Alternatives to fossil fuels (science discussion)

[Schmear]

We're smart folks. How 'bout we figure something out? How do we wean ourselves off of oil/coal/etc.? Let the revolution begin here. Discuss.

[Lane Meyer]

My favorite alternative:
http://www.aerofast.com/bike_cruiser/BLUE_M~1.jpg

Seriously, the best thing I've heard anytime lately is
Biodiesel
edit - and, uhh, I'm not that smrt.

[Schmear]

I agree with you on the bike, but it's not practical for most people. Think of the masses, 'cause they're the ones who'll change last. How do we do it? Fuel, infrastructure, etc.

[Lane Meyer]

Yeah, I guess my thoughts are always skewed to small-town life, since I grew up on an island and live in a small-ish ski town...

I have this discussion often with people who are much smarter than myself, and we almost always come to the same conclusion, which is that the problem lies at a deeper level than our transportation choices. The true problem, I think stems from the lazyness of the masses. Look at our food choices for example - fat people who know they are fat but don't care and keep eating the same shit (I'm pointing at you, Mr. Big Mac) and keep getting plumper need a real shot of conviction in the arm to make changes in their lifestyle. And until the masses stop being lazy, we're FUCKED.

What we really need, I hate to admit it, is some sort of geological or dare I say manmade catastrophy to awaken people to how very deep our reliance on fossil fuels is. Fuck, crude hit $53 a barrel today? But most people I know (inlcuding myself) aren't running screaming to sell our cars because we can't afford gas anymore, we keep driving. If a comet crashed into the earth and disrupted our ability to watch TV, post on this board, or drive/fly, THEN people would make different choices because they would HAVE NO CHOICE.

The above rant is slightly off your original topic, I know. So I think that you have to entice people to WANT to make changes in their reliance on fossil fuels. If the government's fuel policy wasn't controlled by Detroit and Texas lobbyists, perhas we could develop some dort of incentive or voucher program with some real teeth in it to steer some R&D moeny into alternative fuel research or petroleum dependent car buy-back/trade-in programs or something...

[dubu]

We cant. It is all about energy, when you use oil/coal/gas etc you are converting the energy stored in these materials for some other purpose.

you can think of oil/coal/gas as the earths battery, it has been charged over millions of years of sunlight + gravity + pressure. Now we are draining this battery. We are essentially like a car with a crappy and expensive to run alternator, we use more energy than we can produce thus we drain the battery and eventually ending in the car dieing.

our goal should be to create new ways of generating energy that are 1. much cheaper than oil/coal/gas etc, 2. is cleaner than oil etc. (One hope is fusion power)

once we have cheap and plentiful energy sources, the rest is easy as most oil based products can be synthesized and we can use hydrogen gas a clean fuel source. Until then we are going to depend on oil.

[TomK]

Fossil fuels have the highest energy density in a safe to handle form that we know of. Everything else involves tradeoffs of energy, weight, volume, or safety. That's why gasoline/diesel power won out over steam and electricty in the early days and why alternatives are still "alternative".

When electrical storage tech (Battieries/fuel cells/flywheel kinetic/etc) can meet the energy density & recharge capacity/speed of a tank of gas is when all electric transportation can become common.

[splat]

We're smart folks. How 'bout we figure something out? How do we wean ourselves off of oil/coal/etc.? Let the revolution begin here. Discuss.

Maggot wax.

[LegoSkier]

Actually, I think we should work on getting the most from the oil, coal, gas we do have. The fact is that we use this set of molecules to power stuff because they do contain a huge amount of chemical energy. Our problem lies in the way we use these things. To extract the chemical energy in them we use thermochemical reactions to produce high temperature rapid gas expansion to drive shafts to turn wheels or generators. This is inherently inefficent (Free energy G = enthalpy H - Temp T * Entropy S) so by the equation the higher the Temp the less energy you can get. Peroid. And this dosen't even take into account losses due to mechanical inefficencies in the system. We should be working on ways to extract this energy in more efficent low temperature electrochemical reactions that don't produce poisonous gas as a result (redox/acid-base/etc). Heck, look at the way everything else alive on this planet uses energy. Every living thing uses basically the same hydrocarbons to fuel themselves. Nature just does it in a nice, efficent, molecularly precise way that leaves little waste and is self cycling. Do what nature does. The right thing to do has been provided to us and has alway been there, we just need to figure out how to harness this power (which we are working on).

Edit:
Some light reading for those more interested:
http://www.jnanobiotechnology.com/home/
http://www.nbtc.cornell.edu/
http://www.venterinstitute.org/research/
http://www.foresight.org/impact/GillettWhitePaper.txt
http://www.ruf.rice.edu/~cben/

[Superstar Punani]

Nikola Tesla's "Black Box"
http://www.frank.germano.com/blackbox.htm

[PacRimRider1]

Transportation accounts for only about a 1/3 of our fuel consumtion in america, so even if we all started riding bikes around (and how the hell is that gunna get me to the lift?) we would still consume more fuels than any other nation. A funny thing to think about is that fact that no of us would have any food were it not for diesel powered farm equipment. Oil is the most abundant form of concentrated energy on the planet, and should not be considered outdated by any means; the world is going to be dealing with it long after were all gone.

Thats not to say gasoline is the most non polluting form of oil, biodiesel (as someone mentioned) is looking good, and Im sure theres more to come. Personally, I love oil. It keeps me fed, warm, dry and able to get to the hill. That being said, I've heard the technology in nuclear power has come a long way since the power plants of the 80's, and have reduced nuclear waste by 3x or so. So lets not be grumpy about that either.

[splat]

Nikola Tesla's "Black Box"
http://www.frank.germano.com/blackbox.htm

Funny you should mention that, Pu. There's some guys here in Reno that say they've found a way to build something of a near-perpetual motion machine based in Tesla's work. Supposedly CAT has bought into it.

[TomK]

...That being said, I've heard the technology in nuclear power has come a long way since the power plants of the 80's, and have reduced nuclear waste by 3x or so. So lets not be grumpy about that either.

For fixed station power generation, Pebble bed reactor tech is looking mightily attractive. Walk-Away safety inherent to the system is a pretty cool feature.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pebble_bed_reactor

[Plakespear]

[paranoid conspiracy theroist]In the words of the doctors who fixed Steve Austin- we have the technology. However, I have heard that some of the patents on the best alt. energy technology are owned by big oil so they can bury them.[/paranoid conspiracy theroist]

Laziness is factor #1. I don't think we can eliminate use of fossil fuels in the near future. But it wouldn't be that hard to drastically reduce consumption. But we live in a culture of "bigger is better". Imagine if every other SUV you saw was replaced with a Jetta Diesel. Think about how many gallons of gas that would save. Or if people only drove their cars for trips longer than five miles. I myself started using my bike now when I became embarassed to drive a mile to go to the store.

And Schmear- I disagree. I think bikes are VERY practical for most people. But our culture views them as toys, not transportation. However, check out Holland or Denmark- bikes are an important source of transportation there.

[13]

To me, the answer lies in harnessing the power of gravity and/or sunlight. Both are pure, "limitless" sources of energy that to my knowledge, cannot be consumed faster than it is produced (like oil).

What if we had satellites in space that harnessed solar energy and focus it (like a ginormous magnifying glasses) onto power stations located across the globe?

What if we can somehow utilize superconductors and superfluids?

[Mcwop]

The best and quickest thing we could do is eliminate coal generated electricity in the next 5-10 years. Replace with wind (sorry to ruin your view Teddy Kennedy), nuclear, and Fuel Cells. Fuel Cells are already in use by many businesses and government facilities. Fuel cells are not ready for cars yet, but are for buildings and homes.

Read about the 1st National Bank of Omaha and their fuel cells in use.

[Blurred]

Sweet! Today us internet nerds will solve the energy problems, tomorrow we'll find the answer to world peace! I love this place!

[Schmear]

I think bikes are VERY practical for most people.

I don't, not in this country. Most American cities, and particularly the suburbs where millions live, were built around the automobile and the premise that you can get anywhere in ten minutes ... going 35-50 MPH. Cities in Holland were built, presumably, for foot traffic or horse and buggy--certainly closer to bike speed.

Plus it's tough to carry two kids and four bags of groceries on your bike. That's the practicality of the masses I was talking about.

[summit]

Advanced nuclear designs (pebble bed) combined with advanced breeder reactors and fuel reprocessing is the best, most reliable, cheapest way to go until we make fusion viable (and get 3He mining operations up on the moon if we want truly clean ICF or MCF fusion, or if we can get muon-electron replacement induced fusion in D/T lithium hydroxide). Unfortunately, due to irrational fearmongers like greenpeace preying on the ignorant public to perpetuate terror and the NIMBY attitude about nuclear power, this won't go all this way. There will be more nuclear plants however.

This is a great way to gain energy independence for our country (then we won't have to kiss Saudi and Venezualen ass).

ZEM coal technology doens't appear to have gone anywhere which is too bad. We really need to get China off of its soft dirty coal plants and at least using anthrocite with scrubbers (paging Shera).

Natural gas is the best organic fossile fuel method right now.

Wind power holds promise However, the generators are unsightly, require large tracts of land, and do not produce at long range predictable cycles and only produce part of the time. Very large wind production fields will alter the local climate.

Solar is expensive, dirty to produce cells, and also weather dependent.

Traditional hydro disrupts the local ecosystem as does geothermal (which is quite dirty in development).

Tidal based hydropower looks promising if we are willing to accept the ecological effects on the bay that is blocked off. Longterm effects are unknown.

Cars need to go to electric and/or fuel cell. Gas-Electric hybrids and low emission Diesel should be persued in the meanwhile.

There are other ideas such as orbiting solar or microwave generators that beam power through various reflector/repeators to a receiving station on earth... I always wondered about efficiency and what would happen if that power beam got knocked off targed by a degree or two...

[This End Up]

[Monty Python Voice] Huge tracts of land, [Monty Python Voice]

Sorry, it needed to be done in this science related thread.

[glademaster]

I think powering vehicles with Ethanol and/or other varieties of alcohol based fuels in a very feasible idea. They burn very clean, are essentially limitless in supply and most engines require only minor conversions to run on the stuff. it wouldn't even take the kind of R&D that hydrogen fuel cells and such do. If we can run race cars on it, we can run passenger cars. Not only would we become independent of Middle East oil, but we could use supplies almost exclusively from the United States since it can be distilled from corn and other grain products. That just seems to make the most sense to me.

[bad_roo]

How about charging you guys what we pay for gas ($8 per gallon) thus getting you all into more fuel efficient vehicles and in the process raising an enormous amount of money that puts an end to world hunger.

If only things were that simple.

[DJSapp]

Wind power holds promise However, the generators are unsightly, require large tracts of land, and do not produce at long range predictable cycles and only produce part of the time. Very large wind production fields will alter the local climate.

There are other ideas such as orbiting solar or microwave generators that beam power through various reflector/repeators to a receiving station on earth... I always wondered about efficiency and what would happen if that power beam got knocked off targed by a degree or two...

Wow, I mostly agree with summit. Scary. Except that wind power is the cheapest most reliable "green" alternative at this time. Currently, it is feasible for New Zealand to meet 35% of their energy supply from wind power at an increase of $0.02 NZD per kWh. Wind power in the right location is actually very reliable compaired to hydro and solar. In the right location wind energy can generate predictable levels of power ~80% of the time.

As for orbiting solar & microwave generators, didn't you learn anything from simcity 2000? If the beam gets knocked off target, all the surrounding buildings go boom [/nerd]

Lane and Pacrimrider: Biodiesel is fucking terrible. Look at the whole supply chain. From all of the pollution, chemicals and guberment subsidies required to grow corn, the incredable inefficient distilling process, and the tailpipe emissions not really being much better than gas, we're just making things worse.

[Lane Meyer]

Lane and Pacrimrider: Biodiesel is fucking terrible. Look at the whole supply chain. From all of the pollution, chemicals and guberment subsidies required to grow corn, the incredable inefficient distilling process, and the tailpipe emissions not really being much better than gas, we're just making things worse.

Really? Maybe I've been suckered by their propapganda machine - can you point us to any literature to support your claims? I really don't know shit about it, if fact (not that I owuldever do this) I probably know more about where to go in AK/ANWR to find oil....

[swiss powda]

water:

more energy in a gallon of water than a gallon of gasoline. Just don't know how to extract it with any sort of efficiency.

cold fusion:

not just science fiction anymore, but nobody's paying attention except for the Navy.

fission:

would be totally sweet.

edit: but in the mean time, let's stop being ignorant eco-pussies and build more nuclear reactors

[Tippster]

...cold fusion:

not just science fiction anymore, but nobody's paying attention except for the Navy.

fission:

would be totally sweet.

edit: but in the mean time, let's stop being ignorant eco-pussies and build more nuclear reactors

Fission: Is here. That's the process that runs your neighborhood new-kular reactor. It's also what makes big bombs go boom.

Cold Fusion is still hypothetical.

"Hot" Fusion (Hydrogen filled glass spheres heated by lasers) is only being sustained for about a few milli-seconds, right now, but that's a huge increase since they started working on it decades ago. They'll get there.

Disclaimer: My Dad's a plasma physicist for the Dept. of Energy. They're doing their darndest - really they are.