Also do something about the draining of peat bogs in Indonesia, so they don't catch fire. They could have emitted as much as 2.6 billion tons of carbon in 1997-98. There could be as much as 50 billion tons remaining to burn.
By 2050, industrialized nations will be emitting little CO2. By 2100, if necessary, we will be pumping it back into the ground.
That doesn't square with all the investment being poured into e.g. coal-to-liquids synfuels. Rentech is converting a gas-fired fertilizer plant in Illinois to gasified coal (and make Fischer-Tropsch diesel and electricity too). They're going to be burning about 5200 tons of coal a day, and all the carbon is going to wind up in the atmosphere. Multiply this by several hundred over 2 decades, unless incentives are changed.
I agree that we can and should pump carbon back into the ground, and I've proposed a way to do it. I just don't think we will absent a radical change in direction.
The only "tipping point" we are approaching is the point where renewables become cheaper than dino power.
Coal isn't affected by the depletion of oil and gas. There's 1 trillion tons available in conventional mines, and an estimated 3 trillion tons discovered by Norway under the North Sea. Renewables are not guaranteed to be cheaper unless we tax carbon emissions.
adaption is cheap, while prevention is hideously expensive at the moment.
Prevention will never be cheap unless we develop the technology to do it. Nobody will develop the technology unless it is profitable. The only way it will be profitable is if we have a world-wide treaty which taxes carbon emissions and pays for net removals, otherwise industry will just go where it isn't taxed (like China).
Why shouldn't China sign it? It required nothing of them, and the CO2 reductions required of the signatories would shove industry their way. (Industries less efficient than the ones displaced from the West, plus the finished goods had to travel further to market thus burning more fuel in shipping. Kyoto is really stupid on a number of levels.)
You do realize that "co2science.org" is run by fossil-fuel PR flacks, don't you?
We're not denying it, we're just questioning wether it's linked to CO2.
Which conveniently allows the fossil-fuel interests to avoid any remedial actions which might affect their profits. Slick, that.
PR firms are noted for producing bovine excrement. They are really good at polishing it to make it look good, but it doesn't change its essence. If you want to know where climate scientists stand, you should read stuff written by climate scientists.
The cornerstone to the IPCC Report is the Michael Mann (et el) "hockey stick" graph
Sorry, but that's an outright lie. See Myth #1 (and read the rest). You can find the Keeling curve and atmospheric composition data derived from the Vostok ice core (going back 650,000 years) at The Ergosphere.
You still have 50+% losses in the conversion of biomass to ethanol. Distilling ethanol requires most of the remaining energy to be used in the process; if you use a different process like conversion of biomass to charcoal (for direct carbon fuel cells or raw material for reducing zinc oxide to metal), the off-gas from the carbonization process can be used for energy or other purposes.
Maybe the vehicle fuel of the future is a slurry of charcoal in an antifreeze mixture.
Still, that the entire corn crop could come so close is suprising.
The entire corn crop would only make 31 billion gallons; the rest assumes a billion tons of other biomass.
If we are going to use corn as fuel, we'd be better off burning the corn to heat homes and using the natural gas and fuel oil displaced by the corn to run vehicles. A bushel of corn will make about 392,000 BTU of heat, but distilling it takes about 33,000 BTU/gal or 88,000 BTU/bu. If you use the corn in a corn stove instead of sending it to a gas-fired ethanol plant, you free up 470,000 BTU of natural gas at a loss of ~220,000 BTU of ethanol. Ethanol from corn is a farm subsidy program, not an energy program.
One wonders what you would have said about the Spanish flu which became pandemic and killed millions worldwide. Before it mutated to become highly transmissible and took off, it also only showed "the potential for danger". Afterward, of course, it moved far too fast for vaccination to stop it.
I'm almost afraid to ask what you think of the successful eradication of smallpox, or the efforts to finally get rid of polio (also a mere handful of deaths each year... due completely to our efforts to do the same to it as we did with smallpox).
Not that you don't have a lot of company who also make erroneous statements and then stick to them even when they've been proven wrong, but it's not the company you would keep if you were smart.
From your link:
Wasn't my link, stupid. I told you who cited it at least twice. Apparently you need more repetition before meanings sink in; you might want to work on that "reading comprehension" thing.
If you wanted my figures, the least you could do is look at them.
The argument over whether or not Ethanol is energy positive will be what determines whether it is a fuel source or not.
Thank you, Mister Irrelevant. Besides the fact that it wasn't my reference, didn't you get the point that, even if you assume no energy inputs whatsoever, the production isn't sufficient to do the job? An EROEI less than infinity just makes it worse.
In fact, sugar cane produces 22.5 gallons per ton of cane. Yields average 30.8 tons per acre with a maximum of 100 tons per acre. Using the national average, this works out to about 693 gallons per acre vs. the best case of 532 gallons per acre obtained from corn.
And at 25-45 tons/ha and 87 gallons/ton from the Iogen process, Miscanthus has a potential from 880 to 1580 gallons/acre.
What you don't realize is that we don't have 300 million acres to spare, for anything. 2004's record corn harvest came from only 73.6 million acres harvested (80.7 million planted). Further, it's very expensive to grow sugar cane in the US (why do you think we have import quotas and price supports?), and it's one of the most polluting crops we've got due to runoff.
What part of, "It's not about efficiency" do you not understand?
What part of "I can't believe you were stupid enough to claim this once, let alone twice (and I was going to let you back out gracefully)" don't you understand?
Of course it's about efficiency. The more efficient you are, the less of any type of fuel source you need. If we could get 4x the efficiency of oil utilization, we could roughly eliminate imports (for a while). If you have X amount of energy source and it meets only 1/3 of your needs if you use it in 15% efficient systems, it will meet 133% of your needs if you can boost that to 60%.
Plug-in hybrids are a nice idea, but they don't remove the dependency on oil.
Well, let's see. A PIH with 50 miles electric range gets me an 80% reduction, while a vehicle running on E85 (20% of the energy in E85 is petroleum used directly, and another 48% to 59% is one or another kind of fossil fuel used indirectly) gets me as little as 21% reduction or as much as 32%. If I don't drive long distances, the PIH doesn't need liquid fuel at all. I can buy or even make make my own "green" electricity, but I can't control what goes into E85. Doesn't look good for ethanol.
There are no panaceas here, just different options to chose from.
And they need to be evaluated on their merits. Without partisanship or mercy.
why not get a Ethanol-powered plug-in hybrid?:-P
Might be worth it, if ethanol (unsubsidized) gets cheaper than petroleum. Otherwise it's a waste of money. FWIW, the PIH cuts liquid-fuel requirements enough that you really could meet the remaining needs with biofuels.
That's assuming you can phase in the new fuels. First you have to convince fueling stations to add the equipment.
Fueling stations? Every hardware store already has what you'd need. It's this remarkable device called an "extension cord".
He linked to this (factual), and stated that ethanol is:
a fuel source
not a viable replacement for oil
has a much lower fuel efficency
is still non-renewable.
All of which is correct (#4 might be limited to "as produced today", but not #2 or #3).
He... was refuted by respondants.
Only one of whom even tried to address those points I highlighted above, and he quoted a source which didn't even support his claim.
There's quite a bit of discussion regarding the viability of Ethanol as a fuel.
Why didn't YOU address any of those salient points? After criticizing hydrogen for the problems it would have in actually becoming a solution, you blithely ignore the same issues as they apply to ethanol. Sure, they're different; you can dump E85 in some millions of vehicles currently on the road. That doesn't mean that you can actually get enough of the stuff to run them on it.
You've taken our total production and then proclaimed that Ethanol can't do the job. Question? Have you considered that we can increase our crop production?
Have YOU? We burned 139 billion gallons of gasoline in 2004. A gallon of ethanol has the energy of about.66 gallon of gasoline, so that would make ~210 billion gallons of ethanol equivalent. The whole 2004 US corn crop (a record harvest, BTW) would make ~31 billion gallons, so you'd need ALMOST SEVEN TIMES THE HARVEST to replace gasoline.
It's not only impossible, you'd have to be stupid or insane to suggest it. It's far easier to do something about that pathetic 14.9% efficiency figure.
If it was just about efficieny, we'd all be driving electric cars. In fact, it's about range and fuel economy. It's about keeping the transportation system we have.
Replacing our fuel infrastructure and our cars would be one of the most expensive replacements in history.
The electrical grid is already there, and vehicles wear out and are replaced steadily. That investment will be made regardless, it's just a question of what character the replacements will have.
I won't try to determine your mental state. I just wanted to make the point that, on the scale of usefulness, informativity and insightfulness, your post's quality fell way short of its score. If the mods really want to do their job, they'll make sure that the +5's don't include such examples of failed critical thinking.
Your blockquote from REA does not address the claim: that ethanol as produced is not renewable.
The USDA claims 1.34:1 EROEI for ethanol, or about.74 BTU of fuel to make 1 BTU of ethanol. The energy embodied in the fertilizer does not come from ethanol, it comes from natural gas. The cultivation isn't powered by ethanol, it's powered by diesel. The conversion of rock phosphate to soluble form, the formation of the pesticides, the distillation.... none of these processes run on ethanol. If they did, you'd get (at most) 1/4 of the gross production as net surplus after process needs. It is not renewable.
Cellulosic ethanol is touted as being more like 8:1, but it's not on the market yet. Conventional ethanol will be priced out of the market as crude and gas prices rise.
(Ironically, just this minute All Things Considered is running a feature on ethanol quoting David Pimentel.)
I'm disgusted that this has been modded up to 5 (despite at least one "overrated" mod), when the very next comment provided links to info and far more insightful and factual commentary.
USDA says that we can get as much as 2.66 gallons of ethanol from a bushel of corn. The 2004 harvest was 11.8 billion bushels, so the whole crop could yield (at most) ~31 billion gallons of EtOH.
Then there's biomass. The "billion ton vision" is looking for a billion tons/yr of stuff with cellulose in it. Iogen has an enzymatic process from which they claim 330 liters (87 gallons) per ton; from that you could theoretically get another 87 billion gallons a year.
Total from the whole corn crop (g'bye, Tony the Tiger and Corn Chex) and all that biomass would be 118 billion gallons/year. We burned 139 billion gallons of gasoline in 2004 (9,063,000 barrels/day), plus another 4 million bbl/day of distillate (diesel) and 1.6 million bbl/day of jet fuel. Ethanol isn't going to do the job no matter what, and hyping it as The Solution just because it isn't hydrogen is a huge mistake.
The problem with ethanol is, ironically, that it is compatible with the existing vehicle fleet. That fleet has an average tank-to-wheels efficiency of 14.9%. Lead-acid batteries are about 70% efficient, Li-ion is closer to 95%. We are far better off going plug-in hybrid than wasting our money on ethanol.
Moderators: when the parent is back down to 2, it's about where it ought to be.
Historically it has been. Historically, the USA was an oil exporter too; that changed when US production peaked in 1970, while consumption continued to rise. Now oil production of the entire world is peaking or about to.
Historically, most people farmed for a living. If the future was going to be just like history, we wouldn't have history as we know it. Eras end. The era of cheap oil is ending.
Oil has not increased in price versus inflation.
Oil prices are near their inflation-adjusted high (during Gulf War I). They will go higher.
We're not running out and we won't in our lifetimes.
We haven't run out of oil in East Texas, but production has fallen to 12,000 barrels per day. Prudhoe Bay is producing at less than half its peak. Oil comes out slower and slower as the reservoirs are depleted. "Out of oil" in one sense means the zero point of an asymptotic curve; that will arguably never happen. Out of swing capacity (out of cheap oil) is another thing entirely; we're there today, and you can expect $100/bbl in the near future.
Just a few years ago, oil was $15/bbl. Then the target price of oil was $20-$30/bbl. Now it's over $60/bbl, and Kuwait's biggest field has peaked at 1.7 mmbbl/day. Mexico's Cantarell field has peaked. Speculation is that Ghawar, S. Arabia's biggest field and biggest in the world, is producing 80% water (due to reckless water injection) and is about to peak.
If you think oil is going to remain cheap when demand hits a static or slowly shrinking supply (and the historic inelastic short-term demand curve), you've got another thing coming.
Unfortunately for you, I don't have the time to list and refute all of your misconceptions. You start early on:
the lifting gas cells do not have to expand or contract at all, altough clearly they have to be engineered to handle higher pressures than cells designed to operate at equillibrium with ambient pressures."
You fail to grasp that the cells are not pressure vessels. Superpressure balloons do exist, but the structural overhead of a superpressure envelope in an airship is something nobody appears willing to pay.
As for learning anything beyond that, you're on your own now.
Even if the entire bomb was converted to energy, it would not have been enough to throw a significant amount of the atmosphere into space.
Igniting the atmosphere was also not realistic. Scientists knew of far more energetic events in recent history (e.g. Tunguska) and even a chemical reaction of the atmosphere was not plausible.
You don't. That's what I've been trying to get through to you.
conventional airships are limited by bouyancy far below the point where anything starts to burst
No they aren't. Conventional airships are neutrally buoyant at whatever altitude. They have rigid skins, but are unpressurized; the lifting gas is held in flexible cells. Those cells cannot take up any more volume than the shell. The gas expands as the air pressure falls, so there is a maximum altitude (minimum air density, if the gas is at ambient temperature also) at which the airship can fly. If it goes higher, it must vent gas or take damage.
Blimps handle this problem with internal ballonets which hold air under slight pressure. As the blimp rises, the ballonets deflate; when they are empty the blimp can go no higher.
This is Boyle's Law, PV = nRT. A proper geek would know this intuitively; you have more studying to do.
And you think the craft is going to fly well when its ballonets have burst and leaked their lifting gas (esp. if just at one end, causing trim problems), or fly at all if they break through the skin?
What you don't seem to grasp is that the beast is a hybrid, with advantages and limitations drawn from both aerodynes and aerostats.
The operational ceiling of a Dynalifter will be limited by the amount of lifting gas carried and the volume of the envelope; when the ballonets have expanded to their maximum, you won't be able to go any higher.
There may be some tradeoffs between static lift and ceiling (offload gas to allow more expansion), but it only goes so far.
I won't say "problems", but collecting the condensate could be difficult, and I'm curious about the feasible methods of insulation for a steam balloon.
That stuff aside, it's a very good idea. Carrying water for ballast is one thing; being able to turn some of that ballast into lifting gas to e.g. allow a vertical takeoff is damned slick.
There are lots of things that are bad, like slavery and infanticide, which does not collapse civilsations.
Massive wastage of resources does. Remember, this is not an issue of what to do, this is an issue of when not to do anything.
Anyway, even very early prematures can avoid brain damage. I personally know one who was born before 28 weeks...
That's not "very early" as things go today; try 22-24 weeks. Lung maturity is the major issue and the lungs develop relatively late (it's thought to be one of the triggers for labor).
It appears likely that your premature acquaintance did not suffer many complications of prematurity or any severe ones such as blindness, deafness, or brain damage from hemmorhages. Most of the ones who do will never go on to higher education, and may never hold a paying job in their lives. They may never be able to take care of themselves, or even speak about how they feel. That last condition is the saddest, because they can't communicate their pain and get the underlying condition treated properly. They live their abbreviated lives in silent suffering.
Also remember that these premies are natural events and not anyone's fault; we don't have a moral responsibility to "do something!" regardless of the likely outcome. Rather than go to extraordinary lengths just for mere survival, it's probably best to withdraw care in such cases and let nature take its course. It doesn't give anyone a chance to be a medical hero, but it can be the most humane and merciful thing to do.
I think that the insurance issue is less important than the greed of many people in the health care industry.
Most of this care is paid for by Medicaid. Medicaid is run by cheapskates, and IIUC hospitals tend to run a loss on Medicaid patients.
I'll bet that the real problem is more that these babies are just very, very expensive to treat. Given that their treatment causes them pain and they are still likely to wind up with serious disabilities or brain damage due to their condition, we should ask ourselves if we should just allow them to pass peacefully. That's what they all did at one time, and civilization didn't collapse.
The US overproduces so much corn that some people burn it to heat their homes.
Cutting HCFS demand would probably lead to more of it being burned as motor fuel (ethanol). This is a wasteful process with a very poor EROEI; the most optimistic calculations thus far show that you need at least 6/10 of a gallon-equivalent of other fuel to get a gallon of ethanol out (and the usual figure is more like 3/4).
Marquette didn't demand that its students refrain from saying unkind things about their professors, either in blogs or elsewhere. It has taken no action against much more severe criticism elsewhere, singling out the subject. That violates the understanding we all have as members of a free society.
More to the point, Marquette U. gave the subject a scholarship and other encouragements to attend. The subject may also have taken out loans and incurred other expenses to attend. Unless MU is also willing to fully reimburse the subject for his expenses and pay for his lost time, the university has no business trying to back out of the deal at this point.
Higher cetane number is associated with easier self-ignition; it's the opposite of octane.
Cetane number has little to do with the durability of diesels (but plenty to do with NOx emissions and noise).
Engines burn their fuel very completely as it is. The only thing hydrogen would do is increase flame speeds and burn the fuel faster, allowing the combustion gases to do more expansion against the piston.
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Also do something about the draining of peat bogs in Indonesia, so they don't catch fire. They could have emitted as much as 2.6 billion tons of carbon in 1997-98. There could be as much as 50 billion tons remaining to burn.
I agree that we can and should pump carbon back into the ground, and I've proposed a way to do it. I just don't think we will absent a radical change in direction.
Coal isn't affected by the depletion of oil and gas. There's 1 trillion tons available in conventional mines, and an estimated 3 trillion tons discovered by Norway under the North Sea. Renewables are not guaranteed to be cheaper unless we tax carbon emissions. Prevention will never be cheap unless we develop the technology to do it. Nobody will develop the technology unless it is profitable. The only way it will be profitable is if we have a world-wide treaty which taxes carbon emissions and pays for net removals, otherwise industry will just go where it isn't taxed (like China).Why shouldn't China sign it? It required nothing of them, and the CO2 reductions required of the signatories would shove industry their way. (Industries less efficient than the ones displaced from the West, plus the finished goods had to travel further to market thus burning more fuel in shipping. Kyoto is really stupid on a number of levels.)
PR firms are noted for producing bovine excrement. They are really good at polishing it to make it look good, but it doesn't change its essence. If you want to know where climate scientists stand, you should read stuff written by climate scientists.
Sorry, but that's an outright lie. See Myth #1 (and read the rest). You can find the Keeling curve and atmospheric composition data derived from the Vostok ice core (going back 650,000 years) at The Ergosphere.Maybe the vehicle fuel of the future is a slurry of charcoal in an antifreeze mixture.
The entire corn crop would only make 31 billion gallons; the rest assumes a billion tons of other biomass.If we are going to use corn as fuel, we'd be better off burning the corn to heat homes and using the natural gas and fuel oil displaced by the corn to run vehicles. A bushel of corn will make about 392,000 BTU of heat, but distilling it takes about 33,000 BTU/gal or 88,000 BTU/bu. If you use the corn in a corn stove instead of sending it to a gas-fired ethanol plant, you free up 470,000 BTU of natural gas at a loss of ~220,000 BTU of ethanol. Ethanol from corn is a farm subsidy program, not an energy program.
I'm almost afraid to ask what you think of the successful eradication of smallpox, or the efforts to finally get rid of polio (also a mere handful of deaths each year... due completely to our efforts to do the same to it as we did with smallpox).
Wasn't my link, stupid. I told you who cited it at least twice. Apparently you need more repetition before meanings sink in; you might want to work on that "reading comprehension" thing.
If you wanted my figures, the least you could do is look at them.
Thank you, Mister Irrelevant. Besides the fact that it wasn't my reference, didn't you get the point that, even if you assume no energy inputs whatsoever, the production isn't sufficient to do the job? An EROEI less than infinity just makes it worse.
And at 25-45 tons/ha and 87 gallons/ton from the Iogen process, Miscanthus has a potential from 880 to 1580 gallons/acre.
What you don't realize is that we don't have 300 million acres to spare, for anything. 2004's record corn harvest came from only 73.6 million acres harvested (80.7 million planted). Further, it's very expensive to grow sugar cane in the US (why do you think we have import quotas and price supports?), and it's one of the most polluting crops we've got due to runoff.
What part of "I can't believe you were stupid enough to claim this once, let alone twice (and I was going to let you back out gracefully)" don't you understand?
Of course it's about efficiency. The more efficient you are, the less of any type of fuel source you need. If we could get 4x the efficiency of oil utilization, we could roughly eliminate imports (for a while). If you have X amount of energy source and it meets only 1/3 of your needs if you use it in 15% efficient systems, it will meet 133% of your needs if you can boost that to 60%.
Well, let's see. A PIH with 50 miles electric range gets me an 80% reduction, while a vehicle running on E85 (20% of the energy in E85 is petroleum used directly, and another 48% to 59% is one or another kind of fossil fuel used indirectly) gets me as little as 21% reduction or as much as 32%. If I don't drive long distances, the PIH doesn't need liquid fuel at all. I can buy or even make make my own "green" electricity, but I can't control what goes into E85. Doesn't look good for ethanol.
And they need to be evaluated on their merits. Without partisanship or mercy.
Might be worth it, if ethanol (unsubsidized) gets cheaper than petroleum. Otherwise it's a waste of money. FWIW, the PIH cuts liquid-fuel requirements enough that you really could meet the remaining needs with biofuels.
Fueling stations? Every hardware store already has what you'd need. It's this remarkable device called an "extension cord".
The Prius+ conversions thus far
- a fuel source
- not a viable replacement for oil
- has a much lower fuel efficency
- is still non-renewable.
All of which is correct (#4 might be limited to "as produced today", but not #2 or #3). Only one of whom even tried to address those points I highlighted above, and he quoted a source which didn't even support his claim. Why didn't YOU address any of those salient points? After criticizing hydrogen for the problems it would have in actually becoming a solution, you blithely ignore the same issues as they apply to ethanol. Sure, they're different; you can dump E85 in some millions of vehicles currently on the road. That doesn't mean that you can actually get enough of the stuff to run them on it. Have YOU? We burned 139 billion gallons of gasoline in 2004. A gallon of ethanol has the energy of aboutIt's not only impossible, you'd have to be stupid or insane to suggest it. It's far easier to do something about that pathetic 14.9% efficiency figure.
What part of "plug-in hybrid " don't you understand? Maybe you should head over to CalCars and read a bit, or Plug-In Partners. The electrical grid is already there, and vehicles wear out and are replaced steadily. That investment will be made regardless, it's just a question of what character the replacements will have.I won't try to determine your mental state. I just wanted to make the point that, on the scale of usefulness, informativity and insightfulness, your post's quality fell way short of its score. If the mods really want to do their job, they'll make sure that the +5's don't include such examples of failed critical thinking.
The USDA claims 1.34:1 EROEI for ethanol, or about .74 BTU of fuel to make 1 BTU of ethanol. The energy embodied in the fertilizer does not come from ethanol, it comes from natural gas. The cultivation isn't powered by ethanol, it's powered by diesel. The conversion of rock phosphate to soluble form, the formation of the pesticides, the distillation.... none of these processes run on ethanol. If they did, you'd get (at most) 1/4 of the gross production as net surplus after process needs. It is not renewable.
Cellulosic ethanol is touted as being more like 8:1, but it's not on the market yet. Conventional ethanol will be priced out of the market as crude and gas prices rise.
(Ironically, just this minute All Things Considered is running a feature on ethanol quoting David Pimentel.)
USDA says that we can get as much as 2.66 gallons of ethanol from a bushel of corn. The 2004 harvest was 11.8 billion bushels, so the whole crop could yield (at most) ~31 billion gallons of EtOH.
Then there's biomass. The "billion ton vision" is looking for a billion tons/yr of stuff with cellulose in it. Iogen has an enzymatic process from which they claim 330 liters (87 gallons) per ton; from that you could theoretically get another 87 billion gallons a year.
Total from the whole corn crop (g'bye, Tony the Tiger and Corn Chex) and all that biomass would be 118 billion gallons/year. We burned 139 billion gallons of gasoline in 2004 (9,063,000 barrels/day), plus another 4 million bbl/day of distillate (diesel) and 1.6 million bbl/day of jet fuel. Ethanol isn't going to do the job no matter what, and hyping it as The Solution just because it isn't hydrogen is a huge mistake.
The problem with ethanol is, ironically, that it is compatible with the existing vehicle fleet. That fleet has an average tank-to-wheels efficiency of 14.9%. Lead-acid batteries are about 70% efficient, Li-ion is closer to 95%. We are far better off going plug-in hybrid than wasting our money on ethanol.
Moderators: when the parent is back down to 2, it's about where it ought to be.
Historically, most people farmed for a living. If the future was going to be just like history, we wouldn't have history as we know it. Eras end. The era of cheap oil is ending.
Oil prices are near their inflation-adjusted high (during Gulf War I). They will go higher. We haven't run out of oil in East Texas, but production has fallen to 12,000 barrels per day. Prudhoe Bay is producing at less than half its peak. Oil comes out slower and slower as the reservoirs are depleted. "Out of oil" in one sense means the zero point of an asymptotic curve; that will arguably never happen. Out of swing capacity (out of cheap oil) is another thing entirely; we're there today, and you can expect $100/bbl in the near future.Just a few years ago, oil was $15/bbl. Then the target price of oil was $20-$30/bbl. Now it's over $60/bbl, and Kuwait's biggest field has peaked at 1.7 mmbbl/day. Mexico's Cantarell field has peaked. Speculation is that Ghawar, S. Arabia's biggest field and biggest in the world, is producing 80% water (due to reckless water injection) and is about to peak.
If you think oil is going to remain cheap when demand hits a static or slowly shrinking supply (and the historic inelastic short-term demand curve), you've got another thing coming.
As for learning anything beyond that, you're on your own now.
Igniting the atmosphere was also not realistic. Scientists knew of far more energetic events in recent history (e.g. Tunguska) and even a chemical reaction of the atmosphere was not plausible.
Blimps handle this problem with internal ballonets which hold air under slight pressure. As the blimp rises, the ballonets deflate; when they are empty the blimp can go no higher.
This is Boyle's Law, PV = nRT. A proper geek would know this intuitively; you have more studying to do.
What you don't seem to grasp is that the beast is a hybrid, with advantages and limitations drawn from both aerodynes and aerostats.
That would be a Stratellite.
There may be some tradeoffs between static lift and ceiling (offload gas to allow more expansion), but it only goes so far.
That stuff aside, it's a very good idea. Carrying water for ballast is one thing; being able to turn some of that ballast into lifting gas to e.g. allow a vertical takeoff is damned slick.
It appears likely that your premature acquaintance did not suffer many complications of prematurity or any severe ones such as blindness, deafness, or brain damage from hemmorhages. Most of the ones who do will never go on to higher education, and may never hold a paying job in their lives. They may never be able to take care of themselves, or even speak about how they feel. That last condition is the saddest, because they can't communicate their pain and get the underlying condition treated properly. They live their abbreviated lives in silent suffering.
Also remember that these premies are natural events and not anyone's fault; we don't have a moral responsibility to "do something!" regardless of the likely outcome. Rather than go to extraordinary lengths just for mere survival, it's probably best to withdraw care in such cases and let nature take its course. It doesn't give anyone a chance to be a medical hero, but it can be the most humane and merciful thing to do.
I'll bet that the real problem is more that these babies are just very, very expensive to treat. Given that their treatment causes them pain and they are still likely to wind up with serious disabilities or brain damage due to their condition, we should ask ourselves if we should just allow them to pass peacefully. That's what they all did at one time, and civilization didn't collapse.
Cutting HCFS demand would probably lead to more of it being burned as motor fuel (ethanol). This is a wasteful process with a very poor EROEI; the most optimistic calculations thus far show that you need at least 6/10 of a gallon-equivalent of other fuel to get a gallon of ethanol out (and the usual figure is more like 3/4).
This is one of the reasons I wrote this rant about ethanol (and also a FAQ entry on it).
More to the point, Marquette U. gave the subject a scholarship and other encouragements to attend. The subject may also have taken out loans and incurred other expenses to attend. Unless MU is also willing to fully reimburse the subject for his expenses and pay for his lost time, the university has no business trying to back out of the deal at this point.
If you click to call them, they don't have to pay any WATS providers.
What do you bet that spyware/rootkits on music CDs disappear for the next few years?