Actually, I think he’s referring to the fuel reformer used in conjunction with a fuel cell. The reformer pulls hydrogen out of any hydrocarbon fuel, from gasoline to methanol to ethanol (I think ethanol is one of them).
Dean Kamen + Stirling engine = abundant and cheap energy, at some point in the near future.
One thing we haven’t covered here is the possible environmental effects of limitless energy. Even if our “Mr. Fusion” is dead clean it will still emit one kind of pollution - thermal pollution.
As the device becomes more popular there would be no need to design things for efficiency because, hey, why be efficient when you have a limitless supply of energy? A whole lot of energy would be lost as heat in areas where these devices are used. It wouldn’t be much of a problem at first, but a limitless source of energy could produce a nearly limitless use of this new energy on a global scale. Even with moderate efficiency, limitless energy use means limitless thermal loss. The massive amount of waste heat would have to go somewhere.
A new technology may need to be developed to radiate some of the waste heat out into space in order to avoid massive global warming. It’s even possible we would want to build giant space based canopies to block some of the sun’s fusion produced radiation because we have just too damn much of our own fusion energy from our kitchen appliances.
You’re on to something there. The nice thing about a Stirling engine, though, is that it runs off of any heat source. Some of that waste heat could be directed back to the engine, and if it was running off solar heat in the first place, there wouldn’t be too much waste heat.
Actually, it needs a heat difference to run off of, not just a heat source. You need a hot side and a cold side. If everything’s hot, you can’t generate any electricity.
sturmhauke, AndrewL, as promising as stirling engines may be, we need to remember that the engine isn’t the source of the energy. It’s promise lies in increased efficiency - not energy production itself. dalovindj gave an unspecified “unlimited energy source”. This could be fusion, a singularity, so called “vaccum energy”, or whatever…but not a better engine.
My point was that if this source is unlimited, people would find more and more uses for massive loads of power. Future technology would capitalize on this energy glut and even single family homes would draw as much power as small towns do now. (how many amps does an anti-gravity skateboard draw anyway? What about junior’s home particle accelerator set? and the fully interactive 3-D holographic home entertainment center?) Since efficiency isn’t a consideration either, this massive power use would create massive heat - homes would just use even more energy to pipe it away and to cool the living areas. There’s no reason to tap the heat for use because we already have an unlimited supply of energy the size of a cofee maker. Why get water from a well when you have indoor plumbing?
In 2150, with the worlds population at say, 50 billion, we might have a thermal problem if everyone of those 50 billion used that much power - and generated that much waste heat.
It’s possible to build a Stirling engine that needs only a small temperature differential. Theoretically, you could put the hot side out in the sun, and the cold side underground or in an insulated shed or something. You could attach an electrical generator to the Stirling engine. The unlimited energy source in this case is the sun (I know it’s not always available). This set up is not going to generate any more heat energy than originally went into the Stirling engine. Maybe eventually power demand would outstrip the capacity of a bunch of Stirling engines, but it would at least alleviate the problem.
bbeaty wrote:
That’s not the only, nor the largest problem.
The “use old frying oil as a motor fuel” idea is working now because it’s only in use in a very few test vehicles. Right now, fast food restaurants have no use for their waste frying oil and would otherwise throw it out. But,
If frying-oil engines catch on, to the extent that gasoline or diesel-fuel powered engines have caught on today, you will be faced with a very big problem: the supply of available deep-fry oil is far smaller than the supply of available petroleum! Until all the oil wells in the world start running dry, petroleum distillates will always be cheaper than animal or vegetable oils, simply because there’s so much more of it around.
Beeblebrox wrote, re Thermal Pollution:
Or we could just pack up and move to Pluto.
I think what you’re forgetting here is that we have a huge electrical power grid, so electricity generated in one place can be transported (with some losses, admittedly) to other places. In particular, as long as wind isn’t making up a huge fraction of the electrical power generation this variability isn’t such an issue and if the windmills are in several different geographic locations then the variability is reduced anyway.
Similarly with solar, people are often arguing that it is only good when the sun shines, but the latest concept is this reverse-metering where a home can have photovoltaic cells and use them to feed the power grid at some times and then can draw from the power grid at other times. The great thing about this is that one of the times when the cells would tend to be feeding the power grid the most is precisely during sunny hot weather when electrical power is needed the most because of everybody running their air conditioners!
Of course, if we ever get to the point where these are supplying the majority of our power, then the variabilities may become more of an issue. However, that day is still far enough off that the argument is really still mute at this point.
Yes, but it would probably contract a lot. I once was able to find a nice breakdown on the American Petroleum Institute website showing the breakdown of how a barrel of oil gets used. I can’t find it anymore on their new website, but as I recall, the vast majority of oil goes for energy use. Making plastics, for example, accounts for a surprisingly miniscule percentage.
Well, I did manage to find the thread where we had the previous discussion about what a barrel of oil goes into producing, and here is what I said at the time, based on the API info that used to be easy to find on their website (urgh!):