Unlimited clean cheap fuel

In My Humble Opinion
1

Reading this morning about soome kind of silicon oil derived from sand. If it did actually turn out to be as cheap and clean as they are saying it will be how could this change the earth?

The first things than come to mind for me include food production methods, the pumping of water over long distances and general transport issues. We could set up communities virtualy anywhere on the globe. Locations for large manufactures would not be all that important. It seems like it would effectively make the earth a lot smaller place.

Is the silicon oil thing for real??
2

Are you thinking of silcone oil?

It’s not flammable, although it makes a great lubricant.

3

Do you have a link to the story you’re referring to? Because offhand, I can’t see how you could derive energy from sand.

4

I don’t think so, here is a link: Turning Sand into fuel - Silicon oil as an energy carrier - Sepp Hasslberger

5

That is one of the articles I read. Another was a long winded advertisement looking to sell investment opportunities.

It just boggles the mind how dramaticaly earth would change if the concept of efficiency and non polluting was no longer relevant.

6

According to the article, it’s proposed as an energy carrier, not an energy source.

7

How convenient for the people flogging the investment opportunity that their cites are a Flash-based site in German, a PDF image of an article also in German and a book in German. In other words, cites that an English-only speaker can’t use Google Translate to read.

8

The long winded advertisement I was looking at is part of the AOL news stories that they rotate every few seconds, news mixed with adds trying to give the impression it is all news.
Sounds like it was just to good to be true.

9

Sounds like using silanes as fuel. That seems workable except for the parts about being unlimited, clean, and cheap. Also a little problem might be that silanes ignite in contact with air.

10

Bolding mine.

IMO there’s not much more you need to know to evaluate a clickbait teaser on a garbage website. That’s the one place on Earth I would expect *not *to have real news of real breakthroughs.

11

There is a “Deadly, Global War For Sand” going on (because it is the main ingredient in cement) so I would not be too quick to say that anything derived from sand would be cheap or easy to come by. Unless it’s mostly the sort of sand that is not needed for cement, and the mining of it would not cause villages and towns to wash away.