Ethanol. Finally, it has come fully to light by anyone with common sense that the whole ethanol headlong push is a farce when we use corn or grains as feedstocks. Cellulosic conversion doesn't work, YET. I'm not sure it will. In the end the chemistry doesn't hold up (I'm pretty deep in Organic Chemistry, I had Jungle Jim as a professor at NDSU) . Perhaps a feedstock genetically developed to yield more sugars like Sugar Cane or High Fructose Corn would be a good intermediate step. What's happening now is a joke and a travesty. Welfare for farmers is all it is.
Biodiesel from Grain like Soybeans. Same deal as Ethanol. You can't grow and crush enough oil to make it work. It's a scam. Plus you are mono-cropping and mining the soils and taking land out of production that would be better used for food and forage production rather than hammering the earth for a few beans to drive the diesel pickup around on. Again if it's possible to develop genetically a plant that produces huge volumes of oil MAYBE there might be some sense to it. I doubt it very seriously.
Butanol. I had high hopes for this technology and perhaps at some point someone will make a breakthrough. It depends on a direct conversion of unfermented sugars processed at high heats and fractions extracted from the precipitates. A shaky low output program. While at first glance it might seem to be a good plan since the promise of being able to use any sugars containing feedstuff (even lawn grass) would be great. The issue gets to be how do you get it captured before it converts to pure cellulose (drys out). My faith is much less on all this.
Garbage conversion: The whole idea of mass fermentation and reduction of garbage into energy makes a great deal of sense if it's combined with the recapture of metals, plastics, and glass for recycling. And, if the deitrus after the conversion is incinerated is used for energy for pyrolysis the system would be a closed loop. The net energy output from this would be less than the cost to do it. BUT, we already artificially support Ethanol. Wouldn't it make more sense to support this and get the energy from the process. Besides, even post consumer plastics can be converted to crude by a pyrolitic process. The water bottle you drank from was made from oil and using pyrolitics the oil can be recovered. As technology continues to find ways to do organic conversions perhaps the oil could be more efficiently recovered. All I know is we throw away masses of latent energy every day and recovering that makes sense.
Hydrogen. NOPE. Just Nope. Nothing about all that makes any sense at all.
Power from Sea Water. Sure. Sort of. I think there may be a way we will use sea water but this may not be it. Fractioning it electrolytically is a poor answer. The power needed to do this is more than the power generated. So we burn coal, oil and natural gas to generate electricity to split water into h2 and o. Dumb
Wind and Solar. Be sure to wear your hemp shirt. It's a bogus zero sum game. No energy is ever actually generated on the plus side by wind when all the inputs are measured. It's a phony program with feel good press releases. Solar has more promise as solar cells continue to improve and they are getting better every day. The problem is like flying to the sun. If you go during the day you will be burned up. You can only fly to the sun when it's night out. (Norwegian Joke). You only generate electricity when the sun shines. It doesn't always shine. Sometimes it's dark. We always need electricity. Putting power back into the grid is a shell game. Pittsburgh never gets a shot at solar power generated in New Mexico. It never makes the trip whole. Line losses and all. But for the earth mother crowd this is a solution that makes everyone feel good but doesn't work.
There are a couple of promising technologies that make real sense on the horizon.
Oil from Coal. It's like oil from Shale Sand. Same technologies. I think this makes sense if we can just get the global warming scam put to bed. If you want to take a simple 10 question test to see if you really understand the whole human caused global warming issue, here's a link for you to look at.
Nuclear Energy. Always made sense. Still does. We need to come up with a better way to dispose of used radioactive wastes. There are technologies that make some sense. If we do this right there is a lot of weapons grade nuclear material that could power the globe for a very very long time.
Algae that is 50% biofuel when crushed from sea water and dirty water like sewage to me holds the greatest promise. I have been high on this low tech way of capturing the sun's energy and converting it to liquid fuel for a long time. I think I am about to be vindicated. It's crude but functional and makes more sense than anything else I have seen. You can read all about it here.
I have been a fan of plug in electric cars my whole life and they have a place. Hybrids are a phony baloney technology. There is hybrid technology that makes sense. It's just not the one we have now. Current hybrids are still hula hoops. Hip to own but not sensible.
We are not going to overthrow a whole liquid fuel powered industry and economic system for some non-working one. We will figure out how to create fuels that can one for one go directly into our fuel tanks and work in our 57 Chevys and diesel trucks. We will. The internal combustion engine isn't going away any time soon. Nor should it.
The good news is in the short run there is no global shortage of oil. There's lots of it. Easy oil is not as easy to find as it once was. Oklahoma gushers are rare. I would rather not dig up the tundra of Alaska. I would rather not drill in the arctic. Siberia is still largely untapped. The Bering strait is full of oil and untapped. South America has lots of undiscovered oil and Africa is loaded, Kenya, Nigeria, and others. The middle east can still pump as much as they ever did.
Much of the issues with oil shortages are political. The good news is I would like to tell the criminals that hold the world's oil to kiss my pitute. I want the USA free of the stranglehold those places have on us.
I believe that day is coming. SOON!
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