This is not necessarily a mistake. Cecil may have assumed that electric vehicles or vehicles using hydrogen, or some other energy storage medium, would be used in the future.
In the article about oil production, nuclear and solar power are suggested as substitutes for oil. However, they cannot be directly substituted. As a fuel, oil is mainly used for transportation. A small amount is used for electricity production, and oil accounts for 2-3 percent of electricity production in the U.S. Most of what is burned cannot be used in a vehicle and is a byproduct of distillation and fuel transportation.
Since there are no nuclear cars and no practical solar cars, to use solar or nuclear power for transportation, the cars must be battery powered or use hydrogen produced by solar or nuclear power. There are some battery and hydrogen powered cars currently, but it would be inaccurate to say that an existing or new solar or nuclear plant reduces oil dependence, until there are a significant number of them. Wind, hydroelectricity, geothermal, solid biomass and coal power plants have the same limitation, though coal and biomass can be converted into fuel usable in vehicles. Liquid and gaseous biofuels, such as methanol and methane, can be used in vehicles, though they are not without their own problems.
Sigh. You have heard of heating oil, havn’t you? Used to heat homes & businesses? And of course, Nuke & Solar can be used indirectly to power vehicles, as you pointed out.
I have heard of heating oil, but it is still a good point.
I did not consider heating oil because it and natural gas should continue to be used for direct heating until every fossil fuel power plant in a region has been change to renewable and/or nuclear. This is because the main reason for not using them is their emissions and a far smaller amount will need to be burned when using them to heat directly instead of converting the heat to electricity, transmitting the electricity to the user and converting the electricity back to heat (the last conversion is efficient, though). Using natural gas or heating oil for electricity production and using electrical heating is just crazy from a cost, efficiency and environmental point of view. Stopping all fossil fuel combustion in power plants is likely to be farther off in the future than a significant amount of vehicles using batteries, hydrogen or some other alternative fuel. Natural gas and heating oil would be better used as heating fuels than as fuel for existing and new power plants.
Which are made much more efficient if you can use an external source of energy to “pump” energy into the process. For example, one possible way of producing hydrocarbons from coal is the “direct hydrogenation” process. You start by using electricity to produce hydrogen from water and then more electricity to split the H2 molecules into atomic hydrogen, which will spontaneously and rapidly saturate any carbon-carbon bonds. The only drawback is that it takes oodles of electric power to do this, and it’s never been economically viable. But it would place a ceiling on how expensive liquid hydrocarbons can be, provided an abundant alternate source of energy is available.
It is hard to conceive of an effective fuel for air transportation other than a combustible hydrocarbon. Batteries are too heavy, Ships also need a more efficient fuel than hydrogen in terms of cost, though reactors would do the trick. What has been missing from fuel oil discussions in many forums is biodiesel or bio-oils. These can be obtained most efficiently from palm, that is, palm oil and probably most efficiently from algae. Algae during parts of their growth cycle have over 50 percent by weight oil that can be converted to diesel. Both palm and algae are far more efficient in principle than corn for alcohol. A promise is to reverse engineer algal enzyme systems and synthesize the system to convert sun photons to oil, What do the experts think?
Scientist report a record 3 billion degrees contained within an “oven” on this month of this year in history.
We’ve got combustion, lets just try and account for vehicular mishaps and drunk driving. 'Cuz we could have a chain re-action explosion that would perpetuate throughout the terrestrial contiguous 51 states, lol.
If you can generate extra renewable electric power you can create the Hydrogen/Ethanol fuel required to replace Petroleum Gasoline. It really is a fairly simple concept.
That is how Nuclear an d Solar would replace Petroleum.
The problem with simple concepts is how difficult they become in execution. Hydrogen is problematic as a distributed energy source for mobile power plants as explained in [post=7059234]this post[/post]. A direct switch over to free hydrogen as an energy source would be very costly; it would requrie a complete replacement of distribution facilities much more stringent handling requirements as well as selling new vehicles.
Alcohol is certainly an easier conversion, but fuel appropriate alcohols like ethanol and methanol have their own problems; they’re more corrosive than gasoline, they tend to be more hygoscopic than petrols, which means they can’t be stored indefinitely, their volitity goes way down with temperature, making them more difficult to use in cold environs, and they just don’t provide as much energy per bulk, which means you have to carry more fuel. You can develop a higher compression with alcohols, which can offset the lack of power per cycle you obtain, but at a cost of running your engine faster and using more fuel, which reduces range. Also, producing sufficient alcohols for fuel would require devoting substantially more grain production to fuel supply; to put the entire US, much less the world, on an alcohol-based would need to take into account that impact, or otherwise develop some method of mass synthesis of alcohols.
I’m not saying that they are not viable alternatives should petroleum supplies be exhausted, but neither is a simple and painless swapout for current transportation needs. There is a reason that petrol and diesel have become the predominant fuel for mobile powerplants, and that is because, from a functional standpoint, they are superior to the alternatives.
You are absolutely correct of course, but I did say “Simple Concept”, not simple to execute. The problem of building the needed Nuclear and Solar infrastructure to create these alternate fuels is larger than the problem of switching to these fuels.
I think it’s the opposite, actually. We’re so used to the existing fuel and power distribution infrastructure that we don’t realize how elaborate, extensive, and (frankly) kludged together it all is. Notice the blackouts back in 2003; we’ve become so accustomed to being able to flip on a switch, or stop in at the 66 and fill up the gas tank that we don’t really appreciate what all goes on to make that happen, and when it doesn’t happen its an enormous shock to us. Contrast this to, say, Eastern Europe or South America, where outside of major urban centers there has been no infrastructure to deliver electricity and limited access for fuel. They don’t have extensive road networks, phone and power lines, et cetera, and as a result, bringing the benefits of civilization (modern medicine, agriculture, education) to those areas is costly and difficult. That we are able to do so in this country is a result of Roosevelt’s New Deal and the TLA-agencies like the Tennessee Valley Authority which brought electrification to the rural South on the public voucher.
Replacing the existing infrastructure with an entirely new fuel (hydrogen, methanol, et cetera) would be very costly, far more so than we can justify fiscally right now. But it is a cost we’ll have to bear eventually, and we’d best start developing the technology; with any luck we’ll develop some kind of technology (high density power cells, inexpensive petroleum synthesis, “tabletop” fusion sources) which can provide the energy to replace or obsolete out fossil fuels. But we’re not there yet, by a long shot.
Very interesting article here on bio-fuels. Great idea in theory but when real-world economics and politics become involved the whole thing can backfire disasterously.
