Comments on: The Energy Station – Multi Fuel Filling Stations

By: Chris

Chris — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 22:23:34 +0000

The bottom line is that we’re not going to find some magic chemical that beats hydrocarbon fuels for safety, stability, and energy density any time in the next 100 years.

The sooner everyone starts viewing hydrocarbons as an energy *storage* medium, not an energy source, the better off we’ll all be. Nuclear, solar, wind, etc. can be used to generate electricity, which can in turn be used to build hydrocarbon chains that can be used as a fuel for situations where electricity is impractical (e.g., airliners, which will never be able to run purely on chemical batteries due to weight issues).

The so-called “hydrogen economy” is a good first step toward such an ideal, but hydrogen, as far as energy storage media go, has an awful lot of drawbacks. Diesel fuel is a vastly superior means of storing chemical energy by almost every meaningful measure, but making diesel fuel out of electricity and a basic chemical feedstock isn’t easy. Something like thermal depolymerization, which can take pretty much *any* carbon-based feedstock and turn it into diesel-like fuel oil, seems like the way to go here. I don’t think we’d have any problems finding enough feedstock for the process, as Americans seem to love to throw things away.

By: hoyt

hoyt — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 19:15:36 +0000

What would happen if a year’s worth of money and effort that is thrown at Iraq, was instead, put towards scientists harvesting algae?

Millions of $ per DAY

Thousands of $ per SECOND

By: kneeslider

kneeslider — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 16:26:53 +0000

Ethanol is no magic bullet but it might be a partial answer among many which could help us find better answers down the road. Sure, ethanol has shortcomings, but last I checked, so does everything else. Try something, get closer, try something else, get closer still, tweak, improve, life is good. Constant improvement, in a series of small, imperfect steps, is far superior to doing nothing while waiting for the perfect answer to arrive.

By: Doug McDaniel

Doug McDaniel — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 14:52:41 +0000

Personally, I go out of my way to put gas in my bike that has not had ethanol added to it. It’s usually higher priced, but I figure I’m getting roughly 4 mpg higher and riding my bike is almost 3 times more economical (fuel-wise) anyway. I’m sure this isn’t PC with all the Green-Thinking folks out there, but if half the population rode bikes (i.e. motorcycles) when feasible,instead of their cages, that alone would make a huge difference in foreign oil dependency.

By: P.T. Anderson

P.T. Anderson — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 09:45:37 +0000

I’m not going to mince words here. Bio-fuels are the new ecological disaster. It doesn’t matter if it was a crop with the potential for being on someones menu or not. It doesn’t matter how clean it is. It will make us less dependent on foreign petroleum but at the same time we will import more of these bio-fuels, so there is no gain there either. There is no way around this. The current petroleum consumption per year globally is roughly equivilant to 400 years of photosynthesis over the entire planet, not a typo. Check out these recent articles which appeared in a couple of well known periodicals…

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1725975,00.html

I’m sure someone is going to point out the use of used cooking oil, and other waste products like that, as a bio-fuel. Which to me is a great idea and which I prefer to mention as “waste-fuels”. This helps distinguish them from “bio-fuels” which could be grown for the sole purpose as a fuel. However in the grand scheme of things, even “waste-fuels” will never become commercially viable. I wish it could be…