get 'em off our interstates, ASAP. I know, you're gonna disagree, it will cost too much, etc. Save that thought.
If we can put men on the moon, why can't we get our freight transferred in a more efficient, safe, less-aggravating manner than in a huge heavy semi-truck?
They cause a lot of grief and a lot of un-needed stress. Plus, are trucking frims subsidizing the local, state and federal government as they should be for pounding more of the crap out of our interstate road system than us in our fuel-efficient, foreign-made imports, that we should all be buying in America? Just joshin' on that last comment.
Sort of.
Oh, and sports are merely entertainment that some of us choose to watch and/or read about and/or go to events, etc. To get angry about them is a waste of time. If there is a market for what they are selling (great NBA playoff action, for an example),and there clearly is, why get steamed up about them? In Seattle's example, the Sonics' situation could be taken care of by Howard Schultz of Starbuck's and the rest of his business consortium that owns the team. They should build theirselves their own replacement for Key Arena. They can get a good interest rate on the loan, can't they? Don't worry about having to pay for it, obviously the public doesn't buy into it. Even though it's entertainment, really fine entertainment for some people. Should pro sports be banned? Why waste your energy worrying about it? These things get worked ut with dollars and sense and meetings and filibusters and all sorts of time-wasting avenues. Not worth the worry, men. You don't make as much as Ray Allen. Get over it. It's a free market employment system, it's America's moneymaking system.
A better expenditure of time would be breaking free from our dependence on dino-oil. It's in the works. Just don't hold your breath waiting for it to happen.
And let's work on a better way of transporting our freight. Yikes. Talk about an accident waiting to happen.
And let's work on a better way of transporting our freight. Yikes.
Maybe we can improve and incentivise transporting people also by rail. Europe supposedly has a fine rail system for people and freight. Japan might be the leading edge in rail tech.
But, besides semis, need to get/keep more cars off of our roads. Wonder what the amount of fuel/oil is used to transport a person per mile on airlines (or car) vs rail. We can figure out car costs ourselves. Just guessing, but rail would seem to be more efficient than air or car. And, if the US can figure out how to get coal to burn clean, we could go back to steam locomotives.
I agree, conservation is not a solution it merely buys us time.
Here's an off topic question/observation. Toyota, Honda, and Nissan are suddenly offering lightweight vehicles with low power, small displacement engines. Have you noticed that there really isn't much of a fuel efficiency gain? Look at the Yaris compared to the Corolla or the Fit compared to the Civic. What is to be gained here? My point is that a lot of people see the trend towards higher horsepower as being contrary to higher efficiency. I don't think that is necessarily the case. A four cyclinder engine can only be so efficient at extracting energy from a gallon of gasoline.
you: Biology is not the original producer of most gas, oil and coal on this planet.
me: well that goes against what almost any scientific and educational organization has to say. The vast majority of fossil fuels were formed from the biological species that lived and died hundreds of millions of years ago. From Berkeley: http://www.energyquest.ca.gov/story/chapter08.html
you: In this part of the universe/solar system, Hydrogen and Carbon are two of the top four most abundant elements along with Oxygen and Helium.
me: Well on Earth where we're currently getting our fuel, this is the order of abundance: http://www.science.co.il/PTelements.asp?s=Earth The majority of the atmosphere (70-some %) is Nitrogen.
Please post where I can read this "new science facts" that you speak of.
you: If we can put men on the moon, why can't we get our freight transferred in a more efficient, safe, less-aggravating manner than in a huge heavy semi-truck?
me: OK say you're in charge of importing and distibuting Japanese-made Hondas into the U.S. Tell me how you would get the autos from the ships to all the dealers in the U.S. I'd do just as they do currently. Move the cars as close to the markets by bringing the ship to the nearest port. Unload the vehicles into a lot. Then pick and sort what vehicles to load on a truck to deliver to 1 or 2 dealers. Unless you planned on running a railline into every dealer's backyard, you're going to need trucks. If you have cars at the Port of Newark, you wouldn't load them onto a few cars of a 100-car train, and then expect the train to make a circuit of Honda dealers, stopping for an hour in every city of 50,000 to unload a few cars?
Trains are great for moving large quantities of goods between 2 points, without a bunch of stops in between. They are great for hauling coal, grain, and chemicals in bulk. They are not so good as the variety of goods and stops needed multiply.
That is basically the same thing people will tell you. In a densely populated area with multiple lines train/subway travel can be viable. But when Joe Schmoe wants a train-stop 2 blocks from his house in suburbia to take him to the mall 2 suburbs west @ 6pm, it gets rather impossible to meet his needs. Trains will never replace the practicality of a car which takes you door-to-door to where and when you want.
I see lots of trains moving up and down the CSX line a few miles away through the days no matter where I cross the line. There are a lot of trucks being carried on t hose railcars.
What I believe came up here was using railways to relieve car congestion from commuting. But it turned out trucking being replaced partly with railways was the topic also?
I agree with that. Building or improving the railways should be financially viable. The problem is we devestated them for decades and they dwindled away. Tracks were taken up; the right-of-way transferred to the adjacent landowners or political divisions. Now we could use some more of the right-of-ways? OR we can improve the ones we have with more tracks and other improvements to increase their ability to move cargo.
WRT moving autos. In this area there are yards that seem to serve as dropoff points for cars not manufactured here but moved in by trains. Then from the yards the contracted truck carriers pick them up to deliver to dealers within a certain radius.
To eliminate dependence on oil America must develop nuclear energy to the same level that France has and use the technology to convert coal to gasoline and diesel developed in Germany in the 1920's. Easy to say, difficult to do. Oil is still cheap. It is more of a political thing. Talk to the Democrats about new oil drilling, new nuclear power plants, new oil refineries.... new anything to do with power?
First of all, it doesn't really matter how much carbon, oxygen, or hydrogen we have on earth. What is important is the chemical compounds that those elements are stored in. For example, we have loads of hydrogen, but it's all in water which is the form you get after you extract the energy!
I'd group sources this way:
1 - Stored solar energy. This is oil, coal, natural gas, etc. Solar energy captured aeons ago by plants, turned to oil. Once you use it up, it's gone. 2 - Current solar energy. Ultimately, hydropower, corn/ethanol, wind power, and solar power are all powered by the sun. It is not unlimited, as solar collection requires lots of land area. Tidal power (also driven by the sun) might provide the largest quantity of energy in this category. 3 - Nuclear energy from nuclear fission. 4 - Geothermal. Believe it or not, this is considered non-renewable. Once you cool the rocks it will take centuries for internal heat to propagate back upward. 5 - Nuclear fusion. We don't know how to harness this yet, perhaps someday we will. Einstein's E=MC^2. Potentially unlimited energy.
The problem is that Type 1 is where humans get most of our energy today. The peak of production is occurring right now, after which time it will decline. More drilling is not going to substantially extend the timeline (10-20 years max, because of an exponentially increasing consumption rate). This is a huge problem.
Type 2) has the potential to generate some significant relief, lengthening our timeline for Type 1 availability. But the quantity we're likely to get here is not going to be enough. The whole ethanol thing won't produce enough energy to make a huge difference. It's the government's way to look like they're doing something even though we've had no coherent energy policy for at least 20 years.
Type 3) reserves are substantial. Using breeder reactors, we could have a couple hundred years of supply. This is the way we can make hydrogen relatively cheaply. But of course nuclear waste is a special problem, not to mention terrorism issues, etc.
Type 4) is not going to provide a lot of relief.
Type 5) is the holy grail but we are probably a long way off.
A coherent energy policy would combine higher CAFE requirements, taxation on fossil fuels to be spent on a large effort to develop type 2 interim solutions, while also working more on nuclear fusion research. We should also build more nuclear powerplants as a mid-term strategy:
Short term target (under 10 years) - Tax fuels, increase CAFE requirements, increase utilization of renewable technologies: wind, solar, tidal Medium term target (10-30 years) - Increased nuclear energy Long term target (>30 years) - Fusion energy availability
The Berkeley site that you mentioned was for kids . . . like George Washington and the Cherry Tree kind of deal. The Israel site that you cited ranks "abundence" by total weight . . . Oxygen outweighs Hydrogen by 8 to 1 in H2O despite being out-numbered 2 to 1. Carbon is also lighter than Oxygen, and is outnumbered by Oxygen 2 to 1 in CO2 and 3 to 1 in the carbonic acid group (++)CO3, which is actually the most abundant form of carbon association with oxygen on this planet's surface.
The fundamental problem with biogenic theory of hydrocarbon is that, many other planets and their sattelites are full of hydrocarbon as shown by spectral analysis and samples taken by Voyager-type long range scounts in recent decades . . . there simply isn't enough solar energy to melt ice that far from the sun, much less sustaining biological process there. The hydrocarbon must have been there when the astro bodies were formed. There's no reason to suspect earth was especially deprived in hydrocarbon when the solar dust clumped together to form the planets and their satellites. Biology on this planet may well have been the consumer of hydrocarbon not the producer.
Sounds to me like advocacy for taxing rain water in order to pay for research into how to make pure water out of pure hydrogen and pure oxygen :-)
Regardless whether you believe in biogenic theory or abiogenic theory of hydrocarbon, there's plenty of it available. Making oil out of coal (combining it either with water or with natural gas) is probably cheaper than nuclear fission, and most certainly cheaper than non-existent nuclear fusion.
Depending on whether you believe in biogenic theory or abiogenic theory, burning natural gas, oil and coal is probably the simplest and most straight forward way of harnessing either solar energy or nuclear energy (the source energy for hydrocarbon regeneration from CaCO3 and water in the upper mantel is the nuclear decay energy, and the gravitational energy of the moon).
you: First of all, it doesn't really matter how much carbon, oxygen, or hydrogen we have on earth. What is important is the chemical compounds that those elements are stored in.
me: Agree; it was brightness who concluded that since C, H, O, are prevalent and never destroyed in a chemical reaction that everything could just be reformed. But when complex hydrocarbons are burned, entropy increase has occurred and it now requires an excess of energy to put those molecules back together. So if you get 1 joule of energy from burning some gasoline molecules, it'll take you 1+joules to put it back together. Now the Earth has stored energy in the forms we've mentioned, but it does not generate new energy. There is no large-scale nuclear reaction going on. The only thing in the solar system that creates new energy is the Sun. So any reversal or storage of energy that is occurring on Earth is ultimately derived from the Sun. So yes, you can have all the elements you want to form complex hydrocarbons, but you need solar energy to build those. Using the Earth's stored energy to recombine C, H, and o also would increase entropy. Only solar energy reverses entropy on Earth.
Overall your post is pretty much the same thing I said. I considered geothermal to be Stored Solar Energy though figuring that the Earth was formed from the same plasma as the Sun.
And we are in agreement that the Stored Solar Energy - the coal, oil, oil tars and shale took many, many millions of years to form, and we are using that up in a few hundred years. The rate of use and replacement might be on the order of - trying to feed an elephant with an eyedropper.
Well its wonderful to hear you believe in a "hypothesis" started by a 19th scientist. I'm familiar with these sites on abiogenic oil formation, and except for a few scientists, they do not get much support even after years of examination.
The hypothesis I would assume does not get much support, for if it were true, we could all pretty much go out in our back yards, drill down a mile or 2 and start pumping our own oil.
No sorry, the abiogenic hypothesis is nothing more than 'irrational exuberance', by a few people who want to believe our current lifestyle of using fossil fuels can continue indefinitely. The hypothesis if ever taken seriously would be detrimental to the world, in delaying the changes that need to be made to move from fossil fuels.
Plus even if we ignore the entropy problems with creating abiogenic oil, using this "unlimited" supply of oil for the next few centuries would probably end life as we know it due to the CO2 emissions and increased greenhouse effects. Then who would inherit the oil-well in my backyard?
Not all unions. Our union proposed working three 12 hour days in 1971 for Telephone operators. They also advocated split shifts for mothers. Flexible shifts can work for the company, employees & the country. Less fuel & less traffic.
The whole concept of 40 hours per week and 8 hours per day was to set a limit straight time hours. That became law to protect all of us from greedy employers that would work people 14 hours a day and pay them for 8 hours. Or not pay premium for extra hours worked. Safety was used as one of the reasons. I am not sure effectiveness is something you can prove. I have friends that worked 12 or more weeks at a time 16 hours per day 7 days a week, during the construction of the Trans Alaska Pipeline. The good part is everything past 12 hours was double time or even triple time.
Geothermal. Believe it or not, this is considered non-renewable.
I thought the only reason for not using geothermal in places like Hawaii, was superstition. Many of the best geothermal sites in the US are in National Parks, and off limits for some reason. This is the first I have heard of cooling off the geothermal strata. I can see a weakening of volcanic action over time. Not all areas will stay hot forever. I think using it while it is available is a good clean source of energy. Places like Iceland have used geothermal sources for several hundred years for heat.
The fuel efficiency of small automobiles in Europe are much greater than in the US. The Fit and Yaris still weight in the 2400 lb area. High efficiency vehicles (i.e. the Honda CRX HF) need to weight in the 1500 lb area. The ~ 1987 Honda CRX HF was listed at 52 city 57 highway. Alleged "safety" mandates keep vehicle weights high. Ironically, motorcycles are still allowed on the road which have NO safety mechanisms.
On another note, I agree with your assessment about simply keeping the number of cylinders low will not improve fuel efficiency. One doesn't need to break out the Physics book to empirically observe that the Corvette and S2000 get approximately the same fuel economy. However, the Corvette is infinitely faster and more powerful than the S2000. There appears to be a limit to efficiently extracting power from an engine based upon the number of cylinders (i.e. you have to rev much harder and hence make the engine conditions less optimal for fuel efficiency).
In terms of presciptions for the future, I agree with tlong (post 620). If I see a candidate with the name Long in 2008, I'm voting.
The problem is that in most neighborhoods, drilling down a mile or 2 is not enough . . . more like 20-60 miles down. It is pretty much accepted that there is an enormous methane (natural gas) pool 40-60 miles down. Even critics of abiogenic theory only quibbles on two points:
(1) natural gas is not oil (which is pretty silly, considering natural gas can be combined with coal to make oil; lengthening carbon chain is an exothermal process, so making oil out of natural gas alone would be profitable if oil is not ridiculously cheap, so cheap that oil wells would just burn off natural gas)
(2) It takes major amount of money and technology to reach 40-60 miles deep. That is correct if one is inclined to drill indiscriminately. There are cracks in the basement rocks, where hydrocarbon can seep upwards, reaching depth closer to surface. In any case, even the doomsday folks are subtly modifying their thesis from world running out of oil (since 1870, yes, 1870 was when it was first predicted the world would run out of oil for kerosene lamps, while dumping gasoline and other distillents; sounds familiar with the current situation of "running of oil" yet burning natural gas at well heads??) to a new slippery slope theory that it would be too costly to extract the deep hydrocarbons. As we know, as technology always gets cheaper.
As to global warming and greenhouse effect, there are three counter-arguments:
(1) the rate of CaCO3 limestone laying down at sea floor is highly dependent on CO2 level in the atmosphere. It's a metastable feedback system ever since precambrian atmosphere, which had more CO2 than O2. O2, not CO2, was the first massive air pollution, generated by photosynthetic algae; that probably killed off 90+% of all species then living on the surface due to oxidation. In other words, conditions change, get used to it and adapt.
(2) Warming is better for human species than cooling. What we today know as high marks of human civilization were all co-incided with global warming periods; conversely, crop failures and babarian invasions and fall of civilizations were frequently related to historical periods of global cooling. Kinda makes sense, since global warming pushes the line between farming vs. herding further north in the northern hemisphere, and vice versa when cooling took place.
(3) The current oxygen level is so high that forest fire is an eminent threat. Lower oxygen level and higher CO2 level may well be a good thing.
you: It is pretty much accepted that there is an enormous methane (natural gas) pool 40-60 miles down.
me: please post a university, USGS, or other official link to this info.
you: the rate of CaCO3 limestone laying down at sea floor is highly dependent on CO2 level in the atmosphere.
me: so in your theory/opinion, mankind should have no concern over how much oil or other complex hydrocarbons are combusted into simpler hydrocarbons. This is because these simpler hydrocarbons will be flushed from the atmosphere, sink back through the crust of the Earth to a depth of 40-60 miles, and then be converted back to oil/complex-hydrocarbons and seep back to the surface, where we will retap this fuel?
Or if it doesn't come to the surface technology will allow us to bring fuel from 50 miles down, despite the energy required to pump (against gravity of course) to the surface. I really don't understand how technology changes the potential energy needed to raise something 50 miles?
Anyway is there any limit to the RATE at which we can tap this fuel in your theory. Does this 50 miles of Earth "bottleneck" the process? If we're currently pumping 90 million barrels of oil today, this process of yours is able to keep up with that? How about if we go to 150M bbd? What is the limit rate? I would estimate that if we brought all 6 billion people in the world up to a decent standard of living, we're going to need about 10 times that 90M bbd.
you: Warming is better for human species than cooling.
me: Agree. A 5F - 10F rise would be welcome, since we are just coming out of an Ice Age, and vast stretches of the Earth are lightly inhabited due to the cold.
you: The current oxygen level is so high that forest fire is an eminent threat.
me: LOL. If there is insufficient oxygen for forest fires, you and I won't be posting.
What's really interesting is that many critics of the late Tommy Gold (one of the leading advocates of abiogenic theory in the US), i.e. defedents of biogenic theory, even accepted the existence of vast methane, yet focused their objection to abiogenic theory narrowly on oil itself. That is, focusing on the point that from a commercial point of view for oil drilling, most oil is found in a "sweet zone," below which even if hydrocarbon is found, often turns out to be methane (natural gas). While the point has validity if one's only interest is in commercial oil drilling, it is widely off-mark when the discussion is on hydrocarbon reserve in general.
CO2 and ++CO3, while contain carbon, are not hydrocarbons. The hydrocarbon regeneration process in the upper mantle of earth is not a perpetual motion machine; it derives energy from nuclear element decay iside the earth and the gravitational force of the earth-moon system . . . the same energy source as ocean/sea waves, except in this case is clumps of the earth's crust and molten mantle rubbing against each other. That's why I said, burning hydrocarbon may just be the cheapest way of harnessing nuclear energy and tidal energy :-)
How much regeneration capacity is there? No one knows for sure. However, considering that live volcanoes till periodicly spew billions of cubic feet of methane each year on 25% of the earth's surface that is land, and vast methane accummulation exist at sea floor that account for the remainder of earth's surface and periodicly we get massive methane release in the sea and oceans, it is safe to assume that there is considerable reserve capacity left untapped.
I'm glad we agree that a warmer earth will serve humanity remarkably well. As to forest fire, I was referring to the ease with which they can be started right now due to the very high level of oxygen currently exist on this planet. Plant growth and the land's plant carrying capacity is currently very much restricted by the high level of oxygen (natural forest fire is too easy to get started to allow more plant biomass build-up) and low level of CO2, which is why farmers built green houses to increase CO2 feed to their crop to begin with.
It is pretty much accepted that there is an enormous methane (natural gas) pool 40-60 miles down.
LOL...... just a slight problem....... how you gonna get it, since no technology is available to drill that far and as exxonmobil has said, last month, they aren't gonna to build any new refineries, so they surely ain't gonna spend billions on development to try an experiment like that.
Thanks for the link; first it's mor ethan most posters here ever have to support their opinion and second it's from a credible and from what most would consider an unbiased source.
I did note that the word "may" is liberally peppered throughout the Livermore report; I'd guess because many chemical/material reactions and creation can be created in controlled laboratory environments. This does not offer any proof that this is occurring in any significant quantity nature.
You sound like you have a scientific background, and I'd think that you would have a skeptical nature until there was much better data. From your previous posts you infer that abiogenic formation of oil is a definite, whereas the Livermore report states that methane (not oil) "may" be forming.
If abiogenic oil formation is occurring, and if it occurs fast enough to meet our needs, then we should not be seeing oil fields closing down, right? If oil fields are abiogenically refilling slowly, (as I've read some fields are replenished) that really isn't much use is it. If we're using 90M bbd and there's all sorts of unmet demand around the globe, then we're still not going to avoid serious problems unless 90M+ bbd of oil are being formed abiogenically. And that has to be oil that we can get to.
you: how you gonna get it, since no technology is available to drill that far
me: we'll get Bruce Willis and his crew from Armageddon? Or I saw "The Core" where that ship used force-fields and lasers to go right into the Earth's core.
If we could drill that far, and actually we'd only need to go as deep as where it's 300F-400F, I'd guess we could just dump seawater down there and create giant heat exchanger / steam turbines.
Note that a 2,500 acre farm (I think that's small as farms go) uses 1,800 gal. of diesel each week. I'd guess that's only during growing season. Also all the fertilizer the farmer uses is created from oil. Then some sort of fossil fuel supplies energy for the irrigation system to run.
This is only part of the process of creating a crop to produce ethanol. The crop then has to be moved to a railway, shipped to a factory, workers commute to the factory, the crop is converted to ethanol, then the ethanol has to be blended with gasoline, and then E85 shipped to the service stations. All these pieces of the energy balance need to be considered in an energy balance, to see if you really Netted any energy.
If we could drill that far, and actually we'd only need to go as deep as where it's 300F-400F
I would think that is in our current drilling range. The oil in the Arctic is all gas fed. It hits the surface at about 180 degrees F. Those wells are rarely more than 11k feet deep. I think they are through the permafrost at about 1400 feet. I beleive the Russians are drilling down about 40k feet. I don't know what the temperature is at that depth.
I've seen a show on Discovery a couple of weeks ago and the diamond mines are about 5 miles deep. The temperature there was in the low 100F's, so yes they were AC'ed extensively.
But no one is going into a mine if it's near the depth of molten rock. When you're talking molten rock, you're talking a couple of thousand degrees; and no AC unit is going to handle that load all around a mine-shaft. I believe from a college Geological Science course that the continental plates are several hundred miles thick. Of course at the edge of the plates, such as the Pacific Rim of Fire, molten rock is much closer to the surface.
Finding cracks and fissures in the earth's crust, where the hydrocarbon seeps up to shallower levels, is how we have been getting oil and natural gas in the last 120+ years. Since the interior pressure is enormous, it is a relatively safe bet that the seepage is not going to stop any time soon.
If methane (natural gas) replaces oil as the primary form of hydrocarbon that we use (and cars can run on natural gas too), refinery would be somewhat superfluous.
You did raise a very good point about how the industrial oligopolists would behave. The answer to that concern is really vigilant anti-trust; I was very much against allowing the merger of Exxon and Mobil (Chevron+Texaco, and BP+Amoco).
I very much enjoy the dispassionate discussion we are having, too.
IMHO, the "may" is just the operative word for any "scientific theory" (which carries more weight than "theory" in the vernacular sense; the vernacular "theory" is usually referred to as "hypothesis" in a scientific discussion). Nobody has witnessed the canonic biogenic theory in action turning dinosaure into oil either :-) That was a bit of a jest, the original biogenic theory involved animals, but the latest refined ones have been talking about algae etc.. The case for biogenic conversion also rests on controlled lab environments that show what "may" have been happening. Furthermore, biogenic theory faces two hurdles it never managed to overcome:
(1) All bio material has significant quantities of Nitrogen (protein, with nitrogen-heavy amino components, being the basic building material for life on this planet). The lab experiements did produce hydrocarbon from bio material, but also nitrogen-rich compounds. We do not get nearly as much nitrogen-based compounds in any oil or natural gas wells. Where did the nitrogen go? Not to mention the absence of what should have been much higher levels of sulfur too (cell walls and lipids, the predominant would-be source for hydrocarbon from bio material, have much much higher sulfur content than the oil and natural gas that we are getting).
(2) Extra-terrastrial carbonaceous bodies. Many astroids, sattelites and planets in the solar system are rich in hydrocarbon. It's improbable that these are products of decaying bio material.
I'm no expert of abiogenic theory, but my understanding of it is that the theory is composed of two parts in explaining where oil and natural gas came/comes from:
(1) There is an enormous primordial hydrocarbon reserve dating back to when planet earth was coalasced from space dust, which is itself very rich in hydrocarbon. The scale of reserve is measured in percentage, if not double-digit percentage terms of the earth's mass . . . because that's the ratio of carbonaceous material in the space dust in this region of solar system. That means, at current consumption levels, we are not going to run out of that reserve in thousands of years.
(2) The regeneration process in the upper mantle from water and subducted lime stone (calcium carbonate) under high temperature and high pressure generated by interior nuclear element decay and the moon's tidal force torquing the earth's crust and mantle.
The well refilling process is not usually directly related to regeneration immediately below the well itself. Regeneration is taking place at the upper mantle, or in other words the botton of the crust . . . so an oil well is not tapping into the regeneration spot directly unless the oil well is built on an active volcano :-) Although if we can ever catch the billions of cubes of natural gas spewed from valcanoes every year, it would be a huge step towards energy sufficiency without introducing any extra greenhouse gas (if that is really a concern at all).
The primordial reserve and the regeneration combined produce a high pressure pool of hydrocarbon under the earth's surface. We just need to tap into them. Often times oil wells get refilled due the the high pressure underneath the shallowest chamber where the well was first established. If existing wells are not producing enough for global energy needs, we just need to tap more holes.
Very much in agreement with your sentiment. I'm also skeptical of the farming lobby's claims unless and until farmers run all their farm implements on biodiesel or ethanol . . . if they can't even make it work in the farm fields where distribution cost is cut out of the loop, how can we ever expect ethanol to be economicly viable at the pump hundreds if not thousands of miles away.
On the other hand, I'm perfectly willing to pour cheap conola oil into my heating system if heating oil price goes much over $3/gal this winter . . . partly thanks to the oligopolistic tendencies of big oil and the monopolistic character of my local heating oil distributor. Hey, if government takes 40 cents out of every dollar that oil companies take from me, and subsidizes the farmers 20 cents for every dollar worth of oil they make, guess what's my answer to the rigged game? Real energy efficiency be damned.
Very much in agreement with your sentiment. I'm too skeptical of the farming lobby's claims unless and until farmers run all their farm implements on biodiesel or ethanol . .
Or horses like Belgians, Clydesdales, Percherons. Knowing that the Amish and similar groups in the US minimally rely on technology, wonder how efficient their farms are in consumption of energy vs their food output. What is their overall effectiveness/efficiency vs a modern farmer. How green are the Amish?
I would say groups like the Amish are closer to self sustaining than any other segment of our population. That also makes them greener than the rest of us. At least until we corrupt their children and they leave the community.
You don't need to go the the ocean's floor to obtain methane; just get a few pigs. If you recall from Mad Max Beyond Thunderdone", Tina Turner's bodyguard told Mel Gibson "Methane Cometh From Pig :surprise: "
hey marine2, you've posted that junk all over the place.
And I've already replied to it. Yeah, hydrogen is pretty neat stuff. But what you DON'T see in that video is the electricity being consumed to generate the hydrogen from water.
There's nothing new about electrolysis. And the long and short of it is that one consumes MORE energy (in electricity) than one gets out of the end (hydrogen).
With all the new hybrids out there and fancy/expensive 50-60 mpg cars, it occurs to me that mpg really doesn't matter much if you pay thousands more than a car that gets worse gas mileage, but costs much less. As a result, I want to know which cars give you the most bang for your buck. 93 Honda Civic? 91 Corolla? What are your thoughts out there? To get the best possible mpg for your money, I think it's necessary to figure out the current cost of used high mpg cars, the maintenance required since they aren't brand new, and the mpg.
That is easy. A 2002 or 2003 VW Jetta diesel wagon. Lots of room and an honest 50 MPG. No problem going 300k miles on that engine if maintained properly. The tough part is they are selling for about what they sold for 5 years ago. If you know someone that owns a McDonald's franchise you can run it for dang near nothing on old cooking oil. Wait to buy one when the price of fuel drops here in a few months. Timing is everything in buying cars.
Right now your best bet is to buy a Luxury SUV. You can find some fat cat that has to have the latest in a hybrid to look green and will give the SUV away. Neighbor just bought a beautiful loaded 2003 LX470 for $25k. That is $15k under blue book trade-in. Only has 22k miles on it. She is selling her Mercedes that is too small anyway.
Now is the time to buy big luxury. Buy small when every one else is buying the big SUVs.
I;m just about to go over 229,000 on a '96 Sentra. last tank of gas I had no trip longer than 15 miles and got 37 mpg. On the highway on extended trips it gets in the neighborhood of 42-44 mpg.
My '91 Sentra also went over 230,000 and got the same mileage right up until I parted ways with it.
The '96 cost me just over $12,000 total. Decent mileage bang for my buck.
At lunch today I went out with a coworker to refuel his 04.5 Jetta TDI. He calculates his mpg at every fillup...this time it was 43.5xxx in mixed city/highway driving.
a running average going on my '02 Echo, and it gets me a solid 41 mpg all the time. In fact, with the advent of the summer gas, the mileage is actually rising just slightly. My current average covers the last 2800 miles.
With the Prius coming in around 47 mpg according to its owners (per fueleconomy.gov), the Echo seems the better bet, given its price of well under half that of the Prius. Now of course, the Echo is a VERY basic car, and not everyone's cup of tea. But if you don't mind plastic everything, it will save you a lot of gas money.
I believe the Corolla and Civic will do almost as well, if you want a bit more car for your money. Or if you don't mind buying new, the new Yaris does pretty well too, looks to be within a point or two of the Echo it replaces.
Now if you want something bigger than any of those, you might want to look at Camry and Accord 4-cylinders. My buddy gets close to 30 mpg in town with his Accord 4-cylinder automatic. Those models can be expensive new or used, and if you would rather save the money up front and spend a bit more on gas after the purchase, I would get one of the big, very relaxed domestic cars like the GM cars with the 3800 engine (most of the recent Buicks, the Impala with the optional engine, etc). Any of those, two or three years old, will cost you significantly less than a recent model CamCord will cost. If you can save $5000 on the purchase price, that will pay for the extra gas consumption those models will have vs the 4-cyl CamCords for quite a number of years.
Avoid SUVs! They have terrible resale right now, which means you will be stuck in it for quite a while if you buy one. And even if you save money upfront, those $100 fill-ups will have you in tears in no time. Only get a truck-based SUV if you really need to tow, or have more than three kids!
2014 Mini Cooper (stick shift of course), 2016 Camry hybrid, 2009 Outback Sport 5-spd (keeping the stick alive)
my uncle says he averages about 34-38 in mostly highway driving. That's an '03 model with the automatic. However, while his commute is mostly highway, he does run into a lot of rush hour traffic that can grind to a halt. Just for comparison, he borrowed my '00 Intrepid for a week when his truck was in the tranny shop and his Corolla was in the body shop, and he got about 27 mpg with it. He said that was one of the worst weeks he'd ever had for commuting though, with plenty of traffic snarls.
I'd be kinda curious to see how his Corolla does in my type of driving, which is mainly just 3.5 mile commutes back and forth to work and short-distance local driving. I'm lucky to break 20 mpg with my Intrepid, and at the last fill-up, I figure my old '85 Silverado was getting about 9 mpg!
what kind of "real world" mileage a 4-cyl/automatic Altima would get around town? I was always a bit disappointed with the Altima's EPA estimate of 23/29, compared to the 24/34 that the Accord/Camry are able to get with their 4-cyl/5-speed automatic.
you know, if you are filling up the Silverado less than like once a month, you are probably losing enough gas to evaporation that it is skewing your fuel economy calculations for that truck.
For someone like you who does all small trips, the car that would best optimize your gas mileage would be the one with a high EPA city rating. I bet the Corolla would get you at least 30, so you would be saving roughly 1/3 of the gas you put in the Intrepid. But then, as little as you drive, the actual dollar savings per month would be small wouldn't they?
2014 Mini Cooper (stick shift of course), 2016 Camry hybrid, 2009 Outback Sport 5-spd (keeping the stick alive)
as much as I gripe about not being comfortable in small cars, I probably *could* deal with something like my uncle's Corolla in the majority of my driving.
As for evaporation, I didn't even think of that. Last time I filled the truck up though, it took about 9 gallons, and went about 80 miles. I filled up on 5/22, and before that the last time was 5/9. I think another killer is that the trip is so short that sometimes the fast idle hasn't even kicked off when I pull into the parking lot at work!
I might start filling up a bit more often to see if that helps out with the evaporation issue.
And yeah, as little as I drive these days, it would take a long, long time for me to see any financial benefit of getting a more fuel-efficient vehicle, especially since both are paid off. I probably wouldn't get a new vehicle just to save on gas, but when one needs replacing due to being worn out and needing too much in repairs, fuel economy will be on my mind.
Oh, if you're filling up every two weeks, then evaporation isn't playing much of a role. I kinda figured that as little as you drive your truck, you were probably filling it up like once every two months or something.
Wow, 9 mpg! If it were me, I would just leave it in the driveway unless I specifically needed a truck. As it is, my 4Runner only gets 20 mpg, and I don't drive it much, except for the things I bought it for (vacation, camping, ski trips, stuff like that, plus any trip where I need the load space).
2014 Mini Cooper (stick shift of course), 2016 Camry hybrid, 2009 Outback Sport 5-spd (keeping the stick alive)
Well, the best 'bang for your buck' would be an '84 Corolla or Sentra diesel, if you could find one with a good body that's not already been flogged to death.
Go ahead, buy a 20 year old economy car, I dare ya'! ;-)
While the diesel might save you a ton of gas, I just dunno about the repair costs you might face - could be daunting!
Yeah, the '84 Corolla would be cheap to buy, but repairs would again be as problem methinks, and the newer Corollas (especially since '98) have been much higher-rated for fuel economy. Your best bet in this vein would be a well-kept '98 Corolla, which after all is already 8 years old and will have depreciated quite a lot.
2014 Mini Cooper (stick shift of course), 2016 Camry hybrid, 2009 Outback Sport 5-spd (keeping the stick alive)
Comments
If we can put men on the moon, why can't we get our freight transferred in a more efficient, safe, less-aggravating manner than in a huge heavy semi-truck?
They cause a lot of grief and a lot of un-needed stress. Plus, are trucking frims subsidizing the local, state and federal government as they should be for pounding more of the crap out of our interstate road system than us in our fuel-efficient, foreign-made imports, that we should all be buying in America? Just joshin' on that last comment.
Sort of.
Oh, and sports are merely entertainment that some of us choose to watch and/or read about and/or go to events, etc. To get angry about them is a waste of time. If there is a market for what they are selling (great NBA playoff action, for an example),and there clearly is, why get steamed up about them? In Seattle's example, the Sonics' situation could be taken care of by Howard Schultz of Starbuck's and the rest of his business consortium that owns the team. They should build theirselves their own replacement for Key Arena. They can get a good interest rate on the loan, can't they? Don't worry about having to pay for it, obviously the public doesn't buy into it. Even though it's entertainment, really fine entertainment for some people. Should pro sports be banned? Why waste your energy worrying about it? These things get worked ut with dollars and sense and meetings and filibusters and all sorts of time-wasting avenues. Not worth the worry, men. You don't make as much as Ray Allen. Get over it. It's a free market employment system, it's America's moneymaking system.
A better expenditure of time would be breaking free from our dependence on dino-oil. It's in the works. Just don't hold your breath waiting for it to happen.
And let's work on a better way of transporting our freight. Yikes. Talk about an accident waiting to happen.
2021 Kia Soul LX 6-speed stick
Maybe we can improve and incentivise transporting people also by rail. Europe supposedly has a fine rail system for people and freight. Japan might be the leading edge in rail tech.
But, besides semis, need to get/keep more cars off of our roads. Wonder what the amount of fuel/oil is used to transport a person per mile on airlines (or car) vs rail. We can figure out car costs ourselves. Just guessing, but rail would seem to be more efficient than air or car. And, if the US can figure out how to get coal to burn clean, we could go back to steam locomotives.
Here's an off topic question/observation. Toyota, Honda, and Nissan are suddenly offering lightweight vehicles with low power, small displacement engines. Have you noticed that there really isn't much of a fuel efficiency gain? Look at the Yaris compared to the Corolla or the Fit compared to the Civic. What is to be gained here? My point is that a lot of people see the trend towards higher horsepower as being contrary to higher efficiency. I don't think that is necessarily the case. A four cyclinder engine can only be so efficient at extracting energy from a gallon of gasoline.
me: well that goes against what almost any scientific and educational organization has to say. The vast majority of fossil fuels were formed from the biological species that lived and died hundreds of millions of years ago. From Berkeley: http://www.energyquest.ca.gov/story/chapter08.html
you: In this part of the universe/solar system, Hydrogen and Carbon are two of the top four most abundant elements along with Oxygen and Helium.
me: Well on Earth where we're currently getting our fuel, this is the order of abundance: http://www.science.co.il/PTelements.asp?s=Earth The majority of the atmosphere (70-some %) is Nitrogen.
Please post where I can read this "new science facts" that you speak of.
me: OK say you're in charge of importing and distibuting Japanese-made Hondas into the U.S. Tell me how you would get the autos from the ships to all the dealers in the U.S.
I'd do just as they do currently. Move the cars as close to the markets by bringing the ship to the nearest port. Unload the vehicles into a lot. Then pick and sort what vehicles to load on a truck to deliver to 1 or 2 dealers.
Unless you planned on running a railline into every dealer's backyard, you're going to need trucks. If you have cars at the Port of Newark, you wouldn't load them onto a few cars of a 100-car train, and then expect the train to make a circuit of Honda dealers, stopping for an hour in every city of 50,000 to unload a few cars?
Trains are great for moving large quantities of goods between 2 points, without a bunch of stops in between. They are great for hauling coal, grain, and chemicals in bulk. They are not so good as the variety of goods and stops needed multiply.
That is basically the same thing people will tell you. In a densely populated area with multiple lines train/subway travel can be viable. But when Joe Schmoe wants a train-stop 2 blocks from his house in suburbia to take him to the mall 2 suburbs west @ 6pm, it gets rather impossible to meet his needs. Trains will never replace the practicality of a car which takes you door-to-door to where and when you want.
What I believe came up here was using railways to relieve car congestion from commuting. But it turned out trucking being replaced partly with railways was the topic also?
I agree with that. Building or improving the railways should be financially viable. The problem is we devestated them for decades and they dwindled away. Tracks were taken up; the right-of-way transferred to the adjacent landowners or political divisions. Now we could use some more of the right-of-ways? OR we can improve the ones we have with more tracks and other improvements to increase their ability to move cargo.
WRT moving autos. In this area there are yards that seem to serve as dropoff points for cars not manufactured here but moved in by trains. Then from the yards the contracted truck carriers pick them up to deliver to dealers within a certain radius.
2014 Malibu 2LT, 2015 Cruze 2LT,
Easy to say, difficult to do. Oil is still cheap. It is more of a political thing. Talk to the Democrats about new oil drilling, new nuclear power plants, new oil refineries.... new anything to do with power?
I'd group sources this way:
1 - Stored solar energy. This is oil, coal, natural gas, etc. Solar energy captured aeons ago by plants, turned to oil. Once you use it up, it's gone.
2 - Current solar energy. Ultimately, hydropower, corn/ethanol, wind power, and solar power are all powered by the sun. It is not unlimited, as solar collection requires lots of land area. Tidal power (also driven by the sun) might provide the largest quantity of energy in this category.
3 - Nuclear energy from nuclear fission.
4 - Geothermal. Believe it or not, this is considered non-renewable. Once you cool the rocks it will take centuries for internal heat to propagate back upward.
5 - Nuclear fusion. We don't know how to harness this yet, perhaps someday we will. Einstein's E=MC^2. Potentially unlimited energy.
The problem is that Type 1 is where humans get most of our energy today. The peak of production is occurring right now, after which time it will decline. More drilling is not going to substantially extend the timeline (10-20 years max, because of an exponentially increasing consumption rate). This is a huge problem.
Type 2) has the potential to generate some significant relief, lengthening our timeline for Type 1 availability. But the quantity we're likely to get here is not going to be enough. The whole ethanol thing won't produce enough energy to make a huge difference. It's the government's way to look like they're doing something even though we've had no coherent energy policy for at least 20 years.
Type 3) reserves are substantial. Using breeder reactors, we could have a couple hundred years of supply. This is the way we can make hydrogen relatively cheaply. But of course nuclear waste is a special problem, not to mention terrorism issues, etc.
Type 4) is not going to provide a lot of relief.
Type 5) is the holy grail but we are probably a long way off.
A coherent energy policy would combine higher CAFE requirements, taxation on fossil fuels to be spent on a large effort to develop type 2 interim solutions, while also working more on nuclear fusion research. We should also build more nuclear powerplants as a mid-term strategy:
Short term target (under 10 years) - Tax fuels, increase CAFE requirements, increase utilization of renewable technologies: wind, solar, tidal
Medium term target (10-30 years) - Increased nuclear energy
Long term target (>30 years) - Fusion energy availability
http://www.answers.com/topic/abiogenic-petroleum-origin
The Berkeley site that you mentioned was for kids . . . like George Washington and the Cherry Tree kind of deal. The Israel site that you cited ranks "abundence" by total weight . . . Oxygen outweighs Hydrogen by 8 to 1 in H2O despite being out-numbered 2 to 1. Carbon is also lighter than Oxygen, and is outnumbered by Oxygen 2 to 1 in CO2 and 3 to 1 in the carbonic acid group (++)CO3, which is actually the most abundant form of carbon association with oxygen on this planet's surface.
The fundamental problem with biogenic theory of hydrocarbon is that, many other planets and their sattelites are full of hydrocarbon as shown by spectral analysis and samples taken by Voyager-type long range scounts in recent decades . . . there simply isn't enough solar energy to melt ice that far from the sun, much less sustaining biological process there. The hydrocarbon must have been there when the astro bodies were formed. There's no reason to suspect earth was especially deprived in hydrocarbon when the solar dust clumped together to form the planets and their satellites. Biology on this planet may well have been the consumer of hydrocarbon not the producer.
Regardless whether you believe in biogenic theory or abiogenic theory of hydrocarbon, there's plenty of it available. Making oil out of coal (combining it either with water or with natural gas) is probably cheaper than nuclear fission, and most certainly cheaper than non-existent nuclear fusion.
Depending on whether you believe in biogenic theory or abiogenic theory, burning natural gas, oil and coal is probably the simplest and most straight forward way of harnessing either solar energy or nuclear energy (the source energy for hydrocarbon regeneration from CaCO3 and water in the upper mantel is the nuclear decay energy, and the gravitational energy of the moon).
me: Agree; it was brightness who concluded that since C, H, O, are prevalent and never destroyed in a chemical reaction that everything could just be reformed. But when complex hydrocarbons are burned, entropy increase has occurred and it now requires an excess of energy to put those molecules back together. So if you get 1 joule of energy from burning some gasoline molecules, it'll take you 1+joules to put it back together. Now the Earth has stored energy in the forms we've mentioned, but it does not generate new energy. There is no large-scale nuclear reaction going on. The only thing in the solar system that creates new energy is the Sun. So any reversal or storage of energy that is occurring on Earth is ultimately derived from the Sun. So yes, you can have all the elements you want to form complex hydrocarbons, but you need solar energy to build those. Using the Earth's stored energy to recombine C, H, and o also would increase entropy. Only solar energy reverses entropy on Earth.
Overall your post is pretty much the same thing I said. I considered geothermal to be Stored Solar Energy though figuring that the Earth was formed from the same plasma as the Sun.
And we are in agreement that the Stored Solar Energy - the coal, oil, oil tars and shale took many, many millions of years to form, and we are using that up in a few hundred years. The rate of use and replacement might be on the order of - trying to feed an elephant with an eyedropper.
The hypothesis I would assume does not get much support, for if it were true, we could all pretty much go out in our back yards, drill down a mile or 2 and start pumping our own oil.
No sorry, the abiogenic hypothesis is nothing more than 'irrational exuberance', by a few people who want to believe our current lifestyle of using fossil fuels can continue indefinitely. The hypothesis if ever taken seriously would be detrimental to the world, in delaying the changes that need to be made to move from fossil fuels.
Plus even if we ignore the entropy problems with creating abiogenic oil, using this "unlimited" supply of oil for the next few centuries would probably end life as we know it due to the CO2 emissions and increased greenhouse effects. Then who would inherit the oil-well in my backyard?
Not all unions. Our union proposed working three 12 hour days in 1971 for Telephone operators. They also advocated split shifts for mothers. Flexible shifts can work for the company, employees & the country. Less fuel & less traffic.
The whole concept of 40 hours per week and 8 hours per day was to set a limit straight time hours. That became law to protect all of us from greedy employers that would work people 14 hours a day and pay them for 8 hours. Or not pay premium for extra hours worked. Safety was used as one of the reasons. I am not sure effectiveness is something you can prove. I have friends that worked 12 or more weeks at a time 16 hours per day 7 days a week, during the construction of the Trans Alaska Pipeline. The good part is everything past 12 hours was double time or even triple time.
I thought the only reason for not using geothermal in places like Hawaii, was superstition. Many of the best geothermal sites in the US are in National Parks, and off limits for some reason. This is the first I have heard of cooling off the geothermal strata. I can see a weakening of volcanic action over time. Not all areas will stay hot forever. I think using it while it is available is a good clean source of energy. Places like Iceland have used geothermal sources for several hundred years for heat.
On another note, I agree with your assessment about simply keeping the number of cylinders low will not improve fuel efficiency. One doesn't need to break out the Physics book to empirically observe that the Corvette and S2000 get approximately the same fuel economy. However, the Corvette is infinitely faster and more powerful than the S2000. There appears to be a limit to efficiently extracting power from an engine based upon the number of cylinders (i.e. you have to rev much harder and hence make the engine conditions less optimal for fuel efficiency).
In terms of presciptions for the future, I agree with tlong (post 620). If I see a candidate with the name Long in 2008, I'm voting.
Thanks
(1) natural gas is not oil (which is pretty silly, considering natural gas can be combined with coal to make oil; lengthening carbon chain is an exothermal process, so making oil out of natural gas alone would be profitable if oil is not ridiculously cheap, so cheap that oil wells would just burn off natural gas)
(2) It takes major amount of money and technology to reach 40-60 miles deep. That is correct if one is inclined to drill indiscriminately. There are cracks in the basement rocks, where hydrocarbon can seep upwards, reaching depth closer to surface. In any case, even the doomsday folks are subtly modifying their thesis from world running out of oil (since 1870, yes, 1870 was when it was first predicted the world would run out of oil for kerosene lamps, while dumping gasoline and other distillents; sounds familiar with the current situation of "running of oil" yet burning natural gas at well heads??) to a new slippery slope theory that it would be too costly to extract the deep hydrocarbons. As we know, as technology always gets cheaper.
As to global warming and greenhouse effect, there are three counter-arguments:
(1) the rate of CaCO3 limestone laying down at sea floor is highly dependent on CO2 level in the atmosphere. It's a metastable feedback system ever since precambrian atmosphere, which had more CO2 than O2. O2, not CO2, was the first massive air pollution, generated by photosynthetic algae; that probably killed off 90+% of all species then living on the surface due to oxidation. In other words, conditions change, get used to it and adapt.
(2) Warming is better for human species than cooling. What we today know as high marks of human civilization were all co-incided with global warming periods; conversely, crop failures and babarian invasions and fall of civilizations were frequently related to historical periods of global cooling. Kinda makes sense, since global warming pushes the line between farming vs. herding further north in the northern hemisphere, and vice versa when cooling took place.
(3) The current oxygen level is so high that forest fire is an eminent threat. Lower oxygen level and higher CO2 level may well be a good thing.
The Edmunds forums are not your personal battleground.
Ha! Thanks for the comment. However, I'm not nearly dumb enough to expose my private life to a public position.
me: please post a university, USGS, or other official link to this info.
you: the rate of CaCO3 limestone laying down at sea floor is highly dependent on CO2 level in the atmosphere.
me: so in your theory/opinion, mankind should have no concern over how much oil or other complex hydrocarbons are combusted into simpler hydrocarbons. This is because these simpler hydrocarbons will be flushed from the atmosphere, sink back through the crust of the Earth to a depth of 40-60 miles, and then be converted back to oil/complex-hydrocarbons and seep back to the surface, where we will retap this fuel?
Or if it doesn't come to the surface technology will allow us to bring fuel from 50 miles down, despite the energy required to pump (against gravity of course) to the surface. I really don't understand how technology changes the potential energy needed to raise something 50 miles?
Anyway is there any limit to the RATE at which we can tap this fuel in your theory. Does this 50 miles of Earth "bottleneck" the process? If we're currently pumping 90 million barrels of oil today, this process of yours is able to keep up with that? How about if we go to 150M bbd? What is the limit rate? I would estimate that if we brought all 6 billion people in the world up to a decent standard of living, we're going to need about 10 times that 90M bbd.
you: Warming is better for human species than cooling.
me: Agree. A 5F - 10F rise would be welcome, since we are just coming out of an Ice Age, and vast stretches of the Earth are lightly inhabited due to the cold.
you: The current oxygen level is so high that forest fire is an eminent threat.
me: LOL. If there is insufficient oxygen for forest fires, you and I won't be posting.
http://www.llnl.gov/pao/news/news_releases/2004/NR-04-09-07.html
What's really interesting is that many critics of the late Tommy Gold (one of the leading advocates of abiogenic theory in the US), i.e. defedents of biogenic theory, even accepted the existence of vast methane, yet focused their objection to abiogenic theory narrowly on oil itself. That is, focusing on the point that from a commercial point of view for oil drilling, most oil is found in a "sweet zone," below which even if hydrocarbon is found, often turns out to be methane (natural gas). While the point has validity if one's only interest is in commercial oil drilling, it is widely off-mark when the discussion is on hydrocarbon reserve in general.
CO2 and ++CO3, while contain carbon, are not hydrocarbons. The hydrocarbon regeneration process in the upper mantle of earth is not a perpetual motion machine; it derives energy from nuclear element decay iside the earth and the gravitational force of the earth-moon system . . . the same energy source as ocean/sea waves, except in this case is clumps of the earth's crust and molten mantle rubbing against each other. That's why I said, burning hydrocarbon may just be the cheapest way of harnessing nuclear energy and tidal energy :-)
How much regeneration capacity is there? No one knows for sure. However, considering that live volcanoes till periodicly spew billions of cubic feet of methane each year on 25% of the earth's surface that is land, and vast methane accummulation exist at sea floor that account for the remainder of earth's surface and periodicly we get massive methane release in the sea and oceans, it is safe to assume that there is considerable reserve capacity left untapped.
I'm glad we agree that a warmer earth will serve humanity remarkably well. As to forest fire, I was referring to the ease with which they can be started right now due to the very high level of oxygen currently exist on this planet. Plant growth and the land's plant carrying capacity is currently very much restricted by the high level of oxygen (natural forest fire is too easy to get started to allow more plant biomass build-up) and low level of CO2, which is why farmers built green houses to increase CO2 feed to their crop to begin with.
LOL...... just a slight problem....... how you gonna get it, since no technology is available to drill that far and as exxonmobil has said, last month, they aren't gonna to build any new refineries, so they surely ain't gonna spend billions on development to try an experiment like that.
I did note that the word "may" is liberally peppered throughout the Livermore report; I'd guess because many chemical/material reactions and creation can be created in controlled laboratory environments. This does not offer any proof that this is occurring in any significant quantity nature.
You sound like you have a scientific background, and I'd think that you would have a skeptical nature until there was much better data. From your previous posts you infer that abiogenic formation of oil is a definite, whereas the Livermore report states that methane (not oil) "may" be forming.
If abiogenic oil formation is occurring, and if it occurs fast enough to meet our needs, then we should not be seeing oil fields closing down, right? If oil fields are abiogenically refilling slowly, (as I've read some fields are replenished) that really isn't much use is it. If we're using 90M bbd and there's all sorts of unmet demand around the globe, then we're still not going to avoid serious problems unless 90M+ bbd of oil are being formed abiogenically. And that has to be oil that we can get to.
me: we'll get Bruce Willis and his crew from Armageddon? Or I saw "The Core" where that ship used force-fields and lasers to go right into the Earth's core.
If we could drill that far, and actually we'd only need to go as deep as where it's 300F-400F, I'd guess we could just dump seawater down there and create giant heat exchanger / steam turbines.
http://channels.netscape.com/pf/story.jsp?idq=/ff/story/0001/20060514/1243963448- - .htm&sc=1333
Note that a 2,500 acre farm (I think that's small as farms go) uses 1,800 gal. of diesel each week. I'd guess that's only during growing season. Also all the fertilizer the farmer uses is created from oil. Then some sort of fossil fuel supplies energy for the irrigation system to run.
This is only part of the process of creating a crop to produce ethanol. The crop then has to be moved to a railway, shipped to a factory, workers commute to the factory, the crop is converted to ethanol, then the ethanol has to be blended with gasoline, and then E85 shipped to the service stations. All these pieces of the energy balance need to be considered in an energy balance, to see if you really Netted any energy.
I would think that is in our current drilling range. The oil in the Arctic is all gas fed. It hits the surface at about 180 degrees F. Those wells are rarely more than 11k feet deep. I think they are through the permafrost at about 1400 feet. I beleive the Russians are drilling down about 40k feet. I don't know what the temperature is at that depth.
The diamonds mines in South Africa go down very deep and they need huge A/c units cause it's close to the molten core.
But no one is going into a mine if it's near the depth of molten rock. When you're talking molten rock, you're talking a couple of thousand degrees; and no AC unit is going to handle that load all around a mine-shaft. I believe from a college Geological Science course that the continental plates are several hundred miles thick. Of course at the edge of the plates, such as the Pacific Rim of Fire, molten rock is much closer to the surface.
:shades:
If methane (natural gas) replaces oil as the primary form of hydrocarbon that we use (and cars can run on natural gas too), refinery would be somewhat superfluous.
You did raise a very good point about how the industrial oligopolists would behave. The answer to that concern is really vigilant anti-trust; I was very much against allowing the merger of Exxon and Mobil (Chevron+Texaco, and BP+Amoco).
IMHO, the "may" is just the operative word for any "scientific theory" (which carries more weight than "theory" in the vernacular sense; the vernacular "theory" is usually referred to as "hypothesis" in a scientific discussion). Nobody has witnessed the canonic biogenic theory in action turning dinosaure into oil either :-) That was a bit of a jest, the original biogenic theory involved animals, but the latest refined ones have been talking about algae etc.. The case for biogenic conversion also rests on controlled lab environments that show what "may" have been happening. Furthermore, biogenic theory faces two hurdles it never managed to overcome:
(1) All bio material has significant quantities of Nitrogen (protein, with nitrogen-heavy amino components, being the basic building material for life on this planet). The lab experiements did produce hydrocarbon from bio material, but also nitrogen-rich compounds. We do not get nearly as much nitrogen-based compounds in any oil or natural gas wells. Where did the nitrogen go? Not to mention the absence of what should have been much higher levels of sulfur too (cell walls and lipids, the predominant would-be source for hydrocarbon from bio material, have much much higher sulfur content than the oil and natural gas that we are getting).
(2) Extra-terrastrial carbonaceous bodies. Many astroids, sattelites and planets in the solar system are rich in hydrocarbon. It's improbable that these are products of decaying bio material.
I'm no expert of abiogenic theory, but my understanding of it is that the theory is composed of two parts in explaining where oil and natural gas came/comes from:
(1) There is an enormous primordial hydrocarbon reserve dating back to when planet earth was coalasced from space dust, which is itself very rich in hydrocarbon. The scale of reserve is measured in percentage, if not double-digit percentage terms of the earth's mass . . . because that's the ratio of carbonaceous material in the space dust in this region of solar system. That means, at current consumption levels, we are not going to run out of that reserve in thousands of years.
(2) The regeneration process in the upper mantle from water and subducted lime stone (calcium carbonate) under high temperature and high pressure generated by interior nuclear element decay and the moon's tidal force torquing the earth's crust and mantle.
The well refilling process is not usually directly related to regeneration immediately below the well itself. Regeneration is taking place at the upper mantle, or in other words the botton of the crust . . . so an oil well is not tapping into the regeneration spot directly unless the oil well is built on an active volcano :-) Although if we can ever catch the billions of cubes of natural gas spewed from valcanoes every year, it would be a huge step towards energy sufficiency without introducing any extra greenhouse gas (if that is really a concern at all).
The primordial reserve and the regeneration combined produce a high pressure pool of hydrocarbon under the earth's surface. We just need to tap into them. Often times oil wells get refilled due the the high pressure underneath the shallowest chamber where the well was first established. If existing wells are not producing enough for global energy needs, we just need to tap more holes.
On the other hand, I'm perfectly willing to pour cheap conola oil into my heating system if heating oil price goes much over $3/gal this winter . . . partly thanks to the oligopolistic tendencies of big oil and the monopolistic character of my local heating oil distributor. Hey, if government takes 40 cents out of every dollar that oil companies take from me, and subsidizes the farmers 20 cents for every dollar worth of oil they make, guess what's my answer to the rigged game? Real energy efficiency be damned.
Or horses like Belgians, Clydesdales, Percherons. Knowing that the Amish and similar groups in the US minimally rely on technology, wonder how efficient their farms are in consumption of energy vs their food output. What is their overall effectiveness/efficiency vs a modern farmer. How green are the Amish?
You don't need to go the the ocean's floor to obtain methane; just get a few pigs. If you recall from Mad Max Beyond Thunderdone", Tina Turner's bodyguard told Mel Gibson "Methane Cometh From Pig :surprise: "
:P
When at site, Click on words, Water Fuel - HHO Gas
And I've already replied to it. Yeah, hydrogen is pretty neat stuff. But what you DON'T see in that video is the electricity being consumed to generate the hydrogen from water.
There's nothing new about electrolysis. And the long and short of it is that one consumes MORE energy (in electricity) than one gets out of the end (hydrogen).
With all the new hybrids out there and fancy/expensive 50-60 mpg cars, it occurs to me that mpg really doesn't matter much if you pay thousands more than a car that gets worse gas mileage, but costs much less. As a result, I want to know which cars give you the most bang for your buck. 93 Honda Civic? 91 Corolla? What are your thoughts out there? To get the best possible mpg for your money, I think it's necessary to figure out the current cost of used high mpg cars, the maintenance required since they aren't brand new, and the mpg.
Right now your best bet is to buy a Luxury SUV. You can find some fat cat that has to have the latest in a hybrid to look green and will give the SUV away. Neighbor just bought a beautiful loaded 2003 LX470 for $25k. That is $15k under blue book trade-in. Only has 22k miles on it. She is selling her Mercedes that is too small anyway.
Now is the time to buy big luxury. Buy small when every one else is buying the big SUVs.
PS
Welcome to the forum....
My '91 Sentra also went over 230,000 and got the same mileage right up until I parted ways with it.
The '96 cost me just over $12,000 total. Decent mileage bang for my buck.
With the Prius coming in around 47 mpg according to its owners (per fueleconomy.gov), the Echo seems the better bet, given its price of well under half that of the Prius. Now of course, the Echo is a VERY basic car, and not everyone's cup of tea. But if you don't mind plastic everything, it will save you a lot of gas money.
I believe the Corolla and Civic will do almost as well, if you want a bit more car for your money. Or if you don't mind buying new, the new Yaris does pretty well too, looks to be within a point or two of the Echo it replaces.
Now if you want something bigger than any of those, you might want to look at Camry and Accord 4-cylinders. My buddy gets close to 30 mpg in town with his Accord 4-cylinder automatic. Those models can be expensive new or used, and if you would rather save the money up front and spend a bit more on gas after the purchase, I would get one of the big, very relaxed domestic cars like the GM cars with the 3800 engine (most of the recent Buicks, the Impala with the optional engine, etc). Any of those, two or three years old, will cost you significantly less than a recent model CamCord will cost. If you can save $5000 on the purchase price, that will pay for the extra gas consumption those models will have vs the 4-cyl CamCords for quite a number of years.
Avoid SUVs! They have terrible resale right now, which means you will be stuck in it for quite a while if you buy one. And even if you save money upfront, those $100 fill-ups will have you in tears in no time. Only get a truck-based SUV if you really need to tow, or have more than three kids!
2014 Mini Cooper (stick shift of course), 2016 Camry hybrid, 2009 Outback Sport 5-spd (keeping the stick alive)
I'd be kinda curious to see how his Corolla does in my type of driving, which is mainly just 3.5 mile commutes back and forth to work and short-distance local driving. I'm lucky to break 20 mpg with my Intrepid, and at the last fill-up, I figure my old '85 Silverado was getting about 9 mpg!
For someone like you who does all small trips, the car that would best optimize your gas mileage would be the one with a high EPA city rating. I bet the Corolla would get you at least 30, so you would be saving roughly 1/3 of the gas you put in the Intrepid. But then, as little as you drive, the actual dollar savings per month would be small wouldn't they?
2014 Mini Cooper (stick shift of course), 2016 Camry hybrid, 2009 Outback Sport 5-spd (keeping the stick alive)
As for evaporation, I didn't even think of that. Last time I filled the truck up though, it took about 9 gallons, and went about 80 miles. I filled up on 5/22, and before that the last time was 5/9. I think another killer is that the trip is so short that sometimes the fast idle hasn't even kicked off when I pull into the parking lot at work!
I might start filling up a bit more often to see if that helps out with the evaporation issue.
And yeah, as little as I drive these days, it would take a long, long time for me to see any financial benefit of getting a more fuel-efficient vehicle, especially since both are paid off. I probably wouldn't get a new vehicle just to save on gas, but when one needs replacing due to being worn out and needing too much in repairs, fuel economy will be on my mind.
Wow, 9 mpg! If it were me, I would just leave it in the driveway unless I specifically needed a truck. As it is, my 4Runner only gets 20 mpg, and I don't drive it much, except for the things I bought it for (vacation, camping, ski trips, stuff like that, plus any trip where I need the load space).
2014 Mini Cooper (stick shift of course), 2016 Camry hybrid, 2009 Outback Sport 5-spd (keeping the stick alive)
While the diesel might save you a ton of gas, I just dunno about the repair costs you might face - could be daunting!
Yeah, the '84 Corolla would be cheap to buy, but repairs would again be as problem methinks, and the newer Corollas (especially since '98) have been much higher-rated for fuel economy. Your best bet in this vein would be a well-kept '98 Corolla, which after all is already 8 years old and will have depreciated quite a lot.
2014 Mini Cooper (stick shift of course), 2016 Camry hybrid, 2009 Outback Sport 5-spd (keeping the stick alive)