SwiftFuel Alternative To Alternative Fuels

TheDawgLives writes "PBS has an article by Bob Cringely about the best route to end our dependence on oil and reduce our greenhouse gas emissions. Instead of replacing all our expensive cars with even more expensive hybrids or electric cars, his suggestion is to use a cheap drop-in replacement for gasoline called Swift Fuel. It is derived from Ethanol, but doesn't require any modification to older cars to prevent corrosion. It can be mixed with gasoline in any amount and can even be distributed using the same network as gasoline, including being pumped in the same pipes and shipped in the same trucks. It is truly a drop-in replacement for gas, and it is real. It is being tested by the FAA for certification in propeller aircraft. It also happens to be about $2 a gallon cheaper than gasoline."

Comments

Food prices

[xaxa]

Where does the ethanol come from?

Re:Food prices

[Tubal-Cain]

Switchgrass

Re:Food prices

[xaxa]

You still need land to grow it on, which might otherwise be used for growing food.

Re:Food prices

[UncleTogie]

Where does the ethanol come from?

According to TFA, while they can make it from almost any plant, they're starting with sorghum:

"...sorghum, which isn't a typical U.S. crop, can produce six times the ethanol per acre of corn, turning on its head the argument that ethanol production consumes more energy than it produces. China, the third largest producer of ethanol after Brazil and the U.S., is switching entirely to sorghum for its ethanol production."

Re:Food prices

[Mr2001]

It's not the same land or farming resources, though. Switchgrass grows on a wider variety of soil and climate, meaning it can be grown in places where you couldn't grow food crops, and doesn't require much seeding or fertilizer.

Re:Food prices

[sleigher]

Your right that it can be grown on land that is not used for food and grow very well there. I think the problem is that the people who do grow food might stand to make more money growing switchgrass so then the land for food will be used anyways. I know if I was a farmer and had a chance to make more money growing a weed I would be all over it. I might be wrong in that. It might not make them more money it is just the first thing that popped in my mind.

Re:Food prices

[MacDork]

Plowing up new land creates *lots* of CO2 via soil oxidation too, and quite possibly at a faster rate than the fossil fuels they are "replacing." And since oil is a fungible commodity, the oil you "replaced" will simply be sold off and burned by someone else... Biofuels just make oil a little cheaper than it would otherwise be by decreasing demand ever so slightly. So, it's quite likely that the biofuel initiative is actually make the problem a lot worse. The biofuel initiative is also creating a giant dead zone in the gulf of Mexico due to fertilizer runoff. But don't try to tell any of this to the cult of global warming. They don't like facts interfering in their religion.

Re:Food prices

[NeverVotedBush]

Hmmm, does Brazil have these same problems?

Re:Food prices

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't know, but 144,000 people are about to lose their jobs in Brazil thanks to biofuel:
http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/industry_sectors/natural_resources/article4083137.ece

Re:Food prices

[sleigher]

Brazil grows sugar cane and started back in the 70's. It is only in the past 5 or 10 years that they became energy independent so it took them decades. I am sure they had all sorts of growing pains but they should be commended for doing it. We should be doing it for the same reasons. Better to use a renewable fuel where we can and save the oil for what we really need it for. Moms SUV is not really a need to me. She can have ethanol or swift fuel.

Re:Food prices

[Anonymous Coward]

...sorghum, which isn't a typical U.S. crop, can produce six times the ethanol per acre of corn...

Factor of six sounds high. I admit these figures are old, but...

Yield of 99.5% ethanol per acre from:
Sorghum cane: 500 gallons
Corn: 214 gallons
Grain sorghum: 125 gallons

...turning on its head the argument that ethanol production consumes more energy than it produces.

Only David Pimental believes that, and he's in the pay of the oil companies.

Re:Food prices

[Facetious]

My sense from the Cringely article is that the "six times" number refers to net energy. Then again, I read the article Friday and my memory is subject to exponential decay.

Re:Food prices

[Anonymous Coward]

Where are all of these nutrients and minerals going to come from to grow new plants?

I don't know if switchgrass is a legume or not. Legumes make their own nitrogen fertilizer; and cellulosic ethanol could be made from some kind of leguminous grass. You wouldn't need much of the other nutrients (phosphorous, potassium, etc.)

fertilizer is a safe, renewable source that is completely independent of petroleum...

No more dependent on oil than other products. Ammonia for nitrogen fertilizer is made from natural gas; not oil. That stupid oil company TV ad that lumps the two together ("Two-thirds of the oil and natural gas consumed in the U.S. is produced in North America") is very misleading.

The best alternative is to develope communities in a fashion that is conducive to both mass-transit as well as manual-transit (such as walking, biking, &c.)

AC's Law of Real Estate: The housing you can afford is 50 miles from where the jobs are.

Oh, and try walking or biking to work in Wisconsin in February.

Re:Food prices

[FiloEleven]

I know if I was a farmer and had a chance to make more money growing a weed I would be all over it. Yeah, I tried that. You go to jail.

Re:Food prices

[A nonymous Coward]

Mt Everest is even colder and people climb that too.

But not to and from work.

Re:Food prices

[jamesh]

Don't they have to continually clear rainforest to grow that sugar cane though?

Re:Food prices

[Burz]

Parent is trolling but I'll reply anyway.

And since oil is a fungible commodity, the oil you "replaced" will simply be sold off and burned by someone else... So all substitutes and methods of reducing emissions are futile, eh? Or had it occurred to you that they are not being developed in a vacuum; that they just might be effective with a global cap-and-trade system?

And FYI, switchgrass and other cellulose feedstocks are being developed in order to address the land use and runoff problems.

I'll stop 'preaching' to you now and let you get back to your "facts".

Re:Food prices

[mrchaotica]

Where are all of these nutrients and minerals going to come from to grow new plants?

Are these nutrients and minerals present in the hydrocarbon fuel that's the output? I should hope not; they'd kill the cars! Therefore, they must be separated out as waste. And what do you do with the waste (that, not coincidentally, contains the nutrients and minerals)? Duh, you dump it back on the fields for the new plants!

Re:Food prices

[mrchaotica]

Mt Everest is even colder and people climb that too. But not to and from work.

Oh yeah? What about sherpas, then? ; )

Re:Food prices

[TapeCutter]

"But don't try to tell any of this to the cult of global warming. They don't like facts interfering in their religion."

Your post started of by making a good deal of sense, but then you brought politics into it and fucked it up. I am assuming you have done this because it's a popular US pastime to bash environmentalists and not because you have actually done any reasearch into climate science.

The AGW 'cult' have been telling the neo-cons that corn to ethonol is a bad idea since before the first government subsidy cheque was cut. Yes the 'giant dead zone' is caused mainly by fertilzer run-off, but how about pointing out it existed well before the corporate welfare crowd started sponsering hairbrained biofuel schemes?

OTOH, lets not let facts stand in the way of yet another contorted excuse to bash environmentalists, most of whom would agree with your stance that corn for fuel is an exceptionally bad idea.

Re:Food prices

[hedwards]

And that's been seen before. It's the paradox of efficiency.

Say we're only using domestic fuel and none can be exported. Yes, that's not realistic, but it makes things less complicated.

As fuel efficiency is raised, the demand for oil dips, as the demand dips the price or supply must do so as well. Oil companies don't want to settle for less money so they're not going to lower production until they need to.

The result is that in general people start to driver farther than they were, and the savings in efficiency disappears.

In a scenario like this the government would step in and introduce a tax on the fuel being sold, to keep the price from dipping.

In terms of the real world, you'd have OPEC reducing the supply to keep the fuel price from dropping and the incentive for people to be more efficient. Realistically, OPEC knows perfectly well that the oil will eventually dry up completely, and it's really in their interest to keep the rest of the world hooked as long as possible.

Re:Food prices

[MaskedSlacker]

No the deforestation is mostly for cattle ranchers and subsistence farmers.

Re:Food prices

[Mr2001]

I think the problem is that the people who do grow food might stand to make more money growing switchgrass so then the land for food will be used anyways. I know if I was a farmer and had a chance to make more money growing a weed I would be all over it. Well, why do you think farmers aren't doing that already? Why don't they all just switch to growing the single most valuable crop their land will manage?

One reason is diversity. There's some risk in putting all your eggs in one basket. If the weather is wrong, or if your crops get hit by disease, planting two crops instead of one means you'll probably have something left instead of nothing.

Another is the market. If a significant number of farmers stopped growing food crops in favor of switchgrass, the price of switchgrass would go down and the price of food crops would go up, and then it'd be profitable to switch back (or start new farms). So even if some farmers do switch, it'll balance out.

Re:Food prices

[MacDork]

So all substitutes and methods of reducing emissions are futile, eh?

Reducing CO2 emissions futile? No, I'd say pointless and costly.

they just might be effective with a global cap-and-trade system?

Aside from the fact that you are now heralding an unproven, imaginary system as a solution to a problem you and the other members of Heaven's Gate created.... You aren't listening.

It's quite likely you are creating more CO2 by plowing new land than you would have created by burning the fossil fuels you "replaced." Soil oxidation/erosion contributes an order of magnitude more CO2 to the atmosphere each year than the burning of *all fossil fuels* combined. Don't let any inconvenient truth stand in your way though.

And FYI, switchgrass and other cellulose feedstocks are being developed in order to address the land use and runoff problems.

Oh, well wonderful. You're going to solve a problem you created yourselves and it will only cost us millions in taxes, REAL environmental damage in the Gulf of Mexico, and thousands of human lives snuffed out by starvation because you thought it'd be a good idea to burn food in your God damned SUV. Great job, Jim Jones!

Re:Food prices

[sumdumass]

If you was a farmer, would you be growing dent corn or regular corn? If you answered dent corn or I don't know, then you most likely wouldn't be growing food. The vast majority of corn grown is dent corn which isn't use for food except maybe starches and animal feed.

On another note, Farmers usually plant 20,000-60,000 (Even as high as 80,000) corn plants per acre. Typically, 35 - 40k is common, at least in my area. With a 40,000 plant population, you are going to get around 200-210 bushels of corn which translates into about 28 tons or 25 metric tons (tonne) per acre (65% moisture). Now, according to this site, you can get about 5.2 metric tons of switch grass per hectare (around 7 acres). So that is around 175 tonnes for corn compared to around 5 tonnes for switch grass. You don't need to plow and seed switch grass, I assume it is the typical 2-3 cuttings a year like with hay though so some bailing and repeated cutting passes would probable make up for the plowing and seeding and it would probably be equal in fuel usage because fuel rate is calculated by PTO work.

Now the interesting part, you get around 28% product above what it costs to make the ethanol (the article says 25%) with corn. With the switch grass, you would get around 540% (per the article). Now the article is considering using the pulp as fuel for the refining process with switch grass but I assume that using silage from the corn crop could produce similar results if it wasn't ground up and left in the field. But you would likely gain around 49 tonnes of potential energy using the corn compared to 28 tonnes of potential energy going with switch grass in it's place. Now assuming the end product is going to be worth the same amount and the costs would be adjusted to reflect this in the pricing which means it would be better off to plant the switch grass on marginal lands in flood planes or other non-tillable and poor producing lands. Specking Soybeans in it every so often could possible take care of the nitrogen problems but a lot of the low lying marginal lands are already run off filters for existing crops which means they get carryover from fertilizers already in use.

I really don't think it would be beneficial to plant that instead of an existing crop unless the land is already so poor that it doesn't yield right on existing crops like corn. I don't see too much difference between silage and switch grass so an added benefit of planting corn might be a small amount of usable cellulose material that could be sold in addition to existing crop prices. You wouldn't want to do it every year but every other or maybe even every 3 years in between the last rotation might be a considerable source of product. It would take some work to store it but you might get about the same amount of material as if you harvested switch grass. There should be about 1 ton of silage ( metric tonne) for every 5 or 6 or so bushels of corn which translates to around 40 tons (about 36 tonnes) per acre (280 tons and 256 tonnes per hectare) which surprisingly is more then a crop of switch grass and is currently a by product tossed on the ground (it serves more of a purpose then waste though).

Re:Food prices

[sumdumass]

Just a note, the switch grass, one it is established, doesn't need tilled or anything. It just needs harvested so any Co2 production from it would be a one time thing for the most part. They claim that the root system will capture about 94% of the carbon it takes to produce and use the cellulose ethanol too.

Re:Food prices

[MacDork]

Just a note, the switch grass, one it is established, doesn't need tilled or anything. It just needs harvested so any Co2 production from it would be a one time thing for the most part.

Corn can be grown no-till as well with little or no detrimental effect on yield, but in practice, it generally is not. If you can do it without plowing, then you might have a shot at producing fuel without producing more CO2 than you save, but you are still displacing farmland previously devoted to food, resulting in starvation.

Re:Food prices

[Anonymous Coward]

Another is the market. If a significant number of farmers stopped growing food crops in favor of switchgrass, the price of switchgrass would go down and the price of food crops would go up, and then it'd be profitable to switch back (or start new farms). So even if some farmers do switch, it'll balance out. This market mechanism would result in a decrease in total food production. It might be what the 'market' can handle but if you're in Africa you'd much prefer supply to remain static or fall causing a decrease in price.

Re:Food prices

[TapeCutter]

"Global warming cultists are *not* environmentalist. They're easily led rubes that have bought into a self flagellating religion born out of politics."

Thakyou for opening my eyes. I now see how the science I have been following for at least 25yrs is really a massive political conspiracy that has managed to infiltrate and control every national science body on the planet.

Thanks also for sharing your thoughts on 'self-flagellation', it was enough to convince this 'easily led rube' that a massive muti-decadal plot has been hiding right before his very eyes, matter of fact it's now so fucking obvious that I have been led by poitics that I will promptly find and burn my BSc.

Re:Food prices

[sumdumass]

No till usually doesn't produce the same yields when current crops of going with 40 and 50,000 populations. On some fields it will but in practice, you will find that it doesn't. Now sometimes the savings in the tilling make up the difference in loss of yield but that won't be a guarantee. You still have to consider the herbicide spaying to give you a good burn off before planting and fertilizer that needs to be applied in multiple doses of smaller strengths.

Where no till really shines is when you have a low amounts of topsoil and need to control erosion and run off verses spending a fortune in chemicals to renew the lands. Generally, you can only no till a corn crop for 4 or 5 years before the ground it too compacted and effects root growth. But that again is effected by the types of soil, a sandy loamy soil will last longer then a clay soil.

But I think this is all mute because I'm not sure I was clear with the comment about tilling ans switch grass. With no till corn, you still need to seed the field. With the switch grass you don't. Once it is set, it is set.

I did some quick calculations on another post and have determined that planting switch grass isn't really worth replacing another crop over. Generally though, the corn that is in use that would be replaces would be a dent corn which is an industrial field corn. It isn't the food corn. Most of the corn you see growing when driving through the country isn't meant for human consumption. But even at that, it is far more economical to plant the switch grass in marginal lands that would already have grasses on them to control run off and so on. The only difference would be that it would act more like a Hay field then a Fescue plot. Most watershed areas could probably be converted without any detrimental effects on the watershed. These are areas feeding some river system that flood in the spring and isn't really good for crops in the first place. They are sort of buffers to attempt to catch the chemicals being used before they hit the waterways. Most of them can be marked out of production and the government will pay a sum for not farming them. Most of them also have chemical restrictions which makes farming them about useless too.

Re:Food prices

[Apollo_11]

The first I heard of this crop being used in this way. Thought though sorghum was used to feed livestock. Seems to be some rumblings of algae use to make 'green oil' that can be used in refineries to derive gas and diesel equivalents. The bonus being ponds of non potable water could be used and also Co2 could be feed into the setup to feed the algae.

Re:Food prices

[Alsee]

Corn is a pretty bad crop selection for making ethanol. The water, fertilizer, direct and indirect energy requirements for growing corn are quite high. Pessimistic estimates put corn ethanol as a net negative production, but even optimistic estimates put the costs at a large fraction of the gross output. For ever gallon of corn ethanol you make you need to burn away most of that gallon to make the next gallon of corn ethanol.

According to this source(*) on sweet sorghum:

yields between 500 to 800 gallons of ethanol per acre

requires one-half of the water required to grow corn and one third of the water required to grow sugarcane

can grow in marginal soils, ranging from heavy clay to light sand... marked resistance to drought and saline-alkaline soils, and tolerance to high temperature and waterlogging

requires the use of only 40 to 60 pounds of nitrogen per acre whereas corn growers use more than 150 pounds per acre

The energy requirement for converting sweet sorghum juice into ethanol is less than half of that required to convert corn into ethanol

(*)Note: The website appears to be an outlet for information from commercial sources. I have no particular reason to doubt this info on sweet sorghum, but it might be a good idea for someone to dig up a more authoritative source.

-

Re:Food prices

[Zaatxe]

This food price increasing because of ethanol is pure bullshit. Brazil produces ethanol from sugar cane since the 1970's and never experienced food price rising BECAUSE of this. My father has an ethanol-only 1989 Ford Belina, I have a flex Renault Clio (flex cars in Brazil runs with any mixture of gasoline and ethanol and I've been using only ethanol since I bought it about 2 years ago) and I also had a ethanol-only 1992 Ford Escort. So, if ethanol was the only cause of food price rising, food would be expensive in Brazil since 30 years ago.

What causes the food price rising is the price of crude oil (who would tell, huh?), because a lot of energy to produce and transport food still relies on fossil fuels.

Re:Food prices

[misanthrope101]

Many, many environmentalists and left-wingers have been criticizing corn-based ethanol for some time. If you don't like food-based fuel for cars, then argue against that, and you might be surprized to find that a lot of people with different backgrounds, to include the crunchiest of the granola-heads, agreeing with you.

But if you want to just heap contempt on liberals without actually trying to help... well, continue what you were doing.

Re:Food prices

[misanthrope101]

Yes, but moving to alternative fuels lowers your dependence on oil, and when it dries up:

1. Everyone who didn't plan is screwed
2. You are not

If we don't plan ahead by investing heavily in alternatives, we'll have to figure it out at a time when resources are more scarce, energy is vastly more expensive, foreign firms have already patented things out the wazoo, and our society is struggling to reinvent itself on short notice.

Surely it isn't controversial to say that you should generally plan ahead for a big, ugly change that you already know is coming. I'm not the smartest cookie, but even I know that.

Re:Food prices

[mpe]

Actually, anyone who takes global climate change seriously is well aware that so-called 'biofuel' does far more harm than good.

The term "biofuel" covers a lot of fuel sources. Some of which make sense, some of which make less sense than "petro-fuel". Note that "making sense" does not imply anything about "global warming", "climate change", etc...

Re:Food prices

[dmsuperman]

In my first class in college, we learned about logical fallacies. One such fallacy is the "if there's no perfect solution, do nothing" fallacy. I swear, if you had only posted this a few years ago so that I might be able to use it for an example I might have gotten a better grade in that class.

Re:Food prices

[drsquare]

Who can't farm on current farming land because it's now growing bio-fuels.

Re:Food prices

[SQLGuru]

Not to mention that the CO2 produced while tilling the soil is probably more than offset by the CO2 --> O2 process of the plants while they are growing. And as mentioned in the parent post that growing plants keeps the soil from erroding. And that there were only *so* many dinosaurs, once they run out, they run out.....but switchgrass keeps growing and growing. And besides, most "farmers" these days are large corporations, not Ma and Pa. The large corporation would be more likely to balance between switchgrass and food crops (regulate supply and demend of both such that you maximize profits on both).

Layne

Re:Food prices

[Steve Max]

Sugar cane is grown mainly in the continental area of São Paulo state, where rain forests don't exist since the 1800s (or even earlier). The Amazon's climate is too hot for sugar cane to grow, and the soil isn't adequate. Growing it there would be as productive as growing coconuts in Alaska.

Re:Food prices

[that_xmas]

Brazil also has a large amount of oil production and a large proven reserve

http://www.indexmundi.com/brazil/oil_production.html

Re:Food prices

[Bombula]

It's not the same land or farming resources, though. Switchgrass grows on a wider variety of soil and climate, meaning it can be grown in places where you couldn't grow food crops, and doesn't require much seeding or fertilizer.

Algae is an even better option. You can grow it in concrete ponds paved over any surface. And you can use seawater, not just freshwater. We're looking at growing algae in concrete raceway ponds paved onto unusable lava rock fields in Hawaii, fed by untreated seawater pumped right out of the ocean.

The great thing about algae is that it is a lot more efficient at converting sunlight to stored energy than larger plants, since it doesn't have to spend any of that energy building a scaffolding for itself. Most data puts algae at about 10-20 times the efficiency of other biofuel crops. The data I've seen also show a better ability of algae to produce oils than starches - which is more efficient anyway, as I understand it. That means algae is appropriate for biodiesel, not ethanol or a gasoline replacement.

Biodiesel would be just as good as a gasoline replacement, for all the reasons argued by the switchfuel folks: it preserves the utility of all existing technology and infrastructure, while gleaning the benefits of closing the carbon loop. Clean diesel engines are a very mature technology - just look at the auto market in Europe. And the added benefit is that you don't have to use agricultural land to produce algae - useless desert would work just fine.

Algae is the way forward for biofuels, no question.

Re:Food prices

[vhogemann]

It's funny how USA centric slashdot is.

I have to agree that on the USA biofuel production would have an impact on food price. Almost of your land is used. It doesn't matter if you're going to use corn or anything else to produce ethanol, it will replace land used for food crops.

But, you seem to always forget that countries like Brazil and India already have large sugar-cane cultures, used both for sugar and ethanol production. And these have ZERO impact on food production.

The real problem USA have with biofuel is that they can't produce it in a economical viable way. So if biofuel substitute petrol, USA will become dependant on other countries.

Resuming:

Biofuel:
* Good for the enviroment
* Good for developing nations
* Good for Europe
* Very bad for the USA economy

Re:Food prices

[bryce4president]

This is about decreasing our dependence on foreign oil. So what if someone else is "going to burn it anyway". That's not the point. I think that our "carbon footprint" is an over hyped money machine to begin with. Should we do things that help the environment? Of course we should. But electric/hybrid cars are only the beginning of getting us to where we need to go. There are over 247,000,000 cars in America http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passenger_vehicles_in_the_United_States

Toyota announced yesterday that they want to be producing 1 million new hybrid cars per year by 2010 (still two years away). Even if the other automakers can get to 500,000 by then you're looking at maybe 3 to 4 million hybrid/electric cars per year by 2010. You are trying to replace 247 million cars... Thats a looooong time. So if you have this drop in replacement who the hell cares about the emissions part of it as long as its close. People are so disillusioned about how much effect switching 3 million cars per year in the US will be. Its a slow process and it will NOT eliminate our dependence on foreign oil in the next 25 years.

Re:Food prices

[Z34107]

So all substitutes and methods of reducing emissions are futile, eh? Or had it occurred to you that they are not being developed in a vacuum; that they just might be effective with a global cap-and-trade system?

Not what parent said; if we don't burn a barrel of oil because we have Magic Fairy Dust (tm), that barrel will just get burned by someone else. At least for the foreseeable future.

And "global cap-and-trade"? Are you kidding? Good luck getting every nation in the world to agree to that system. Good luck getting just China to agree to that system. Good luck getting everyone bound by that system to stop bickering over what their caps should be. And good luck having such a system function as it's actually intended to.

Getting the entire world to agree on a complicated system simultaneously is not a good way to solve world problems. Even if that problem would actually be solved by them doing so. The US has made greater progress on its would-be Kyoto goals than any Kyoto nation - and we didn't even sign the thing.

Now, biofuel is great and whatnot - biofuel and politics have killed a large chunk of the world economy. We subsidize corn ethanol to make the corn belt farmers happy. In the meantime, we have a huge tariff on imported ethanol - we can't buy alternative fuels from Brazil, for example, but we can buy crude oil from the Middle East. The result is a lot of corn diverted for ethanol production.

All this legislated corn-ethanol nonsense raises the price of corn - that's a side effect of doubling demand for it overnight. So, of course, some food prices go up too, but that's just for starters. The prices of other grains rise as well - they're "substitute goods", things people will use instead of the now-prices corn if they can. With the costs of every grain rising, livestock feed becomes more expensive, meaning practically everything you buy in a grocery store is more expensive. Meats, soda (corn syrup, remember) - all of it rising in price.

But it doesn't stop at just food, either. Soap is made in part from waste fats from slaughtered animals. As it becomes more expensive to feed livestock, even something as simple as soap becomes more expensive. We in America can generally deal with the rising food costs, but our Big Ag special-interest political games in the name of the "environment" come at the expense of the rest of the world.

Biofuel is great... If it happens on its own, and not when huge tracts of our economy are forcibly shifted so politicians can win the farm vote.

Re:Food prices

[RudeIota]

Almost of your land is used.

I'm going to assume this actually means, "Almost all of your land is used", given the context it was put in.

Where did you get this information from?

I've heard from plenty of other people that the U.S. has vasts amount of open land and after traveling to quite a few places in the U.S., it sure seems like it.

Some relevant statistics here.

As of 2002, farmland takes up just about 43% of the U.S. That sounds like quite a bit, but it also shows that about half of of our pastureland and woodland are not in use (read: still available). If that's the case, there is some legroom for bio fuels. You made it sound as if the U.S. would certainly have to cut sustenance production to do anything with bio fuels. I think this notion is false.

Re:Food prices

[quantum bit]

You do realize that plants are much more efficient solar collectors than photovoltaic cells?

They're a lot easier to make too.

Re:Food prices

[Anonymous Coward]

My family use to grow switchgrass on our farm until the land was stolen and turned into a hunting rental.

Switchgrass is quite a remarkable native North American prairie grass. The root system grew so thick that jack-hammers were needed to put in a water-line. Switchgrass prevents land erosion and is drought resistant. Cattle and Bison prefer to eat young-green switchgrass to other feed.

If a native North American grass that is easy to grow with few resources can make us energy independent, then great! If I had the money, I would start another switchgrass farm.

Re:Food prices

[Em Adespoton]

Just a note, the switch grass, one it is established, doesn't need tilled or anything. It just needs harvested so any Co2 production from it would be a one time thing for the most part. They claim that the root system will capture about 94% of the carbon it takes to produce and use the cellulose ethanol too. Just one question: how is it going to be harvested? Considering the low volume of biomass generated per hectare, 3 harvests per year plus 3 seedings have to be factored in, vs 1 tilling, 1 planting and 1 harvest for crops that generate more biomass.

Re:Food prices

[bgat]

I assume it is the typical 2-3 cuttings a year like with hay though so some bailing and repeated cutting passes would probable make up for the plowing and seeding and it would probably be equal in fuel usage because fuel rate is calculated by PTO work.

I don't think that assumption works.

What is important is "PTO energy", but you appear to be using "PTO hours" as your definition instead. This error doesn't totally wreck your point, but it tips the scales a little further over towards switchgrass.

Plowing, particularly the subsoiling type often done in drier climates, requires considerably more energy input than baling, mowing and seeding put together. Consider the quantity of diesel fuel required to plow and otherwise prepare a plot for seeding vs. mowing and bailing. There's a large difference, you notice it right away if your diesel storage tank features only a hand pump. :)

It's true that corn silage provides tons of energy, all of which is wasted in our current approach to ethanol production. But once you've extracted that, you have to plow and plant again to restart the process. Large output, but a large input required to get it.

With switchgrass, you don't get the huge yields all-at-once the way you would with corn silage, but what you would get would come with (I think--- I haven't run the numbers) a better return-on-investment. The heavy energy consumption happens only once to get the stand established, after that there's only maintenance input during the periodic harvesting.

I bet that corn silage wins easily in total net energy yield per unit of land planted, but switchgrass comes out ahead in cost per unit of energy yield. You don't get as much out of a plot of land with switchgrass, but you put even less in.

Let's go on. Switchgrass is a perennial, so the heavy equipment needed to establish a plot isn't needed long-term (e.g. rent it vs. buy it). The maintenance equipment (mower, cutter, baler) is much cheaper, perhaps placing it within the budget of farmers that couldn't farm otherwise. Some of those wanna-be farmers might also be in regions that corn silage just won't grow in, whether you have the equipment or not.

Finally, since you only plow for switchgrass once, you don't have an annual release of large quantities of CO2 that might undo some of the gains made by switching away from a fossil fuel in the first place. I know that's not a part of this discussion, but I think it's worth mentioning anyway.

Overall, I really like your analysis and its approach. Some of the foundation might not be quite right, but the critical thinking is what this whole debate needs much more of. Kudos.

Re:Food prices

[Reziac]

Another factor is that grain combines, especially corn machinery, needs level to rolling ground. Haying equipment is not as large, heavy, or topheavy, and can be used on steeper ground. Also as a rule the steeper the ground the thinner and poorer the soil, and grains need decent soil.

BTW I'm wondering what advantage switchgrass has over alfalfa, which in a hot climate with sufficient water can produce up to 10 cuttings a year. Even in a northern climate, you get 3 cuttings. And alfalfa sets its own nitrogen, plus the primo first cutting can be sold at horse hay prices instead of silage prices.

Another thing I'm wondering -- is switchgrass any good as winter graze?

Correction

[morgan_greywolf]

It also happens to be about $2 a gallon cheaper than gasoline for the next five minutes."

There. Fixed it for ya.

Re:Correction

[CrazyJim1]

So wait, I don't get you. Do you mean gasoline is going to go up another 10 cents in the next five minutes so it will be $2.10 cheaper? Or do you mean that once this technology gets found out, they'll jack the price up because it is a substitute for gasoline?

Re:Correction

[Dwedit]

Demand for gasoline means the entire supply of ethanol would last that long.

Oil != Gas

[corsec67]

Even if they use ethanol from algae, hemp, switchgrass, or sugar cane, this might reduce our need for oil, but it can't replace oil used for other things like plastic.

If this is made using ethanol from corn, then diesel is used in the production of this, and it causes food prices to increase.

What is wrong with using a vegetable oil in a diesel engine? That is a bio-fuel with low processing requirements.

Re:Oil != Gas

[linzeal]

Corn based plastics are just the tip of the iceberg, we will be seeing dozens of new plant based plastics in the decade. Just because oil has been used for a 100 years doesn't mean that they will even need it in another 100.

Re:Oil != Gas

[corsec67]

For one thing, most diesel engines can't run on biodiesel unmodified.

That is wrong. In a new diesel, it will run pure biodiesel with no modifications. In a used diesel, the biodiesel will clean out the fuel system, so the fuel filter will get plugged. That is the only change needed.

And, you can't use "fresh" vegetable oil, either. It has to sit in barrels and ferment in the sun.

Ferment into what? It is running in a diesel engine, not a ethanol engine.

For vegetable oils, it needs to be warmed up before running in the diesel engine, but that is also the only thing needed to do when the vegetable oil is heated up before being sent to the engine.
One reference for running only straight vegetable engine in a car. There it did need modifications like different injectors and glow plugs, mostly to compensate for the increased viscosity.

Re:Oil != Gas

[drinkypoo]

In a used diesel, the biodiesel will clean out the fuel system, so the fuel filter will get plugged. That is the only change needed.

This is NOT necessarily true. If you don't KNOW that your car is compatible, you should NOT put in more than 20% biodiesel, because it destroys natural seals in a way that petrodiesel doesn't. Some vehicles require fuel line replacement. Because they're diesels, these are almost always low pressure lines and it's cheap and easy to do. The cheapest thing worth using is Nylon 77 (most Nylon tubing is Nylon 66! There is a big difference!)

With that said, anything especially new (late nineties on) probably has synthetic seals.

ALSO it is absolutely true that you need to change your oil more often if you run biodiesel or veggie oil; this isn't so much a change but it is a negative effect. The blow-by inherent to all piston engines is the problem; the stuff from the biofuel ruins your crankcase lube faster.

Other than that... I have a buddy who has an F250, he did his own conversion. He wrapped a copper heating coil around his exhaust manifold to preheat the oil, and that's all he did. It's a switchover system though (he also added a solenoid switchover valve.) I don't know what he finally did with the return. He did have to change the hoses around a little bit to change where they're short/long. So running veggie oil is not necessarily hard at all. Now he has a pump and a oil/water sep. and a filter onboard and just pumps WVO right into a tank. Still starts up and shuts down on diesel though.

Re:Oil != Gas

[PatrickThomson]

It's not just plastics, lots of things depend on ground-sourced chemicals that are extremely uneconomical to make from plants. I always stay out of oil debates because there's a temptation to repeatedly scream "OIL IS NOT JUST FOR CARS!". I'm biased though, being a pharmaceutical chemist. Everything I handle every day is sourced from oil, and it's only going to get more expensive. Ethyl acetate would be a rare exception, but for the fact that it's made from inorganically-sourced ethanol! How's that for irony.

Re:Food?

[xaxa]

You might not have a "shortage" in the USA (and I don't, in Europe), but try asking some people in a developing country. Their prices have increased more than ours and there's less international food aid. Some countries have banned wheat exports. Government stocks are low.

http://www.worldwatch.org/node/5539

It's not a religion

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not a religion. Religions are based on faith. This is based on hysteria.

Re:Price

[larry bagina]

A commodity is anything for which there is demand, but which is supplied without qualitative differentiation across a market. In other words, copper is copper. Rice is rice. Stereos, on the other hand, come in many varieties of quality. And, the better a stereo is, the more it will cost. Whereas, the price of copper is universal, and fluctuates daily based on global supply and demand.

One of the characteristics of a commodity good is that its price is determined as a function of its market as a whole. Well-established physical commodities have actively traded spot and derivative markets. Generally, these are basic resources and agricultural products such as iron ore, crude oil, coal, ethanol, sugar, coffee beans, soybeans, aluminum, rice, wheat, gold and silver.

Re:SwiftFuel sounds like a bad idea.

[corsec67]

You realize that SwiftFuel is an attempt to replace 100LL avgas?

That is 100 Octane, Low Lead.

Avgas already has tetraethyl lead in it, right now. And it is definitely a hazard, as you point out.

Re:Australian Government Fuel Excise

[larry bagina]

Per the article (Cringely, so not exactly trustworthy, but I don't feel like verifying the numbers) wholesale ethanol costs $1.42 a gallon and SwitftFuel production costs are ~40 cents/gallon. 1 Barrel of oil (42 gallons) currently goes for $130. That's converted to 20 gallons of gasoline (plus 20 gallons of other useful stuff), so the raw cost of gasoline is ~3.09/gallon. That's reasonably consistent with these numbers from the California gov't. Refinery costs for gasoline are slightly less, but not too far out of line.

Therefore, IF the ethanol price and ethanol conversion costs are accurate, the end user cost could easily be $1.50-1.60/gallon less than gasoline.

No, No, No, No, No...

[copponex]

Bad idea, bad idea, bad idea. Why? The process is totally inefficient.

Grow sawgrass -> harvest sawgress -> haul sawgrass -> process sawgrass -> haul SwiftFuel -> store SwiftFuel

OR

solar power -> through existing electric infrastructure -> to the battery of your electric car/mower/series of tubes

This is not hard to understand. Why it continues to elude everyone gives me a headache every time I read about "alternative energy." Gasoline combustion or any similar idea involving controlled explosions are highly unreliable and expensive to maintain. It may be necessary for air travel but has no place powering anything with wheels.

Furthermore, there's no such thing as alternative energy. There are three choices when it comes to energy given our current technology: thermal, nuclear, and solar. Sawgrass biofuel is yet another pathetically short sighted delivery system for solar energy. Thermal energy is viable in only a few places in the world like Iceland. Nuclear uses finite resources and requires a lot of investment and still presents many, many environmental concerns.

Solar energy, whether directly converted to electricity with panels or used in a novel solar-powered plants, is decentralized, clean, uses existing infrastructure, and uses electricity as it's delivery medium which is the only transmission system which doesn't move even a single atom after the line is in place.

It uses recyclable materials. We've been working with it for well over a hundred years. We have the engine technology. Am I missing something?

Re:No, No, No, No, No...

[FooAtWFU]

Bad idea, bad idea, bad idea. Why? The process is totally inefficient.

kpppppffffffffft. Like running solar power through the electric grid into batteries isn't triply inefficient itself? Guess again.

It uses recyclable materials. Yeah? Metals like steel and copper are pretty recyclable. Doesn't mean they're cheap. In fact, they've more-than-doubled in price over the past several years.

Re:No, No, No, No, No...

[copponex]

kpppppffffffffft. Like running solar power through the electric grid into batteries isn't triply inefficient itself? Guess again. Quite more efficient than hauling yet another form of solar energy around as dead weight.

But let's build a new infrastructure around an unproven technology that's dependent on a corporation's patents. That sounds like a much better idea.

Re:No, No, No, No, No...

[ceoyoyo]

Guess what the most efficient way to transport electrical power long distances is? Give up? You turn it into hydrogen through electrolysis, put the hydrogen on a ship, then burn it to produce electricity at the destination.

Inefficient? Yes. But less so than trying to cram it through "existing electric infrastructure."

Perhaps you're getting a headache because you've chosen what you believe is the truth and your brain is warning you to stop paying attention when reality threatens to shatter the illusion?

Re:No, No, No, No, No...

[plover]

I think the GP was saying there are three choices of non-depletable energy sources (except for nuclear energy), or perhaps he meant non-polluting (not that hectares of farmland or the production of ethanol don't pollute, nor is spent uranium a pollutant.) And by thermal energy being limited to Iceland, he didn't mean you couldn't use a ground-source heat pump in Minnesota. And by no such thing as alternative energy, he didn't mean that oil and coal weren't the primary sources of energy in the industrial world today. And he's probably lumping in hydroelectric dams and wind generators with solar energy (the sun fuels the weather, after all) and tidal power with, ... uh, well ...

I give up. I can't rationalize his mistakes as fast as he can make them.

Re:No, No, No, No, No...

[Bjorn_Redtail]

Now, what kind of battery can hold the same amount of energy as a similar weight and volume of flammable fuel? It's not like they are planning to make this stuff and burn it in a fixed generator. As you point out there are dozens of simpler, more efficient ways of doing that. The plan is to replace automotive and aviation fuels with this. For these applications, battery packs simply cannot store enough energy per volume or per weight.

Re:No, No, No, No, No...

[jozmala]

Nuclear is pretty much infinite resource if reprocessing takes place. The price of fuel is so small percentage in nuclear powerplant costs that you can increase the uranium extraction costs by 10x and still be profitable. Really, we do have enough uranium for producing entire worlds CURRENT electricity consumption for tens of thousands of years. Yes there is 10^5 times the current "estimate of economical mining" reserves, if we use
a) fuel reprocessing.
b) breeder reactors
And the fuel cycle improvements give another 10^3 increase over current model. So its 10^8 increase over what figure people talk about the current economic reserves just by one cent electricity price increase since last study. Or that much reductions in operating costs by making all parts of nuclear economy higher volume production.

Re:No, No, No, No, No...

[richie2000]

But let's build a new infrastructure around an unproven technology that's dependent on a corporation's patents.
The whole point of SwiftFuel is that it uses an existing infrastructure, as opposed to converting transportation to electrical-based. But I'm with you on the corp patent-based con, although I suspect that first off the patents are at least co-owned by Purdue, and second that the .gov would expropriate them in a nanosecond if they felt this was a good enough idea.

Anyway; this fuel, or something like it, will be needed to tide us over until battery or hydrogen storage technologies have caught up. Or we get under-the-hood cold fusion, whichever comes first.

Re:No, No, No, No, No...

[jtoomim]

This discussion needs more numbers. If you don't want to read all of the below, then at least read this: sorghum-based ethanol cars use 200 times as much land as solar panel-powered battery-electric (not hybrid) cars.

In 2006 the USA consumed 5.1x10^11 L of gasoline. Gasoline's energy of combustion is 34.8 MJ/L; ethanol's is 23.5 MJ/L, or 68% that of gasoline, so replacing the USA's gasoline consumption would require 7.5x10^11 L of ethanol. Sorghum can produce 3100-7600 L ethanol per hectare, or 3.1-7.6x10^5 L/km^2. Let's assume 5.0x10^5 L/km^2. The total area of the USA is 9.83x10^6--that includes agricultural powerhouses like Alaska and Los Angeles. To replace our gasoline consumption with ethanol, we would need to use 1.50x10^6 km^2 of land, or 15.2% of that. In 2002, 20% of US land use was agricultural, and 26% was pasture land. Harvesting sorghum is more akin to harvesting corn than to letting cows roam free, so the agricultural portion is likely to see a larger hit, so in order to fulfill all our gasoline needs with ethanol the USA would probably have to halve it's agricultural production. That's impractical. Diverting smaller amounts of land to ethanol production is still not worth it; the land is simply better used for producing food for the world's burgeoning population. (Alternatively, the USA could shrink its national parks, forests, and wilderness preserves.) Gasoline only accounted for 23% of all energy used in the USA in 2004, and 61% of fossil fuels used for transportation. Diverting agricultural land to biofuel production is a bad idea.

(On the other hand, the USA produces a lot of waste biomass. Reclaiming this as biofuel is a good idea, since it reduces landfill use while also providing energy. However, this can be at most a supplemental energy source, since it can't be scaled past the amount of biomass waste we produce. McDonald's only makes so many french fries.)

The internal combustion engine is grossly inefficient. A typical gasoline car engine and drivetrain in typical usage is able to convert about 20% of the chemical energy in gasoline into kinetic energy; the rest is lost as heat. Diesel engines are better, largely due to their higher compression ratios, and average roughly 25%. Modern gas turbine power plants extract about 60%. For comparison, fuel cells can convert roughly 36% of the energy stored in H_2 to kinetic energy in typical automotive conditions; including energy expenditures in generating H_2 from electricity and storing it, that figure drops to 17% or 22% if stored as liquid or high-pressure gas, respectively. Electric motors convert 85-95% of the electrical energy input into kinetic energy. Battery charge-discharge efficiencies vary by chemistry from 66% (NiMH) to 99.8% (Li-based chemistries). Electrical transmission losses in the USA in 1995 were 7.2%. (I'm too lazy to look up transportation and processing losses for fossil fuels, so I'm assuming (inaccurately) that they're zero.) Thin-film solar cells convert about 15% of incident light energy into electricity, or 200 W/m^2 (perpendicular to the sun's rays, NOT parallel to the ground). At 38 degrees latitude, that figure drops to 126 W/m^2 (parallel to the ground). Annual average insolation is roughly 18 MJ/m^2/day in most of the USA, so a 15%-efficient solar panel would produce roughly 990 MJ/m^2/year of electricity.

Multiplying these efficiencies out, a battery-electric car powered off of a gas turbine gets 31-53% of the natur

Re:Food?

[zippthorne]

And the food is there. It exists. If it's not getting to them it's not because there isn't enough food.

And what's so important about the starving children? Presumably, they have starving parents who you should also be worried about. Unless you only care about starving orphans, that is.

Re:SwiftFuel sounds like a bad idea.

[plover]

The idea is to use SwiftFuel as a no-lead replacement.

Lead is currently added to avgas to retard premature detonation in the cylinders, and to increase the octane rating. One of the problems with unleaded fuels is that they produce higher compression than avgas. Today's unleaded gas would increase compression to the point where it would literally blow the seals out of the engines. They also have different chemical effects on materials that may cause deterioration in such parts as fuel lines and gaskets. Another difference is that the lead additives help protect the engine valve seats from eroding.

Airplane engines were designed to run on a very specific fuel, that had very specific properties. Avgas produces a precise amount of compression when it's burnt. The old engines were designed to be run at 100% of their potential power, so there is no tolerance for out-of-spec components, such as unleaded fuel.

In order for SwiftFuel to be an acceptable replacement, it will have to have very similar characteristics to today's avgas. Either that or it will have to be "close enough" so that older engines can at least be modified to burn it, and that would promise to be an unpopular, expensive decision (airplane repairs are never cheap.)

Re:Sure it's cheap

[ceoyoyo]

On the other hand, there also aren't any large refineries pumping the stuff out. Provided the raw materials aren't limited, the price should DROP if it catches on and economies of scale take over.

I just ate an aspirin pancake.

[copponex]

I'm sorry to yell. But where exactly do you think coal and oil and natural gas come from?

Here's a hint: it's all dead organic material, which originally gathered energy from something that gathered energy from what original source? Yes, that's right kids! It's the sun! Revered for millenniums for a reason...

Wind generation? Another form of solar energy. No sun, no wind. Lakes and rivers? No sun, no rain, no fresh water, no lakes and rivers! Not to say you can't harness these different manifestations of the sun's energy...

Passive solar plants are already in use all over the world, and even store energy using gravity or other passive methods that waste very little energy. Many small power plants can decentralize the grid, improve efficiency since the grid is smaller, and are much more viable than millions of little ICEs.

Imagine, Wal-Mart borrows ten billion dollars to install solar panels to cover their parking lots, which stop local heating effects, decrease A/C usage in all customer cars, and provide them with another revenue stream all in one master stroke.

Re:I just ate an aspirin pancake.

[timotten]

we should all simply develop photosynthesis to fuel our bodies instead.

Okay, sounds good. I'll need a cost estimate on that for Monday's meeting.

Also, do you know any consultants who have done this before?

Thanks,
Management

Actually you are both quite wrong.

[Calledor]

This is based on an economic consequence. The infrastructure of America is built around the car, and not just any car, but a car that had 60 years of dirt cheap fuel. Our cities and towns are modeled around this. More importantly salaries are also adjusted for a much cheaper transportation cost. You have several options and none of them are particularly appetizing, and none of them have anything to do with global warming. You can produce your own fuel through biofuels, switch to electric cars, or produce more oil from costly hard to access oil reseviors which represent the last of your domestic supply. Nothing else is feasible despite all the fairy farts, adament denials, and heartfelt praying that might be offered. If you don't want to live where public transportation can be possible, then do not expect people to cry for you when something clearly predictable damages your ONLY source of personal transportation.

Re:Actually you are both quite wrong.

[novocastrian]

Heh, you mention Peak Oil then in the same breath betray your ignorance as to what it is.

Peak Oil is _not_ "that stuff running out". It is the production of oil reaching a plateau and then going into decline. The peak of a mountain doesn't happen when you reach the valley, it happens when you've got to the top and can't go higher.

Consider this - since 2005 oil production has been on a bumpy plateau with a slight downward trend. There's tons of publicly available data you can research to confirm this. In the meantime worldwide demand continues to go up - where's your magical creation of new oil via supply and demand? Oh yes, Bakken. I'll believe that one when its up & running and producing a few million barrels a day.

You should also realise that the USA's oil production peaked in 1973 - its been all downhill ever since. Even opening up Alaska didn't reverse the decline for long. North Sea peaked in 2000 and its plummeting now. Mexico's Cantarell field is doing the same. Perhaps you should clear your head of the economic "demand will create supply" nonsense and wake up to the geological realities of living on a finite planet with finite resources. Have you checked out the EIA's reports on US inventory levels lately?

Yes it won't run out for ages, probably not in our lifetime. I wouldn't say the same for the chances of being able to fill up at your local service station though.

Re:Actually you are both quite wrong.

[sumdumass]

The problem with peak oil predictions is that it never takes into account for more efficient production advances. You can reverse the peak trends with technology and innovation.

Peak oil doesn't mean that there is less and less oil, but that the cost of getting to it gets more and more expensive and at some point we end up producing as much as we can. Well, with technology innovations and advances, that peak can be moved to higher levels of production until a point where we actually run out. Canada is pulling bituminous oils for sand which was unheard of or highly impractical 20 years ago. And this totally negates the fact that we can make the fuels produced by oil from coal which means that peak oil is mitigated even more.

The US is still the number 3 oil producer in the world behind Saudi Arabia and Russia. We have fields not in production, one of which China has got a lease from Cuba on off the coast of Florida. New types of drilling technology and and processing has allowed us to tap into fields once thought to have been out of reach or too costly to use. Peak oil is a red herring of sorts.

Re:Actually you are both quite wrong.

[werewolf1031]

For by riding my bicycle, I am now one of the elitist jerks, the holier-than-thou and more self-righteous than the car or bus-bound commuters around me. There, fixed that for ya. :)

Re:Actually you are both quite wrong.

[Eivind]

Is true offcourse. But it's also true that medium-term higher prices will lead to lower demand /AND/ higher production, there's a sort of equilibrium here.

There are oil-fields that can be profitably produced from at $130/barrel which wouldn't be profitable at $100/barrel. And so on.

But sure, the main idea, that once the easiest-to-get oil is used up, prices WILL rise is sound. The only question is how soon and how dramatic an increase. The current price is already pretty high, even when you include the fact that the dollar is weak.

Nobody knows if the oilprice in 5 years will be aproximately what it is now, or if it'll be $250/barrel. My guess is it'll be more expensive than today, but nor enormously so. Perhaps $150 - $170.

Re:Actually you are both quite wrong.

[Alioth]

The significant thing isn't a reduction in the amount of oil that can be produced, it's the reduction in cheap oil that can be produced. Only the cheap oil has to run out for the US to be in a severe world of economic hurt.

Re:Actually you are both quite wrong.

[Bruha]

So you're telling me to uproot my family in Dallas where the cost of living is cheap, and move out to California where the cost of living is 4x what it is here. While I can transfer through work out there I will not get a salary boost and as such will be pretty much broke out there.

Public transportation is nice, but like you said cities were built around cars not busses and trains. There is NO public transportation where I live that would take me to where I work. I can not live near work because the cost of living there is 2x what it is 15 miles away.

While I generally support the democrats I do think they're being fairly stupid or opportunistic about this windfall profit tax. Tax em, fine. That money should be 100% allocated to funding expansion of public transportation systems in the top 20 metro areas in the US. Not the damn general fund where it will just be sucked up by Bush's war machine.

Re:Actually you are both quite wrong.

[misanthrope101]

The problem with peak oil predictions is that it never takes into account for more efficient production advances.

A sphere of finite volume can hold only a finite amount of oil. No matter how efficient or high-tech your extraction, finite is finite, unless you're using nanotechnology to make oil out of other stuff. Eventually we will run out, though I concede that technically there might be 1.5 cups squirreled away here and there in the crust.

Putting money into increasing efficiency of extraction (and even consumption, like the Prius) only extending the life of the oil companies; long-term, we need to put money into alternatives.

Re:Actually you are both quite wrong.

[mpe]

This is based on an economic consequence. The infrastructure of America is built around the car, and not just any car, but a car that had 60 years of dirt cheap fuel. Our cities and towns are modeled around this. More importantly salaries are also adjusted for a much cheaper transportation cost.

Changing all this would probably take rather longer than the 10 year estimate for changing all cars in the original article. Consider that fuel in the US is still considerably cheaper in many other places.

You have several options and none of them are particularly appetizing, and none of them have anything to do with global warming. You can produce your own fuel through biofuels, switch to electric cars, or produce more oil from costly hard to access oil reseviors which represent the last of your domestic supply.

A problem many bio fuels have is that they are not interchangable with petrofuels. This "SwiftFuel" is, which means that it is usable without modifications to existing infrastructure. The problem with electric cars is that you'd need to change considerably more than just the cars, there would be a need to completly rebuild power grids at the same time.

Re:Actually you are both quite wrong.

[smellsofbikes]

>Yes it won't run out for ages, probably not in our lifetime. I wouldn't say the same for the chances of being able to fill up at your local service station though.

My coworker did some research on this over the last week, using data from the Department of Energy website. The stuff he printed out says, pretty clearly, that if we continue using oil at the same rate we are currently using it -- that is, not increasing usage -- the United States would use up its entire domestic supply in three years, and the world would use up its entire available supply in 38 years. Note this is not the amount of proven crude oil: this is the amount of oil extractable from crude oil, oil shale, and currently-existing technology for oil extraction from coal. That's *everything*, all the oil there is, and it'll be gone in under 40 years.

I'm trying to find a mistake in the Department of Energy's numbers, but haven't yet.

Crazy

[copponex]

I thought my electricity was generated about thirty miles away where they burn coal. I wonder how they get a ship on the highway?

Sure, power lines don't work when I want to send energy across a continent or an ocean. But I have this wild idea where smaller solar plants dotting the landscape can decentralize the grid, improve transmission efficiency, and use existing infrastructure and proven technology.

There's that headache again... perhaps my brain is warning me that you're a dumb douchebag who will miss everything cool and die angry.

With apologies to Patton Oswalt.

Re:Crazy

[mrchaotica]

Sure, power lines don't work when I want to send energy across a continent or an ocean. But I have this wild idea where smaller solar plants dotting the landscape can decentralize the grid, improve transmission efficiency, and use existing infrastructure and proven technology.

And here's the part of your argument that gives me a headache: since when were "smaller solar plants dotting the landscape" and "decentraliz[ing] the grid" considered to be "existing infrastructure?!" Either it does exist, or it doesn't. You can't argue it both ways in the same fucking sentence!

Re:Crazy

[Chirs]

I'm guessing that he's talking about having smaller plants tie into the existing grid.

In this case, the grid exists, the solar plants would be new and distributed.

Did you even read the article?

[Fallen Kell]

He talks EXACTLY WHY the solar power->electric->battery WON'T WORK! Because it will take over a decade for electric cars make it to most households even if we outlawed all non-electric car sales today! Cars have a life expectancy of 10 years or more, which means you will see that same 2007 car that was bought last year on the road until 2017 or later. The government could even outright outlaw all gas powered cars today and still you would not see a full uptake of electric or hybrid cars for several years because people can't afford to make the purchase. Again, it is usually every 3-4 years for someone to get a different car, but not necessarily a brand new car (usually a used one), and most cars will see at least 10 years and 3 owners. This means people expect to have 10 years to save up to purchase a brand new vehicle, or 3 years to save up for a several year old used one. Any change that would be significant would need to be able to affect ALL cars at the same time, not after 10 years. This is why a fuel change that can be used in existing cars is the method of choice to change our energy usage. Yes, keep the hybrids and electrics coming, but do the thing right now which can affect ALL cars right now! And let the 10+ year solution continue to work as well.

Well aware of the arguments.

[copponex]

There is no simple solution. Any solution that involves combustion is the wrong direction, because you will use up whatever resource it depends on in a heartbeat. That even goes for solar energy, but there are millions of square miles in deserts that could be used for power generation, since it produces no other benefit for human civilization.

In Kathmandu, they already have a fleet of operating electric vehicles, because they're cheaper, more reliable, and cleaner than oil-propelled vehicles. They are run by private businesses, not the government.

Mass transit ridership is the highest since the mid-50s (when GM was tearing down mass transit to sell more cars). Cars are as good as dead in towns and cities.

Whenever possible, build electric propulsion systems. Regardless of what becomes our solution beyond the dead-organic storage we've been using, we can have an infrastructure that uses it.

Re:Well aware of the arguments.

[MaskedSlacker]

Cars as good as dead in towns and cities? Come on out to Los Angeles and tell me that. And I'll show you the 2 million cars on the road every day.

Which is why you preserve dense energy resources..

[copponex]

A person needs very little energy to move around. In fact, a burrito can get you at least fifteen miles on foot. As a civilization, we have to recognize that as the goal, and give up on the idea of cars as we know them. They're just not viable in the long run.

You're right - we'll never see a battery powered Hummer. But electric vehicles that serve the needs of 90% of the population have been in mass production (even if subsequently shut down) since 1996. All because the government of California demanded that car companies deliver them.

Now consumer demand and energy awareness are at an all time high. They're backordering SmartCars and Apteras and even high-performance Tesla Motors sports cars into two and three year waits.

And I have to say, I hope gas goes to it's true cost where it covers our involvement in the middle east. Anyone who wants to stick with their 6 liter engine after gas hits $12 a gallon is getting exactly what they deserve.

Which vehicles?

[copponex]

I'm sorry, hauling 3500 pounds of steel to carry one person and groceries using controlled explosions is monumentally stupid.

We need to conserve energy dense fuels for situations where they are are truly needed (emergency vehicles, long-haul transportation through sparse landscapes, aviation).

What people are upset about is that life is much less convenient when we're all not driving powerful vehicles than can carry 10 folks and tow a boat on a whim. Well, tough shit. You may have to carpool or take the bus. You may not be able to keep your own jetski in a garage a hundred miles from your lake house. These are privileges, not rights.

Algae based biodiesel is interesting, but again, we need to get away from ICEs except where they are absolutely necessary. An electric car can receive power from any source - nuclear, coal, and even biodiesel through small on-board generators. ICEs will always be addicted to one type of depletable resource - that derived from dead organic material.

Re:Which vehicles?

[Migraineman]

I think you're missing the point. The volumetric energy density of batteries isn't up to the task. It doesn't matter if it's a pickup truck or a motorcycle - they all seem to go about 35 miles on a charge. Why? Because energy density is Wh/l or Wh/kg, and smaller vehicles carry fewer liters or kilograms of battery. Banging that lower energy storage against a lower energy requirement of the smaller vehicle - hey! about the same effective range. Imagine that.

Have a look through the projects over at EV Album. Most of the folks are "hoping" to get 30-40 miles of range. All manner of budgets, motors and battery chemistries are represented. The results aren't stunning.

Biodiesel and butanol represent renewable energy storage methods that are compatible with the current distribution infrastructure. Both may be synthesized from renewable feedstocks (that aren't food, dammit.) Moving toward all-electric is desirable, but it's not the immediate next-step. Battery storage densities need to increase by 10x (though 5x would probably be good enough.) The power distribution grid needs to be upgraded too.

What? Why can't we just "plug in?" Let's compare the electrical power requirements of a current-day EV. Running a 6+6 flooded lead acid cell pack (six in front, six in back,) you've got 144V at about 50Ah. A full charge is 7.2kWh (we'll ignore the charging losses for now.) To charge in one hour, which the batteries will object to, requires 7.2kW. With a 120VAC source, which rectifies to a bit over 165VDC, you'll need about a 50A source. Don't have one of those at the office, do you? How about spreading that charge out over several hours? Okay, let's use an entire 15A branch circuit - you'll need 3.5-ish hours to charge the battery.

I'll add some reference numbers. My electric power bill (looking at it now) has a one-year historical use chart on the back. My 4-person 3-bed residential usage is about 1000kWh for 30 days, or about 33kWh per day. My anemic EV needed 7.2kWh twice a day - outbound trip and return trip, recharging at the office. I'm going to need to increase my electrical usage by almost 50% to convert to EV transportation. The current electrical grid is barely adequate for the existing load. Oh, and don't forget that my wif has a vehicle too, so converting our family to EVs will double our existing electrical load.

Re:Which vehicles?

[loshwomp]

I wouldn't buy an electric or even a hybrid because i drive 50 miles to work every day and 50 miles back on a highway. No one cares if you personally will buy one because there are plenty of other people who will. There is an clear market for such vehicles, and supply is tiny and growing slowly. Electric cars will gradually replace fossil fuel cars, but for now they're only available in small numbers and they're expensive. Supply of electric cars won't catch up to demand for decades.

electric cars [...] would require new infrastructure to recharge on the go if you were to take a long trip or vacation somewhere. No, that's the sort of misunderstanding typical of people who haven't driven an electric vehicle. EVs aren't well suited to long trips. Period. Yes, you could do it if you're determined, but it's completely impractical. Fortunately:

1. Two or three standard deviations of car use in America is short range travel that is well suited to EVs,
2. There are plenty of gas cars around if you do need to take a long trip. (The hybridization doesn't have to be in the car; it can be in the fleet.)
3. You probably already have a second car for those long trips, but if you only have one car, then
4. You probably aren't in the demographic who can afford an EV any time soon anyway. Be patient; they'll get more affordable eventually.

And if everyone was to switch to electric vehicles wouldn't more fossil fuels be burned in power stations till your distributed grid solar power plants get built Any argument predicated on the condition "if everyone switched to electric vehicles" is ridiculous, because the transition to electric vehicles will be gradual. Hybrid vehicles took 10 years to achieve a 1% market penetration, and that was with a fairly successful product.

Wait wait wait

[Calledor]

Are you actually advocating that brazil not mechanize the nearly 500 yearold process of sugar cane harvest? Are you nuts? Was industrialization something you found "quaint"?

Re:Wait wait wait

[MaskedSlacker]

'Progressives' always oppose progress if they think it benefits the capitalists more than the workers. Even when the workers still come out vastly ahead, just not as much ahead. And to head off the incoming replies, the median income in the US adjusted for inflation is seven times what it was a century ago, and several orders of magnitude above pre-industrial revolution levels (or for that matter, Brazil's current median income). So yes, industrialisation made everyone better off, even though all those farm laborers lost their jobs.

Re:Wait wait wait

[Anonymous Coward]

"So yes, industrialisation made everyone better off, even though all those farm laborers lost their jobs." So those farmers were better off because they had to uproot their lives and move to the city? They had to go through emotional issues of having the ground swept from underneath them? I think they would not have been so quick to praise the industrial revolution. The industrial revolution merely widened the gap between the "haves" and "have nots".

I think we are fooling ourselves if we think things are as rosie as ever. I remember when I was a kid my mother didn't have to work and my father earned a slightly better than average wage. The house we lived in was brand new, in a new estate on the shores of the largest saltwater lake in the southern hemisphere. The house cost my father 3 times his yearly wage.

I am at roughly the same age now, I have a new but fairly average house in a new estate and I earn about double the mean wage. My house is over 6 times my yearly wage. Are we really better off? Yes we have more gadgets but that is not what is best in life. We have been fooled into being hooked on consumerism.

Re:Wait wait wait

[Xenogyst]

"So yes, industrialisation made everyone better off"

Some of that is because we just changed where our poor are. The minimum wage in the Guangdong province, China (2004) is about $50-100 dollars a month, assuming 40 hours a weeks, is about $0.63-0.31 an hour. Which is about 12% of the current US minimum wage; roughly 8 times less.

The 3rd/2nd world is our real labor class.

Re:Wait wait wait

[ArcherB]

There is one line in this entire post that is very telling:

The industrial revolution merely widened the gap between the "haves" and "have nots". So, it doesn't matter that the "have not" have MORE than they did before? This AC is pissed because someone increased the amount they have MORE than others, even though everyone ended up with more than they started? Are we so afraid that someone may have more than we do that we will accept poverty as long as there are no winners? What kind of crap is that?!!?

I'm reminded of an experiment someone did a while back (don't care to find the link), where people were allowed to play a gambling game where you could see you winnings and everyone else's. The game was rigged of course and set up so that the player would win some, but could also see that other people won less or even lost and some people won more. At the end of the game, they were given the option to reduce the winnings of the top winners and give it back to the "house", but it would cost the player a smaller percentage of their winnings. An overwhelming percentage of people (75% or something) chose to reduce the winnings of the top winners, even though it did not benefit them at all, and even actually cost them some of their own winnings. Maybe it's human nature to want poverty over prosperity as long as everyone suffers equally.

Re:Wait wait wait

[ArcherB]

Found a reference to the experiment I was talking about above... and forgive me if this seems OT, but there is a point to be made here. People suffer from envy. I feel this is what has led to our reluctance to drill for oil, for example. I believe that many environmentalists are afraid that someone may make money off of it. Before Global Warming, drilling was banned in ANWR. The excuse given was that it may harm the porcupine caribou, as the area to be drilled was in the path of their annual mating migration. It didn't matter that the porcupine caribou had been actually doing better since starting another area of drilling in Prudhoe Bay, along the same migration path. Which leads me to wonder, if not because of the environmental concerns they were citing, then why the resistance?
Here may be an explanation (it is the study I mentioned in the post above... and PDF warning):

We design an experiment where subjects can reduce (âoeburnâ) other subjectsâ(TM) Money. Those who burn the money of others have to give up some of their own cash. Despite this cost, and contrary to the assumptions of economics textbooks, the majority of our subjects choose to destroy at least part of othersâ(TM) money holdings. We vary experimentally the amount that subjects have to pay to reduce other peopleâ(TM)s cash. The implied price elasticity of burning is calculated; it is mostly less than unity. There is a strong correlation between wealth, or rank, and the amounts by which subjects are burnt. In making their decisions, many burners, especially disadvantaged ones, seem to care about whether another person âdeservesâ(TM) the money he has. Desert is not simply a matter of relative payoff. To bring this back on topic, I fear that the REAL motivation behind some (not all) of th environmental concerns are part of this. How often do you hear the argument that drilling for new oil would "line the pockets of big oil CEO's"? So what? Why do I care if some big oil CEO if it will save me and everyone else $0.25 a gallon? I still end up ahead! What difference does it make if someone else ends up further ahead than I do? I understand that there may be legitimate environmental concerns, then why bring up how much money someone may make?

Anyway, the GP post is upset that even though workers will be better off, and environmental concerns are addressed, the "haves" will do better than everyone else.

Re:Wait wait wait

[spune]

'Progressives" inherently back progress. Throughout the past century progressives have been fighting to bring social justice, equality, and higher standards of living to people who were being exploited without restriction by large businesses and the rich.
The increase in American's standard of living is a testament to the labor movement, the women's right's movement, and the civil rights movement, all of which were part of the progressive movement. Before the progressive movement started, the benefits of industrialization were enjoyed only by a very small minority, the super-wealthy capitalists. Progressives spread these to the workers.

Re:Wait wait wait

[ProppaT]

Well, I guess the main question is, following capitalism, what are we all to do when everything is automated and industrialized? Our population is growing, yet our wealth distribution is going down and we're eliminating jobs through 'progress.' It's great that we can now get rid of the truly horrible jobs but, what are all these people to start doing? Sure, we have more desk jobs, engineering jobs, etc. than ever but there's still only a finite number of these to go around.

In the future we're going to eliminate so many jobs through advancement that we'll have no choice but to go towards a socialistic society...which I find ironic, because that's what capitalists fear the most.

Re:Wait wait wait

[Bandman]

I don't think it's fair to say that the dumb vote democrat. The dumb probably vote whatever their parents voted.

Idealists vote democrat. You're right that they're generally younger, though. It takes a while for a realist to become jaded with the system and to become cynics.

It would be nice to have another party or two, because the original republican party that I respected is gone (and left with Reagan), and the democratic party that I admired for progress is gone with Clinton.

I'm afraid that McCain is more of the same republicans we've had, but I really, really hope that Obama is different. The only problem is that it's going to take a couple of presidential terms at least, to clean up the mess that Bush and company left.

Re:Wait wait wait

[CAIMLAS]

'Progressives" inherently back progress.

Uh, yeah. And "Conservatives" inherently back conservation.

I've got news for you: progressives have only existed for a scant couple of years. Before that, they were self-identified as liberals, socialists, even communists. As those names became tarnished by their activities and policies, they moved onto the next most convenient label.

Re:Wait wait wait

[AshtangiMan]

I suppose that for me the really infuriating thing about the oil company CEO is that he is raking in my tax dollars in the guise of subsidies. I'd rather the oil market was unsubsidized and deal with that reality, where if I don't like it I can choose not to support it. But now even though I chose not to buy oil (in the form of gasoline) the bastards still have a hand in my pocket. I'm not sure why that doesn't infuriate you too, though there have been some experiments which examine that phenomenon.

Re:Wait wait wait

[Ex-MislTech]

Well there is a tipping point at some point.

There will come a time when you go to a store as a drive thru,
and you wave a Fob key at a scanner with your shopping list
and a robot will start handing you bags to put in your back seat.

Then you drive off from the almost 100% robotic store,
or it will be delivered by said robotic truck to your house.

Your car will be built by robots.

Your house will be built by robots.

Your food will be grown and harvested by robots.

FBI at langley already have 'Electric sheep'

http://www.friendlyrobotics.com/about/news/

Once 90% of jobs are done by robots, then it will be well past
the tipping point.

A lot of ppl say there will be new jobs, but at some point any
job you can think of can be done by a very well programmed robot.

Its kinda like the ppl that think that the illegals that mow
your yard are too dumb to do any other job, then they show
up in construction and other jobs and ppl say hey wait !

The illegals can do any job here that they do in their home country,
and the robots will be doing the jobs at some point as well.

Asimo can already serve drinks, soon he will do other human
tasks with no problem.

http://asimo.honda.com/asimotv/

Then it just becomes about getting the price down.

When the robot can build and repair other robots then they
will not even need the factory workers.

Re:Wait wait wait

[somersault]

Maybe it's human nature to want poverty over prosperity as long as everyone suffers equally. Sounds more like it's human nature to be jealous jerks. I think if the people who won less were really 'poor' they would have just kept the money.. otherwise they're just being bitter.

As far as actual wealth distribution goes, I'd give up a part of my wage if I knew that it was going to for example get rid of the corruption in 3rd world governments and let those countries develop more effectively, but that's not even an option open to me so I'd prefer to just keep what I have. I'm pretty lucky to have a decent job. I'm not especially rich by most western standards, but I'm not poor either, and I'm happy with that. I don't wish that Sergei Brin or whoever didn't get to spend his money on going into space or on nice cars, and I certainly wouldn't take a pay cut just so that I could hear that he lost all his money. Maybe some troll like twitter would take a pay cut just to see for example Bill Gates lose all his money.. I'd take a pay cut to see MS as a company disappear off the face of the earth, but that's something that would affect me and my job directly (in a positive way :) ). As far as individuals who work in MS or any other company are concerned, I don't care how rich they are since it doesn't affect me.

Re:Wait wait wait

[Facetious]

the median income in the US adjusted for inflation is seven times what it was a century ago, and several orders of magnitude above pre-industrial revolution levels... So yes, industrialisation made everyone better off, even though all those farm laborers lost their jobs.

I don't necessarily oppose your thesis, but thought I should comment on the part of your post meant to "head off" opposition.

Income and wealth are not the same thing. To borrow language from Alvin Toffler in his book The Third Wave, there is an economic continuum with people filling the role of producer and consumer at one end and people being "prosumers" (consumers of their own production) at the other end. The pendulum has swung from the latter to the former, with the industrial revolution and its after-effects being the primary driver.

To further illustrate, consider the skills of former generations compared to ours. They generally produced their own clothing, often build their own homes including production of building materials, raised and processed much of their own food, etc, and little of this work was converted into income. They were generalists. We, conversely, are specialists. We do one kind of job, and use the income produced to buy the things other generations produced for their own use.

That is why I cannot simply accept inflation-adjusted income as a measure of prosperity. Wealth needs to be a factor. Goods produced for personal consumption need to be considered.

Re:Wait wait wait

[demonbug]

'Progressives" inherently back progress.

Uh, yeah. And "Conservatives" inherently back conservation.

I've got news for you: progressives have only existed for a scant couple of years. Before that, they were self-identified as liberals, socialists, even communists. As those names became tarnished by their activities and policies, they moved onto the next most convenient label. Don't tell that to the Progressive party. Pursuing such image-tarnishing activities as universal suffrage and the breakup of the Southern Pacific Railroad monopoly in California.

But yeah - obviously only a newly-invented label to hide the iniquities of those evil liberals.

Re:Wait wait wait

[Free the Cowards]

Only existed for a scant couple of years? Might want to do a little research on that.

Are you saying that the dead zone did not exist...

[Calledor]

prior to the biofuels initiative or that you are against agriculture in the midwest that produces huge amounts of untreated runoff every year and has been since probably the mid 50s if not before. Remember at one point in time, before gasoline was discovered to be perfect for the combustion engine, ford considered ethenol. As it happens he chose gasoline because it was dirt cheap and they were dumping it straight into the Mississippi (I honestly cannot fathom how that must have smelled) since it was a by product. Mind you I'm not trying to justify this as a perfect circle or some other kind of historical asshatery but I find your most compelling arguement not only contrary to your final statement about global warming but also tangential to the issue.ãã Additionally, while oil will always be sold and burned off by someone else, decreasing the demand will decrease the price and also reduce the incentive for people to tap costlier reseviors.

Re:SwiftFuel sounds like a bad idea.

[mrchaotica]

One of the problems with unleaded fuels is that they produce higher compression than avgas.

Forgive my ignorance, but I was under the impression that compression was caused by the reduction in volume within the cylinders between the bottom and top ends of the piston stroke, and had nothing to do with the particular gas that was being compressed. Am I wrong, or did you mean to say that unleaded gas detonates at lower compression ratios than leaded gas does?

Not efficient enough

[bill_mcgonigle]

solar power -> through existing electric infrastructure -> to the battery of your electric car/mower/series of tubes

So I worked out the math on this one time. The limiting factor is the amount of light that falls on the earth.

If you assume 40% efficiency (the best we're hoping for) and start building with a year 2050 goal, you'll need enough solar panels to cover 1/4 of New Mexico with nothing but panels. And that's with no room for maintenance or cabling infrastructure - if you include that you're covering 1/3 of New Mexico. If you factor in clouds, it's about half of New Mexico, and I didn't even deal with breakage from all those damn cacti growing up through the panels.

And that just accounts for our electricity needs, it doesn't account for our automotive needs.

Kurzweil is expecting a 2^5 increase in efficiency over the next 5 years, but for the life of me I can't figure out how he's going to get more sunshine in.

Re:RTFA

[hardburn]

Ultimately, prop planes and cars use the same technology, with some differences in details. One of those details is that airplanes don't have the same emissions requirements, allowing them to use leaded gas with a higher octane rating. The consequence is that they can run a higher compression ratio, and thus be more efficient.

If SwiftFuel can provide an additive that produces octane ratings on par with leaded gas, we can all jump for joy. Combined with direct injection, we could potentially see gas engines with compression ratios and supercharging boost on par with diesels.

Re:Which is why you preserve dense energy resource

[mrchaotica]

You're right - we'll never see a battery powered Hummer.

Wanna bet? ; )

(FYI: the point of this is not efficiency, but rather that an electric motor is quieter than a diesel engine so they can sneak up on enemies more easily.)

Re:SwiftFuel sounds like a bad idea.

[drinkypoo]

You are not wrong. Compression is a feature of the volume, the bore, and the stroke. The volume is based on the bore, stroke, piston head features, and the head volume. Pretty much end of story. As per the Gasoline FAQ (google it) Octane Enhancers [...] are usually formulated blends of alkyl lead or MMT compounds in a solvent such as toluene, and added at the 100-1000 ppm levels. They have been replaced by hydrocarbons with higher octanes such as aromatics and olefins. These hydrocarbons are now being replaced by a mixture of saturated hydrocarbons and and oxygenates. Incidentally, they were specifically replaced by MTBE, and have since mostly been replaced with Ethanol.

Unleaded fuels without other octane boosters are prone to predetonation. That might be what the guy was talking about - that "pinging" noise of a so-called knock condition is the sound of the piston vibrating in the cylinder as it tries to compress an expanding mixture. Hard to say.

As for eroding lines and such, this is true, especially of Ethanol. A lot of that aeronautic stuff is pretty damned antiquated. I wouldn't be surprised to find that replacement parts are still sold with leather seals and whatnot. It wasn't an airplane, but my 1960 Dodge Dart (2dr, "Phoenix", 318ci big block hemi) had a 650 CFM Carter carburetor which had a leather acceleration pump flap. When the switch from leaded occurred, a lot of these cars sort of fell apart. Not mine though. Must have gotten lucky. Also I used the expensive lead substitute, maybe it was good.

How about one of these...

[ayjay29]

There's been so many articles on what fuel, or what car is going to be big in the next few years. Seems to me we have had the answer around for a number of years.

I usually cycle to work in the summer, in Stockholm its quicker than driving or taking the subway, and parking is not a problem. It's easy to stay fit cycling and, provided you find a good route, probably a lot safer than driving.

There's bound to be a bunch of excuses about not having a great route to work, or living too far from work etc. But it's something to think about if you re-locate or change jobs. I have not owned a car for over 10 years, and for 9 of them i have commuted on an old city bike a got for $60. I've probably spent another $50 on maintainance in that time. Add in all the health benifits, and money saved, and it does seem to be a pretty sane option to consider.

Re:How about one of these...

[Gazzonyx]

So, what do you do to get to work during winter?

Why this is seriously Stupid

[drinkypoo]

Everything we make Ethanol from is based on soil.

All mass agriculture is based on petrochemical fertilizers. The tomatoes that you buy at the local supermarket are fertilized with oil! Oh sure, not directly...

Here's the biggest lie, though: "It also happens to be about $2 a gallon cheaper than gasoline." In reality, the true cost of both this fuel and gasoline are much much higher than what you see (or would see, in this case of this fuel) at the pump.

See, the cost of gasoline is human lives. Whatever you think about the reasons for our current military activities, we have definitely gone to war for oil. Not to steal oil, of course, but simply to increase its value. See, when oil goes up anywhere in the world, it goes up everywhere in the world, because it's a global commodity.

Interestingly, so is corn, which is where we get most of our Ethanol. While in theory we can produce cellulosic ethanol from things we would normally burn, releasing the CO2 into the atmosphere for no reason and without benefit, it really hasn't turned out to be that profitable and so it has gone largely unexplored. Of course, that corn is fertilized with oil, so when it comes right down to it, Ethanol as we use it in America today is a fossil fuel.

Really, this is the ultimate rub with all topsoil-based fuels: while through careful management it is possible to fertilize fields simply through rotation and the use of your own shit, we actually waste our humanure instead of growing plants with it. Consequently the plants must be fertilized with non-human byproducts (e.g. blood meal, bone meal, animal shit, et cetera) in the case of organic farming, or with petroleum-based products (typically, anyway) in the case of mass factory farming (the so-called "Green Revolution".) Taking this thought a step further, as we're currently not feeding the soil that our food comes from, how do we plan to feed the soil that we're going to feed our cars from? I don't know if you've noticed, but they have rapacious appetites. It might be because they weigh an order of magnitude more than a human, and have an engine under 25% efficient, but what do I know? I'm not a physicist. I could be wrong.

I found your comment unrefreshingly naive when you said "Or is it just some evil price fixing conspiracy to make their 5% profits worth more?" The oil companies are making record profits right now, vastly more than 5%. On top of that, yes, yes it is just an evil conspiracy. Keep in mind that any time two or more people get together to screw at least one other person, it's a conspiracy. Conspiracies to fuck you out of money really are everywhere. This should not be a revelation by now, either.

Anyway, one more time: The only liquid fuel technology which does not have some horrible defect that makes it at least as bad as what we're already doing is algae-based biodiesel. It still has nasty emissions compared to anything you actually want to breathe (so does vegetable oil, honestly - though it's different) but it is actually potentially better than carbon neutral.

See, essentially all the carbon plants are made of (and it is their primary building block of course) is harvested from the air. Once you separate the lipids from the rest of the algae, the remainder is useful as fertilizer, high in nitrogen. You know, so you don't need ANFO, which makes a better bomb than a soil food. Oh, it's an OK plant food, but it's no good for the soil. Without healthy soil (soil is not just some mineral dust, it is a community of living organisms AND mineral dust AND the organic but decomposing remnants of organisms past, and should be at least 60% organic material) you cannot grow a proper plant.

The Amazon is on the verge of collapse, Brazil is about to become an incredibly shitty place to live (aside from the Favelas, which are already incredibly shitty.) Topsoil-based fuels

Re:Why this is seriously Stupid

[ColdWetDog]

Bingo.

The real problem is that we're breeding like flies, and we're putting a lot of stress on the planet. We need to do a better job of making fewer babies, or we're going to put ourselves in a very ugly situation.

Exactly, and I'm surprised that this isn't brought up more often. And the insect analogy might be more apt than you intended. Many insect populations grow exponentially until they exceed the carrying capacity of the environment. Then the populations crash. Then the populations start rising exponentially again and rinse, lather, repeat.

For the human-population-on-earth experiment we're currently on the exponential rise portion of the graph. Time will tell whether humans are smart enough (unlikely) or lucky enough (possibly) to start into a negative population growth and allow the human species to live on the planet in some sort of desirable equilibrium rather that having everyone eck out some marginal existence boiling their dandelions for gas. Or worse, having mass die offs of humans (and likely other parts of the ecosystem). It's happened before. It will probably happen again. We might be able to control it.

Then again, maybe not. Murphy was an optimist.

Re:Food?

[MaskedSlacker]

Starving parents forfeited their right to sympathy by having children thus dooming them (the children) to starve. Making babies without candy is basically the same as taking candy from the baby.

So what about these guys?

[McWilde]

These guys are promising a biofuel that is exactly like fossil crude oil. It could be mixed in with the petro crude and refined into any currently available fuel.

wikipedia article, additional information?

[jetpeach]

i created a wikipedia article with some basic info from the pbs article. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swiftfuel please add and improve it if you have any further information on this elusive SwiftFuel (i say elusive, because the "inventors" have no patents, there is practically no information i can find on it other than the pbs article, and practically none of the comments i saw in this thread had any useful information, just the usually bickering about biofuels and food...)

i also can't access the swiftenterprises page though (it's slashdot affected), and as i said there isn't much useful info in google that i could find. the pbs article practically reads like an ad...not objective enough for my tastes (what about all the trade-offs? cost of refining? etc etc etc!)

Re:Oh, that's right...

[Jesus_666]

They're getting more expensive everywhere. In Germany we had cases of people stealing scrap wires or even trying to remove the thick power wires from railroad installations(!) because copper is expensive enough for cable theft to be lucrative.

Re:Hydrogen isn't bad, but it's not so good, eithe

[sumdumass]

Ideally, you wouldn't want to store hydrogen. You would want to find a way to make it on the fly. We have problems with long term Hydrogen storage because it is so thin of a molecule, it tends to evaporate or seep through the storage containers as well as the evaporation causes the pressure to builf to a point it needs to be vented if it isn't kept cool. With long term storage, you will reach a point where energy use in keeping it cool will outplay any benefits or savings in using it.

Here are a couple of links talking about the issues.
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2008-06/dlnl-lph060408.php
http://www.fuelfromthewater.com/storage.htm

Yea, I didn't mess with a proper link so you might have to copy and paste them. I don't know why I didn't link them properly, it seems that this little explanation uses more key strokes then I could possibly save by not including a href= and a couple of anchors. But that's where I'm at tonight.

The Solution (drum roll, please)

[BucketOfLard]

Problem: We're running out of cheap oil.
Solution: Kill more dinosaurs.

That was easy.

many different types of energy

[mlwmohawk]

Electricity != Combustion Fuels

Th reason why we use combustion fuels is because the energy density is amazing. OK, so we use gasoline very inefficiently, and could double our efficiency without altering the shape and size of vehicles, but it is still a very efficient power to weight ratio.

Batteries are inefficient and costly as well as an environmental disaster to produce and recycle.

Maybe if we can make giant low leak capacitors, that would be better, but battery or capacitor, gasoline is still more stable than shorted high current wires in a car crash.

Even with a hybrid, you still got gasoline.

The answer, I think, has to be a clean burning fuel, maybe some form of alcohol. Seriously, in new england at least, we loose every leaf on most of our trees every year. If we were to rake that all up, press the oil out of it and ferment the available sugars, that may be some real energy for combustion.

Wind turbines in every house. Solar panels on the roofs. DC appliances. LED lighting. solid state refrigeration. symbiotic appliances, i.e. refrigerators that extract heat and aid the the devices that produce heat. Like a water heater that is aided by the hot side of the peltier device of the fridge.

Well you do the work then

[Anonymous Coward]

If the workers don't deserve more of the profits, why don't you try getting on without them.

Missing the point

[fish_in_the_c]

As seems typical in discussions about ethanol or like fuels many are missing the point.

bio-fuel technology in the current state of the art is NOT a replacement for fossils fuels nor can it be. The reason is simple , it takes more energy to produce a gallon of ethanol then you get by burning it.

However, if you view it as a storage mechanism, ( like a battery ) and realize that it can be easily substituted into our existing infrastructure it starts to make sense.

Energy problems come in two flavors. Energy supply and energy storage/delivery
ethanol is a good solution to a storage/ delivery problem. It is not even remotely a solution to the supply problem.

However, it is impractical and costly to retrofit most vehicles with a replacement energy source ( geo thermal? Solar? Wood? ). Not that cars can't use any of these thing, but they currently don't and the work needed to make them do so is years away.

However, if we use solar, wind, geo-thermal what have you to produce ethanol we can power our cars indirectly from wind/solar rather then fossil flues.

This process is highly inefficient, but it is better then nothing and could reduce or eliminate the use of fossil fuels in a much shorter time then any other option.

As such I think it makes a nice intermediate step even if it isn't the final solution.

I'm your boogie man, that's what I am...

[GameboyRMH]

Must...not...joke...about...spelling...

Re:SwiftFuel sounds like a bad idea.

[Thelasko]

Forgive my ignorance, but I was under the impression that compression was caused by the reduction in volume within the cylinders between the bottom and top ends of the piston stroke, and had nothing to do with the particular gas that was being compressed. As a person who designs engines, I will note that the parent is correct and should be modded +5 insightful and grandparent should be modded down significantly for not knowing what he is talking about.

One correction to parent, unleaded gas autodetonates at lower compression ratios. Meaning detonates due to pressure/temperature without spark. A related phenomenon that is most likely to occur is knock.

Re:Remember when?

[pavera]

The reason european countries pay so much for gas is because there is about a 300% tax on the stuff... Oil costs the same amount everywhere. It's all traded on the same markets. Exxon Mobile sells a barrel of oil for $137 whether it was pumped out of the ground in Texas, Alaska, Venezuela, or Iran. It doesn't matter where the oil came from.

The only thing that effects the price besides the market price of oil is local taxation/subsidies. In China and India for example, the government buys that $137 barrel of oil, and then sells it to consumers for like $10/barrel. Sure the government loses money on this but they figure they'll make it up in economic growth. In Europe, they take that $137 barrel of oil and add a 2-300% tax so now the oil costs $270-400. hence the $8-9 price for a gallon of gas.

Compaction

[MacDork]

I'm not trying to argue, because I really can't take exception with much of your post, but...

Generally, you can only no till a corn crop for 4 or 5 years before the ground it too compacted and effects root growth.

Just so nobody reading gets the wrong idea.... Compaction is generally a result of tillage, not so much the lack of it. Earthworms and root systems tend to leave the ground pretty well aerated if you leave them alone. Especially in soils with heavy clays, you're generally better off with minimal or no tillage. With tillage, you can get a hard, impenetrable plate just below the plow line. That's particularly detrimental to corn because the root system goes so deep.

At least, that's what I've observed and was taught. But I can see how you could be getting different results with different soils, especially those deep heavily organic loamy soil profiles out there in corn country.

The only developed country that bans growing hemp

[tepples]

Why don't they all just switch to growing the single most valuable crop their land will manage? Because their land is within a jurisdiction that bans "the single most valuable crop their land will manage". The synthetic chemical industry has lobbied the United States government to prohibit growing even those hemp varieties with no significant dronabinol content.

You are actually wrong about ethanol

[WebCowboy]

The reason is simple , it takes more energy to produce a gallon of ethanol then you get by burning it. That is actually incorrect. It is a myth based upon misleading studies from a researcher at Cornell university. Using his equations it takes more energy to make a gallon of GASOLINE than is contained in that gallon produced. Furthermore, the study is based upon the use of Corn and traditional processing to make ethanol (the lest efficient means of production--sugar cane is much more efficient, as are the use of non-feedstock cellulosic sources). Plus, he assumes that the equiplent used to grow the corn is running on petroleum-based fules, when it could easily run on biodiesel (also more efficiently produced and energy dense than ethanol).

Since ALL fuels using the exceedingly complex formulae will result in more than 100% energy used to make the fuel, all the Cornell study proved is that with the most common growing and processing techniques used to make ethanol in the US that ethanol is half as efficient as gasoline, but a lot of studies have shown that, and newer technology has brought ethanol production close to the efficiency of gasoline production.

I agree that it isn't the optimal, final solution, but I happen to think that biodiesel technology is a better idea, as crops like canola and soybean can produce oil readily (using only a fractino of energy required for fermentation) that can be poured into the tanks of existing diesel engines with little to no modification. Furthermore, once the oil is extracted the meal left over is still recoverable for feedstock, whereas there is much less left to use as feed when corn is made into fuel.

Re:On the road to trouble

[trongey]

...when you start burning your food as fuel, you're in trouble Uh-oh. I've been doing that for 48 years. Guess I'm screwed.

wtf is swift fuel really?

[Mordstrom]

Ummm, has anyone looked at what this magical fuel is really? It can't be purely ethanol with the claims they are making. I realize you guys are having a good time getting wound up about the bio-fuels debate, but has anyone questioned the actual fuel itself? Their web page is remarkably less than informative.

It's all Solar

[AK Marc]

I see so many comparisons to oil. But it is really just a form of capturing solar energy. What is more efficient, plowing under the farmland and putting a solar plant on it, or planting crops and burning them to extract power? We shouldn't be tailoring the "fix" to match our current needs. We should find out what is the most efficient, and steer our needs toward that. Our needs are not fixed. We need energy, whether that's a flammable liquid or electricity is a question of storage, not generation. We can always convert later (at a loss), but should be generating that which is best. The other thing to keep in mind, is that there isn't going to be one solution. Perhaps on the best farmland, the choice should be to raise corn. For the questionable lands, raise switchgrass. And for the areas where nothing useful can grow, put the large power plants. Sprinkle wind farms over all of it. Hydro (rivers, damed lakes, and tidal) and geothermal where appropriate, and nuclear to make up the difference. Get some mass energy storage (temporary hydro in the form of high-altitude lakes, flywheels, electrolysis at off times to burn the H2 in peak times, or whatever works) to even out the variabilities in solar and wind, and all our problems are solved. Coming up with the solution is easy. It's just implementing it that is hard (and expensive).

Re:Actually... He's Right, You're Wrong

[YetAnotherBob]

I know you are just trying to defend your religion, but you are mistaken.

The publicity died, but the efforts were only scaled back a little. Some facts for you

Here, (Phoenix Arizona area) there have been small scale tests of Solar Power going on and slowly expanding for the last 20 years. 5 years ago, a utility was installing solar panels with inverters on some folks rooftops. APS, the local Electric Utility currently claims to have around 2% of it's generation solar. The limiting factor is the cost of the panels.

Solar panels cost have continued to go down in cost, year by year since the 1960's. They are still about 1.5 to 2 times the cost of coal/oil based electricity. That's down from more than 100 times. There has been progress.

I use solar here because you thought it was eliminated under Regan. Wrong. They just stopped making political hay with it. The same it true of syn fuels.

Synthetic fuels have been in limited production since before 1900. Ethanol, Methanol, and other more exotic liquids. Methane, ethane, carbon monoxide, hydrogen, and other exotic gasses have all been tried, boosted, and are all in limited production. Hitler largely ran Germany on synthetic fuels for WWII, because he didn't have access to any large oil reserves.

The research is ongoing. It's not just the Government either. Every large oil company has a research group looking for a workable alternative to oil. They need it for their continued corporate survival. The Government continues to fund research too. There are lots of programs in Colleges. It's out there, it's just not a current hot button issue. You don't often see it on the nightly 'news'.

The limiting factor really is cost. Compared to alternatives, Gas is cheap. Even at $5.00 per gallon for gasoline, Ethanol is more expensive to use. Gasoline has a higher energy capacity, so you need more ethanol to go the same distance. Methanol has an even lower energy density. That's why ethanol is presently preferred. It's the best alternative to oil we can do right now. Remember to factor that into your cost data. The energy needed to produce it factors in too. Energy costs are high for ethanol, somewhat lower for methanol. There is even work on producing wholly synthetic petroleum. That is still ridiculously expensive.

And actually, we are not even close to running out of oil. Just running out of easy to get (read 'CHEAP') oil.

To date, though, nothing we've found will replace oil completely. Too bad, we do need to get off the oil.

As the poster you were criticizing said, we need more research.