Matt Ingenthron's Stream of Consciousness

I've though about this a little too, and have come to the conclusion our low cost of oil is 'naturally artificial.' If you consider the source of the energy in oil: Solar and Gravity, the total amount of time and material it went into produce oil over the costs of the stuff over is actually quite high. Solar energy was stored in plants thousands to millions of years ago, they died, and were compressed underground to make the long chain hydrocarbons that store the energy. The amount of time it takes for this to happen, for the sake of argument, is on the order of a million years. Also for the sake of argument, it takes a ton of plant material to make one gallon of gasoline (Although this number is much higher .) then 1x10^6 years TIMES 1x10^3 tons of plants / 1 gallon = 1x10^9 ton years per gallon.

Nearly the same amount of energy density that can be found in diesel can be found in renewable energy sources, such as veggie oil (95-95% volumetric energy density of dyno-juice diesel). Check out This webpage for more info. I also think Thermal Depolymerization could help as well. Take the soy bean example. .03 tons of soybeans grown in 1 year per 1 gallon of soydiesel times 90% of diesel energy: 3.33x10^-2 ton years per gallon.

The best and most abundant energy source is nuclear fusion... and we circle a big ball of fusing hydrogen. The secret to future energy independence will rely on capturing, storing and redistrubuting that energy. We got a lucky break that the planet did that for us over the span of a few hundred million years... too bad we pissed that away in a matter of 200 years. hopefully, I think it gave us a jump start in our technological growth, and we can learn how to ween ourselves off natural oil. With the bell curve of peak oil production nearly upon us, the costs for crude oil will only go up from here, and high prices could be a good stimulation to 'go green,' but bottom line is we could be screwed.

Posted by Dan on March 21, 2005 at 10:06 PM PST #