G-spotter Posted October 18, 2006 Share Posted October 18, 2006 Coal? Fusion? You think you are gonna run a jet or a logging truck on electricity? No but you can run both of those on hydrogen (water plus electricity). You can reform methane into more complex hydrocarbons with electricity. You can run either on biofuel right now. You can make oil from coal for $60 a barrel. And there's lots of coal. You want to talk EROEI? On biofuels - 1.33 for ethanol from corn. 1.92 for biodiesel from soy. I haven't seen the figures yet for non-foodstuff crops but it makes way more logistic sense. China has a lot of food waste. Peak oil is a religion to some people but the idea that the future ... is absolutely going to be lower tech than the present is laughable. Scarcity is the most efficient motivator there is for innovation. The sooner oil peaks the sooner there will be serious $$$ put into replacement energy sources. Even right now at $60 a barrel there is little incentive... which is why OPEC has worked the price of oil back down to $60 from $80. And look for it to drop further. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
pup_on_the_mountain Posted October 18, 2006 Share Posted October 18, 2006 Scarcity is the most efficient motivator there is for innovation. As someone said, "Necessity is the invention of all mothers"! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bstach Posted October 18, 2006 Share Posted October 18, 2006 Some of my ancestors rode the underground railroad to get away from American genocide. Maybe you would have preferred Uncle Sam to gun them down at the border? Never would have guessed, white boy. Gonna tell us you got rythm, too? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
G-spotter Posted October 18, 2006 Share Posted October 18, 2006 And I love fried chicken and watermelon Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
chris_stolz Posted October 18, 2006 Share Posted October 18, 2006 Coal? Fusion? You think you are gonna run a jet or a logging truck on electricity? No but you can run both of those on hydrogen (water plus electricity). You can reform methane into more complex hydrocarbons with electricity. You can run either on biofuel right now. You can make oil from coal for $60 a barrel. And there's lots of coal. You want to talk EROEI? On biofuels - 1.33 for ethanol from corn. 1.92 for biodiesel from soy. I haven't seen the figures yet for non-foodstuff crops but it makes way more logistic sense. China has a lot of food waste. Peak oil is a religion to some people but the idea that the future ... is absolutely going to be lower tech than the present is laughable. Scarcity is the most efficient motivator there is for innovation. The sooner oil peaks the sooner there will be serious $$$ put into replacement energy sources. Even right now at $60 a barrel there is little incentive... which is why OPEC has worked the price of oil back down to $60 from $80. And look for it to drop further. Problems with the "scarcity makes innovation" theory: as energy costs rise, so do developmental costs. Look at the issues in the Alberta tar sands. Every developer there-- without exception-- has seen their costs TRIPLE in the last three years, and this has resulted in only marginal improvements in output. Second, easiest problems are solved first (in all fields of human endeavour; there are no exceptions to this rule) and so the kind of EROEI we get from oil, n.g. and old now-mined easy-to-access coal deposits are never going to be found again. Your correct assertion that there are positive EROEIs for some non-fossil-fuel sources however fails to take into account the fact that these EROEIs are way too low to run anything like industrial civilisation. You had EROEIs of between 10 and 15 during the height of western economic expansion. 1.33 or whatever you get from solar simply won't cut it; even if we could run stuff on 1.33 we would have very, very low-tech world. You can google this topic for much more detailed stats. Hydrogen is an energy carrier, not a source-- all known methods of making hydrogen have negative EROEIs. Show me some stats that prove otherwise. Methane-->hydrogen--> energy = massive loss of potential energy each step fo the conversion, mostly cos you need to use electricity to do this! You *cannot* make oil from coal for $60/barrel equivalent, unless...oil and natural gas are so cheap that it wouldn't be worth it. Coal EROEI, true, WAS over 10 historically, but this has massively dropped due to the easy-to-find stuff being mostly mined out. If China could replace oil with coal, why did they a) sign the biggest business deal in human history with the IRanians for natural gas and oil development projects (I think this one, form last year, is worth about $500 billion)? b) sign about a million memorandae of understanding with every "Stan" country and with Russia about oil development? c) Buy a Canadian oil company and pipeline? d) block any US sanctions of iran for nuclear weapons? e) back every horrible African dictatorship (including Sudan) with whom they also seem to have oil agreements? Coal-- even if it were cheap and abundant enough, which it isn't-- coudl nevr be a mass energy source, as it is too polluting to work in urban areas. note that scrubbed coal EROEIs are around 3-- this is far too low for most uses. Cool when was the last time climbers talked about this? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bstach Posted October 18, 2006 Share Posted October 18, 2006 (edited) And I love fried chicken and watermelon Buckwheat Brayshaw Edited October 18, 2006 by bstach Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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