Way out of the US fuel chrises?

Great Debates
1

Happy day. I figured out the solution to this mess! Both my own troubles and a broader national strategy.

First my own troubles. I worked out a deal with someone to barter my car for a motor bike that gets 60 to 80 mpg, and can do 70+ mph in a few weeks. I could take a trip all the way up Michigan state and back for for under $40 on that thing easy. Not that I’d want to. Someone let me know about the roads up there.
Now the national strategy. It’s broken down into parts. That way it could survive oil and auto lobbiest attempts water it down and keep us reliant on their petrol crack, and still do some good. Mopeds can be gotten for around $1,000, don’t require much red tape, and get super mileage. With the trade off of being a bit drafty in the winter.

The federal government gives vouchers for low income people, and tax credits for high income people to purchases a moped. Then makes next year’s economic stimulus package dependent on driving 75% of your yearly commute distance to work on your moped. This cuts gas usage and brings down the price of gas for people who have to drive a car for whatever reason, and frees up alot of money for the mopeders to spend on other parts of the economy. The parts that don’t automatically get shipped off to Saudi Arabia for example.

Then with congress implements strict high mpg requirements for autos down the road, per vehicular class (SUVs get upped to 40 mpg, passenger cars, 60 mpg ect.) This is possible with rechargeable hi-bred technology. People have gotten Honda Prieses over 100 mpg. If you use it for short trips you won’t need any gas, just plug into your electric. Giving big auto a reasonable time to do this, of course. Also make flex fuel a requirement for the combustion engine portion of the hi-bred. As many fuels as reasonable should be required. The more options we have the less screwed we’ll be in the future.

Meanwhile congress implements a synthetic fuel program. The techonlogy exists now. There was actually a production plant in New Zealand (second cite) that produces gasoline from methanol. It’s proven technology. The beauty of it is the process works on any hydrocarbon from to coal, to orange peels, sewage, biomass, or whatever.

This country is one of the most productive producers of biomass in the world, as the stereotypical American butt testifies.

How it works.

First the biomass is converted to syngas via Gasification. Syngas can be converted to Methanol which can be converted to Gasoline.

Basically we can run our cars on, sewage, scrap wood, food waste, dry grass, coal (although that one is an environmental no no, and will run out anyway so why depend on it?), ect. Once we have high economical cars that run entirely of domestic energy sources we can shift back to driving places in our stylin autos.

Then just to make sure OPEC don’t grab us by the nads again we embargo all their energy imports. That’ll teach em.

Thoughts? Would this work? Are there any major pitfalls with gasification? I understand there’s situations where mopeds or motor bikes/cycles would not work, but this should help the problem alot.

Any criticism is welcome if it helps me refine problems out of it. I’d like to send a workable proposal to both my Congress critters, and the local papers. Maybe make a few waves.

2

Hi and welcome to the board TTR!

Here are some of the questions I would want answered before I considered your proposal.

How many people would be able to drive a moped vs a car? (Disabled, elderly, etc.)

How safe are modern mopeds compared to modern cars?

How much would the entire process [Harvest, transport, hydrocarbon->syn gas, syn gas->ethanol, ethanol-> gasoline] cost in labor (transporting garbage or growing/harvesting it) and how much in raw materials?

How much gas or electricity would be required to transport enough orange peels to produce one gallon of syngas?

How much energy does the conversion process require?

How much fuel can be produced in a day by a converting facility?

How much would such a facility cost to build, maintain and operate?

How many would be needed to achieve energy independance? A million? A hundred thousand?

Also, OPEC countries are paid in dollars. Their interest lies with a rich America and a strong dollar. Inflation hurts them too. I don’t see how punishing them with an embargo helps.

3

Thanks Gozu!

Good thinking points! I’ll take some time to research them. Thanks. To answer this one though.

Lol, that was more personal annoyance slipping through. The main point of the embargo is for our own protection. Simply put if we’re stuck using our own energy sources the only person that can hurt us there, is us. By the time it’d be implemented we’d have cut off most of our energy imports anyway, substituting our own synthetic gasoline, or other fuel. They’d have to find new markets anyway. India and China wouldn’t mind picking up the slack I’d wager.

Let them be in the vice for awhile.

We could still import oil for plastics production if domestic oil wasn’t sufficient.

4

I can just see soccer moms picking off 3-5 mopeds each day on their commute in their urban assault vehicles.

5

If they’re not stuck on the side of the road from lack of gas that is;)

You do raise some safety issues. Maybe mopeds and light economy vehicles should be given access to the car pool lane. They’re doing the same thing car pooling does, save gas.

And SUVs should be banned from it.

6

But mopeds aren’t allowed on freeways, so that rules out letting them in the carpool lane. And banning SUVs from it would be counterproductive.

7

True I guess, I’m learning all I can about this stuff. It’s a whole new world including the exact terminologies, but the benefits of high economy transportation is pretty evident. I wonder how much mass produced motorcycle level scooters would cost for this? If there was a nation wide production run I bet economies of scale would cut the price down. Combined with safety courses.

At anyrate with all those increased two wheel vehicles, it’d be alot safer to keep larger transportation isolated to different lanes.

To answer

[QUOTE=Gozu]
How safe are modern mopeds compared to modern cars?
Not very in the winter, I’m learning in the other thread.

Hmm time to look at other high economy cheap transportation.

8

Make that impossible in the winter in many places. Please. Might work fine in southern California, not so much in much of the rest of the country. The day this 60+ y.o. lady goes mopedding in the freezing slush that is a New Jersey winter will be a long time coming, as in never. Besides which, it would be pretty dangerous, all those unprotected commuters slip sliding around on the roads. It’s bad enough with crash-tested autos with protected passenger compartments.

9

No one is talking about taking your right to drive a car away. I’m just looking to find a solution to help as many people as possible deal with the gas prices. I’d wager if New Jersey is anything like the rest of the east cost you have options for public transit. Not so much in the midwest, and most of the rest of the country.

If I can’t afford the $4+ per gallon gas I have to walk. There’s buses 20 miles north in Kalamazoo, nothing much in my county. Alot of people are in real difficult situations. The gas prices, combined with high unemployment have put alot of people in really bad places.

Scooters or something to take the sting out of fuel prices could help.

Btw your objection was noted further down in the thread already.

10

Understood, but what you’re suggesting is just impractical for most people.

New Jersey *is * a lot like the rest of the east coast, and I have zero options for public transit, and I think I’m fairly typical of most workers. I have a 9-mile drive to work and there is absolutely no way I could get there without a car. I used to have a 30-mile drive, and there was no public transportation to that workplace, either. If I had wanted to get to a major metropolis like NY, Trenton or Philly, I could take a train or, in dire circumstances a bus. But in order to do so, I’d have to have a car to get me to the train or bus station, and a place to park, or a person to drive me there and back.

In fact, most places on the east coast that I’ve been, it would be equally difficult to get to work and back without a car, unless you are already located within the same town that you work.

11

I’ve been wondering for a few years now why no one has popularized a single-passenger car (there’s the Corbin Sparrow but it’s $45,000 and you’d risk getting your ass kicked everytime you get in and out of it.) I look around while I’m out and most people by far are alone in their vehicles. Even the giant Nimitz-class SUVs. The funny thing is, if people actually used all 14 (or however many) seats in those land yachts, they’d be far more economical than a Prius, or even a motorcycle. How and why did the standard that we have to drive around in huge empty vehicles come about?

12

Perhaps investing more in public and mass transportation would be helpful for the immediate crisis, until we see where things are going and we can formulate a long-term plan. Bring back the red cars. Refurbish old vehicles instead of throwing them away and building new ones.

13

I think the main reason is that while much of the time an individual is alone in his/her car, one wants the ability to transport more than one or two from time to time.

I agree, though, that many humongous vehicles are used inappropriately. By that I mean that it makes sense to have a big many-passenger van if you’re planning to regularly have to transport the soccer team. It used to really bug me to see the number of 9-passenger vehicles parked in my employer’s parking garages that I just knew were used mostly to transport one individual for 10, 20 or more miles when a small and economical one would do just as well.

14

So have a regular car for those situations, and an SPV (single-passenger vehicle) for commuting. Most families can afford 2 cars these days anyway, and ideally they would cost a lot less.

15

The solution is simple. drill every hole that can be drilled in the short term and use the money generated in this country to fund bio-fuel research.

Bio-algae is currently 50 times more productive per acre than soybeans and estimates have put that at 100 times or better with improved technology.

We already have the diesel technology and bio-diesel doesn’t have the sulfur content of crude oil based diesel. It’s a win win situation.

16

Nuclear power and plug-in hybrid cars.

17

I agree. The U.S needs to go nuclear big time. and shift from gasoline tanks to electric batteries. Hybrids are ok until battery storage density and charging time improve.

In the end, we need to use electric cars. They are too silent and clean not to be used. It’s very nice to have silent and clean vehicles. Biofuels are neither. If a car has an exhaust pipe, I don’t want anything except water and oxygen coming out of it.

Perhaps that will be the world our great grandchildren live in.

18

I’d hold out for one with better acceleration. :wink: Welcome to SDMB.

19

Theoretically, there is not enough energy content in municipal waste to provide the energy needed to cover gasoline consumption in the US. The latest numbers I’ve seen are about 360 million tons of municipal solid waste per year in the U.S., at about 4,500 Btu/lb. That calculates out to be equivalent to about 72 million gallons of gasoline per day, compared to current consumption of about 380 million gallons per day.

However, it takes energy to collect the waste and convert it into useful fuel, so it’s not a 1:1 ratio. But that ignores the fact that the energy embedded in the waste is greater (sometimes significantly greater) than the energy you can get out of it. By “embedded”, I mean that it has taken a lot of energy to make the product that you use and get it to the store, and that energy is not included in the direct energy content of the waste. Over the full life cycle of the stuff we use and toss, it’s more likely that we are less than 5% efficient when we compare the total energy in the waste to what we would be able to squeeze into a fuel.

Sewage is even worse as a fuel feedstock. There’s really not that much of it, and it’s got relatively low energy content. Plus, it has to be dried before it can be used as a feedstock for gasification or other conversion to fuel.

The Department of Agriculture has estimated that the U.S. could harvest as much as a billion tons of biomass each year for energy production, without impacting agricultural output for food and fiber. Even if that were possible, and even ignoring the conversion issue, that still doesn’t get us enough energy to cover current gasoline consumption levels. With biomass, municipal waste, and sewage, you get about 270 million gallons of gasoline per day, if you could convert it without any further use or loss of energy. That still leaves 100 million gallons per day that need to be made up by reduced driving or increased efficiency.

Even at perfect conversion efficiency, we would need to increase our average mpg by over 28% to make it possible to be petroleum free, and in reality, the amount would need to be much higher to account for the losses and the increased energy needed to grow and collect all this stuff.

The problem with most of the “easy” fixes that people identify is that they can work very well on a small scale, but expanding them to national or global scales has tremendous impacts.

20

I’m sorry but I vehemently disagree. The allowance of a select few hybrid vehicles to use the carpool lane in California is just wrong. First off, it rewards those who could afford a new Prius, thus helping the more affluent and penalizing the poor. If I lived in L.A., I would’ve bought a Prius immediately, just to get the car pool lane sticker. Plus, people dnving Priuses drive significantly slower than others, clogging the carpool lane and causing road rage. I think the most important reason for carpool lanes is to reduce traffic congestion and encourage carpooling. Single drivers do nothing to improve congestion.

The idea to incentivize the purchase of hybrid vehicles proved to be ridiculous. They sold like hotcakes in Southern California. Every other car in Santa Barbara is a Prius. We don’t even have carpool lanes here.