The EROI on supplying fuel
Posted by Heading Out on November 28, 2007 - 11:00am
There have been a couple of comments this past week that lead me from the question of my last post – “what if it doesn’t get better?” into the sequel “how is it going to get worse?” Because if the presupposition is that there will be some cataclysmic event that will carry us into the next phase of our evolving reality, I am not sure that this will happen. And yet, without this impetus, and a focus for public and political attention, it becomes more difficult to get action, or recognition, of the urgency of the problem.
I can perhaps simplify a picture of this evolution by a simple example. You are a farmer in the less populated parts of the country, and you drive over to your local gas station, after noticing that you have less than three gallons of gas in your tank. You get there to find that the station has closed, and there is a note on the door that says that the nearest station is now 50 miles away. If you can make it to the station, and if your car gets 20 miles per gallon, you will now use a third of your tank of gas, each time you fill up, just in filling up your 15-gallon tank. (Until you also start filling gas cans).
As the price of delivery of fuel to remote stations increases, the first step that the operators take is to increase prices. As Leanan has posted, in Drumbeat, this increase in price causes problems, consider, for example, the Shetland Isles .
THE AVERAGE cost of a litre of unleaded petrol in the northern isles has rocketed to £1.15, while a litre of diesel costs £1.18. . . . . . . . He wants to persuade the government to cut fuel duty in peripheral areas, following the lead of other EU states such as Portugal, Greece and France.
As the story notes, governments in Europe are recognizing that there already exists a problem in supplying fuel to the more distant parts of their economies.
Similar increases in cost can also drive up local prices in places such as Bridgeport, CA
The Shell station in Bridgeport, a tourist town of 850 residents during the summertime peak, is charging $4.09 a gallon for regular. The outlet posted prices above the $4 mark at least four other times this year.
Rosemary Glazier, who works in Bridgeport as Mono County's assistant finance director, is so irritated by the prices that she refuses to fill up at the local stations.
"It makes the whole town look bad," Glazier said of the $4-plus prices. Instead, she drives all the way to Gardnerville in Nevada, 62 miles north of Bridgeport, where gas is substantially cheaper.
Note that she is now driving a round trip of 124 miles (consuming what percentage of the gas in her tank one wonders) in order to fill (?) up. But at least, at present, she has the option to do either. The declining demand that comes from the increased price will reduce the profits of the dealers and station operators, in turn threatening their livelihoods. Consider the current case in Maine in the related fields of heating oil supply.
"The higher the price, the less the small oil companies are making," Porter said Wednesday. "It does impact you because it’s getting tougher for people to order larger quantities, and it costs me money to make smaller deliveries. My travel costs have almost doubled."
Porter said that customers who ordered 150-gallon deliveries last year have been ordering 100 gallons at a time this season. That results in his having to make a delivery stop every two weeks instead of every four weeks as in previous years. . . . . . . . As a way of cutting back on expenses, Porter has canceled all his advertising and is relying on word of mouth to market his product. He said he has been in contact with others in the oil business around the state, and their situation is just as bleak.
And so, as demand drops, and profitability disappears, so the neighborhood gas station will likely close, and one will have to drive further in order to fill one’s tank, and thus the energy cost of filling a tank will get higher.
This is not a problem that will impact the majority of Americans, the gas stations along the highways and in the cities and larger communities will not be as oppressed, and will likely retain profitability, rather it is the remoter parts of the land, where the food is grown, where this might first appear as a problem. This is not the problem that relates to refinery issues , but more to the simple economics of a small business. And it is difficult in the U.S., where there are not the tax burdens on fuel, to see the same sort of relief that is in existence in Europe.
One solution would be to accelerate the transition of vehicles to using higher percentages of ethanol, since that would at least provide a local source of fuel and reduce the need for the ethanol pipeline. But, as we are seeing, the immediate glamour of ethanol is fading, and in this regard I disagree with Richard Heinberg on the relative conflict between food and fuel, at this stage. The data from this and earlier years suggests that when the price of the crops start to go up, then the food demand can afford to pay a higher price than the fuel demand can, and so food, albeit at a slightly higher price, wins. As a result the economic incentive to run a bio-fuels refinery disappears, and without greater incentives, some of the refineries either close, or never get built. Of course, with a mandate for a certain percentage fuel, this does, in time lift the price of the remaining ethanol until an uneasy balance develops between the two, but I suspect it will be one that leaves our poor farmer still at that gas station trying to decide whether he can get to next town before he runs out of gas.
Many societies don’t have the luxury of the internal combustion engine to provide their supplies. R.B. Gill in his book on the Great Mayan Drought quotes Robert Drennan and Ross Hassig on the amount of food that a person can productively carry, over that which is consumed to provide the energy for the travel.
He estimated that a single human porter or tlameme as they were known in Nahuatl, could carry a load of about 25 kg (55 lb) of maize. He calculated, however, that the per day overburden of a porter, taking into account the nutritional needs of the porter and his family, was about 30% of the value of the load, based on a round trip for the porter. This places an absolute limit on the transportation of corn of 3.3 days or 100 km (60 miles). In other words, if a porter carried a load of corn 100 km, he would have used it all to feed himself and his family. The effective limit for a commercial distribution system, of course, would have been considerably less, say 50% of the absolute limit, or 50 km. During the Aztec dominance in the Mexican highlands, basic foodstuffs, other than gourmet items, were normally drawn from within a restricted radius of one day’s journey or approximately 30 km.
He goes on to quote Johann von Thunen on German economics, with a horse
He determined that the absolute trasportation limit for cereials carried by a horse and wagon was about 80 km. At that point, the horses and drivers would have eaten all the grain during the round trip.
It makes you appreciate the benefits of the coming of power., and the tremendous benefit in terms of food portability that it brings. But as that fuel availability diminishes, it also underscores the need to find alternative sources, since I am not sure that there is that much food grown within 30 km of any major U.S. city to feed its population.
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"You are a farmer in the less populated parts of the country, and you drive over to your local gas station, after noticing that you have less than three gallons of gas in your tank. You get there to find that the station has closed, and there is a note on the door that says that the nearest station is now 50 miles away."
The region I farm in, the Mid South (Memphis)
will not have this problem.
Or the farmer won't. The farmer will convert to diesel or NatGas/Propane if gas is short.
There will be no shortage of diesel on the farm.
If there is, there will be a shortage of food in the city.
>The farmer will convert to diesel or NatGas/Propane if gas is short.
Right on the spot? Is he a transformer or something?
In Nepal, right now, there are diesel shortages on the farm.
Nepal is dependent on India, dependent on ....
The US produces a large part of all three sources (diesel, LP,
gasoline.
Make no mistake (sounding like a political hack here),
the US farmer will be hurt. But Suburbs and cities will
be hurting hardest and firstest.
;)
Yes.
Lift an LP tank into the back of the Pick Up, reattach
fuel line,
adjust the carburetor...
United States Patent 4413607
Link to this page:
http://www.freepatentsonline.com/4413607.html
Abstract:
A system for an existing combustion engine is provided for enabling the engine to be operated on liquefied propane, alone, through a conventional gasoline carburetor, to operate on either gasoline or liquefied propane through a conventional gasoline carburetor, to operate on liquefied propane, alone, through an inlet casting to be utilized in lieu of a conventional gasoline carburetor, or to operate on liquefied propane, alone, at a substantially constant engine speed. Further, the system is also operative in conjunction with a diesel engine whereby a small amount of gasified liquid propane may be introduced into the induction system of a diesel engine as a supplemental fuel charge therefor during high power demand periods of operation. The system includes a regulator-vaporizer assembly for reducing the pressure of and thus transferring liquid propane into gasified liquid propane, heating the propane gas and ducting the propane gas to an induction passage mixer, the latter including various adjustment features whereby the proper mixture of induction air and propane is afforded.
Take a day. And we're off. 8D
Very few cars & trucks still on the road have carburetors. They went out in the mid to late 1970s.
And I believe propane requires a new carburetor and not just adjustments to an existing one.
Propane through a modern, computer controlled car or truck, with not work without MAJOR factory level re-engineering.
Alan
I know that there are people that reprogram their automobile ROMs. I think that altering timing, pressure, and amount of fuel injection is not going to be a problem.
It's the fuel system plumbing that's going to be a problem for home rebuilders.
Why not just swap out the engine and fuel tank when your old system breaks down at 200K miles? Use a new system from GM or Chrysler or Toyota that is already designed for their model for that year? Just have them make a million cars and two million engines and fuel tanks.
Generally, by the time a vehicle's engine has worn out in normal use, so has much of the rest of the vehicle. It makes more sense to recycle it and build a whole new one, with all the improvements of the intervening time.
"And I believe propane requires a new carburetor and not just adjustments to an existing one."
That's correct. It's usually referred to as a "dry gas" carburetor. Popular with 4X4 off-roaders as it allows for the truck to operate at all sorts of extreme angles without starving it of gas like a normal carb/float system would. Also doesn't spew gas all over the place if you accidently flip it.
"Propane through a modern, computer controlled car or truck, with not work without MAJOR factory level re-engineering."
Ehhh. Well the original (gasoline) fuel injection assembly would most likely be useless. I can't say for sure though as I'm not sure of their flow capability, or whether they'd freeze from the pressure release, and the pressure regulation system would surely be useless. However, beyond that, a place like ZDyne can take a car's computer and re-write the coding to change the fuel injection duration (the fuel injector is just an on-off solenoid that raises and lowers a pintle either allowing fuel to flow, or disallowing fuel to flow...so on any cycle the length of time the pintle stays open is what matters). By changing the fuel injection mapping you can control the mixture. Or, (likely easier) you could disable the original fuel injection system (perhaps just using switches to turn off the injectors themselves, meaning you could turn them back on) and put a dry gas carburetor in behind the throttle body - the rest of the system should act the same (delivering spark at the correct time, etc).
So while likely technically feasible...in practice, a bit rediculous and I doubt some poor farmer is going to want to pony up $2,000 bucks or something for some kit to switch to propane on a whim.
That is what companies like Impco do for their dual-fuel systems. The gasoline injector systems do not have the pressure-handling capability to work with liquid propane, the thermal issues of the boiling liquid plus the reduced lubricating capacity would make injector compatibility an issue, and the system as a whole would be subject to vapor lock. The dual-fuel system Impco made some years back just hijacked the ECU inputs from the oxygen sensor to make it think everything was hunky dory, while using the signals from the mass-air sensor to control mixture in the optimum (lean of stoichiometric) range for propane (I'm not sure what they do to meet today's emissions regs).
Lean-burning a gaseous fuel like Hythane with a reasonably compatible flame speed might be fairly easy to do, but it would still require a second fuel system and a highly modified or secondary ECU to meet emissions. In other words, not a job for casual tinkerers working with off-the-shelf parts.
will there be "a shortage of food" if there is no NH3? if there is NH3, however, then you don't even need to convert to diesel or NG/propane.
by the way, NH3 can directly synthesized from heat/electricity rather than hydrocarbons or even H2.
NH3 directly from heat and electricity, with no hydrogen input?
So we're now putting Einstein's equation, E=mc2, to some practical use finally?
He was probably implying that one should use the eletricity to gather hydrogen, from water.
not necessary. in short, there are solid-state ammonia synthesis and thermal-chemical ammonia synthesis. neither needs to make H2 as a middle step. more can be found here.
Your link is broken - is this what you were referring to?
The linked method still requires hydrogen from electrolysis, but operates at relatively low temperatures, eliminating much of the additional energy overhead.
FWIW, the energy required for electrolysis isn't all that much. The energy required is quite close to the lower heating value of hydrogen, or about 300kJ/mol.
One mole of NH3 requires 1.5 moles of H2, or roughly 500kJ, and weighs 17g. To make the 80M tons of nitrogen fertilizer used per year, then, would require 80M x 1Mg/ton / 17g/mol x 500kJ = 650TWh, or about 4% of world electricity consumption.
So the energy requirements of fertilizer just aren't a big deal.
sorry for the broken link, here it is.
the point is that NH3 is also a clean (carbon-free) liquid fuel that can be readily used in various types of combustion engines. it has been done before (during the 1930s), extensively studied by the US army (involved people from UC Berkeley, GM and many other engine, vehicle and aviation companies) between 1960s and 70s and is being done right now by a small but steadily growing group of people.
The main problem with using ammonia for a fuel, particularly if done on a wide-scale basis, is that the combustion of ammonia produces various oxides of nitrogen (the exact type depending on specific combustion conditions). Nitrogen oxides (generally referred to as 'NOx') are a serious air pollutant, a major contributor to photochemical smog, and are now highly regulated, particularly in areas with poor air quality such as the Los Angeles
basin. The US auto industry has had to spend billions of dollars changing the designs of its internal combustion engines to reduce the amount of NOx formed as a natural part of high-temperature transient combustion conditions.
As a retired environmental engineer, there is no way that I can conceive of that the federal EPA and state environmental agencies would ever allow the widespread use of ammonia as a fuel. In fact, one of the concerns about using animal wastes as supplemental fuel is that it contains lots of ammonia and other nitrogenous compounds and thus produces high levels of NOx when burned.
Yes, I am aware that some rocket fuels contain nitrogen compounds, but the DOD and NASA have always had a sort of 'special dispensation' when it comes to certain evironmental regulations.
such concern may be unsubstantiated. rather to the contrary, if you read the various studies carried out in the 1960s and 70s by folks in UC Berkeley and GM, etc., ammonia combustion should produce far less NOx than produced by the combustion of hydrocarbons mainly because the peak temperature is lower in the ammonia fueled engines. another point is that the "state-of-art" method used by some high-end car makers in reducing NOx emission is to use urea - basically ammonia - to absorb the NOx. combustion of ammonia is never known to produce any NxO.
If your combustion temperature is lower, then you energy efficiency is lower, because that is the way the way engines work (thermodynamics). High engine efficiencies require high operating temperatures.
Without saying outright that NH3 is bogus, your respondants here are pointing out that there are a LOT of issues you have to address before this form of energy storage becomes credible.
are high peak temperature and efficiency of thermal-mechanical energy conversion so simply related? no matter how high the peak temperature goes, if the combustion is not ignited at the right moment due to self ignition or avoidance of knocking - as most of the gasoline engines do - the efficiency can remain very low.
no matter one doubts it or not, the fact remains that ammonia fueled cars, trucks, buses operated in Europe during WWII and that the fastest airplane ever existed was fueled by ammonia. to scientifically minded readers, there is a considerable body of work from the extensive investigations into the ammonia fuel applications performed between 1960s to 1980s funded by US army. one only needs to find and read them.
"Are high peak temperature and efficiency of thermal-mechanical energy conversion so simply related?"
Yes.
High temperature does not, of course, guarantee effficiency, only the converse: high efficiency is not possible without it. This is a basic law of thermodynamics: Look up the Carnot cycle and you should find a coherent explanation. The key point is that efficiency is constrained by the difference between burning temperature and exhaust gas temperature, and the greater the difference, the greater the possible efficiency. That said, this is indeed the reason engine manufacturers have always sought high compression ratios (and why high-octane gasoline, which burns hotter without exploding to make a knock is preferable to low-octane gasoline), and why diesel engines are inherently more efficient than gasoline engines.
Since I posted before, it has been posted that the amonia fueled-engines DO have high burn temperatures. This is good for efficiency, but brings us back to the problem of NOx in the exhaust gas. These gasses are poisonous and produce smog, and are an unavoidable consequence of high temperature burning. In defense of ammonia, let it be admitted that most of the nitrogen being turned into NOx will come from the atmosphere (which is 4/5 N2 to 1/5 O2) but the ammmonia itself will be adding a share, which hydrocarbons and alcohols do not.
Ammonia is highly, highly poisonous, so avoiding accidents is really important.
In modern industrial society ammonia is created using hydrocarbons to provide heat for the manufacture process. I don't think their is enough natural ammonia around to divert it from its vital role in food production and waste it as fuel.
... but only applies to heat engines. Electrochemical devices (batteries, fuel cells) have different constraints.
The problem with ammonia is that the nitrogen is a direct participant in the chemical reaction, so you're going to have atomic nitrogen up against oxygen radicals.
In NH3's defense, ammonia is also the preferred hydrogen source for NOx reduction catalysts. If you are fueling with ammonia, you won't have to worry about refilling an AdBlue tank.
Electrochemistry was mentioned as a possibility for production of ammonia--not, in this thread, for utilization. That would be an ammonia-powered fuel cell. If somebody invents one, that is a whole new subject.
So far, we have been talking about burning it in an internal combustion engine. The laws of thermodynamics apply. There is no way around this.
You said "high efficiency is not possible without it [high temperature]". I was just pointing out one of Nature's loopholes. And if the electrochemical ammonia production cell is reversible, it makes ammonia a far more useful fuel than it is with today's technology.
You will excuse me if I insist that I not be taken out of context.
"Are high peak temperature and efficiency of thermal-mechanical energy conversion so simply related?"
There is no ambiguity here: What do you think thermal-mechanical means, anyway?
And yes, maximum possible efficiency in an engine and difference between burn temperature and exhaust temperature are that simply related.
No, there are no loop-holes. Nature is not conned.
You deceive yourself to think otherwise.
When someone invents an ammonia fuel-cell, THEN we can talk about its pros and cons. If you are thinking of inventing one yourself, keep in mind that, your first constraint will be the electro-chemisty that makes a fuel-cell work. But from the standpoint of ease of storage and safety, ammonia lacks virtues.
Well, relative to hydrogen, ammonia is very easy to store. However, it shares many of the disadvantages of hydrogen including its low throughput efficiency if made from electricity.
Compared to hydrogen--you have agreement there! Hydrogen is so difficult to work with I often wonder why we are even discussing it. A very high-tech and unforgiving solution that I cannot believe will ever work.
Hydrogen comes up because the proponents of ammonia as fuel claim (rightly) that it stores more hydrogen per volume than liquid hydrogen and only requires cheap tankage. From this they conclude (wrongly) that it's a panacea.
it is a wrongly concluded statement that from this (storage advantage alone) they (the ammonia fuel advocates) concluded that it's a panacea (rather, it's considered a more practical, more immediate and more sustainable solution for both PO and ACC without the need to completely replace the existing infrastructure and equipment). any open minded reader can reach his or her own conclusion by looking into here.
Those reports have all the same flaws of the hydrogen advocacy: they ignore two critical facts:
We buy horribly expensive batteries for those applications where portability is key, but you'd never think of running your house lights on D cells. Neither are we going to build an ammonia-fuel infrastructure when Firefly Energy's lead-acid technology is good enough for the next 10 years and we can forego both the infrastructure costs and the conversion losses involved with chemical fuels of any kind.
Ironically, the Iowa State slideshow I linked shows why the near-term future will go to the PHEV. There's about 8 quads of energy in a typical corn crop (somewhat less than half of this in the cobs and stover). This pre-existing chemical energy will supply the chemical fuel required by PHEVs; the electricity produced from RE will supply the other 80% of the energy they need. There is no need to convert from electricity to chemical fuel and back, and the only way such a system can get going is with massive subsidies.
Considered by whom? Its partisans? Let's see, what new infrastructure would be required for RE-generated ammonia to replace petroleum motor fuel?
What new infrastructure is required for PHEVs? Roughly nothing, until they get well past 50% of the fleet; they leverage the existing electric infrastructure and add value to it in ways that ammonia never could.
You can be ignorant and think of ammonia as a serious possibility to replace petroleum motor fuels. But once you're knowledgable, that excuse is gone.
the "Those" and "they" are, again, wrongly concluded. people working on various aspects and scenarios of ammonia fuel applications are not organized. they have diverse motives and points of view. the link you provided reflects only one point of view. any one read through all the presentations (only then the conclusive "they" can be applied to the people who have expressed their opinions there) should be able to find the alleged ignorance unfounded.
no one disputes that "electricity used directly is far more efficient and attractive". the question is whether that is practical for all the applications of concern.
at least by some of the people advocating ammonia as fuel.
people advocate alternative fuels, ammonia among them, for different applications with different concerns - to some, satisfying the desire of continuing happy motoring and averting the possible accidental injury of some motorists due to fuel leakage may be of top concern; to others, avoiding the disruption in food production/distribution and preventing the almost certained death of many people due to starvation caused by such disruption are of paramount importance.
even if one assumes there is a straight electric powertrain that can outperform the ammonia powertrain in all prime movers, let alone ships and planes, by a factor of 3 to 6 in efficiency thus needs only 1/3 or 1/6 as much RE generation, it does not directly lead to the conclusion of only that much of RE generation capacity or infrastructure is needed. the amount of RE generation infrastructure needed has much to do with where they will be deployed. the difference, as can be easily seen on a global wind resource map, between some large areas on ocean and most areas on land can be more than 4 to 8 times in terms of W/m2.
that compare to the production of other means for energy storage unless the prime movers are grid-connected all the time.
you perhaps agree the existing ones are usable.
they can be underground or aboveground, pressurized or unpressurized. yes, new ones will need to be build.
can and should one reach such conclusion simply by drawing a parallel between a past experience during a resource-unconstrained era and one that is to take place in a resource-constrained future? besides, some, if not most, prime movers are already equipped with engines with high compression ratios.
why is that ammonia fuel needs an "entire new vehicle fleet" while PHEV needs "Roughly nothing"? does it also imply that the current FF power stations should just go on BAU?
the serious possibility to replace petroleum motor fuels with ammonia was practiced and confirmed in countries suffered the shortage of petroleum motor fuels during WWII. the consequence of being ignorant of this possibility and being unprepared for using it in a shortage of petroleum motor fuels could be very serious indeed.
should one jump to the conclusion that the combustion of NH3 will inevitably produce more NOx than that of hydrocarbon just because NH3 contains N? the answer from many careful studies is not. please read the article mentioned by Chris in his reply.
is ammonia poisonous? according to this expert (the number 3 presenter) it is Non-toxic: inhalation hazard only. one could also get frostbite if liquid ammonia comes to the direct contact with the body, of course, but yet again, that is not a toxic reaction.
it is the concern of the sustainability of this "modern industrial society" brought us here, isn't it? ammonia doesn't have to and should not come from hydrocarbons - as these resources are too precious (by the way, the main purpose of using hydrocarbons in making ammonia is not for the heat they produce but to get the H) - ammonia can be synthesized with just the renewable energy plus water (no need to be clean, fresh water as that is a scarce resource itself - on the other hand, combustion of ammonia will produce clean, potable water in return) and air. now comes to the question: is the current way of using ammonia as fertilizer sustainable? hasn't it caused severe environmental (especially in water ways and oceans by the run-offs) damage and soil organic degradation already? would it be better to use ammonia as fertilizer and the crop or other organic materials so produced as feedstock of biofuels or to use the organic materials as organic fertilizers and ammonia as a carbon-free fuel as suggested in here?
Inhalation hazard only. Sure. But that is the whole problem: You breathe it and it kills you.
In the accidents cited above, the survivors were just lucky. Not safe at all.
sounds like one whiff, you are dead kind of poison gas. but it is not. it is hazardous with prolonged exposure at and beyond certain level of concentration. in that category, one can enlist CO, CO2 and hydrocarbon such as CH4 and on and on - too many to list individually. one unique feature of ammonia is that it can be detected by human nose at an extremely low level of concentration. gaseous ammonia is also lighter than air at normal temperature. thus unless one is trapped in a closed environment with considerable amount of ammonia, the probability of fatality caused by ammonia should be lower than that long list of not so scary sounding and less odorous gases.
there is much danger in the easy way of life.
Ammonia smelling salts are still used to revive individuals who have fainted. BTW breathing Dihydrogen Monoxide can be fatal too, right? Ok, I not trying to make light of the potential hazards but as far as hazards go it's probably safest to avoid crashes in the first place.
John Holbrook sent me some papers on ammonia turbines yesterday. Thanks, NH3 for the introduction. The achieved temperatures were the same as for fossil fuels. The rate of fuel consumption was 2.4 time higher than for diesel and the power output about 10% higher.
I recall about 5 years ago many people insisting that jet fuel could not melt steel. The achievable temperature is not limited to the temperature at which a fuel burns in open air. Burning in heated air raises the temperature higher. One of the interesting things about ammonia is that the autoignition temperature is about 1200 F, rather higher than for gasoline (495 F) and higher that for hydrogen (1060 F), so compression ratios could be increased quite a bit using ammonia. The heat release per unit mass of stochiometric air is about 8% higher than for propane. Here, I'm citing Faehn, Bull and Shekleton (1966) Society of Automotive Engineers publication 660769.
It seems to me that the number of emissions to control with ammonia are fewer than for carbon based fuels and so catalytic converter design would be simpler. High power applications where fuel tank safety is not an issue owing to low travel speeds such as tractors or construction equipment would be a good place to introduce this kind of thing. If you are not trying to dual fuel a tank, then turbines with larger combustors seem like they could replace some of our peak demand electric supply presently provided by natural gas powered turbines.
It is worth remembering that 1 person died and many people were injured in Minot, ND in 2002, 14 people were injured in 1979 in Cestview, FL and two people died and 46 people were injured in 1977 in Pensacola, Fl as a result of ammonia spills in train accidents. Widespread use as a transportation fuel could have safety drawbacks. But applications in energy storage or use close to the point of manufacture could make sense.
Chris
you are welcome and thanks for the more detailed account.
ammonia fueled power stations can provide not only electricity but also potable water which in some places around the world could soon become a critical problem.
in short, ammonia could be applied relatively quickly to ease the shock that be brought by PO and ACC and to help the world to unwind a bit less painfully. it is a choice out of no better choice.
ammonia is one of the most commonly shipped chemicals by tankers over the seas, tankercars over the rails, barges over the rivers and trucks over the roads. there is an ammonia pipeline running throughout the corn-belt states with long operation history. no one heard about it due, perhaps, mainly to the lack of incident or accident.
for people interested in finding out more about various aspects of the ammonia fuel application, there is a collection of the presentations through the last four years' ammonia fuel meetings which can be found here.
Partly we see less damage from ammonia than from fossil fuels because it does not burn right away, but partly it is because we use much less. With increased use, the casualty rate will increase. There have been problems with spills from pipelines as well with big fish kills for example. So, increased environmental damage must be expected with increased use. Working out methods of fueling that don't leak, methods of making fuel tanks that survive high speed collisions and other aspects would need to be worked out to get broad adoption. I think that electric vehicles are likely to get a larger market share in the near term at the consumer level. I'm not sure how things might go with trucking.
Chris
if you know any specific incident related to the ammonia pipeline leak, i would like to learn about it. about the big fish kills, are they caused by the run-offs from the over application of ammonia as fertilizer or by the leak or spill related to the transportation of ammonia?
ammonia tank and its refueling should be quite similar to that of propane. if people don't worry about using or carrying propane tanks on vehicle, it is hard to see the rationale to worry about ammonia.
regarding to battery powered EV, it might be interesting for people to know the two cases of cell phone death both caused by the explosion of Li-ion batteries. if such a small sized Li-ion battery could have caused two fatalities, what should one expect from the much bigger ones working in a much tougher condition conducting much larger current?
Cell phone batteries are completely enclosed so trapped gas causes explosive failure. EV batteries may catch fire, but would not explode. There has been at least one case of EV burn out. This is no greater problem than the number of ICE vehicles that catch fire.
Cell phone batteries use Lithium Cobalt Oxide (LiCoO2). In a situation where there's a short or some sort of damage this particualar chemistry can undergo a runaway thermal decomposition because of the release of oxygen from the molocule which reacts with the next molocule releasing even more oxygen which reacts with the next molocule, ad nauseum, until you get an explosion/fire. The smart folks are using LiFeP04 Lithium Iron Phosphate, or Lithium Titanate...which don't have the same explosion/fire problem.
Hi NH3,
There was a large spill in Kansas in 2004.
Some kids were injured recently in Florida as well. This is kind of like people shooting at oil pipelines.
Chris
thanks for the info.
I think that with current federal regulations any vehicle on a public way that is transporting ammonia would need this placard:
Edit: lost the image, text was "Inhalation Hazard"
I think for propane fueled vehicles you sometimes need an alternative fuel placard to let fire departments know what they are dealing with. I think this is state level regulation.
The use of ammonia as a fuel would be problematic - its a hotly sought after component used in methamphetamine production. Some years ago people had to start locking and protecting anhydrous ammonia tanks and every year there are events where the spigot is smashed with a sledge hammer, a little bit of ammonia is stolen, and a large tank is left to drain, spoiling many acres of ground in the process.
well, as the hydrocarbon fueled age of easy life comes to an end, one should indeed expect some heightened demand for those mind altering chemicals. one of the many good things PO or P(ost)PO may, however, do to the world is to set people to focus on what is essential.
be careful! there is a difference between H and H2. water and air are needed, of course.
You are presuming that the coming era will be sufficiently visible and marked that our farmer will have been able to change. Part of the point is that this is likely to be a creeping change, and that the markers of its advent are already here.
Creeping change just makes the transition easier. As oil supplies get tighter, prices go up. As prices go up, alternatives look increasingly more attractive. As alternatives gain in appeal, they are increasingly adopted and become increasingly mainstream.
Which is exactly what we see happening already.
The longer we have a creeping change, the more any possible sharp change is blunted. After a long enough period of creeping change, we'll have finished changing, and there will be no more risk of a sharp change.
Creeping change is about the best situation in which we can find ourselves.
I think I did not express myself as clearly as I wanted to. The nature of the change is at such a rate that it is not being given the "flashing red lights" of a dramatic change, and so we are not all rushing out to buy Mercedes diesels (grin). But it is happening fast enough yet at a level that is not nationally remarkable (outside our small circle) that I fear we will not have time to adapt. I am, I suspect, more pessimistic than most about the length of the plateau.
I already have *MY* Mercedes diesel. A white 1982 240D with a manual transmission and 87,8xx miles. 30 to 31 mpg in the city.
Best Hopes for the most reliable and durable car ever built by Mercedes (and everyone else ?)
Alan
Say the price of oil goes up $10 per barrel per year. That will cause big gradual changes in efficiency of energy usage.
There's a rate of oil production decline that is so sharp as to cause serious breakdowns in how well society functions. But a plateau or yearly decline of 1% or 2% isn't going to cause a reversion to primitive living conditions.
Diesels: Once the problem becomes clear car companies can shift to only building small diesels of the sort they sell in Europe. Add in some hybrid technology for regenerative braking. That could triple gas mileage.
The length of the plateau: We've already been on it long enough to cause big shifts in investment money. The general public is changing more slowly. But the venture capitalists are a lot more nimble.
"Creeping change just makes the transition easier."
Not if there is a tipping point.
http://politics.reddit.com/info/61ms4/comments/
http://digg.com/politics/You_re_a_rural_farmer_and_you_re_close_to_empty...
thanks for your support...
perhaps one needs to clarify where the data is collected from or where should the one's concern end.
Well soybeans are up to $10 a bushel right now (source, initially one of my students, then the Iowa Dept of Agriculture). There is an interesting note on relative economics between corn prices which are in the $3.85 to +$4 range, and soybeans on this site .
My initial information on the closing of refineries related to sugar in Malaysia and Indonesia, as I remember, a year or so ago.
when food price arises, people in other parts of the world have no choice but to switch to the ones less affected or to other unimaginable "alternatives".
not too long ago, during a soybean price hike, some soy sauce makers in China switched to the "alternatives" of soybean - human and animal hairs and worn-out leather/hides - as source of protein.
"human and animal hairs"
Soylent Green is P-E-O-P-L-E !!
soylent brown.
The conversion of dead people into food was a natural process not too long ago. Before we started using hermetically sealed coffins insects, worms, bacteria, and mold would decompose a body back into the nutrients plants could directly use. There is a good reason why old cemetaries have such rich and deep topsoil.
There is a lot of phosphorus in bones and it is not being recycled into food for the living.
still is in many parts of the world - perhaps will be and should be more so in the future. how much energy is consumed in cremating a body?
one of the ecologically most efficient process of this kind is still practiced in Tibet - the so called "skyward burial" - the details will shock most people unfamiliar with the culture/religion - the net effect, however, is that a dead body (including bones) becomes "prepared" food for some kind of sacred bird, soars to the sky then drops back to earth as fertilizer in just few days.
Yikes! I'm glad I don't like soy sauce.
Water transportation is what allowed Egypt to feed Rome. That, and paved roads from Ostia (the port) to Rome proper.
Paved roads tremendously increased the diameter of effective horse drawn transport.
One nice thing about electrified railroads is that they "refuel"off of the grid. No extra weight to carry (except the pantograph), no "deadhead" time going back for fuel and then refueling.
Best Hopes for Low Energy Transportation,
Alan
Also, ball bearings must help a great deal.
We can get enough energy to keep electrified trains and electric vehicles moving.
Your essay supports my belief as to why relocalization won't work in most cases; the necessary raw materials/finished products are either too far away or the market is too small to support a business.
I live in a rural area in the Coast Range Mountians of northern California. Even though the total population of the area is small, it is spread out over ~600 square miles. There are only limited areas where row crops can be grown on a moderate scale but even here a farmer would run into the problem of supplying sufficient irrigation water. In reality, residents would be forced to either grow their own food or move.
As far as small businesses go, most would wither because of the travel distances involved. I'm 15 miles from "town" and it is unlikely that I would hire someone to come to my place (or go to theirs) in a fuel constrained era - I would have to do it myself (whatever it was) or make do. This is why I've posted so frequently about the necessity of having a broad skill set.
People in cities would be worse off as you note regarding food and fuel for heating. It's not a pretty picture.
Todd
Here in my part of Ky its a 12 mile roundtrip to the closest gas station. My jeep doesn't get great mileage even though its well suited to my needs otherwise(I can pull a disk or a harrow in my garden...haul stuff...etc
But I found that my weekly gas costs are about $60 and I dont' commute to work..I just go get food, visit the lawyer, go to the Doctor, and other small trips.
It eats one at these prices.
I am on a fixed income ..Pension and SS.
I am not really thriving but I am holding my own...
if it gets worse then my life becomes more constrained.
airdale
Airdale - well, we're in the same boat, pension plus SS. But, at the same time we are far better off then 90+% of other people.
We have skill sets for the real world. Look at all the city people who don't know how to take game, fix a motor, build a house, fell a tree or grow food. To me, they're dead meat as time goes by.
We also have lived through hard times and know that making do isn't the end of the world. You and I grew up in a world where a radio was the only entertainment. When I was a kid, our applicances consited of a stove, small fridge and toaster. The old wringer washer was in the basement. Hot water came from a hand-fired little coal unit - you wanted hot water, you built a fire.
We also have the tools necessary to survive. We don't have to buy them (although I have to admit I just bought a couple of spokeshaves - and how many people today even see the value of such a thing). City people wouldn't even know the tools it takes to get along.
I have no doubt we're going to find ourselves constrainted financially but we'll still be a hell of a lot better off then almost everyone else.
Todd
Too true Todd.
This winter during my slack time I intend to start building my beehives. A Nuc hive and a 5 frame langstroth or a 10 frame.
In the spring I will obtain a queen and a swarm , from a neighbor or buy it or whaterver.
In the spring I intend to start building my japanese style forge(just fireclay,sand and gravel and a charcoal retort, to make my own fuel and then set a square anvil. Place a small shed over it out north of my garden.
Then turn my attention to stirling motors fueled by some form of wood gas or ?
Plans , plans and more plans..all interspersed with my usual gardening.
The forge,anvil and charcoal gives me independence from coal and the marketplace to obtain it. Charcoal burns clearner and no clinkers. I intend to start with knives and then whatever else I can think of..maybe fireplace cooking tools.
Anyway thats my plans for the next year. Also a small PV panel. An electric assist bike or a small engine to run on ethanol.
For the last three days I have been consuming a breakfast of honest Amish processed pork sausage. This is the best sausage I have eaten in many many years. Its my opinion that the food industry has lost all semblance of quality in our food products.
Thats why I am also planning on building an outdoor woodfired oven. Based on the Pompeii design.
Good to have plans and be doing something rather than sitting around waiting for TSTHTF.
airdale-Best wishes to the "Class of '57"
Then turn my attention to stirling motors fueled by some form of wood gas or
The last production unit I know of was the ST-5.
http://www.stirling-tech.com/stirlingengine.htm
Next spring I'm on a list to get 3 hives, my first. Looking forward to it. There was a Nature show, or was it Nova, on Colony Collapse Disorder. Scary. In one place in China there are no insect pollenators at all so they do it all BY HAND!!
We've really F***ed this planet.
Richard Wakefield
its climate system included or not?
To some extent yes. But there is still no conclusive evidence on that. As was posted about the precipitation. That's a serious problem for AGW theory.
Sounds like a good plan. What part of KY are you from? I live near Cincinnati, but spend alot of time ancestor hunting in KY.
As someone else just mentioned, I also thought about Colony Collapse Disorder when I read your post. Peak Oil and Peak Honey?
Dpatek,
Hi, I live in what we term the Jackson Purchase area. This is west of the lakes. The soil and strata here is entirely different that that east of the lakes so we are major producers of food crops via row farming. Also we have four major rivers intersecting here. Ohio,Mississippi,Cumberland and the Tennessee. Lots of water. Lots of fishing.I love it.
I do a lot of genealogy research as well , time permitting.
I am 5th generation on my paternal grandfathers side. I am 8th generation on my paternal grandmothers side. My home town was sited on my ancestors military land grant for his service in the War of 1812.
CCD...what I read is that those who practice 'organic beekeeping' do not suffer CCD. Also not transporting hives long distances seem to work as well. We do not have incidents of CCD here locally.
Organic beekeeping? Ok like not putting in huge cell sized foundation, just to get bigger bees and therefore more honey flow. Not discouraging the brood from creating drone cells...since the varrora love to pick on the larger cells of the drones. Not using a lot of chemicals on the hive...
perhaps taking out the frames and foundation and just using a top bar of each frame so they build comb as they do in nature,,not absolutely straight. You might get less honey but the idea is not to force the bees into an unatural habitat and way of life.
Read some of Charles Martin Simon on beekeeping.
Now with irregular comb you can use and extractor but so what? You are not producing for a mass market or any market..just locally and for barter or for your own consumption so many of the 'newer' and more popular methods are affecting the bees life negatively.
BTW C.M. Simon extolls the ability of 'local honey' to allow one to grow immunity to allergies. He is therefore an allergist also. As well as a good fiction and non-fiction writer.
Up the road a friend has always raised bees. He sells just a bit and I keep several quart jars handy. This is who I intend to get my hive from for I can stand right over his opened hives and with no protection or smoke observe them closely with no problems. I can even stick my hand down in the comb if I wished. He wears a veil but I wear nothing.I do have a veil but I have never used it. Around unknown bees I might...but if one listens closely they always give you plenty of warning...that high pitched BUZZZZZ as they circle your head means ..I am getting pissed...watch out...
Guess I have always loved bees from when my uncle used to raise them back when I lived with him a year or so up in the backwoods.
airdale
airdale
you wanted hot water, you built a fire.
Gosh, tell us again how a gas powered hot water heater works! Or how them thar fancy electric ones get their electricity!
Think...pyrolysis stove. No smoke,little fuel,lots of heat. Output is terra preta, a fine ash.
What if the crops are not grown in rows? Consider the methods of Masonobu Fukuoka--Natural Farming:
I am practicing his methods as an experiment in my own backyard, sowing clover and wheat using his methods.
For more information, see his book entitled The One-Straw Revolution at http://tinyurl.com/3b5efl or read about his methods online at http://fukuokafarmingol.info .
Not a cure-all, of course, but an alternative.
Nicely done, H.O. Thanks for reemphasizing the connections fuel availability has to our most basic needs. More reason for the focus of our efforts to be on the re-localization of food production.
I've just begun reading Barbara Kingsolver's book on eating locally and it looks to be a fairly realistic view of what we can expect.
We've purchased a home in a small suburban town where they have had the sense to attempt to build a town center. One reason we chose this area is that it is halfway between two one time agricultural centers linked by a (now unused) rail line. Our hope is that we can encourage and participate in the revitalization of those one time farm communities. One big issue is that much of the old farm land has been "developed." Another is that the aquifer is dropping and the lakes that once supplied these farm communities are now badly polluted. Our efforts now are on establishing a community garden and support of the "farmer's market" that was started just two years ago.
But what I'm getting at is what you have reinforced for me. We are talking about a complete restructuring of our most basic infrastructures like food supply.
EDIT: Ooops! I swear I thought you said you were in New Jersey, but now I don't see it. Pardon my misreading.
------------------------------------------------------
Hi Shaman,
Where are you in Jersey? I'm in Plainfield and I'm trying to figure out how going local will apply to my urban center.
BK
This is flawed logic as it misses a fundemental problem. Rising food prices will mean fewer people able to afford food. The result of which can lead to starvation, or very poor health.
The problem with ethanol is not the technology. The problem with ethanol is that we have reached the carrying capacity to produce enough food. Ethanol is just another "mouth" to feed. And a big mouth to boot. In this situation, fuel as a competition to food is just morally wrong too. One has to wonder what poor people, who cannot afford good food, will do when they see rich people filling their SUV's with ethanol based fuels.
Maybe when the population is considerably lower, down the road, will ethanol production be viable. It may even be a requirement at that time. But not now. The scale of the problem is overwhelming the system.
Richard Wakefield
Pehaps we should discuss if producing biofuels is ethical at the same time we discuss if agricultural subsides and dumping currently done are also so.
People will die from big food prices, but people also die today because of too low food prices.
With the caveat that it's not ethanol, but biodiesel, this is a very good point. However, it requires a finer analysis.
Let's think 100 years down the road, when oil production rates are negligible. Farming could be done using either animal power or biodiesel. (The latter option assumes that crucial inputs to metallurgical industry will have been reserved long ago for really essential uses such as the production and maintenance of farming machinery.) Let's try to figure out which option would be best.
With animals, you need to devote Xa% of the land for feeding them and you get Ya yield.
With biodiesel, you need to devote Xb% of the land for producing it and you get Yb yield.
There is a case for using biodiesel if, and only if,
(100 - Xa) Ya < (100 - Xb) Yb
Eating the tractor will be difficult :-)
Thailand is actively promoting SMALL biogas tractors today. On farm fermentation of human & animal dung + other biowastes produces biogas for cooking and minimal transportation.
An alternative and.or supplement to biodiesel.
Best Hopes for Sustainable Farming,
Alan
Go a collection of links to these small biogas units?
I live in Thailand and have had some small involvement with the development of biogas reactors. The industry is active and commercially viable because Thailand is hot, flat and has a huge agriculture industry (including pig farms, where the first digesters were built).
However, I have seen no evidence that Thailand has made any real efforts to develop biogas fueled tractors. The energy ministry is active in discussing and promoting efforts to develop new technologies and methods, but the list of breakthroughs is quite short.
Currently the preferred use for biogas is a replacement for natural gas in agro-industrial processes. The second-best use is to generate electricity, which is sold into the grid on a favorable basis.
I have friends here who have developed and funded many of Thailand's digesters. I have never heard a claim that biogas is currently so abundant that new markets need to be developed, nor have I heard discussions about tractor development.
A Google search for Thailand Biogas Tractors didn't turn up much.
However, it is an interesting idea.
I have seen pictures with an article about small Thai farms creating enough bio-gas for cooking and compressing for on farm use of a bio-gas tractor.
Said tractor had small wheels and did not cover 1 m2. SWAG was 150 to 200 kg and 1 or 2 cylinder engine.
The article stated that the Thai Gov't was pushing these as a way of isolating the farmers from oil prices, adding value, etc.
This was over a year ago and I could not find the same story again. And like you, I found no other significant stories @ bio-gas tractors, which makes me wonder if the reporter "overstated" the program. Was it just a prototype ?
I did find a week old story where Thailand is preparing for $200/barrel oil.
Alan
Sure. And in a much more localized economy of the future there will be local variables that will change the balance of such equations one way or the other.
Someone noted that using waterways to move food. In some areas that will be logicaly practicle, but other areas won't have such water ways, and hence more liquid fuels will be needed to haul the same load of food.
Bottom line is once we are in FF free fall, food will be everything, and as little as possible will be able to trump food, simply because the starving public will demand it. And as often happens an irrational/demanding/desparate/scared public, often force politicians to make the wrong choices. Such are humans.
Richard Wakefield
Or electricity.
Multi-ton electric combines already exist, so it's been demonstrated that farm machinery could be converted to battery-electric vehicles. Once that has been done, farming is no longer reliant on oil, and can be fuelled from wind, solar, or related sources.
It's a false dilemma to say "oil or powerdown".
It's still oil or power down untill the entire fleat of farm machinary is replace. simply stating 'it's technicly possible' doesn't solve it. After that there is still the mantaince question non of the so called alternitives have been proven to work in absence of the oil driven infrastructure. Like it or not the simplest most cost effective way to survive would be to go back to the pre-industrial form of farming. the taboo though here is realizing that people must die to allow for a smaller population to live.
Of course not, since that's an absurd requirement. It's like saying "no cars have been built in the absence of an English-speaking country, so we don't know if people can build cars without the English language" - it's not feasible to test the proposition in the current world.
What we can do, though, is consider what is actually required to maintain today's infrastructure, consider which part of that uses oil, and consider which part of that can or cannot be replaced.
Already-existing technologies provide the means by which to replace the machinery (with the possible exception of airplanes, although there are tests going on now with hydrogen-powered ones, as well as appropriate synfuels), so that's not an issue.
What are the other concerns? Petrochemicals? NGLs can be used, and coal, at least until those run down. Is it feasible to replace those with biomass, as some packing peanuts for shipping are now made? Maybe - it depends on how much is currently used, and how much will be used once gas and coal start to run down. Asphalt? High-quality motorways can be made with an appropriate concrete (and, in fact, that's becoming relatively common in Germany, I'm told).
What problems do you forsee, other than the difficulties involved in converting?
Whether I like that or not is utterly irrelevant to the fact that you have provided no evidence to back up that assertion.
Indeed, given how eager farmers using pre-industrial methods seem to be to take up post-industrial methods when they can, evidence seems to suggest that you're unlikely to be right.
The plausibility of your assertion is determined by evidence, not by whether you like it or not.
It's not Absurd. it's a simple fact. since the system we are in is based on oil and oil has provided enough energy to make and maintain it's own needed infrastructure to get it + all the extra's. for a alternitive to replace it the alternitive must at least provide the needed energy to make and maintain it's own needed infrastructure. otherwise it will fail when the current infrastrure can't be maintained. To claim otherwise would be trying to stack two boxs three boxes high by pulling out the bottom one and placing it on the top one before it falls.
Natural gas and coal can be used as substitutes but they will run out. plant made plastic is as bad or worse then bio-fuels, since it's mining the currently depelting top soil so you can have faux leather seats. Honestly i do not know where this faith that once 'renewables' are deploied they will some how take care of themselves, do your self a favor and research each alternitive energy source and look at all the systems and systems to make the systems needed just to make them.
True, but very different.
It's absurd to complain that no alternative has been proved in the absence of oil, since there's no feasible way to do so right now. It's entirely reasonable, though, to insist that alternatives be capable of sustaining themselves.
Alternatives such as wind and solar have large EROEI - 20+ - so getting enough energy isn't a problem. If there is a problem, it lies in some other aspect of infrastructural maintenance, and that's why I was talking about whether the infrastructure can be maintained without oil. From the looks of it, there's no real problem.
Other than conversion of the existing stock, of course. That'd be hard to do in a hurry, but a gradual squeeze - which is what I expect - would lead to that being done by natural replacement activities.
There are sustainable ways to grow plants, and they need not be less productive than current methods. They're just less economically efficient, so we don't use them. See, for example, the longitudinal study on organic farming that Cornell's been carrying out for the last 22 years.
Name a major class of ground-based machines that cannot be converted to run on electricity.
I don't expect technologies like wind turbines and solar farms to "take care of themselves" in any sort of abstract sense. I expect them to power an enormous web of machines that will tie together life in the coming decades much as similar machines do so now. Since I can't think of any of those machines which can't be converted to all-electric - with the exception of air and water transport - I don't see any technical barriers to replacing the vast majority of fossil fuel energy use.
If you see some, what are they? Details, not handwaving. What machines cannot be built or run? What pieces of infrastructure cannot be built or repaired?
If you try to drill down to specific problems, I think you'll find most of your complaints are not supported by evidence.
Only in a lower population society, much lower. Converting all current ground based machinery from something else into electrical is a massive undertaking. Just the copper alone will be a problem with our current population.
Reduce the population then it would be feasable to mine the equipment that is laying unclaimed and use it for raw materials.
But to claim that just converting everything to electric now and keep this party going, including increasing population, is only going to push the population crash off into the future when there are many more people. Meaning the crash will be worse.
Richard Wakefield
I know you like to think that's true, but asserting it without a shred of evidence isn't going to convince anyone.
Sure, however, there's a difference between "massive undertaking" and "impossible", and my point is that if you want to claim the latter, you'll need to provide evidence to back that claim up. Building 70M vehicles per year is a massive undertaking, but we keep doing it. At what point does "massive" become "unachievable"?
Credible (e.g., UN, US census) predictions of world population agree it will level off and start declining within 100 years, even in the lots-of-growth-business-as-usual scenario. So this "population crash" you insist must happen is far less inevitable than you suggest.
Pitt,
I suspect you've weighed in previously on the recently updated Limits to Growth work by Meadows and Randers? This work seems to provide a very solid, well supported model which indicates some type of overshoot as the most likely scenario for this century. Could you comment on this or maybe point me to where you have before?
Thanks.
Renewables have some problems, but these do not in all cases include low EROEI.
Such liquid hydrocarbon as is needed by a high-EROEI renewable energy installation such as a CSP plant to operate and to build its successor is much less than the amount it could, if necessary, synthesize by capturing atmospheric CO2, dissociating water, and reacting them.
--- G.R.L. Cowan, hydrogen-to-boron convert
TrueKaiserk, thank you for speaking the sad but inevitable truth. The truth is that even the 1880 US population probably wasn't sustainable long term; Americans ate the bison nearly to extinction and Passenger Pigeons over that edge. Their agriculture was running through thousands of years' accumulation of guano, and potash from burning New England forrests. They burned coal to make steam trains and riverboats, used whale's oil to near extinction, and had started using petroleum.
Mayan prophecy says this is the time for "remembering and recording". I propose that the best response we educated people can have to the coming bottleneck is to record and bury our "[what the] dead see scrolls" for future generations to know and understand what the hell happened here. Have empty 5-gallon lidded buckets and a nearby cave?
PLAN, PLAN, PLANet
Errol in Miami
Yes, I do! We adopted two young children (no comments, please, about me being old enough to be their grandfather) and are intending for them to be the "buckets" into which we pour ideas on how to survive the coming tumult.
When you say "long term", how long is that?
I've always wondered where the bar is set for something to qualify as "sustainable".
I'm thinking ancient Egypt as an good example of a long term sustainable society: 2500 years (longer if you count the time after the culture was driven above the cataracts by cultures with much more exosomatic-energy consumption). They never did overshoot and collapse, but were overrun and driven upstream.
PLAN, PLANt, PLANet
Errol in Miami
"Americans ate the bison nearly to extinction".
No, the herds were driven nearly to extinction by commercial hunters who killed them in massive numbers for their hides. They were considered a nuisance and a hazard to the railroads.
No, the entire fleet of farm machinery does not need replacement. Their engines will need replacement in some cases. But the machinery has lots of metal and plastic and other components aside from the engines.
Also, one potential solution is to use nuclear power to generate hydrogen to use to reduce carbon (e.g. from trees or from coal) to make synthetic liquid hydrocarbons. The cost of synthetic liquid hydrocarbons is the long run upper limit on liquid hydrocarbon prices.
The issue will be can all the combines be converted in time. That in itself will use FF do do so. Scale is the problem with any massive conversion program.
Those who get it done first will be the winners.
The rest, well, loosers with their lives.
Richard Wakefield
Or the winners will feed the losers, in exchange for money. Kind of like how things work now, actually.
There appears to be an enormously black-or-white view of the world being bandied about here, and without supporting evidence that view has a very tenuous connection to reality.
To start with, you might look at how many tractors are used in world agriculture, how much it takes to manufacture each one, and what fraction of world manufacturing capacity that stock represents. That'll give you an idea of how rapidly the world's agricultural machinery could be replaced in a crash program, or what tiny fraction of manufacturing it would take to replace it over a period of years.
No matter how much you're hoping for a dieoff, your wishes have no bearing on whether it's likely.
How/when are we going to know that Pitt?
When are so short of fuel that we then have to manufacture tractors and batteries in enough numbers to save the world.
They will have to compete with all your electric cars and windmills and solar panels you advocate as well.
You have so many "crash programs" running that you will start another economic boom, I wont know where to invest......maybe oil, yes that's it they'll need oil to run the mines, transport and iron foundries and manufacturing business.
All this time I was worrying for nothing.
You misunderstand.
I expect the transition to wind/solar to occur gradually as part of the natural expansion and replacement of electricity generating systems. Indeed, we see that happening already, with wind representing a surprisingly large fraction of new capacity. Moreover, as I've shown before, just 5% of world manufacturing capacity (as compared to the 2-3% used to build electrical capacity currently) would have much of the world's electricity coming from wind within a few decades.
Replacing the vehicle fleet with electric vehicles will, as I've repeatedly pointed out, be a much larger problem. Then again, though, much more in the way of resources will be devoted to it, as around 20% of current manufacturing capacity is devoted to building vehicles, so this is simply another natural and gradual transition.
The point of demonstrating that, for example, a single year of world manufacturing capacity could replace all the electricity generated from fossil fuels with wind energy isn't to argue that we're likely to actually do that, and it'd be incredibly foolish to read it as such. The point is simply to demonstrate the surprisingly-small magnitude of the problem - something that can be done in a single year using all resources can be done in 20 years using 5% of resources.
So you've simply misunderstood.
We don't have a "few decades", Pitt. We're going to need every metal and composite shaping business we've got converted to wind here in very short order, just like we converted everything we had to guns, tanks, and planes in WW II, or we are toast.
4th Turning?
Obviously, I disagree with your alarmist predictions about the immediate future.
In WWII, factories were converted in about a year. Is world production of coal, gas, and oil going to stop a year from now? No. So the time scale we're looking at is longer than the WWII factory conversion turnaround time, meaning something less than a crash program would be sufficient.
Indeed, based on GliderGuider's model of fossil fuel production - which, based on the Energy Watch Group's deeply flawed reports as it is, is almost certain to be pessimistic - we do have decades in which to prepare, albeit decades of rising fossil fuel prices.
That's sort of the point, though: those rising prices will be what drives preparation. As oil has become more expensive, hybrids and EVs have started coming into the mainstream. As gas has become more expensive, fertilizer-from-wind has started being developed. As coal as become more expensive, wind and solar electricity has taken off. As energy has become more expensive, conservation has started moving into the mainstream of the US again, for the first time in decades.
The conversion process started several years ago.
But will it happen fast enough? I don't know that, but I do know that you're quite wrong about needing to convert all metal and composite shaping to wind within a year or two. There is no looming shortage of electricity in the developed world, not within that timeframe. And if you think there is, well, come back with some evidence.
This is true, based only on the energy issues we face. When the economy falls on its behind, which we've all pretty much agreed is inevitable, and we lose another major metro area to climate change, which seems to be happening in Atlanta, things are going to move much faster than those nice, sloping curves we see on graphs here.
Obvious climate issues + massive unemployment + oil price shock + 2008 presidential election adds up to something - we either get some leadership, or we get a disaster in the form of a stinky little warmongering theocratic regime here in the U.S. coming out of the shadows and formally declaring their shadow coup.
That you believe something does not make it true.
Evidence?
Yeah - "unlikely".
While further oil price increases are likely in 2008, a tanking of world production is not. The "usual suspects" for that - Russia and Saudi Arabia - are displaying precisely the opposite signs of a production collapse (strong production growth for the former, and strong production increase with the higher quota for the latter). Without that kind of tanking, we're not likely to see a price shock any more severe than what we're seeing right now, which has hardly made a ripple in the world economy.
Massive unemployment is similarly unlikely, as the US is currently enjoying unusually low unemployment (under 5%), and that tends to change relatively slowly. It'll rise, of course, as the subprime thing keeps shaking out, but there's very little evidence it'll rise hugely.
As for obvious climate change issues, well, the climate moves rather more slowly than your timescale would suggest. What do you expect to happen in the next 11 months that's different from what's happened in the last 10 years in terms of climate? Atlanta's drought? While it's certainly severe, drought is neither new nor particularly newsworthy, and the duration of city's water supply appears to have increased to 4-5 months from just 3 months 1.5 months ago.
So I really think you're overplaying things.
with all due respect to the "elder"...
if you add up all your solutions for the future we will require 2 or three times the amount of LEAD that the world has already produced. Everything I read says that that resource is already strained. Sorry no links
Is this possible?
I sure hope Pitt is right. It would make life for my grandchildren tolerable, maybe bright. But he no more has a crystal ball that those of us who subscribe to a crash.
No one knows what's going to happen until it does.
I'm all in favour of doing what we can for those in the furture who may not have the energy resources to make life easier for themselves.
But there are some things that one can predict, albeit in general terms.
-- the population cannot continue to increase. Immigration cannot continue to increase from developing countries to developed. If you disagree then ask yourself if the US can house and feed a billion people. As one says to a hooker, we agree she's a hooker, just at what value it makes her that. So at what number the population will go before a crash is the only real debatable subject.
-- things tend to follow what in biology is known as Punctuated Equilibrium. Things stay nice a steady as the pressure builds. The system can absorb the pressure for a while (like $90 oil), but then the system breaks once the pressure goes over a threashold. Then decades of bordom gets replaced by a few short years of terror as things radically change until the next equilibrium phase.
-- hope there are no major resource wars. We are living in a relative time of peace these last 60 years, but that is starting to change already. Young people today have not tasted war on a large scale, so have no clue as to what is involved. If a major war breaks out over oil (and I have my eye on China for that, and I'll plug my manuscript thank you, hoping to get it published soon.), all bets for any future smooth changes like Pitt hopes for are all off as we gear up for war.
-- the future when it arrives nearly always suprises everyone.
Richard Wakefield
Only if you make the assumption that population cannot level out on its own. Based on serious demographic projections, though, that's a very bad assumption to make.
The current misadventure in Iraq should have done a pretty fine job of convincing people that military action will tend to lower, not raise, oil production, and that force is much better at denying oil to someone else than in obtaining it for yourself.
I'm not refering to the US. But China. China has a very nasty track record of people as cannon fodder when it wants to get what it wants. Still with the millions who died in WWII, the millions who died through Stalin's rule, we still had the baby boom that vastly over compensated for that loss.
And I ask, how will the population on it's on level off. What's the mechanism? How will it be applied to the entire planet including places that encourage population increasing?
Richard Wakefield
can you elaborate a bit on that "nasty track record"?
Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution, for a start. The former killed tens of millions of people, the latter almost killed millennia of culture.
now imagine what would the world be like today had the mentioned events not happened and Deng XiaoPing and/or other "pro-capitalists" got their way - to let the Chinese people get rich and pursue the western life style including the private car ownership - a good 10 or 20 years earlier? would we still be here talking about the whens and ifs of PO and ACC? about that "millennia of culture" being "almost killed", wouldn't the PO/ACC and subsequent collapse of the modern (westernized) world - as you feared of and, especially, had it occurred some 10 or 20 years earlier - have killed the millennia of culture more definitely and completely? would your future "dead sea scroll" equivalent or your "manuscript" have been written some 10 or 20 years ago?
'nh3' seems to assume a half-billion car-driving Chinese would not have ended up driving NH3(l) cars whose NH3 was produced using non-carbon primary energy.
--- G.R.L. Cowan, hydrogen-to-boron convert
if only would they have done that, would we still be here discussing these issues relating to China? if pursuing the American way of life - the nonnegotiable kind - is the goal, should one, then, assume differently?
Korean war too. They sent in waves and waves of soldiers against UN forces in an attempt to overwhelm by sheer numbers. In some cases UN troops simply ran out of ammo and then overrun.
Richard Wakefield
Doesn't matter. The available evidence is that using military force will lead to less oil production. Even if China doesn't give a damn about its soldiers, it's still a counterproductive thing to do.
There's a very lengthy discussion of this on the UN's population and demographics site, right beside those population projections. The short form is that prosperity lowers birth rates.
And the UN itself says we will get to 9 billion, that still a 50% increase. You haven't answered where they will all go.
And we know where prosperity is headed, down.
I won't believe anything the UN says until it actually happens. They have a nasty habbit of being political and and often very wrong (as well as impotent in world affairs). They have zero credibility.
Richard Wakefield
The UN gives a very extensive list.
I disagree, for reasons covered in GliderGuider's recent article on exergy's effect on the economy. The short form is that even pessimistic assumptions about fossil fuel production and business-as-usual assumptions about alternative-energy production leave us with enough exergy that continued improvements in efficiency of production at historical rates will leave the world with a higher real GDP per capita than it has now.
There's no guarantee that'll happen, of course, but it seems the most likely situation, since it's based on things turning out more optimistic than "medium pessimistic".
Such as?
That you believe something does not make it so.
Not that that's any reason to discount their research.
They have more than anyone here does.
If you're going to ignore their research without giving any evidence that it's wrong, feel free, but realize that you're being unreasonable and irrational in doing so, and that people will discount what you say accordingly.
Not true, but it doesn't matter - we're in the fortunate position of having a wide variety of alternatives to lead-acid batteries, particularly nickel-based and lithium-based, although also zinc-based, to take up the burden. Since producing hundreds of millions of electric cars to replace the world's future fleet would take decades anyway, requiring decades to obtain the necessary battery metals really isn't a problem.
Besides, I'd like to think that electrified trams and buses would help displace some of those future cars. That may be wishful thinking on my part, though.
Only due to the sudden run-up in demand. Up until at least 2004, lead prices were low ($0.40-$0.50/lb, about half their inflation-adjusted price in the 70's), so the recent spike in demand, plus some unexpected supply difficulties (contamination in Australia and export duties in China) should make it hardly surprising there's a short-term crunch. But there's very little indication that the world is going to run out of lead any time soon - deposits that are economic or nearly so account for about 140Mt.
The most interesting statistic in that 2005 USGS summary is probably that 89 per cent of lead was produced by old battery recycling and that 88 per cent was used in production of new batteries - a nearly perfect balance at that time. Presumably, the recent runup in price was mainly caused by the sudden need for new batteries for new cars in China, India, Russia, etc.
Lead in most large mines is produced in conjunction with silver (with the silver accounting for most of the value) and zinc (as a separate associated mineral, pricier than lead). Once lead was outlawed as the pigment in white paint, supply (as a by-product of silver and/or zinc mining) tended to exceed the demand, accounting for the low price. This history could reverse temporarily if battery demand (as for electric cars) suddenly increases many times again, inasmuch as there are rather few lead mines as such (other than a few small survivors in the mid-continental USA). That is, supply could prove inflexible, at least in the short term (a problem with many metals).
Of US production only. Of world production, about half is new.
I'd argue that supply is already proving inflexible - hence the price runups - and hence is already pushing people towards developing new lead resources.
Sufficient metal supplies for electric car batteries aren't a short-term problem anyway, though, since building that many cars in the short term isn't feasible.
Agree about the price runups, disagree about the probable result. Rather than developing new lead resources, which process might take 10-20 years, what might happen at existing mines is one or more of the following: 1) hire more miners to increase the number of 8-hour shifts per day from 1 or 2 to 3; 2) mine and process the higher grade ores while prices remain high to maximize profits; 3) modify the mill circuits to enlarge recovery of whatever metal is bringing the highest price, perhaps at the expense of recovery of other metals (note: this metal will NOT be lead in most cases - zinc and silver have increased even more in price).
Inasmuch as demand for new lead for batteries in a mature automotive economy is small, owing to recycling, and lead prices remain comparatively low, new lead mines in the USA would be especially unlikely (even discounting environmental objections). Finally, speaking as reader of TOD, how many additional cars will be on the road in 10-20 years?
Note: New zinc and/or silver mines, producing by-product lead, are more probable.
You're assuming that the amount of lead per car remains roughly the same. This assumption could be wildly wrong:
Pity the crystal ball is so hazy....
I have been wondering for a while about the abruptness many people assume change will take, and my best explanation is that many people confuse nuclear war (which would indeed cause a number of very abrupt changes) with any other process which will force societies to live differently.
Apart from the fairly standard American faith in the apocalypse, of course.
I think its because the pressure to change will increase gradually but most people (in the developed world) will ignore that pressure until it build up and something snaps.
Add to that the developing world who are not just resisting that change but activly working against it. Ie the rapid development of India and China and their growing energy demands.
So the change will be abrubt, but the forces behind it will be gradual.
Based on what do you say that? Does the rapid increase in wind power not represent change? Or the growing push to making hybrid and all-electric vehicles mainstream? Or the push for higher fuel efficiencies? Or the documented drop in SUV and truck sales as gas prices rise? Or renewed interest in heat pumps for space heating? Or...
If you think the pressures of higher oil and gas prices are being ignored, you haven't been looking.
Just can't let this doozy by without a comment. IMO the way thing work now is based on the maxim 'might makes right.' In many cases it is physical might in the form of weaponry. In most cases, I suspect, it is economic might, teamed up with the physical might.
Ever since the dawn of agriculture, the rich have been enslaving the poor. This is how winners vs losers continues to work. The rich-owned propaganda machine would, of course, have one believe that the poor are losers of entirely their own making and that the rich are the 'producers.' IMO Ayn Rand had it backwards.
That is one of the things I do dread when the new era starts up. I'm sure such things will restart and we will return to feudalism and slavery.
One of the greatest virtues, in my opinion, of this civilization is the freedom and democracy we have. Oh, I can hear the moaning now. But I'll take this flawed system over the others that have existed in the past, and still exists in places, any day. The fact I have the free will to do what I want without living in fear of being ratted out by a greedy neighbour is quite comforting.
I really hope we can rebuild a society that is free and demoractic. If you want to reduce or prevent people from hoarding wealth, then what you need is an attitude change. make such behavour as a "sin". People who try to become weathly at the expence of the rest should be shunned. Canada used to have small communities just like that. Immigrants who started communities were free, there was often no money, and people worked for the betterment of the entire community. I kind of Star Trekian society as it were.
That only works when the group is small and everyone knows everyone else and depends on everyone else for something.
But that's just my wishful thinking. Probably just that...
Richard Wakefield
That's very nice, but it ain't the dawn of agriculture anymore.
What we have now are millions of Americans who left or whose ancestors left farms because they were being out-competed, a small number of "winners" who still run farms, and the biggest problem being too much food.
Those with farms feed those without, for money. That's a fact in the US today, class-based rants notwithstanding.
The enslavement aside, many poor people in the world starve to death today. Is there a shortage of food in the world? No, there is a substantial surplus of food. The problem is that rich people - that's us - rather throw away food than give it to the starving poor for free. Every year 15 million children die of hunger. Around 800 million people suffer from the effects of near starvation. It's the principle of the thing. If they can't pay, they starve. I don't think this will change anytime soon.
I'm not hoping for a crash. I'm not a mass murderer. But I understand population dynamics. All populations crash when they overshoot their carrying capacity. (Gee, we've been here before.)
If it isn't because of oil depletion, it will be something else in the future. There is no way the planet can keep this population increase going indefinitely. And don't give me that level off suggestion as that too is rather short on evidence.
Richard Wakefield
Are you unfamiliar with the nation of Germany? Or Japan? Or Russia? Or practically the entire industrialized world, once you strip out immigration?
If you think there isn't evidence for human populations levelling off naturally, that's nothing more than a gap in your knowledge. I'd recommend you look into demographics a little more before you try arguing what does or does not have evidence supporting it.
What is happening is immigration is increasing the population of the developed countries from the developing countries, which in turn leaves space for more people in developing countries. Specifically India, China and Africa. If the population is starting to level off now then how come the UN's own prediction is 9 billion? That's nearly 50% more than who's here today. Where do you think that 50% more will end up? China alone is looking at 150 MILLION environmental refugees in the next 10 years that will have to leave the country. The US ready to accept them all?
Richard
Actually, all three of the countries I mentioned have declining populations, even with immigration.
Because it hasn't finished levelling off, and there's a great deal of momentum.
Evidence?
Interview with China's ambassador to Canada. That's what he said, to the suprise of the interviewer.
And you can guarrentee that? That it would not contiune?
I don't think we will even get to be able to test that. Long before then we will be in population free fall. The mechanisms of which have been discussed here.
Richard Wakefield
Link? Google turned up nothing.
Of course not. All serious long-term population predictions agree that population will level off this century, though, so it's silly to rant about the effects of exponential population growth. It's not exponential, and hasn't been for about 20 years now - the rate of increase is actually slightly sublinear, as the number of people added per year has dropped by 5-10%.
As Pitt states:
Are you unfamiliar with the nation of Germany? Or Japan? Or Russia? Or practically the entire industrialized world, once you strip out immigration?
If you think there isn't evidence for human populations levelling off naturally, that's nothing more than a gap in your knowledge.
==============
You might find that populations quoted are not stabilising for "natural" reasons.
If I wanted to pick recent histories not to have, those 3 would be it - and China, the other one that is "levelling off naturally". Find me somewhere untraumatized as evidence.
Don't be absurd. For Germany and Japan, at least, they're declining because the birth rate is well below the replacement rate - that much is undeniable - and all indications are that that lowered birth rate is due to prosperity and education, especially of women.
If you're trying to imply that WWII has something to do with this, you're going to need to break out some evidence to support that kind of wild claim.
You realize that excludes almost the entire world, don't you?
Multi-ton electric combines already exist
Do you have a cite for that?
I linked to the manufacturer's page for one during a discussion of electric vehicles and how large they could get, but the link took a while to find and was some months ago, so it wouldn't be trivial to re-find.
If I get a chance I may root through old stories and look for it, but if you're impatient then just opening the stories where I've posted and doing a search for "combine" or "tractor" would probably do it.
We already have an example of post peak oil living in the Amish here is Iowa. They seem to survive quite nicely and even prosper. The technique they use is local value added production such as dairy farming and wood work. They hire the local heathen to transport them and do energy intensive things. Many times I've seen several Amish arrive at the local Aldi store in a large pickup truck driven by a neighbor. They do their monthly shopping all at once and in bulk. The solution is to have just a few of the energy consuming items. There will always be some rich enough and willing to rent their gas guzzlers out partly because they will have to.
In regard to distances in the transport of cereals, it is a rule of thumb here that no ethanol plant should be within 50 miles of another one. However it is getting difficult to find good locations because a lot of the best locations are already taken. It seems to me that obtaining gas for remote locations is not that difficult. We have several small towns around here with no gas station. People just fill up at the larger towns when they go shopping. In remote areas they will have to learn to do what I do. Fill up as many red plastic gas cans as you can carry with each trip.
I use them mostly as a hedge when I notice that the price of gas is about to jump.
What about solar power tractors/transport?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R26RdfqGvUE
http://solarcarandtractor.com/
You forget that draft animals reproduce themselves. Tractors do not. Creating tractors from scratch, using only renewable energy sources, will be a daunting task.
What part of building a tractor cannot be done using electricity as the energy source?
Ground vehicles can be made electric, so the materials can be mined. Metals can be processed, refined, and smelted electrically (arc furnace). Most factories are run on electricity already.
Exactly what part of a tractor's supply chain do you believe cannot be powered by electricity?
Our civilization is extremely diverse and complex. To make a blanket statement that every process can ultimately use electricity mean you must have some omni-knowledge of every aspect of all manufacturing of everything in the world.
I guarantee that you arn't. And that means there will be vital processes that cannot be done just with electrical power alone without FF.
Don't ask me what because I'm not omni-knowledgable. But the world is full of suprizes. Though a good place to start is "How It's Made".
Richard Wakefield
Is something I haven't done.
What I have done is ask people who are making an assertion - that the world needs oil to function and it can't be replaced - to put up or shut up. Needs it where? Needs it how?
If people are going to make claims like that, they should be prepared to back them up.
Actually there is a process where FF is vital for the production of a major product.
The bitumen from the tar sands requires natural gas at high temperature and pressure to crack the bitumen into smaller molecules. Electricity on its own can't do that. It has to be natural gas.
I suspect, but would have to check, that cement manufacturing, which also uses natural gas for the chemical process, could be included in a process that cannot be done on electrical power alone.
Richard Wakefield
Electrolysis can provide the hydrogen for upgrading (or just about any other use of hydrogen).
Besides, if the challenge is "what can't be done without fossil fuels?", the production of more fossil fuels is pretty irrelevant.
Cement manufacture is a high temperature solid state reaction. It requires heat, not carbon. You can make cement using just electricity.
You can also make cement by chemical means. It is more expensive, stronger, and can be higher quality in terms of tensile strength. You can also preciptate calcium and magnesium ions to get "seacrete" if you want preforms.
You could also make cement from impure limestone simply by roasting it with a solar lens or mirror. This might sound "green" but really isn't. When you produce cement by roasting (by whatever heating method, including natural gas combustion), you release the carbon dioxide in the limestone (which is mainly calcium carbonate) to make the calcium silicates and aluminates that constitute cement. That is, for each atom of calcium, you must release a molecule of carbon dioxide.
No it doesn't (time for you to review some chemistry!). It requires hydrogen, which is most cheaply made from natural gas. Hydrogen can be made from water and carbon, and I have found news items talking about plans to gasify bitumen (producing a syngas of CO and H2 which can be further processed to just H2) to produce the hydrogen to upgrade the rest.
Tractors can also be run on things which even a draft animal cannot use for food (wood chips), and do not need to be fed when they aren't working. We'll have plenty of tractors for quite some time even if we stop building them today; all they require is a conversion to fuel gas and a gasogene to make it, and you have a workable (albeit inconvenient) alternative to petroleum for cultivation and harvest.
Hello HO,
Thxs for this keypost and my chance to comment.
IMO, the long term trend is for FFs' price to rise to the equivalent human-power value; one barrel of crude=25,000 hours of human labor.
Thus, my many postings on wheelbarrows and bicycles as a strategic postPeak need for leveraging human effort. A human, on a bicycle with baskets, can easily pedal the human porter load [tlameme] of 55 lbs of maize a hundred kilometers in a single day. Basically, a tripling of the distribution spiderweb's effective radius compared to a porter on foot, or using draft animals.
If larger loads are desired, but more time/distance is optimal: a foot porter using a well-balanced wheelbarrow, or a following trailer, over a smooth surface can probably transport 4 X 55, or 220 lbs of maize 30 kilometers per day.
The reverse is also true: the bike or barrow porter can haul equivalent pounds of fuel or non-substitutable NPK from the urban cluster back out to the rural areas as required on the return trip. High value, light items such as medicines can obviously be distributed over an even larger radius; e.g. 5 lbs of vital antibiotics can be pedaled much farther than 55 lbs of grains.
Lastly, my SpiderWebRiding proposal can further leverage this human-efficiency scheme: a steel wheel railbike or railbarrow can add additional distributional geo-radius, and possibly offers packet-networking whereby 'pipeline pigs' could be used internal to the pipes to remove the need for much human effort.
Bob Shaw in Phx,Az Are Humans Smarter than Yeast?
As an additional refinement to my SpiderWebRiding Proposal:
In the rural farm areas where irrigation water is plentiful and required, and evaporation rates are low, it becomes possible to make open, rectangular concrete or stone aqueducts sized for the standard webriding narrow gauge. Then bolting the webrails atop these aqueducts is easily accomplished. This then allows a railbike to easily pull a heavily grain laden canoe for max. transport efficiency to the railhead endpoints of Alan Drake's RR & TOD proposals. It also facilitates the reverse of moving bulk NPK, FFs, urban compost, and bulky or long objects back out to the rural areas.
Bob, at least in this particular example you gave, humans are indeed smarter than yeast.
As a long-time bike messenger, I can attest to the viability of the bicycle as a tool for personal transportation as well as for moving small goods.
However I think you might be a bit hopeful here with your estimations of the potential for hauling sizable loads via foot or bicycle. Hauling 55 lbs (on a 25-30 lb. bicycle) for 60 miles would be a daunting task for all but a very small percentage of people, most of whom would be hard-pressed to ride 100k without any load at all. Riding 60 miles with that load would likely take at least 5 hours (leaving a four-hour return trip) and would require the consumption of no small amount of fuel in the form of food (currently the price of that food in dollars is likely to be greater than the price of the amount of gas required to drive that distance). Hauling anything long-distance by bicycle is my idea of a good time, but I don't think it will make much practical sense compared to other options, if those options are available. For movement within cities, the bicycle is unbeatable. It's been that way since the bike was invented and it's likely to become even more obvious in a post-PO world.
As for walking any distance with 220 lbs. -- no way. Just a few kilometers with that much weight is enough, even with a hand cart designed for the task. This is something I know all too well.
To combine a few of your points, the Vietnamese used bicycles to great effect in their several decades of war against the French and the US, by loading them with rice and supplies (I believe about 100-150 lbs.) and pushing them through the jungle to the front lines. They were pretty dedicated, though.
Robert
I've done this as a quick calculation for my own area. For us up here in the London area, we need about 1 acre of land per person to be self suffient in food (storing over the winter and spring). Including the population from the surrounding areas, London would need an area about 30 miles in radius.
Problem is that it's also needed by neighbouring cities to the west and east where the required land overlaps.
This does not include in any way the requirements of the Golden Horseshoe.
I think that this is a clear indication that without FF's for moving food to high density areas that we are well beyond the carrying capacity.
Railways will need to be rebuilt big time, and more ships in the Great Lakes to move food from the prairies. But even then how much longer can this population be supported, let alone increasing population.
Richard Wakefield
Heading Out wrote:
Except that most major U.S. cities are on water. And food has been shipped by water in huge quantities for thousands of miles for thousands of years.
So, what's with the 30km?
I'm beginning to see a change in the common man's perception of the fuel shortage problem and hope this will lead to a smoother transition to a post-oil, world society.
People in rural areas are resourceful and will find a way to deal with the transition. Those in the city, I'm afraid, will try to ride it out, looking to their leaders for answers. This will create a chasm between rural and city dwellers as the reality of the situation creeps in like a cold wind through the cracks.
My father, who grew up during the Great Depression, said, there was plenty of food, but no money. Everyone traded and bartered. There was also plenty of work on the farms, as long as you didn't expect to get money in return for your work.
Most of the older folk, with whom I'm acquainted, who lived during those times, were extremely resourceful. They possessed a large complement of adages designed to promote self-reliance and cooperative living.
I'm sure if we look at the farmer, as a single entity, the picture looks glum. Most farmers tend to be cooperative. I'm sure they will allocate acreage to grow fuel crops and develop a central fuel production system to help them facilitate the use their equipment.
As in the days of the Great Depression, those in the city, who have never had to work as common labor will end up in the soup lines. A strong government will form and come up with ways to keep everyone busy, (idle hands do the devil's work). A new pecking order will evolve.
The hardest hit, will be undeveloped countries fraught with violence. Their story will be even more horrific, as the worlds ability to intervene in international affairs becomes too costly.
The wind is free. I'm sure sailing,augmented with our modern technology, will become an honest and fashionable means of transporting goods from one location to another. Wind generators will prevail as the ultimate means of generating electricity. As in the pre-oil era, electricity will become the central energy source of the world and we can reinstate its exploitation.
Manufacturing will move, along with capital, toward those locations that possess good wind, geothermal and hydromatic resources. Politicians will secure a civil environment conducive to business and erect a military structure to protect those areas. In fact, the markets are shifting, or have such notions in the planning stages.
Of course, this future is only probable if countries do not use their nuclear tools to devastate one another by crippling the oil rich countries ability to wage war. There will be a rush (and it is already happening), to stake out those resources necessary to sustain a simple, post-oil, productive world-market, as well as maintain working military structures.
There will be intermediate solutions and long term ones. I'll put my money on the farmer's ability to overcome times of manufacturing famine. I think we can all agree, that the change to a post-oil, world order will be a traumatic one, with few easy rides to the other side.
I've noticed many older members of this site like to point out that they and many others survived the depression just fine -- as if this experience can translate directly to today's circumstances. I think we have a very poor match.
What was the earth's human population at that time? Half of our current population?
How much land has been lost to soil erosion since then? How many wetlands have been destroyed since then? How depleted are the oceans now? How much have we drained from the aquifers since then? How many people were farmers back then?
The times, they have a changed, and all nostalgic forays aside, we are looking at a much more difficult situation.
more like 3x
Estimated population in 1930 - 2 billion
http://www.census.gov/ipc/www/worldhis.html
World population - 6.6 billion
http://www.census.gov/main/www/popclock.html
The situation is very different, but those who survived the Great Depression have a leg up on those who only know how to push buttons on a keyboard and microwave things bought prepackaged at a grocery store.
Could be we'll tumble a good ways further back than 1940 in terms of our lifestyles, but those in possession of Depression era survival skills have a big leg up on those starting from scratch.
I can't speak for all of the old farts here, although I think they would agree with the following:
We, not the younger people (and I'll say people under 55), know with far more certainty that times have changed. We are the ones who know that the skill sets of the vast majority of people in the US are not worth crap when it comes to what will be needed.
You say, "I've noticed many older members of this site like to point out that they and many others survived the depression just fine -- as if this experience can translate directly to today's circumstances. I think we have a very poor match." You don't know jack shit since you obviously weren't there. As I noted above, old farts are far more cognizant of the changes because we actually experienced them.
Finally, it is my impression that it is the old farts who anticipate a die off not some kind of transition like younger people. Why is that? Well, it certainly isn't because we may be dead when it all comes down but rather because we have a deep understanding of the kind of psychological and economic adaptation that will be necessary. I see no reason to believe they will occur.
Todd
I agree with Todd.
But let me add my thoughts to the picture.
I just picked up a nice Woodmaster woodburing stove..with two nice grates and a thermostatically controlled damper and ash pan below.
I traded some left over diesel from my storage tank for it.
So I can put it up in my barn this summer and next winter or when bad times come...pickup enough deadfall in the woods to
keep it fired up enough. I can keep a cast iron pot on the top and cook soup or white beans and keep a kettle of hot water. I can cook ashpones as well. I can also hack up some pyrolysis cooking stoves and a stirling engine(if they can do appreciable work). I can work a forge and anvil with homemade charcoal. I can barter work.
I have some seed saved, enough to 'make' my garden.
I have a two closet full of warm clothes and two down comforters and lots of homemade quilts.
I can winter over and I can survive. I can shot some squirrels in the woods for the occassional meat.
So you keep warm, you sleep at nite ok and you have something to eat. According to Thoreau thats enough.
When its get right down to the nub and gets rough...well I was there when the depression was tailing off and we lived pretty much like above. Cold bedrooms and one big woodburner in the main part of the house. No electricity.All cooking on a woodburning range. Drew water out of a cistern We went to bed when it got dark and got up when it got light.
This is not an unknown to me and those who are my age and lived a rural lifestyle or perhaps even small town lifestyle.
For the yuppies and the younger genxers? They haven't a clue...not a clue. They won't do well. IMO of course.
If your warm at nite and get a good sleep it doesn't matter if the room is 50 degrees or colder. You get up and kindle up a fire in the morning and cook some grits, do the chores and life goes on.
I can do all this or else roll over and die. I chose the former.
airdale-been there, done it and not bragging either
thank you for that moonstroller - that is what I like to see is some fleshing out of the bottleneck and imediate after affects.
A hearty Sarconol CHEERS to ya!
The Balclutha
This ship is currently moored at San Francisco's Hyde Street Pier. She is a steel-hulled sailing vessel that was in commercial use hauling food and other products very long distances until 1930.
In other words, many of our parents lives overlapped with the tail end of the age of sail for food shipping. And more importantly, the age of sail massively overlapped the fossil fuel age.
I toured this ship a couple of months back. The guide explained that there were no romantic notions involved in keeping the ship going commercially up to 1930. She still made good business sense. The economics were still there up to that point.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balclutha_%281886%29
Hello George Asebius,
Thxs for the link--all the more reason why we need to get started with Earthmarines to ferociously protect tall trees' habitats, and encourage reforestation and NPK fertilization that will optimize the global warming migration northward of these essential trees, so that we can later harvest them for shipmasts, yardarms, and other naval gear. When FF-manufactured rope becomes wildly over-priced: hemp plantations for rope-making is essential too.
Yes, they were! In Finland, too, where sail ships were used up to the second world war.
And the germ forms of the return are there already. For instance, Estelle, a 53 meter bermuda schooner does trips to Africa in the name of Fair Trade. The crew is largely composed of volunteers. They take stuff like sewing machines and clothes to Africa, and bring coffee etc. back.
See:
http://www.yle.fi/d-projekti/arkisto/paasarja/99estelle.html
and (in Finnish)
http://fi.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estelle
The number by Drennan and Hassig on the effective overburden of a human transporter is just not plausible. I'll call BS on that number. Yes I probably should read the source before I comment but I'm pretty sure that this is the same problem that all EROEI calculations have. There is no clear demarcation where the boundary should be set. Why is there a necessity that the human porter have a family? Slaves and peasants that are too poor to marry can provide this service more cheaply.
This source quotes Drennan as providing a figure of 31 days for how long a human porter can travel on food he's carrying.
We can reality-check these numbers by looking at the experiences of long-distance ("thru") hikers. They burn about 5,000cal for 20mi of distance in relatively rough terrain (the Appalachian Trail has 100 vertical miles in 2200 horizontal miles) with about 40-50 pounds of gear. At about 1,500cal/lb, 40 pounds of grain could take the person roughly 250 miles in just under two weeks.
That's someone hiking for leisure. Professional porters, such as those in Alaska and the Yukon during the gold rush, would often carry 80 pounds. The extra weight would add relatively little to calories burned, suggesting that it is not unreasonable for a human to set out with a month's food and travel over 500 miles in that time.
That doesn't mean it makes any economic sense to do so, of course, but the energy limits on human foot travel are not nearly so tight as Gill appears to suggest. Especially when one takes into account the huge mechanical advantage of wheeled transport - even something as simple as a rickshaw - it's not at all clear that human power could not transport large amounts of food relatively long distances overland.
Not that it'd need to - there's a reason most major cities are built on rivers, after all.
He was calculating food requirements for the porter AND his family.
Which is, of course, utterly absurd - why would the family come for the trip? And if they did, why aren't they carrying anything? That's simply not the way this kind of thing worked, at least in recent times (e.g., Yukon Gold Rush).
It's a nonsensical calculation, so of course it gives nonsensical results. I was just trying to point out that better data exists, and that a little bit of calculation confirms the superiority of that data.
Pitt, if the porter doesn't have a family, pretty soon us pampered folks run out of porters. Or were you counting on a steady supply of new slaves? That's basically how the Roman economy prospered.
Someone has calculated that a barrel oil contains 25,000 man-hours of human exertion, and therefore called oil "energy slaves". This is a useful concept to remember while riding Hubber's Roller-Coaster of Fate.
PLAN, PLANt, PLANet
Errol in Miami
Irrelevant - there's no need for the porter's family to come along on short trips. How often do truckers bring their families in their 18-wheelers?
Misleading statistic - not all Wh are created equal, and those present in fossil fuels are used in a notoriously inefficient manner.
Pitt, you give the impression of being a smart guy, but then you go and ruin it. ;)
What happens when the porter dies?
Hes dead and someone else takes his job. That someone else could be a younger son of a farmer who wants to pass the farm on intact to his oldest son. The porter doesn't need to have a family just like priests don't need to have families for there to be priests.
Are you sure you're replying to the correct post?
If the porter dies, then someone else takes his job. Like his son, who was safely back at his home while he was out on his trip, much like a trucker who dies today might be replaced by his own son.
Why are people having such trouble with the idea that a porter's family doesn't need to dog his heels 24/7?
I believe that the original thought was that the porter was going to go and get food for the family, and this imposes the limit on how far he can travel, with how much, and how fast it is consumed. Remember, in times of drought, if there is no longer food in the stores, then someone has to go and get it for the family.
We are measuring the spare productive output of a family unit, not the porter. Obviously, the family unit is the minimum unit required to replace itself, as well as have spare production.
Surely you get that.
Actually, I hadn't until the middle of my last post.
Nevertheless, it's still a deeply flawed way to calculate transportation effectiveness, since it assumes the rest of the family unit has no productive output.
If a farming village can spare one adult member of each family for a total of one month a year - on a rotating basis and as dictated by labour requirements of the agricultural season - then it can supply 5-6% its number in city dwellers in a city 150km away. That minor loss in productivity - lost when it's needed least, mind you - is much less than was enforced by medieval European holy days or levies, and yet would be sufficient to supply a city 5 days walk away.
Now, perhaps there's particular reasons why that didn't work in the Mayan case, but the 3.3-day figure is simply not applicable to human transport in general.
As I recall, the Europeans had horses and the Mayans didn't. The Mayans and other Native American cultures relied heavily on human transportation AIUI. Of course, given enough time, we could go back to real horsepower, but the level of available power would be rather low, compared with that we now enjoy due to fossil fuels.
Also, I recall the settlement patterns in the early days of the U.S., such as Georgia. Georgia is the largest state east of the Mississippi and there are some 156 counties. The reason for all those small counties was that the county seat was located near the middle of the county such that the towns were within a day's ride by horseback starting from any point in the county. My mother grew up in Western KY and mentioned the family outings to the local county seat on Saturdays. The trip (about 10 miles one way) took all day by horse drawn carriage.
E. Swanson
Michigan: 96,810 sq mi
Florida: 65,758 sq mi
Georgia: 59,441 sq mi
Michigan: 96,810 sq mi
Florida: 65,758 sq mi
Georgia: 59,441 sq mi
Source: http://www.enchantedlearning.com/usa/states/area.shtml
Another old-brain factoid displaced. Was it a left over from the high school history class? Should it have been, "Largest of the original 13 colonies"? Oh well, my bad.
Not bad. See here:
http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0108355.html
That Enchanted Learning site list state areas "including water". By land area only, GA is the biggest...
A lot of that 96,810 sq mi of Michigan is large portions of Lakes Michigan, Huron, and Superior.
True. Should it "count" or not? In terms of their chunk of the surface area of the globe, I guess it does.
The 25,000 man hours of exertion often sited here are really 25,000 moron hours of labor.
Seriously - the direct conversion between the two is just silly. Sure, I can only plant 1/4th acre using my fingers and toes to dig ... but I'll get a sharp stick if I can't find anything else ... and I am sure there is a ratty ol' hoe in one of our outbuildings.
We're losing easy access to fossil fuel, we're not losing our common sense, nor the accumulated wisdom of how to do things by hand which is easily accessible for those with older relatives ... or Google.
Some people so enjoy the prospect of huge disastrous collapse that they are willing to fantasize about an eminent death of common sense or of technological capability in order to make their expectation of collapse seem more plausible.
But we aren't going to lose huge amounts of accumulated technology just because the price of oil goes way up. We have plenty of ways to generate energy from non-fossil fuel sources at a price. Granted, the prices are much higher. But a society run on solar, wind, and nuclear power would have at least half the living standard we have now and eventually something better than we have now.
The transition will bring some pains though.
Much of the debate here is about how successful and viable will we be by transitioning from abundant fossil fuels to a scarcity of fossil fuels and alternatives such as wind, solar, nuclear, geothermal, biomass, etc. While I guess it would be useful to know what kind of existence we could or will have under such a scenario, much of the debate seems pointless and a waste of energy. I don't know what such a future will look like but I think it is something that will eventually have to be done. All we can do is make the best of it.
There are certainly societies in the present and in the past that have or had a so called living standard at least half of what we have now. This certainly doesn't exclude the existence of a happy, fruitful, and even pleasant life, especially if people relearn to make do without all the goods and services we have now. Study after study shows that we passed long ago the level of income that led to the increase in the overall level of happiness and basic well being.
We can choose to just let the shit hit the fan with undying faith in the so called free market, as people like Bush would have us do. Or, as a society and as a world, we can start on the journey now. If we fail, we fail. But our chances of success are much better starting right now than simply waiting for the forces of scarcity and global warming to compel us to change.
At a minimum, we will live in a world that is less poisoned and poisonous if we learn to live off sustainable natural systems.
Collapse could come regardless of what we do. But why should we go into this necessary transition assuming disaster?
What is this porter going to eat after he finishes his 500 miles? Is it 250 miles out and 250 miles back or is he a nomad?
How long did it take him to work and accumulate/store the food so he could carry it 500 miles?
What is the purpose of this 500 mile trip?
Maybe he lives on water, enough for a month, obviously he isn't carrying any so water appears whenever he needs it.
The energy limits on foot travel are exactly as stated NOT what you imagine in a modern world with processed food.
Gather and grow your own and see how many f...ing 500 mile foot trips you make. EROEI.
Further assumption upthread: That the porter must carry his own food.
Alternatively: In those days, and in that culture, it is entirely possible that 1) there were way stations where he could get food (provided), and/or 2) he could also eat (to a certain extent) off the land...fruit, and other easily obtainable foodstuffs that could be found along the path.
BKhere, if there is food for the porter enroute, then that food would be brought to the marketplace from that intermediate distance. Our ancestors knew the often-fatal consequences of wasting energy, something fossil fuels have given us the luxury of forgetting.
Contemporary Americans are generally physically lazy and fat because they were strongly selected to be so. Until very recently in human history, people were VERY reluctant to waste their exertion and would eat as much as they could when food was plentiful. Those who did the oposite got selected out. These realities are returning soon to a city near you.
PLAN, PLANt, PLANet
Errol in Miami
I think one of the fallacies in this thread is that anyone at that time and location would be porting BASIC food over that kind of distance (250-500 miles). That's a 20th-21st Century phenomenon. Even now there are milpas (small corn fields) all over Mexico, Guatemala, etc. tended by local farmers/families.
EXOTIC food for specialized trade, on the other hand, might be transported over long distances. The Mexhika (Aztecs) were well-known for their diverse and abundant marketplaces. Even the Spanish invaders were impressed with their high function of commerce. And perhaps the more highly valued gourmet foodstuffs might be lighter in weight than corn or beans.
Of course all this is speculation. I know some of the history but haven't done the research for the thread.
BK
I suggest you re-read the thread - nobody's suggested anything of the sort. (Other than by water, of course, but long-distance water transport of bulk goods is hardly in question; Rome, for example, was well-known to import vast quantities of grain from North Africa.)
A human could transport food hundreds of miles on foot; nobody's saying they would, and I, for one, have explicitly said that it would make no sense for them to do so on any large scale.
No one hauls corn all over the continent without cheap fossil fuel to do the work, but when sailing ship and horse drawn wagons were the best we had we still got spices from all over the world, and those commodities were prized.
There are 1,600 square feet of basement in this place, plenty of outlets, and I am thinking hydroponic dainties and spices might just be good winter work for me ... but only if I can get a turbine to drive the grow lights.
Envision the future as best you can, and then plan accordingly ... the wise and the lucky may prosper, at least for a bit, as things change ...
Food.
It's 500+ miles of travel, which could be 500 miles point-to-point, 250 round-trip, or whatever was desired. In practice, of course, there'd be no economic reason for a person to do that.
Utterly and obviously irrelevant to the question of how efficiently a person can transport food on foot.
Are you just trying to make trouble, or do you have a point?
The evidence - including from Drennan, the source of those limits - overwhelmingly says otherwise.
Since when is grain "processed food"?
There are plenty of foods which are more energy-dense than grain, and which would substantially extend the range of the person. Some of these are modern (MREs), some of these less so (dehydrated food), and some of these are ancient (cheese).
The question was about grain, though, so I used grain in the example. If you didn't realize that, perhaps you should read more carefully.
so are you saying stuff like this http://www.ess.uci.edu/~oliver/silk.html
never happened?
or a example here in america. copper is not easially found in the notheast but is plentifull in the great lakes region. copper artifacts in the northeast have been analyzed and traced back to the deposits in the great lakes region.
Yes it is realivent. it will determine how much he carrys. weither he needs to carry it all for one go or if he can replenish it along the way.
Processed:
subjected to a special process or treatment; "prepared ergot"; "processed cheeses are easy to spread"
refined: freed from impurities by processing; "refined sugar"; "refined oil"; "to gild refined gold"- Shakespeare
prepared or converted from a natural state by subjecting to a special process; "processed ores"
grain is a processed food since it needs to be seperated, cooked, and milled before it can be eaten.
Grain could not be carried long distances over land until the railroads. Luxury goods and metals could.
Of course I'm not saying that.
What I'm saying is that having humans carry grain for hundreds of miles would make no economic sense on a large scale. Long-distance trade for high-value trade goods, with food purchased from local sources, is a very different thing.
Then your definition of "modern world" goes back several thousand years, rendering your original objection - that my calculations were based on "a modern world with processed food" - nonsensical.
People can travel hundreds of miles carrying all their own food, and have been able to do so for hundreds of years. We have an academic cite for that as well as direct evidence from the caloric intake of present-day long-distance hikers. Why is this a difficult thing to accept?
I just had to calm down for a while.
What food, where will it come from? Another porter who has walked 500 miles? Apples from the orchard he planted before he left.
Get out of the world of powdered milk and cornflakes.
You can use grain of scotch whiskey, I don't care the questions are still the same.
Yes I'm trying to make trouble for you. You have made the most inane statement I've ever heard.
When some jackass says someone can walk 500 miles to carry food enough to walk 500 miles again.............
Who supplies this poor geezers shoes and fur coat, or is it paved roads and temperate climate all the way. Where does his shelter and security come from?
Just saying someone can walk 500 miles, starting carrying 80lbs and ending carrying nothing says horse shit.
There has to be a purpose and a return on investment.
If you think the world is going to prosper with people walking 500 miles a month, wow are you in dreamland.
What we are talking about is how far a man can walk carrying his own food. The appalachian trail is not the best example since if you were a porter you wouldn't take the scenic route over the mountains, but in any event I think about 30 days sounds about right. That isn't to say it makes sense for anyone to lug a sack of grain for thirty days and expect to make a profit, but the number is more useful than the 30% overburden cited in the OP.
No the porter doesn't need a family to supply future generations of porters. Priests are still around even though they don't have families. Men who were successful enough to start a family usually had more than just 2 surviving offspring. A large number of men would never gather the wealth to be able to start a family. So if you sourced your porters from the younger sons of successful families the porters themselves need not necessarily earn enough to raise a family.
No the porter doesn't get food along the way except by selling the food he is carrying. He doesn't have the time to gather food and if there was food to be easily had he wouldn't be lugging the food in from further afield. The porter probably does have access to waystations where he can purchase a good place to rest and get his food cooked for him. Again he has to account for this expense out of the money he earns by lugging the grain so it still comes out of the grain on his back in the end.
This is just endless re-hashing of the eternal question, is this shit worth it? You go to a swapmeet and think you're making all kinds of money, then some smartass who's an accountant goes over the cost in gas, fees, cost of buying the goods and time hunting down same, and finds out you're making less than you'd be at McDonald's. Or you well on Ebay, and lo and behold, the harder you work, the more money you bleed. Again, McDonald's comes out being a far more brilliant way to make a career.
This equation comes up in a person's life again and again, it's there in some form until you die. In so many modern activities, you're actually losing but you swear you'll just work harder and "make it up on volume". Until you're bankrupt. Or in the olden days, until you starve.
It also answers why high-tech is such a scam. Keep the masses busy with shiny baubles, and even better, shiny baubles that require a society to work an average of 60 hours a week to have them.
OK so in the olden days, wheat etc may have been traded to the next town by land. The Romans etc did transport stuff by water, almonds and olive oil and grains too. Mostly by land the long-transport stuff had to be valuable to be worth it - furs and gold and spices and so on.
A single trekker carrying wheat may be carrying that to save from friends from starvation with his man-load of grain. Or carrying it because he has to go somewhere and it's the best thing he's got - or else he'd carry his provisions in cheese or sunflower seeds or something. And 20-30 miles a day is realistic, and at 4MPH allows for down time too, so there's time for foraging. Small game hunting, foraging, digging up bugs whatever.
As an absolute lower bound enforced only by the energy expended by the porter, I agree that the number is far too low. But obviously, the grain has to be planted and harvested as well.
A bushel (25 kg) is a lot of grain. As a homebrewer, I've got some first-hand experience with the quantities involved. Recipes for a 5-gallon batch of somewhat strong beer generally call for 8-10 pounds (4-5 kg) of malted barley. That amount of grain would probably feed a family of 4 for a week. They'd be pretty bored of grain and they wouldn't be any fatter, but they wouldn't be starving.
A friend and I once cooked up 15 pounds of corn and 5 pounds of malt barley in a recipe for something a wee bit stronger than beer. Mixed with water until it was the consistency of corn chowder, it was about 32 litres in volume. That's a lot of corn chowder. How much of this stuff would an adult need to eat? A litre? At a litre of corn chowder a day, a bushel would last a long time.
This is why some doomers buy bushel bags of wheat, barley, and corn from an agricultural feed store. It's a simple and cheap way to put away a year's supply of food. (I have to keep about that much on hand at any one time just for my livestock.) A bushel of rice doesn't cost much either and doesn't get as many weird looks when loaded into the trunk of the family car.
It's biodiesel, not ethanol. For farming machinery, that's obvious. And for farmers' personal vehicles, let me quote from Matthew Simmons' Aug 18 interview by Jim Puplava at
http://www.financialsense.com/transcriptions/2007/0818.html
JIM: It’s amazing, in California it’s been hard to bring diesels into the state and I was talking to a Mercedes dealer and they’re going to start bringing in diesels into California on an experimental basis later this fall. And I was saying, aren’t you getting more requests for your customers for diesel. And he said, “no, just the opposite.” He said the people that come in to the showrooms want the ones with the biggest engines. And I go, “you’ve got to be kidding me?” And he said, “no,” and I go, “why?”
MATT: Yes, the problem is that our environmentalists just can’t stand the word diesel, because diesel was really ugly in the 70s. And for some reason or another they’re too myopic to ever go to Europe or the states that have allowed diesel engines and see these unbelievable turbo diesels.
I happen in Houston to drive a 320D Mercedes and on the open road I get 45 miles per gallon. And it’s a more enjoyable car to drive than the 740 BMW I turned in. So diesel’s the way of the future. But it’s too bad that the manufacturer of these diesel engines didn’t change the name and call it clean technology or something like that. But they stuck with this old antiquated name, and diesel just has a bad name. [23:01]
JIM: And yet we know that – what was it? – last year they reduced the sulfur content on diesel and its cleaner than gasoline.
MATT: Oh yeah, diesel is our best fuel, and diesels have way better fuel to ask our refiner to make when the refiner’s having to deal with heavier, and heavier crude. So there’s just a whole bunch of benefits of diesel. But the environmentalists hate it. Don’t ask me why. It’s just stupidity. So for California to say that we’re going to experiment with diesel – they don’t have to experiment with diesel, just send someone to Europe with a camera. Seventy-five percent of the cars in Europe in the last five or seven years have been these turbo diesels. It’s a better engine.
The key issue here is not availability, but availability at a specific price. If you are willing to pay enough, diesel fuel will be available for you wherever in the world a truck can get. (And if you are really willing to pay enough, it will be delivered to you by helicopter.)
So the point is: for each specific area, either there is diesel fuel available at a price lower than the net cost of producing biodiesel locally or there is not. If there is, farmers will use it. If there is not, there is a business case for building a biodiesel refinery for the area.
Taking the quantity of soybean/sunflower/rapeseed (SSR) seeds necessary to produce a gallon (or litre) of biodiesel, the business case requires that ($ goes for PRICE of, as opposed to cost):
COST of SSR seeds + $ refinery energy input + $ methanol input - $ glycerin byproduct - $ SSR byproduct < $ diesel fuel
(edited version)
This exemplifies the naïve thinking of economists. Helicopters are very energy-intensive, and diesel delivered by helicopter is going to have very high losses. Whatever the recipient can pay for that fuel has to come out of those deliveries, not what gets burned by the chopper. In a world of constrained production, delivering diesel by chopper is a loss if there is any better alternative.
As we went up the left side of the oil production curve the economic pie expanded. As we go down the right side of the production curve the economic pie must contract. The economic expansion had certain effects, among which were population growth, suburban living, the consumer lifestyle, and a shift in population from rural to urban. Overall, the opposite should result from economic contraction.
In some respects, prices send messages. If we had a stable money system, the messages would be clear, but because we have had an inflatable paper money system imposed upon us for the benefit of our rulers, the price messages are somewhat more complex. How much of prices results from true supply/demand and how much from inflation of the money supply?
Higher prices tell us (force us) as consumers to use less. Higher prices tell us (encourage us) as producers to produce more. There is no need for some mastermind to decide what should be consumed or produced, and by whom, since no government or economist can sufficiently know which direction to take; the ethanol debacle is a good example of the failure of central planning. Government interference will only make a bad situation worse. Calls that describe what "we" should do are really counterproductive and will only result in more human suffering if heeded. If you plan on getting to the natural end of your life, the question should be what "I" should do.
The future will be dismal, to my mind, no question about it; likely many will die. Whether rural gas stations will fail or prosper is only a small issue. Maybe the food producers in rural areas will receive a sufficiently higher price for their product, and will be better able to afford a higher fuel price than suburban or urban counterparts. The higher cost of transport to outlets remote from production facilities has always existed, yet those remote outlets have managed to function.
The problem is that it's mainly lawyers run for and are elected to public office. They don't understand the "rules" of nature that are behind what they call "economics" and are confounded when "economics as they know it" fails. The GDP growth, by which political success is measured by the MSM, is actually a miserable measure of genuine, sustainable wealth building. The last president who had an engineering degree was Jimmy Carter, and he had a notion of what was coming in the future, although he messed up somewhat on the timing (so did I).
The GDP model needs to be tossed out for good and replaced with something that more nearly reflects reality.
Congratulations to those of you who realize that by simple technology (wheels, rails, bicycles, pipelines, pumps,etc.) we are still light-years ahead of stone-age man who had to carry everything on his back, in spite of our diminished prospects for "cheap oil" in the future.
Now when we begin to realize that there is virtually a limitless supply of "free" energy above our heads in the form of Convective Available Potential Energy (CAPE), and that the technology (concept) of how to capture this has already been invented by L. M. Michaud, P.Eng. (www.vortexengine.ca), then we can begin building a new, decentralized, collectiviezed, well-insulated, low-FF consuming society that can provide it's own food locally--in short, we'll be cookin' (and heatin' and drivin' and farmin' and water pumpin'...) with electricity.
Looking at things on a shorter-term basis:
I think that you will find that quite a few farms have large above-ground fuel tanks and buy their fuel in quantity. There are trucks that make the rounds on a regular basis to refill these bulk tanks. This is arguably a more fuel-efficient way to deliver fuel to the farms. Most of the fuel is actually used on the farm itself, and the fuel expended in making the delivery round is going to be less than the collective fuel expended in a bunch of individual two-way trips by each farmer. This type of business is probably also more profitable for the supplier, because they do not have the overhead expense of maintaining a retail outlet at a high-cost location, or of staffing it for extended hours; they also deal with a stable customer base and have a predictable cash flow. Thus, I expect that if anything, this model will grow to become pretty much the universal norm among all farmers, and probably all industrial and commerical customers as well.
It is the individual consumer that is most likely to be in trouble, for retail service stations are apparently going to become increasingly unprofitable in all but the highest-traffic areas. What are their options:
1) Is some ways, this is a problem not dissimilar to that of mail. Left completely to the free market, we would have cheap mail service in the cities and hugely expensive or non-existent mail service in remote rural locations. Most countries have made a public policy decision to make mail universally accessible, and to do so by charging a uniform, universal rate. We all know that this creates an implicit subsidy on the part of urban customers in behalf of rural customers. A similar approach could be taken with fuel, in which case we see a chain of government gas stations, none more than X miles from anyone. In the US, there would probably be considerable resistance to this, although other countries might be more receptive to such an approach.
2) Another possibility for people living in an area that will no longer be well served is to form a co-operative (or possibly to get their local farmer's co-op to let them join, if the farmer's co-op has its own pump, which some do). Co-ops don't have quite the same profit pressure that purely private-sector enterprises have these days.
3) A third possibility is for several neighbors to go in together on a bulk fuel tank, and contract for bulk deliveries. This requires a high degree of cooperation and trust, and may be hard to do, but it could be done.
4) If none of the above happen, then each household will pretty much be left to fend for themselves. Under such circumstances, I see lots of people buying lots of gas cans and safety containers, and filling up extra when they do make a trip to the gas pump. Or perhaps several neighbors pile into one pickup truck with a whole bunch of cans in the back. In this manner, most vehicles can go for two or three tankfulls before they need to be driven back to the nearest station for a refill. This is not a very good solution from a safety perspective, and if this is what happens, we'll see an increase in catastrophic residential fires in the future.
5) As a variation on #4, I can see some individuals filling up extra cans, and then getting into the local retail fuel business on a small-scale basis themselves. Selling fuel out of the back of a truck along the side of the road has up to now been considered a 3rd world/FSU sort-of-thing; we may start seeing it here in the US eventually.
Longer-term, obviously, fuel starts to become more widely unavailable and hugely expensive, so eventually increasing numbers of vehicles sit empty with non-refillable fuel tanks. None of the above will be of much help for that problem.
Here in my area I drive 18 wheelers hauling grain and whatever for a farmer who puts in about 3,000 acres.I didn't this year but I usually do. I also keep the comm gear running and the electronics on the rigs and tractors. We figure maybe 3mpg for the rigs. We usually don't shut the engines down due to the mechanics of turbo chargers.
He does not have a big storage tank but we do have a tanker we sometimes go and bring a load back in if the local supplier is running out.
Most others do not have on site storage to a large degree either except for their field tractors. 6 tractor trailer rigs and two combines and 4 huge field tractors eat a lot of fuel and everyone has a pickup. They can't carry shit in a four wheeler car.
But of course it diesel in those storage tanks and not gas.
and not road diesel at that..its farm diesel,,granted won't matter when TSHTF but still....Chicken coops are still open. The Bears are still out.
If small stations in small towns start running out of straight gas then we all shut down.We have only 2 stations in my hometown. The workers, field hands, stores and everything else. We can't do much except field work and run 18 wheelers on diesel.
If we here in the farming regions falter and fall seriously then the rest of the USA and maybe the world...go belly up.
One season of missed planting and/or harvest and we can pretty much kiss a lot goodbye. Thats not regional I am speaking of but national small town Ahhmerkuh. We need gas as much or more than some others. We produce the foodstuffs.
I know of far too many who are barely hanging on at minimum wage pay...just barely..they have poor teeth, poor diets and junky food for the big store distributors s don't favor us with the good food. We get the worst of it and have to just shut up.
Thats storebrought food. I eat as much of my own as possible for that very reason. Plus we don't have very good nearby medical facilities. One Dr. here serves a whole county and we are lucky to have him. They have all fled long ago.
Its 35 miles to a hospital. To the dentist. To the nearest gas stations if the locals run out.
They can't afford to shutdown the rural outback where the growing is done. They might not understand that though.
We are sometimes very strained. A combine breaks down. A harvest is at peril. Parts are needed. Pickups are dispatched. All miles and miles apart. A worker is hurt. Shit happens. If the fuel logistics break down? We break down.
There is little backup. It all has to function once the planting starts or harvest starts. No one slows down for many weeks at that time. Work can be way past dark. 16 hour work days.
I hope the cold breeze of reality isn't disturbing too many people here.....
Out here, 25 miles to a hospital, 100+ to a good one. If someone around here gets sick/injured I load 'em up and drive 'em in - they'll get there an hour quicker than the EMT types will get here.
People check up on each other for this reason. Someone's not feeling well enough to go to town, someone else makes the mail run for 'em. And so on.
Sustainability out here would probably mean something like 10-20 acres PER PERSON. If TSHTF I'd expect a lot of people go to running to the cities where the soup kitchens are.
I've not been through the last big Depression but I've been through the 70s and that was a whole different universe than people live in now. Stuff like mending clothes because well, it's that or go naked. Stuff like working all day at age 14 so the family could have dinner that night. Stuff like not having a dime for bus fare and no one else has a dime either so you just don't go. Being made fun of swimming because of all the ribs and bones showing. But also being incredibly physically tough, from doing physical stuff for work and for fun, being used to walking miles, etc.
Life without Nintendo and Hot Pockets is going to be a huge shock to a lot of people.
There are already discussions about this at the legislative level - hearings on fuel shortages in North Dakota. People are going to squeal but you're dead right, airdale - no fuel in Los Angeles is one sort of problem, but no fuel in Lamoni, Iowa at the wrong time is another ... and one that has grim consequences.
I think people here are catching on - I'm seeing old anhydrous tanks pulled off their carriers, old fashion fuel barrels mounted in their place, and these are following the harvest. Hopefully people are tanking up to buffer against problems in the spring, but production is going to have to take priority over everything else, and its got to be what counts as production post peak ... no flipping of bits or shuffling paper matches the value of consumable calories.
Please read some of the threads above. You can run it all on electricity easy peasy, or you and your buds can easily hike the food around for 500miles. Happy happy happy. Im ok you're ok we're all going to make it into a great wind, solar, battery and hydrogen powerhouse economy of the future.
PS Was being sarcastic. I really feel for how people like you doing what I consider "real work" and getting so little reward. Lets hope those "markets" start directing some money and investment your way.
Airdale,
Thanks for the brutal honesty.
I'm waiting for an economics type to chime in here and explain how the marginal utility of your last-doctor in the farmlands meshes with globalized prosperity. Maybe you're supposed to telephone an outsourced health provider in India after your leg breaks and you can't operate the combine when most needed? Maybe it will all be fixed with the miracle of global telecommunications? Sweet.
Not arguable. It's as certain as sunshine is warm, water is wet and gravity pulls things together.
This will probably run afoul of permit and insurance requirements for bulk fuel storage, and rightly so. Besides, when fuel gets precious those tanks are targets for thieves. Fewer gas stations mean fewer points to defend.
In WW2 The Deutsh Afrika Korps suffered this diminishing return effect in having all their petrol transported by trucks across the Libyan desert compared with the allied use of coastal shipping. In the end supply lines were so long all the fuel was being consumed in transporting fuel rather than supplying the front line.
In the DOCU Fog of War McNamarra relates a story about B-29'S trying to accumulate petrol stocks in China by flying back and forwards over the Himalayas. it didn't work.
efficiency or the lack of it is a major factor in feasibility... Mao's great leap forward.
Boris
London
They flew six or seven supply flights for every raid when they were using B-29s to move supplies over "the hump". The planes were war weary before they ever came under enemy fire ...
The Great North African Logistics Debates restarts anew. Coastal shipping wouldn't help Rommel because of port capacity. A truck borne supply line from Tripoli to Egypt eats more gasoline than it carries. Monty didn't have to fight a battle between El Alamein and capturing Tripoli. There was a rail line running through French N. Africa to supply the battles in Tunisia.
To follow through on the German example - 80 km, or until a river is reached. Obviously, rivers aren't available everywhere, but they play a major role where they are available - which is why New Orleans/its successors are likely to remain at the mouth of a river system conveniently running through much of a continent.
While restoring rail makes sense, restoring river traffic makes equal sense - and would be quicker and easier to do - except that Americans don't live that way anymore. After all, the Sunbelt/Southwest are pretty notable for having urban concentrations far away from navigable rivers.
I think that this diminishing return problem is probably the key to shortages. Suppliers via to supply the closest destinations since unless they calculate the fuel surcharge on each delivery their profit is lower for the outlying areas.
Once you get into the situation that surcharges for delivery are immediate and large you have a situation where the price fluctuates quite a bit for the outliers.
So say you have two gas stations a and b in a remote area. Station a run lows before b so he either has to increase his prices to make up for the surcharge say 10-15 cents per gallon or sell at no profit or a loss. Station b makes a profit the first week but orders later and say faces a 20-30 cent increase when he finally orders.
You can see how people rushing back and forth to the cheapest station could easily result in both stations closing.
Hello,
For your info:
http://www.spiegel.de/spiegel/0,1518,519773,00.html
It ties in with "fuel" supplies, Germany, turbo diesels, etc. (all mentioned in posts above) in that the article discusses a breakthrough in batteries that may make all-electric cars feasible, at least in terms of range. For people in rural areas, the "fuel" would come in via the utility lines.
The article seems unaware of the many implications of PO and only scratches the surface of the question of where the electricity would come from.
In short, it is, in my opinion, overly optimistic, but still of interest in this discussion. It is in German.
Ciao,
FB
OK, this is just silly. It currently takes U.S. Railroads 334 BTU to move one ton of stuff for one mile. A ton of cellulose or starch releases something like 15 million BTU when burned. Even if you assume that a wood-fueled train (say powered by a Stirling engine or a modern steam engine) is only 1/4 as efficient as a modern diesel you can transport one ton of food/fuel 10,900 miles before you run out. That is, you can productively transport food across the continent, just as we do now. I'm not worried.
During periodic wheat gluts in the late 1800s, steam locomotives burned wheat instead of coal in the Great Plains (it was cheaper).
Alan
Of course it is silly. Why let pesky facts get in the way of a perfectly good fantasy about societal collapse?
But your 334 BTU per ton-mile seems low. Here's a US government source:
Thanks for the link. The report is from 1982 and the numbers are likely to be out of date, especially for rail transport.
As it happens, I worked on a project involving a new hopper car for bulk transport about 15 years ago. We ran numerical simulations (using 486 PC's), calculating fuel consumption of trains with traditional hopper cars in comparison with the newer ones and found that they could make for some improvement in fuel consumption. The unit coal trains weren't very good, especially as they tended to return back to the mine running empty. The open top coal cars were particularly bad in terms of aerodynamic drag, a situation which the proposed cars were designed to address. This was less of a problem for cars used to transport grains, since they have tops on them, which helps reduce the fuel consumption when running empty on the way back toward the grain elevators.
Having not been associated with the rail industry (or had any other job for that matter) for the last 15 years, I can't say what things are like now. But, with oil at nearly $100 per barrel, you can be sure that the railroad industry is working to further minimize fuel consumption.
E. Swanson
Double stack containers are also fairly aerodynamic, much more so that truck trailers.
Truck trailers rolled onto rail cars are not nearly as efficient as the alternative, double stack containers. Much less payload/dead weight with roll-on trailers than with double stack containers.
Also, latest GE locos are 2% more fuel efficient than those 5 years ago. Latest trucks use more fuel (new 2007 pollution regs). So the spread is widening.
Best Hopes for More Efficient Transportation,
Alan
Black_Dog, I would like to find a much newer source of numbers for rail freight efficiency in BTU/ton-mile. Got any good links on this?
That's a good source. The 334 BTU/ton mile was my own calculation using 2006 US DOE data. I have sense found a table of freight energy consumption here.. The table (table 2.16) shows the Energy intensity of freight rail in the U.S. since 1970. From 1970 to 2005, the energy used to move a ton of freight one mile has dropped 2% per year. It now requires less energy to move a ton of freight via rail than it does via ship.
Year Rail BTU/ton-mi
1970 691
1975 687
1980 597
1985 497
1990 420
1995 372
2000 352
2005 337
good source of data. any reason why rail can improve energy efficiency at such steady rate while ship can't?
That trend is noted here as well. I'm going to guess that ships are moving a little faster as harbors get mode automated. It could be worth the extra use of fuel to hit a scheduled loading or unloading slot.
Chris
another good source of data. can one assume the efficiency gain in rail is partly due to slower speed?
if anything centralized food movement is more efficient. this EROI of food movement argument runs counter to the anti suburbia argument.
you can't have it both ways.
either dispersion is efficient or it isn't. the percentage of the fossil fuel consumption used in food production and its distribution is small compared to the overall level of production for a good while.
I think Nero did a calculation that ocean going trade doesn't suffer prohibitively from increased oil prices until the price is pretty extreme
you have to disperse food production as its a area energy collection kind of deal. the other end population can be concentrated.
the alternative is create a infrastructure that disperses population across the food producing areas in a pattern that reduces transportation cost to less than centralized movement. off course the entire economy needs to be dispersed and localization of all industries will create duplication.
this type of area multiplication is why oil sands and stripper wells are a lower EROI than Ghawar..
or have i got that wrong?
Boris
London
This segment:
may be correct, but the following reasoning is wrong:
The reason for existing a "problem" in supplying fuel to the more "distant" parts of Portuguese economy is irrelevant, for there is none.
The reason there are problems in selling fuel in the borders of Portugal is because in Portugal one pays a lot more taxes in fuel than in its only neighbour, Spain. People in the border, given the free border in EU, just jump the border and buy the fuel on the other side, creating deserts in the portuguese fuel stations side.
Oh, and if you are telling me that fueling through 200km (120 miles) from the east coast to the west coast is somehow difficult because those are "distant" borders....
... get a lesson of geography.
This is the shallowness that sometimes invades the posts in here. Try making a little investigation before shooting yourself in the foot.
Instead of converting corn to ethanol... using natural gas in the process, what if there were a corn stove in every home and the corn went directly into home heating, thus conserving the natural gas for other uses?
What if no natural gas is used, does that change things for you?
I had never seen them before this season, but now all of the hardware stores around here are hawking corn/wood pellet stoves. Back when people used to collect and burn corn cobs post harvest, but I think this was done when the corn was picked and transported on the cob, then shelled right before sale. Modern combines spit the cobs out and return nothing but shelled corn to the waiting wagons.
The combines spit out shelled corn...sez SCT.
Right on. They also have flails on the discharge chute at the rear to tear it up even more,especially wheat stalks.
If you do not leave the residue on the soil ..then you are robbing the nitrogen as well as the P and K and must then make it up with more chemical inputs and thats not even talking about the organic matter contributed and the lessening of erosion as a result of bare soil.
Of course if you are running on flat creek bottom ground you may alter your methods somewhat..but on the grades you want residuce..its called 'Farming Dirty'.
Its amazing how thick that residue is when you stand in it while the grain buggies fill your 30 ft dumper trailer. We are good enough that the grain buggies can take a bin load off the combine without it even stopping in the rows. The old days of 'bob trucks' has passed. They are now all rusting away in the treelines. We haul the max load of grain on the big rigs to the grain elevators,,any less is a waste of time and energy.
What's a "bob truck"?
Semi-OT: There's a park on the NE side of Wichita which used to be a farm. Not far off one of the nature trails there is a combine, rusting away. Straight 6 engine (missing a lot of parts and with some spark plugs broken off); if there were identifying marks as to manufacturer, I don't remember them.
I think it's interesting that these machines are there. They must not have been worth enough even to scrap.
Heading Out,
The 30 km radius by horse in Germany was greatly extended in the US by use of mules which towed barges on canals. This led to substantial transatlantic trade in wheat after repeal of the Corn Law in 1846. Much of this was handled with wind power once the mules were done with their towing. London thus drew from a distance of a couple thousand miles. In the end, they got so dependent on imported grain that they started using steam ships but that is another story where we see that free trade is not so free if it depends on fossil fuels.
Chris
HO
thanks for u'r realism & connecting the social/economic dots.
my neighbor that recently passed @ 93 got up w/ her father @ 3am to go to market[horse & wagon] w/ produce; 23 miles.
they got back well after dark.
as u say we need something to shock us onto a new perception of reality [really was a denial of reality all along].
thanks again.
Summing up, there are limitations on transporting commodities of any kind, including fuels. We have seen that the installation of roads, rails and pipelines together with existing waterways and canals, using wind or animals, have greatly extended the distances these commodities can be economically transported as compared to using human, or even "beast of burden" labor.
When the transported commodity is a fuel, we have a direct measure of how "efficient" a given transport is, based on how much is consumed during the trip. We have not necessarily optimized the distribution and "consumption" system for each fuel (apart from arguments concerning the efficiency or desireability of it's synthesis). There is legitimate concern that we are using up too much of it in our present "business as usual" systems and that the incentives for doing things a certain way are "wrong".
I have put forward the notion that all this discussion, while enlightening, is moot, since we have an alternate, easily transportable "fuel" in the form of electricity. Furthermore, an inexpensive, decentralized way of producing it has been proposed,(AVE-www.vortexengine.ca). So far, the scientific basis for this technology has not been refuted by anyone in a peer-reviewed article. The science behind it has been labelled as "solid" by Nilton Renno of the University of Michigan, an atmospheric scientist and expert in vorticies. If someone out there reading this has any proof that it won't work and can defend it in the scientific arena, please speak up now.
While electricity is also consumed (I2R losses) en route from its point of generation to point of consumption, this would be minimial for the "average" distance of travel before consumption of 5-10 km, given an array of strategically located plants, with 30 km for outlying areas not even being a real problem.
So, those of you reading this may continue to ignore the news I bring with respect to the viability and rapid implementation of this technology, and carry on with your discussion with respect to "how many angels would be able to dance on the head of a pin", ignoring the 800 lb "energy gorilla" floating around in the air above you--or you can start generating interest by "discussing things that never were, and asking your fellow engineers, scientists and yes, even business and (especially) political types: Why not?
Why not indeed, with the twin monsters of Peak Oil and Anthropogenic Global Warming staring us directly in the face!
HOG (aka AVE_fan)