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Cant we just capture the flatulence every animal and human give off and convert to LNG?
I guess because all the animals and humans are so spread out, capturing it all and bringing together costs too much money. Unless each individual human did it for themselves and their pets in their homes, businesses and vehicles.
Cant we just capture the flatulence every animal and human give off and convert to LNG?
I guess because all the animals and humans are so spread out, capturing it all and bringing together costs too much money. Unless each individual human did it for themselves and their pets in their homes, businesses and vehicles.
The economics of bottled farts is a subject that needs more detailed studies.
There is no "energy beams" in Star Trek. They use a mineral called Dylithium to power the warp cores. And aparently its highly volatile, and can destroy planets.
In the new Star Trek Discovery, the current plotline is all the Dylithium in galaxy combusted simultaneously leaving everyone without warp drive and fracturing the old alliances like the Federation.
The problem with using ethanol is we have more deforestation and soil erosion which ultimately results in desertification. This is especially true in tropical nations which remove their rainforest to grow these crops. The answer is wind, solar, and should be nuclear, but the left doesn't want to do nuclear.
In the meantime, natural gas and coal are preferable to ethanol and burning wood. Ultimately it's all just carbon from plant material. Deforestation and desertification are much larger potential problems than atmospheric CO2 levels.
I don't see how ethanol is any more "carbon neutral" than natural gas. That makes no sense. This is why I don't trust studies. You can literally come up with a study to support any conclusion, depending on how political hacks of the day feel.
Brazil can get by on ethanol as fuel because you have a huge ag production and only one motor vehicle for every five Brazilians. Here in The States, we have one vehicle for every man, woman and child.
Here, 10% ethanol/90% gasoline is mandated by the govt, but it winds up "saving" only one gallon of gasoline for every 100 used...That means that, if the petroleum supply is to only last 100 yrs without ethanol, it will last 101 yrs with ethanol. Big Deal.
It's no secret that green plants make oil-- corn oil, granola oil, palm oil, etc etc. There are many projects under way to commercially produce bio-oil form algae-- none economically feasible...Think of it as a problem in space-time geometry-- It took millions upon million of years of plant growth over millions of square miles of territory to produce our oil reserves-- and we're on a path to use it all up in just 2-3 centuries....Artificial production of oil ain't gunna work.
OTOH- wood gas (many ch4 & h2) is easily produced when ANY organic material (wood- including yard waste and slash from the lumbering process, plastic , etc) is heated under hypoxic conditions. This could be captured like coal gas (town gas) was captured in the 19th/early 20th century....It's the tech behind the wood burning Paris taxis pf WWII. It's the way I and many others heat their homes....
It's old tech readily developed and exploited to give us the high energy density, convenience and reliability of fossil fuels and we don't have to pray for some technological break thru that probably won't ever happen or to lower our expectations using Unreliable Energy.
I live in Brazil and I always fill up my car's fuel tank with ethanol, a carbon-neutral alternative to fossil fuels. But the problem with sugarcane-made ethanol is the extensive use of arable land that could be used to grow food instead...
This is the problem with ethanol. Remember the last ethanol craze, back when gas prices spiked the last time? IIRC, it turned out the price of corn went way up and land used for other things was converted to grow corn.
Unfortunately, any other energy source is going to have some kind of unintended consequence like this.
Quote:
Originally Posted by MalaMan
If there was an economically feasible way to make ethanol from plants that grow in arid and semi-arid land, that would be a good solution. Or from algae. Or plants that grow on rivers and lakes.
The problem is that then we would destroy those ecosystems to get these new energy sources in enough volume to make a difference.
This is the problem with ethanol. Remember the last ethanol craze, back when gas prices spiked the last time? IIRC, it turned out the price of corn went way up and land used for other things was converted to grow corn.
Unfortunately, any other energy source is going to have some kind of unintended consequence like this.
The problem is that then we would destroy those ecosystems to get these new energy sources in enough volume to make a difference.
This increase in corn prices caused by ethanol production raised the price of corn used for food throughout the world. A UN official called this ethanol induced price increase a crime against humanity. It's not often that I agree with the UN, but this time I did.
This increase in corn prices caused by ethanol production raised the price of corn used for food throughout the world. A UN official called this ethanol induced price increase a crime against humanity. It's not often that I agree with the UN, but this time I did.
The last time I checked (20 y/a), the ethaol mandate only addded $0.25 to the price of a $3.50 bu of corn,,,Now corn is $6.50/bu so the impact is even less.
The ethanol mandate did not remove even one ear of corn from the food supply. Extra ac were planted to acount for the increased demand. That's why corn prices did not increase until the artifical problems caused by the CoV lockdown over the last 3 yrs....Proces are relaated to supply/demand ratio. Supply went up as much as the demand = no change in price
Quote:
Originally Posted by rjshae
A couple of possibilities: Ammonia fuel cells for vehicles. Synthetic kerosene for aircraft.
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Haber-Bosch Process is extremely energy intensive. That's how we take "free" N2 from the atm and turn it into NH3....A full one half of all ag production is dependent on industrially produced, artifical N fertilizer, and we're having trouble meeting demand now.
A cow make ~25lb of manure (dry weight) per day, and it takes 5000 lb of dry manure to provided the N for one ac of corn each year...and in the US we plant 90,000,000 ac of corn each year. Do the arithmetic. It ain't gunna work. We need our N fertilzer plants for fertilizer, not fuel.
Concerning synthetic kerosene-- see my earlier post about oil production vs space-time geometry. That's a loser too.
addendum-- for perspective, I just looked up the figures on world Uranium reserves, power production per ton of U, annual electrical energy demand etc...If ALL the known U in the world were put into reactors to provide all our juice, it would only last about 10yrs....
We got problems.
Last edited by guidoLaMoto; 01-30-2023 at 07:31 AM..
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