Gasoline is currently very expensive, compared to what it was years ago, and the reason for this high cost is obvious; as petroleum becomes more scarce, a greater amount of time and effort is required to drill it from the earth, and then refine it into useable fuel.
A remedy for this dilemma of which I have become aware in recent years is synthetic fuels, fuels that are manufactured in a laboratory, rather than being refined from petroleum mined from the ground, and the advantages of such fuels are obvious and significant.
First, synthetic fuels can be manufactured for only a small fraction of the time and effort that is required to produce fossil fuels, since they do not need to be extracted from the earth or refined, while petroleum takes millions of years to form, and thus shall be far less expensive. Second, they can be manufactured specifically to burn more cleanly and last longer, thus saving the environment and money from customers. Third, they can be manufactured from virtually anything, such as prairie grass, scraps of food from restaurants or farms, or other forms of organic waste, such as parts of animals that shall not be consumed by humans.
As great as this idea may be, I have not seen any evidence that synthetic fuels are used very much, since gasoline is still very expensive. While I do believe that the best possible solution for energy and environmental crises are to switch from gasoline cars to electric cars and to replace all fossil fuel power plants with solar and nuclear plants, a reasonable strategy to use while that transition is made would be synthetic fuels. What does everyone else say about this? Why are synthetic fuels not more prevalent?
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“Those who would trade their freedoms for security will have neither.”-Benjamin Franklin
“When the people fear the government, there is tyranny; when the government fears the people, there is liberty.”-Thomas Jefferson
“A vote is like a rifle; its usefulness depends upon the character of its user.”-Theodore Roosevelt
“Patriotism means to stand by one's country; it does not mean to stand by one's president.”-Theodore Roosevelt
The reasonably cost effective existing methods of producing synthetic fuel appear to be coal and natural gas based. This doesn't really change the fundamental dynamic of deriving fuel from a scarce and exhaustible natural resource. The alternative is biomass synthetic fuels, but these remain extremely expensive to produce, more than double the current price of oil-based fuels.
The economics of synthetic fuel manufacture vary greatly depending the feedstock used, the precise process employed, site characteristics such as feedstock and transportation costs, and the cost of additional equipment required to control emissions. The examples described below indicate a wide range of production costs between $20/BBL for large-scale gas-to-liquids, to as much as $240/BBL for small-scale biomass-to-liquids + Carbon Capture and Sequestration.
In order for synthetic fuel to take off, it seems like a much cheaper method of biomass-based production is needed.
Are the two of you saying that there is no miraculous solution to the Earth's energy and environmental crises? Are you saying that it is very unlikely that we shall ever discover a source of energy that is inexpensive, easily-renewable, and environmentally-friendly?
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“Those who would trade their freedoms for security will have neither.”-Benjamin Franklin
“When the people fear the government, there is tyranny; when the government fears the people, there is liberty.”-Thomas Jefferson
“A vote is like a rifle; its usefulness depends upon the character of its user.”-Theodore Roosevelt
“Patriotism means to stand by one's country; it does not mean to stand by one's president.”-Theodore Roosevelt
Are the two of you saying that there is no miraculous solution to the Earth's energy and environmental crises? Are you saying that it is very unlikely that we shall ever discover a source of energy that is inexpensive, easily-renewable, and environmentally-friendly?
They're not likely to be wrong. Most renewable tech currently requires some fairly major restructuring or has a bottleneck of weight which limits it's use as a gasoline replacement. That's one of the reasons why people are pushing for renewable sources to be begun before the market curves them into a necessity: it gives us a little more freedom in case things mess up.
For example: New Zealand could probably shift to Hydro and Geo for the cities and mass-transit quite easily.
Off-road vehicles/cars are difficult: they need to be relatively lightweight and powerful, which currently means you need a variety of gasoline, which needs to be extracted or synthetically produced.
Renewable energy has a lot of problems, wind turbines are just terrible as you need 100% backup from some other source when the wind doesn't blow and when it does you end up with too much. Wave power is a myth as far as I am concerned, been just round the corner for at least 20 years. At least geo is good if you live somewhere that can use it, but that doesn't account for many places.
This all depends on location.
Wind works well in area's like West Australia with a massive coastline > I'm sure it would have a good chance around Chicago too given the amount of wind.
Geo seems to be problematic, I'm yet to see power generation for a long sustained period in the articles I've read > there's a geo plant down in south Australia, but my understanding is that geo power requires very certain geology, and most cities will be unable to use it.
RE: Wave power > it does work > we have one along the coast near where I live here in Perth (Australia), I guess it just depends on location as to how effective it might be.
All of this seems that whilst power generation for homes isn't that big a deal for the time when necessity demands > it's the food part of the equation that grabs me.
We all have to eat, can't say that about electricity, cars or petrol.
Agriculture requires a massive amount of energy to get the food to our table, and petroleum makes that all affordable. Once petrol gets unsustainably expensive, food prices will no doubt get ridiculous. Expect the poor to get poorer etc etc.
Are the two of you saying that there is no miraculous solution to the Earth's energy and environmental crises? Are you saying that it is very unlikely that we shall ever discover a source of energy that is inexpensive, easily-renewable, and environmentally-friendly?
No? How does my post read anything remotely like that? Don't put words in my mouth.
Are the two of you saying that there is no miraculous solution to the Earth's energy and environmental crises? Are you saying that it is very unlikely that we shall ever discover a source of energy that is inexpensive, easily-renewable, and environmentally-friendly?
A source of energy that is all of the above? No, I doubt we will ever discover that.
But we have some potential improvements: Thorium, for example. Liquid Fluoride-Thorium reactors can theoretically provide a lot of energy from something that is common, and does not have huge environmental issues. I say theoretically because the reactors we keep building keep breaking down. It isn't renewable, but common enough that it shouldn't matter for a good while.
So we technically have the source already. Harnessing it to our use is an entirely different beast altogether. If we could just implement theoretical ideas to practice easily enough, we'd be building Dyson spheres in no time.
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The Sage is occupied with the unspoken
and acts without effort.
Teaching without verbosity,
producing without possessing,
creating without regard to result,
claiming nothing,
the Sage has nothing to lose.
Wind works well in area's like West Australia with a massive coastline > I'm sure it would have a good chance around Chicago too given the amount of wind.
It's called the "Midwest" or "Great Plains", and yes, there are a lot of wind turbines springing up in the region. Except in Nebraska - our laws are set up for publicly-owned power companies, and unfriendly to the private startups who are building the things. So come to Nebraska if you want to see environmentalists calling for energy deregulation. It's pretty funny.
But A Guy Who Might Post is still right - all these turbines are just there to supplement the main fossil-fuel-burning plants. They can't power a town on their own, and a major metro center like Chicago barely even notices their contribution. He's also right about their unreliability. A huge part of the problem that surprises many laymen is that we still don't have a really effective way to store energy, so we can generate extra during the off-hours and keep it to distribute during the peak hours. A modern power grid needs to have the capacity to generate peak demand or else there are brown-outs, meaning most of that capacity just goes unused when there isn't peak demand. And of course, with wind (and solar) you don't always know what your real capacity is going to be from hour to hour. So if you could invent a super-efficient battery or something, that would be really helpful.
Geo seems to be problematic, I'm yet to see power generation for a long sustained period in the articles I've read > there's a geo plant down in south Australia, but my understanding is that geo power requires very certain geology, and most cities will be unable to use it.
You basically have to be Iceland.
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Vive, vale. Siquid novisti rectius istis,
candidus inperti; si nil, his utere mecum.
I still believe that nuclear and solar power are the best options for alternatives to fossil fuels; nuclear power, because it generates far more power than do fossil fuels and actually is very safe, despite popular conceptions (incidents such as the Chernobyl accident or the Fukushima accident are by far the exception, not the norm); and solar power, because the sun's light continually shines on the planet, is free to use, and will not ever be depleted during any human's lifetime (scientists estimate that the sun shall last for at least another 5 billion years, and I believe that it is very safe to say that that is far longer than the human race, or any life on Earth, for that matter, shall last).
I have heard Blinking Spirit's words before, that there are currently very efficient methods for generating energy, but not for storing it. Why is that, and surely, scientists are working to solve that problem? If microprocessors can continually become more powerful and more energy-efficient, and if storage devices can continually become smaller and greater in capacity, why have batteries not been continually improving, as well? From what I know of energy generation and storage (which, admittedly, is not sufficient for me to be considered an expert on those subjects), it would be best for scientists to invest in both nuclear fusion (which is far superior to nuclear fission in that it produces far less radioactive fallout and generates far more energy) and more efficient solar panels (as the maximum energy efficiency of current solar panels is only approximately twenty percent).
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“Those who would trade their freedoms for security will have neither.”-Benjamin Franklin
“When the people fear the government, there is tyranny; when the government fears the people, there is liberty.”-Thomas Jefferson
“A vote is like a rifle; its usefulness depends upon the character of its user.”-Theodore Roosevelt
“Patriotism means to stand by one's country; it does not mean to stand by one's president.”-Theodore Roosevelt
Many have been investing into fusion research for at least 20 years AFAIK > they're yet to actually make it work in a reliable, or sustained, sense.
Fingers crossed, cos that one right there is the freakin holy grail.
The other holy grail as I see it, is the tech they're trying to make work concerning cars running on hydrogen, but at the same time having an air intake that breaks molecules in the air and robbing the hydrogen from it, so you never ever have to fuel up.
Sadly, both are a loooooong way off.
I'm a great believer that necessity will breed innovation as companies and govt's pour money into alternatives. The thing is, coupled with an ageing population, peak oil will no doubt cause a economic meltdown at the very least.
Problem is, the real world isn't a game of Civilization. We can't just allocate more funds to the "Fusion" project and be confident that we will unlock those powers in a decade or two. Research takes unpredictable paths and has many dead ends; some tasks that seem simple from the outside may be forever beyond our reach. Yes, of course scientists are working on better batteries (as well as alternative approaches to the problem). GE and the other tech companies stand to make a mint from them. And incremental improvements are being made. But as much as we wish for breakthroughs, we cannot rest our hopes on them. We have to have a plan of action that will work even if fusion and battery research go bust.
Also, fusion ain't exactly clean on the radiation front. After all, sunburns and skin cancer are radiation damage from a natural fusion reactor. The potential of fusion is really freaking amazing, but it's not magically perfect in every way.
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Vive, vale. Siquid novisti rectius istis,
candidus inperti; si nil, his utere mecum.
Gasoline is currently very expensive, compared to what it was years ago, and the reason for this high cost is obvious; as petroleum becomes more scarce, a greater amount of time and effort is required to drill it from the earth, and then refine it into useable fuel.
No it's not, and no it isn't.
Gas is getting more expensive because of a geometric increase in demand with a relatively stable level of production. Technology has currently done well to create new means of production for oil in ways that were not possible years ago. Oil, by the way, has been relatively stable for the past 15 years or so. Oil, is only one ingredient in gas, gas's increased price is not really tied to the price of oil but rather to the consolidation in the oil industry. Aamaco becoming part of BP, and the like.
All this aside gas is still cheap and that's why it's still leaned on so heavily.
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What's the big deal? You could have played multiple Righteous Avengers for years now.
I still believe that nuclear and solar power are the best options for alternatives to fossil fuels; nuclear power, because it generates far more power than do fossil fuels and actually is very safe, despite popular conceptions (incidents such as the Chernobyl accident or the Fukushima accident are by far the exception, not the norm); and solar power, because the sun's light continually shines on the planet, is free to use, and will not ever be depleted during any human's lifetime (scientists estimate that the sun shall last for at least another 5 billion years, and I believe that it is very safe to say that that is far longer than the human race, or any life on Earth, for that matter, shall last).
I have heard Blinking Spirit's words before, that there are currently very efficient methods for generating energy, but not for storing it. Why is that, and surely, scientists are working to solve that problem? If microprocessors can continually become more powerful and more energy-efficient, and if storage devices can continually become smaller and greater in capacity, why have batteries not been continually improving, as well? From what I know of energy generation and storage (which, admittedly, is not sufficient for me to be considered an expert on those subjects), it would be best for scientists to invest in both nuclear fusion (which is far superior to nuclear fission in that it produces far less radioactive fallout and generates far more energy) and more efficient solar panels (as the maximum energy efficiency of current solar panels is only approximately twenty percent).
Storing energy and microprocessor improvements really aren't the same thing. With microprocessors, your fundamental element is logic. If you can figure out a smaller way of making something to represent various states, then you conceptually have a smaller device. For example, you can use a punch card and make a hole out of a piece of cardboard to represent a zero. But if you find a way to use magentic interlocks, you can compress the data and go from carrying a stack of punch cards into a floppy disk.
Likewise with digital processors, you can go from a vacuum tube, to a single penny sized transistor, to laser cut layers of transistors.
But the fundamental problem with storing energy is different. At this stage, practically all of our stored energy is chemical or potential energy based. It's a little sad to say but much of our stored energy is literally elevated water. Take a bucket of water, put it up in a high spot. That's stored energy. It's potential energy due to gravity. When we want to store energy, we just use that energy to pump the water to a higher location.
Our battery technology just isn't that good. Only recent developments in lithium-ion tech have allowed battery storage of energy to be sufficient enough to run a car. Tesla is still trying to work through these issues.
But I'm sure you already know a traditional car battery is really just used to run some minor electronics and headlights.
Fusion for now is completely and utterly infeasible. Decades of attempting to make it work have not yielded practical results. Fusion occurs in stars as their principle source of power. But you can't very well create high pressures and temperatures in excess of a hundred million degrees on a whim. You need a huge reactor with magnets so powerful, that it creates a hot plasma that doesn't touch ANY surface since all metals readily melt around 4000 degrees. What we need is a method of cold fusion, or a method of fusion that doesn't require conditions that are literally as hot as the core of our sun. We have not found that in spite of tremendous market incentive to do that. The last I heard, one group was trying to do something akin to firing a "bullet of" tritium or deuterium into a large chamber and having 192 charged lasers simultaneously zap the radioisotope in mid-flight around the center of the chamber to trigger a fusion reaction.
All things considered, one of the best means of storing energy we have is petroleum. But finding alternatives to this is the point of this thread isnt it?
Almost all the energy you are using right now was generated microseconds ago. AC current cannot be stored, but comes from the generation of energy from the churning of a turbine somewhere out in the midwest or NY. In other words the current you get when you plug into your wall socket, AC current, is not stored energy. It was generated on the fly from the spinning of a turbine--probably from the flow of water. Wind power would likely be the same. We can store some of this energy by using that power to pumping water to a higher elevation. But we don't have any magic battery or cell that stores massive amounts of power, nor is our research and technology anywhere even close to such a thing.
This statement should indicate the reality to you:
Pumped storage is the largest-capacity form of grid energy storage available, and, as of March 2012, the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI) reports that PSH accounts for more than 99% of bulk storage capacity worldwide, representing around 127,000 MW
99% of all stored power on the grid is nothing more than displacing water to a higher physical location.
A lot of synthetic fuels suck in cold weather. They produce much less energy than the same amount of gasoline in cold weather. Bio diesel is the best example of this.
Technology has currently done well to create new means of production for oil in ways that were not possible years ago. Oil, by the way, has been relatively stable for the past 15 years or so.
A lot of these new technologies also involve spending much more capital to set them up, and more to point, were not economically viable in the past when the oil price was lower.
Fast forward 50 years from now, and I'd take a punt there'll still be oil drilling going on, that by todays standards would not be considered due to cost.
Problem is, the real world isn't a game of Civilization. We can't just allocate more funds to the "Fusion" project and be confident that we will unlock those powers in a decade or two.
Also, fusion ain't exactly clean on the radiation front. .... The potential of fusion is really freaking amazing, but it's not magically perfect in every way.
I would be prepared to take a bet that a fusion power plant would be properly shielded.
We're talking about a controlled fusion reaction, in the same vein as a nuclear fission power plant > not a sun.
They'd never get govt. approval to even conduct the research unless they had all the boxes ticked with no potential risk to anyone (including researchers)
Gas is getting more expensive because of a geometric increase in demand with a relatively stable level of production. Technology has currently done well to create new means of production for oil in ways that were not possible years ago. Oil, by the way, has been relatively stable for the past 15 years or so. Oil, is only one ingredient in gas, gas's increased price is not really tied to the price of oil but rather to the consolidation in the oil industry. Aamaco becoming part of BP, and the like.
All this aside gas is still cheap and that's why it's still leaned on so heavily.
You may say that, but, I can recall (albeit vaguely) that gasoline cost only between $1 and $2 per gallon during my childhood, and, when the price first rose to $3 per gallon, everyone was shocked by that, but confident that such an increase was temporary, and that the prices would soon return to their previous levels. However, the price never did decrease, again, and now, the average price of gasoline in the Untied States seem to be $3.50 per gallon or around that amount; I have not seen gasoline below $3 per gallon in years.
What about solar power? In the past, solar panels were too expensive to be widely used, but they are becoming more affordable in recent years, which is leading to greater usage. I also wonder about the efficiency of solar panels, and if that shall improve; currently, the highest efficiency of solar panels is approximately twenty percent, meaning that solar panels convert only twenty percent at most of sunlight that strikes them into electricity and that the remaining eighty percent is not converted, which is a tremendous waste, in my mind. How long shall it take for solar panels to reach fifty percent (and possibly greater) efficiency, and, if that point is reached, will there be a major paradigm shift in how energy for society is generated?
Private Mod Note
():
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
“Those who would trade their freedoms for security will have neither.”-Benjamin Franklin
“When the people fear the government, there is tyranny; when the government fears the people, there is liberty.”-Thomas Jefferson
“A vote is like a rifle; its usefulness depends upon the character of its user.”-Theodore Roosevelt
“Patriotism means to stand by one's country; it does not mean to stand by one's president.”-Theodore Roosevelt
Gas had it's price artificially low, and had not been keeping up with inflation. Having it finally catch up is what you saw. A fifty percent increase on cheap as dirt is not that high.
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What's the big deal? You could have played multiple Righteous Avengers for years now.
I also wonder about the efficiency of solar panels, and if that shall improve; currently, the highest efficiency of solar panels is approximately twenty percent, meaning that solar panels convert only twenty percent at most of sunlight that strikes them into electricity and that the remaining eighty percent is not converted, which is a tremendous waste, in my mind.
Everything that isn't a solar panel has a 0% rate of converting the sunlight that strikes it into electricity. So to say 20% is a "tremendous waste" of sunlight is a little silly.
The problem with solar is the inefficiencies associated with producing them. The cost, energy, and resources required to build a solar panel are high, so it takes a long operation lifetime for the solar panel to "pay for itself" and justify the pollution and energy that went into making it. Obviously increasing the electrical generating efficiency would help here, but finding more efficient methods of panel production is the more promising avenue to making them economically viable.
A remedy for this dilemma of which I have become aware in recent years is synthetic fuels, fuels that are manufactured in a laboratory, rather than being refined from petroleum mined from the ground, and the advantages of such fuels are obvious and significant.
First, synthetic fuels can be manufactured for only a small fraction of the time and effort that is required to produce fossil fuels, since they do not need to be extracted from the earth or refined, while petroleum takes millions of years to form, and thus shall be far less expensive. Second, they can be manufactured specifically to burn more cleanly and last longer, thus saving the environment and money from customers. Third, they can be manufactured from virtually anything, such as prairie grass, scraps of food from restaurants or farms, or other forms of organic waste, such as parts of animals that shall not be consumed by humans.
As great as this idea may be, I have not seen any evidence that synthetic fuels are used very much, since gasoline is still very expensive. While I do believe that the best possible solution for energy and environmental crises are to switch from gasoline cars to electric cars and to replace all fossil fuel power plants with solar and nuclear plants, a reasonable strategy to use while that transition is made would be synthetic fuels. What does everyone else say about this? Why are synthetic fuels not more prevalent?
“When the people fear the government, there is tyranny; when the government fears the people, there is liberty.”-Thomas Jefferson
“A vote is like a rifle; its usefulness depends upon the character of its user.”-Theodore Roosevelt
“Patriotism means to stand by one's country; it does not mean to stand by one's president.”-Theodore Roosevelt
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synthetic_fuel
In order for synthetic fuel to take off, it seems like a much cheaper method of biomass-based production is needed.
“When the people fear the government, there is tyranny; when the government fears the people, there is liberty.”-Thomas Jefferson
“A vote is like a rifle; its usefulness depends upon the character of its user.”-Theodore Roosevelt
“Patriotism means to stand by one's country; it does not mean to stand by one's president.”-Theodore Roosevelt
For example: New Zealand could probably shift to Hydro and Geo for the cities and mass-transit quite easily.
Off-road vehicles/cars are difficult: they need to be relatively lightweight and powerful, which currently means you need a variety of gasoline, which needs to be extracted or synthetically produced.
Art is life itself.
This all depends on location.
Wind works well in area's like West Australia with a massive coastline > I'm sure it would have a good chance around Chicago too given the amount of wind.
Geo seems to be problematic, I'm yet to see power generation for a long sustained period in the articles I've read > there's a geo plant down in south Australia, but my understanding is that geo power requires very certain geology, and most cities will be unable to use it.
RE: Wave power > it does work > we have one along the coast near where I live here in Perth (Australia), I guess it just depends on location as to how effective it might be.
All of this seems that whilst power generation for homes isn't that big a deal for the time when necessity demands > it's the food part of the equation that grabs me.
We all have to eat, can't say that about electricity, cars or petrol.
Agriculture requires a massive amount of energy to get the food to our table, and petroleum makes that all affordable. Once petrol gets unsustainably expensive, food prices will no doubt get ridiculous. Expect the poor to get poorer etc etc.
No? How does my post read anything remotely like that? Don't put words in my mouth.
A source of energy that is all of the above? No, I doubt we will ever discover that.
But we have some potential improvements: Thorium, for example. Liquid Fluoride-Thorium reactors can theoretically provide a lot of energy from something that is common, and does not have huge environmental issues. I say theoretically because the reactors we keep building keep breaking down. It isn't renewable, but common enough that it shouldn't matter for a good while.
So we technically have the source already. Harnessing it to our use is an entirely different beast altogether. If we could just implement theoretical ideas to practice easily enough, we'd be building Dyson spheres in no time.
and acts without effort.
Teaching without verbosity,
producing without possessing,
creating without regard to result,
claiming nothing,
the Sage has nothing to lose.
But A Guy Who Might Post is still right - all these turbines are just there to supplement the main fossil-fuel-burning plants. They can't power a town on their own, and a major metro center like Chicago barely even notices their contribution. He's also right about their unreliability. A huge part of the problem that surprises many laymen is that we still don't have a really effective way to store energy, so we can generate extra during the off-hours and keep it to distribute during the peak hours. A modern power grid needs to have the capacity to generate peak demand or else there are brown-outs, meaning most of that capacity just goes unused when there isn't peak demand. And of course, with wind (and solar) you don't always know what your real capacity is going to be from hour to hour. So if you could invent a super-efficient battery or something, that would be really helpful.
You basically have to be Iceland.
candidus inperti; si nil, his utere mecum.
I have heard Blinking Spirit's words before, that there are currently very efficient methods for generating energy, but not for storing it. Why is that, and surely, scientists are working to solve that problem? If microprocessors can continually become more powerful and more energy-efficient, and if storage devices can continually become smaller and greater in capacity, why have batteries not been continually improving, as well? From what I know of energy generation and storage (which, admittedly, is not sufficient for me to be considered an expert on those subjects), it would be best for scientists to invest in both nuclear fusion (which is far superior to nuclear fission in that it produces far less radioactive fallout and generates far more energy) and more efficient solar panels (as the maximum energy efficiency of current solar panels is only approximately twenty percent).
“When the people fear the government, there is tyranny; when the government fears the people, there is liberty.”-Thomas Jefferson
“A vote is like a rifle; its usefulness depends upon the character of its user.”-Theodore Roosevelt
“Patriotism means to stand by one's country; it does not mean to stand by one's president.”-Theodore Roosevelt
Fingers crossed, cos that one right there is the freakin holy grail.
The other holy grail as I see it, is the tech they're trying to make work concerning cars running on hydrogen, but at the same time having an air intake that breaks molecules in the air and robbing the hydrogen from it, so you never ever have to fuel up.
Sadly, both are a loooooong way off.
I'm a great believer that necessity will breed innovation as companies and govt's pour money into alternatives. The thing is, coupled with an ageing population, peak oil will no doubt cause a economic meltdown at the very least.
Also, fusion ain't exactly clean on the radiation front. After all, sunburns and skin cancer are radiation damage from a natural fusion reactor. The potential of fusion is really freaking amazing, but it's not magically perfect in every way.
candidus inperti; si nil, his utere mecum.
Gas is getting more expensive because of a geometric increase in demand with a relatively stable level of production. Technology has currently done well to create new means of production for oil in ways that were not possible years ago. Oil, by the way, has been relatively stable for the past 15 years or so. Oil, is only one ingredient in gas, gas's increased price is not really tied to the price of oil but rather to the consolidation in the oil industry. Aamaco becoming part of BP, and the like.
All this aside gas is still cheap and that's why it's still leaned on so heavily.
Storing energy and microprocessor improvements really aren't the same thing. With microprocessors, your fundamental element is logic. If you can figure out a smaller way of making something to represent various states, then you conceptually have a smaller device. For example, you can use a punch card and make a hole out of a piece of cardboard to represent a zero. But if you find a way to use magentic interlocks, you can compress the data and go from carrying a stack of punch cards into a floppy disk.
Likewise with digital processors, you can go from a vacuum tube, to a single penny sized transistor, to laser cut layers of transistors.
But the fundamental problem with storing energy is different. At this stage, practically all of our stored energy is chemical or potential energy based. It's a little sad to say but much of our stored energy is literally elevated water. Take a bucket of water, put it up in a high spot. That's stored energy. It's potential energy due to gravity. When we want to store energy, we just use that energy to pump the water to a higher location.
Our battery technology just isn't that good. Only recent developments in lithium-ion tech have allowed battery storage of energy to be sufficient enough to run a car. Tesla is still trying to work through these issues.
But I'm sure you already know a traditional car battery is really just used to run some minor electronics and headlights.
Fusion for now is completely and utterly infeasible. Decades of attempting to make it work have not yielded practical results. Fusion occurs in stars as their principle source of power. But you can't very well create high pressures and temperatures in excess of a hundred million degrees on a whim. You need a huge reactor with magnets so powerful, that it creates a hot plasma that doesn't touch ANY surface since all metals readily melt around 4000 degrees. What we need is a method of cold fusion, or a method of fusion that doesn't require conditions that are literally as hot as the core of our sun. We have not found that in spite of tremendous market incentive to do that. The last I heard, one group was trying to do something akin to firing a "bullet of" tritium or deuterium into a large chamber and having 192 charged lasers simultaneously zap the radioisotope in mid-flight around the center of the chamber to trigger a fusion reaction.
All things considered, one of the best means of storing energy we have is petroleum. But finding alternatives to this is the point of this thread isnt it?
Almost all the energy you are using right now was generated microseconds ago. AC current cannot be stored, but comes from the generation of energy from the churning of a turbine somewhere out in the midwest or NY. In other words the current you get when you plug into your wall socket, AC current, is not stored energy. It was generated on the fly from the spinning of a turbine--probably from the flow of water. Wind power would likely be the same. We can store some of this energy by using that power to pumping water to a higher elevation. But we don't have any magic battery or cell that stores massive amounts of power, nor is our research and technology anywhere even close to such a thing.
This statement should indicate the reality to you:
Pumped storage is the largest-capacity form of grid energy storage available, and, as of March 2012, the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI) reports that PSH accounts for more than 99% of bulk storage capacity worldwide, representing around 127,000 MW
99% of all stored power on the grid is nothing more than displacing water to a higher physical location.
Fast forward 50 years from now, and I'd take a punt there'll still be oil drilling going on, that by todays standards would not be considered due to cost.
Gas and petrol are different things in my country, (so this whilst perfectly reasonable from your point of view) so this gave me the giggles.
Exactly.
I would be prepared to take a bet that a fusion power plant would be properly shielded.
We're talking about a controlled fusion reaction, in the same vein as a nuclear fission power plant > not a sun.
They'd never get govt. approval to even conduct the research unless they had all the boxes ticked with no potential risk to anyone (including researchers)
You may say that, but, I can recall (albeit vaguely) that gasoline cost only between $1 and $2 per gallon during my childhood, and, when the price first rose to $3 per gallon, everyone was shocked by that, but confident that such an increase was temporary, and that the prices would soon return to their previous levels. However, the price never did decrease, again, and now, the average price of gasoline in the Untied States seem to be $3.50 per gallon or around that amount; I have not seen gasoline below $3 per gallon in years.
What about solar power? In the past, solar panels were too expensive to be widely used, but they are becoming more affordable in recent years, which is leading to greater usage. I also wonder about the efficiency of solar panels, and if that shall improve; currently, the highest efficiency of solar panels is approximately twenty percent, meaning that solar panels convert only twenty percent at most of sunlight that strikes them into electricity and that the remaining eighty percent is not converted, which is a tremendous waste, in my mind. How long shall it take for solar panels to reach fifty percent (and possibly greater) efficiency, and, if that point is reached, will there be a major paradigm shift in how energy for society is generated?
“When the people fear the government, there is tyranny; when the government fears the people, there is liberty.”-Thomas Jefferson
“A vote is like a rifle; its usefulness depends upon the character of its user.”-Theodore Roosevelt
“Patriotism means to stand by one's country; it does not mean to stand by one's president.”-Theodore Roosevelt
Everything that isn't a solar panel has a 0% rate of converting the sunlight that strikes it into electricity. So to say 20% is a "tremendous waste" of sunlight is a little silly.
The problem with solar is the inefficiencies associated with producing them. The cost, energy, and resources required to build a solar panel are high, so it takes a long operation lifetime for the solar panel to "pay for itself" and justify the pollution and energy that went into making it. Obviously increasing the electrical generating efficiency would help here, but finding more efficient methods of panel production is the more promising avenue to making them economically viable.
Lockheed Martin makes progress with fusion energy.
Huzzah for human ingenuity.
candidus inperti; si nil, his utere mecum.