-in hybrids, AND more electric rail, AND offshore drilling, AND liquefied coal, AND get rid of tariffs on sugarcane ethanol from Brazil, AND put serious money into SPS. Etc. Nothing infuriates me more than rich Democratic-voting "environmentalists" of Martha's Vineyard who moan about offshore wind turbines spoiling the view and (horrors!) possibly affecting birds.

 

What is most incredible about most of these "new" technologies is that most of them have their origins in the mid to late 1800's!!

With the photo voltaic cell being an obvious exception (as far as I know), solar energy is as old as time. Indeed the Chinese have been sailing for millenia. That's solar power.

Wind is solar.

The question is not one of technology - the Romans could have built a thermal-solar plant if only they had the understanding of basic Physics to develop a steam turbine.

Heat up a large rock (obsidian, for example - or alternately black slate), boil some water, generate power.

Bi-chambered clay pots have been discovered dating into the BCE's containing metallic components that would generate electricity if only a strong acid were added to the mix.

We're not dealing with a scientific or technological hurdle at all, quite to the contrary. It is a political and economic hurdle.

We have to convince the government, and indeed industry to invest in these existing technologies, and then we have to find ways to distribute it.

Of course in the modern age of law suits and suicidal wackos you have to consider safety and security. Terrorism is an issue now more than ever before.

Surely these problems are minute compared to the certain nightmare into which we are headed, if not now then a generation hence.

Trains represent a triumph of human ingenuity, and as they are, even running Diesel, they are much more practical than anything else we have developed. For specific purposes, flying to Europe or going to the grocery store you still need other forms of transportation.

But we have allowed our rail lines to fall into antiquity and ruin, they are looked upon as nostalgic, romantic relics of a bygone age when, in fact, the relics of a naive romantic obsession will surely be the enormous SUV's we grew so used to only a handful of years in the past.

Trains will likely follow us to the stars - not directly, of course - and are likely to make as much sense on the Martian surface as they do here.

But we still need a way to fetch the bacon.

 

In my fairly large and extended family of mostly lower middle and higher lower class Americans, exactly one of the thirty plus employed adults I know has a job that can be done over a computer hookup.

And that one is constantly finding herself shanghaid thousands of miles away from her family at odd and unpredictable times to redo and patch over fuckups that never would have happened had the people been in the same room in the first place. That and being available for the demands and pressures of work, the various insanities and distractions of employer whim, 24/7, is not much of a recommendation.

My experience with people telecommuting - it used to be called "phoning in" - work that I needed done is with bureaucracies handling licenses, help centers when I had a problem with some service, catalogue shopping for stuff I can no longer heft and examine, online low-fidelity music downloads, etc. These have in general not been experiences I look forward to having again.

I'm pretty underwhelmed. Call me a Luddite, but the day when more than about a third of the work done in any given society even can - let alone should - be done by avatar looks a long way off to me. And the day when more than 2/3 of the population can take advantage of such a situation even in dumbed-down circumstances looks even further.

So it's a nice idea for some folks, and there should be more of it, but among the responses to the increasing price of energy wastage it's not the biggest factor.

A higher percentage of people could bicycle to work than telecommute, if the infrastructure were there.

Politically speaking, I much prefer keeping the hard-won mobility-at-whim of regular folks. So probably bikes, cars and trains - smaller, cheaper, lighter, solar-powered (at the base - I mean electric) cars; likewise trains; infrastructure friendly to bikes.

You have got to be kidding.

 

LOL. This suit is black not. Hydrocarbons above methane require pressures greater than 30 kilobar for their formation which corrresponds to a depth 100 kilometers deep in the mantle. No biological molecule can survive there.

Exactly. Hydrocarbons can be synthesized in the lab, no biological material necessary.

Noone ever said otherwise. However the inorganic hydrogen in cow farts and the inorganic hydrogen in petroleum are both abiotic chemical elements.

What is the difference between oil and petroleum? This ought to be good...LOL.

You have absolutely no idea what you are talking about. PAHs and oil exist everywhere in the universe, no biological activity required.

 

Is someone collecting these things ? Along with those from the earlier Ice Age Civilizations identity, they'd make a handy list to post for newbies.