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I watched the 60 minutes segment, I even found a 10 minute or so clip. Another incremental advance, but it requires FUEL, the business that Houston is in and always will be. All of these technologies help. I'm not trying to take away from the efforts by dedicated and talented people. But we can't just run the planet on sewer gas. The pipe dream killer ap that people have been talking about for 40 years just has not arrived and never will. The best we can hope for is increased energy efficiencies in the generation and consumption cycles, plus the help of the niche technologies coming into the marketplace, like these fuel cells. I have some knowledge of the energy sectors with an MSEE degree, and been around long enough to have sobered up a little from all of the pie-in-sky thinking that even I used to engage in during the first 20 years of my career. Even the hoopla around hybrid vehicles seems now to be overblown, and this is one area in which I had high hopes too. Electric vehicles? I just drove roundtrip to Colorado for less than $175 in fuel, now how could an electric vehicle have managed this in anyone's imagination?
Yep ~ reality is somtimes not so entertaining as ideology
It needs fuel, but not necessarily FOSSIL FUELS. I keep on saying that the technology keeps on getting better. You state you have an MSEE degree, okay, then you should be no stranger to how fast technology is advancing. Remember, a lot of these technologies (alternative energy, nanotechnology, and the like) are still very much in development. I'm telling you we going to see some great changes in the next 20 years.
Last edited by Alphalogica; 03-03-2010 at 07:55 PM..
What?? Oil doesn't come from the core. Oil and other fossil fuels are made from biomass which lived and died on the surface, then was buried by sediment. It is indeed "dinosaur fat and compost", not some inorgic product of the core.
Think again. Russian scientists have, for the last 60 years, maintained that most hydrocarbons that we extract are formed in the deep mantle under immense pressure and high temperature.
Now, finally western scientists agree that at least some of the hydrocarbons we use come into existence this way. I have been reading about this for years. It blew me away when I became aware of it. But what really blew me away was when I began reading scientific extracts about how CO2 is recycled back into the mantle via undersea vents, to be converted back into hydrocarbons. If all this is really happening, and I think more likely the more I think about it, it means that the energy powering our civilization comes from the nuclear decay in the earth's core, which is the source of the heat required to convert CO2 into hydrocarbons. You can find all sorts of reports on this stuff on the internet. Here is a brief one:
This all fits in with the book "Privledged Planet" which I have never read, but intend to. It was written by astronomer Gulliermo Gonzales, and in the book he maintains that the earth (and universe) were designed to support advanced, scientific, industrialized civilizations, in addition to other types of civilizations. The book website:
Another feature of the earth is that the molten core has at least 2 more functions for life and civilization: 1. Iron in the core is subject to convection currents which generate the geomagnetic field, now know to be ESSENTIAL for life to exist because it deflects most of the solar wind which would mostly destroy life, or more correctly, prevented life from arising in the first place. 2. The molten core supports the tectonic plates which are breached by volcanic eruptions and collisions pushing up mountain ranges. Without this action, the continents would have washed into the seabeds a couple billion years back. I think Guillermo discusses all of this stuff in the book.
It may be that someday hydrocarbons will be seen as "clean energy", if CO2 is being recycled.
One thing I do know. There are old reservoirs in Texas that are gradually refilling after having been depleted.
Last edited by groovamos; 03-03-2010 at 11:20 PM..
One thing I do know. There are old reservoirs in Texas that are gradually refilling after having been depleted.
Sources? Preferably something credible? (i.e. from a major oil & gas/drilling services company)
I, my dad (who is in drilling systems development at Halliburton), or anyone else I know in Houston's energy industry -- doesn't know of anyone in Houston who would consider "SpaceDaily" a trusted, respected resource in regards to the state of the oil and gas industry.
Can you explain to me why oil and gas are referred to as "fossil fuels" if this is the case?
Quote:
Originally Posted by groovamos
You can find all sorts of reports on this stuff on the internet.
And, you can find "birthers" and Holocaust deniers on the Internet as well. The fact it's on the Internet doesn't mean its true. You can find anybody saying anything on the Internet, the issue is whether or not its credible. Matthew Simmons is credible. 60 Minutes is credible.
It needs fuel, but not necessarily FOSSIL FUELS. I keep on saying that the technology keeps on getting better. You state you have an MSEE degree, okay, then you should be no stranger to how fast technology is advancing. Remember, a lot of these technologies (alternative energy, nanotechnology, and the like) are still very much in development. I'm telling you we going to see some great changes in the next 20 years.
Please give me some of what you are smoking!
In all seriousness, we will probably crack 20% of our country's renewable in 20 years. Here's the current situation:
You are being way too optimistic on how energy we consume and will need to consume. Remember how much the world is going to grow and will need power:
We need to ween ourselves off of coal and start using more natural gas, wind, and solar.
Remember 10 years ago Wi-Fi was d--n near non-existent, look at it now. Look at the Internet during the last 20 years as well.
Solar becoming dominant in 2 decades is a rather off-the-wall view, I agree. But then again, people wouldn't imagine an iPhone even 10 years ago, let alone every other 13 year-old having one.
Last edited by Alphalogica; 03-04-2010 at 12:56 AM..
Sources? Preferably something credible? (i.e. from a major oil & gas/drilling services company)
I, my dad (who is in drilling systems development at Halliburton), or anyone else I know in Houston's energy industry -- doesn't know of anyone in Houston who would consider "SpaceDaily" a trusted, respected resource in regards to the state of the oil and gas industry.
Can you explain to me why oil and gas are referred to as "fossil fuels" if this is the case?
And, you can find "birthers" and Holocaust deniers on the Internet as well. The fact it's on the Internet doesn't mean its true. You can find anybody saying anything on the Internet, the issue is whether or not its credible. Matthew Simmons is credible. 60 Minutes is credible.
Well now, insincerety and seeming dearth of respect are noted. The above poster was supplied, in good faith, with what I termed a brief report, suitable for a 3 minute perusal before "hitting the hay" --- and we get "laugh" for the effort. I'm sure the ego was quite approving.
Delaying sleep for another 3 minutes, if instead of hitting the "laugh" button, you instead click the mouse button after entering your search phrase on PubMed you would get:
Performing your original search, hydrocarbons in the mantle, in PubMed will retrieve 488 records.
"Features of the hydrocarbons are that (a) the mantle hydrocarbons reside mainly along grain boundaries and in fluid inclusions of minerals; (b) heavier isoprenoids such as pristane and phytane are present; and (c) delta 13C of the mantle hydrocarbons is uniform (about -27%). Possible origins for the mantle hydrocarbons are as follows. (1) They were in organically synthesized by Fischer-Tropsch type reaction in the mantle."
The term Fischer-Tropsch is a reoccuring one in most of the papers on hydrocarbon synthesis in the mantle.
Now in regards to my own career, I have spent 35 years in system analysis and board level hardware design: here, in Austin, and in Southern CA. The above post displays the typical confusion of a layman in trying to compare advances in high technology to advances in energy sourcing and distribution. The two fields are hardly analagous. High technology hardware advances by increasing complexity. Increasing complexity is required by the obvious benefits of faster and more massive information processing. Increasing complexity and faster and more massive information processing is accompished on a silicon die by reducing feature size. Feature size can be reduced only in accompaniment with drastic reduction in energy consumption, we're talking microergs/bit or something of that nature. High technology also advances algorithmically, as developments in applied mathematics drives algorithmically dependent technologies such as CDMA, one of the cellular phone vehicles, and WiFi.
Now the energy sector is preoccupied with the opposite: massive power level handling and generation. In this field my background is mainly academic but has been somewhat buttressed by applying high tech hardware to energy management and industrial instrumentation and measurement, in my career in Houston.
So I think you can see that energy systems and information systems, although interdependent, are at the opposite ends of a scale, and are anti-analogous as to how they advance. So all this talk of mp3, cell phones and Wi Fi is irrelevent to the discussion.
Now a question: will there be anymore snideness, or can this thread progress?
BTW, if the poster doesn't know how to find scientific papers on the internet, here's one in daily progress, mine
If you are correct, then I'm trying to figure out why we see stuff like this. BP Solar Global (http://www.bp.com/genericcountryjump.do?categoryId=9070&contentId=70 38143 - broken link)
You are free to believe what you want. However, I would bet that your view isn't a very commonly held one in Houston's energy industry. We will see in 20 years where abiogenic petroleum gets us. Okay, let's say you are right that there is oil formed in the mantle. Just for instance. The deeper you go the more expensive/difficult it is to extract the oil, and that's the issue. There's a point where extracting oil from the ground no longer becomes economically feasible. It's not so much whether there is still oil left in the ground.
Papers on deep, complex hydrocarbon formation are almost entirely based on conjecture.
Last edited by Alphalogica; 03-04-2010 at 12:27 PM..
If you are correct, then I'm trying to figure out why we see stuff....
I'm not sure what subject you refer to as to my "correctness". If you refer to hydrocarbon synthesis in the earth's mantle, not only am I not expert, but I haven't made a claim as to the correctness of my view. What I think is only opinion, based on my intuition as to how the universe is constructed, and whether it is intentionally constructed to support the large energy budgets of advanced civilizations like ours. The ability to power a civilization from the nuclear events in the core of a planet has a certain logic and would add to the overwhelming elegance manifested in the design of a universe. As such my opinion is not firm and I'm open to any discussion or persuasion.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Alphalogica
You are free to believe what you want. However, I would bet that your view isn't a very commonly held one in Houston's energy industry.
You could probably count on one hand the number of people in Houston who have the qualifications to become experts in the ongoing research into this question of abiogenesis. As a result, the views of the people in the sector here are not any more relevant than the views of academics worldwide. Again, my view is not firm on this, so what "view" to which you refer is unknown.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Alphalogica
Papers on deep, complex hydrocarbon formation are almost entirely based on conjecture.
Now how would you know this? I see no indication that you have even heard of this research before the last 24 hours. How many academic papers did PubMed locate on the subject? Was it 488 or something like that, and did you read a great many of them, or did you even read one, in entirety? Again, the Russians have been studying this for more than 60 years. Did you happen to read the papers on the multi-multi-million dollar experimental drilling projects in support of this research? Do you think that hundreds or maybe more than a thousand papers on this would by any stretch be motivated by zero experimental evidence?
I will say this. When you get to be my age and have been proven wrong so many times on so many things that life tends to throw at you, you begin to learn not to jump to conclusions; on the other hand you also learn to give up cherished beliefs held for decades and including the ones that society has imposed. Here is an example: A certain sector of our society has determined that there is a class of persons known as "birthers", and you have adopted this social construct, apparently. Well then, if this is all valid, then you would obviously have well defined criteria as to who is a member of this class.
Now would a black female academic who is an Obama supporter possibly be categorized as a member of this class? I'm looking for a yes/no answer, go to this link and decide:
Location: Visitation between Wal-Mart & Home Depot
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I must say... The idea of hydrocarbon formation within the mantle is a new one to me. That's pretty creative.
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