No wonder the public is misinformed about energy

nth · Light Sweet Crude Joined: Feb 24, 2005 Posts: 1976

Fertilizers are currently made using NG, but can be substituted with electricity. This is an energy intensive method.

We will never runout of fertilizers as long as we got abundant energy. It doesn't have to be fossil fuel.

netfind · Coal Joined: Nov 13, 2005 Posts: 11 Location: The Ozarks

Starvid has a most important point when he says that peak oil is not an energy crisis, but a liquid fuel crisis. At first, you might say this smacks of the cornicopian view of Huber and Mills in their book "The Bottomless Well", where they say all the energy we'll ever need is all around us. We are not using up energy, it is merely changing form - from matter to heat to vapor back to matter and on and on. And according to the 1st law of thermodynamics, energy is conserved. We just need to be technologically clever enough to catch energy transformation in ways that are useful to us. But my response to that is that, historically, technological innovation tends to come along in quantum leaps in the grand scheme of things. And, while 5 or 10 years is a but a blink of an eye in that grand scheme, it is a very long and dangerous time atop Hubbert's peak. We get our electricity from coal (50%) and nuclear (20%) and natural gas and dams. Over 70% of oil goes to transportation fuel. So the Arab ATM of oil could cut us off next week, and we would still have all good life electricity gives us. We just couldn't get around. That's the way it happened in the '73 oil embargo. We had plenty of light to wait in gas lines by. The crisis we are entering is indeed a liquid fuel technology crisis. If we had developed gasoline from coal the way Presidents Carter and Ford started to 30 years ago, we would now be using less than 30% of the oil we are now using, and there would be no peak oil crisis for many, many years. Now there has to be a panic rush into coal conversion and other liquid fuel technologies that is going to be dicey for many years, but hopefully successful. That's not impossible. Hitler did it when the Allies cut off his oil imports. About half the fuel used by Germany's immense war machine was made from coal! And with 65 year old technology. Something similar could probably be done in 2006 America but for the wall of stupidity it faces in our governing bodies.

dub_scratch

The_Toecutter · Light Sweet Crude Joined: Jun 18, 2005 Posts: 1736

Starvid

Hey I like electric vehicles myself and am a total convert. I will buy an electric scooter in the spring (see my avatar).
http://evtamerica.com/z20.htm

But call me when I can buy a midsize elctric car for $25000. Or even a small one.

edit: If anyone can figure out how I should remove the white borders from my avatar, send me a pm.
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Peak oil is not an energy crisis. It is a liquid fuel crisis.

The_Toecutter · Light Sweet Crude Joined: Jun 18, 2005 Posts: 1736

dub_scratch

The_Toecutter · Light Sweet Crude Joined: Jun 18, 2005 Posts: 1736

More like without having the millions of dollars needed to pass a government crash test, small companies are restricted to having their vehicles registered as "special construction vehicles" and other similar designations like people do with kit cars, purpose built road-legal race cars, and fully custom hot rods. There's a catch: the states limit how many of those "special construction vehicles" are allowed to be built registered each year. In California, for instance, the limit is 300 cars per year for the *entire* state, including those who custom build and register their own cars regardless of whether they are a business or not.
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The unnecessary felling of a tree, perhaps the old growth of centuries, seems to me a crime little short of murder. ~Thomas Jefferson

netfind · Coal Joined: Nov 13, 2005 Posts: 11 Location: The Ozarks

"dub_scratch" - I agree with you on the practicality of technology saving us from the fossil fuel depletion problem (I was just presenting the cornucopian mind set of The Bottomless Well). Huber and Mills seem to think that we will simply take technology to the very limits of the 2nd law in a decade or so and come up with near magic ways of capturing nature's other gifts besides fossils - hydrogen, the ocean bed nonfossil goodies, what have you (they don't deal with trivial pests like Hubbert in their book). I'm not saying any of this new technology is impossible, but not likely in a decade and in enough QUANTITY to more than replace the highly pressurized, water injected flow rates of nature's nearly perfect energy source. Our energy policy should have been an emergency program to replace oil derived transportation fuel with coal derived fuel 30 years ago to give us much added time to gradually replace the other 20% or so of oil usage with other things. We really started to do that, then oil got cheap, Reagan, a cornucopian, was elected, tore Carter's solar panels off the white house, and let his normally good belief in free markets tell him that the free oil market would fix any real problem we had with energy. So we had the Asleep-At-The-Wheel energy policy for the next 25 years.