The end of the Oil Age

[zeocrash]

ok well I was surfing overgrow and one of the members there posted about this
http://www.lifeaftertheoilcrash.net/
What do you guys think.
The guy used to have the whole book available for free download, but that's gone now so I'll upload a copy to the ftp

[bobo]

I'd like to see the book cos I work for an energy company.

Anyway, my own thoughts about this limited to two alternatives:

* biomass: if you have one acre of land, you can use it to produce food or produce a product that industry can adapt to instead of crude oil. Land is scarce, but this energy type IS renewable. The catch is, this is five times as expensive as oil used to be. The other catch is that some people will not eat because I drive around in my van, burning oil that is produced with energy crop, where corn plants could have grown too. After all, with my comfortable western european income I can pay 5$ a liter for gasoline even though grumbling at it, while the hungry ppl can't pay 5$ for a days bread.

* solar cells: As they are getting more and more efficient, electricity can be made using solars and compete with COAL. Yup, coal. Aren't we forgetting the other black source of energy? Thousands of ppl scrape coal in infernal mines in the third world and we make our electricity chiefly of coal. Yet, as I said, silicon technology has gotten a boost making it cheaper and cheaper. And many alternatives such as polymer solar cells are in research phase. The lights will not go out unless the change is drastic enough because our great leaders look only at the near future and the economic stimulus has to exist for some time to make them react the desired way.

One thing we need though, is a better fuel cell tech to make electricity storeable. So, gasoline is still necessary for transit until we can store electricity well enough.

[warmage]

I think if you guys check some of these links; you will find that what we can already do is quite astonshing.

http://www.backwoodssolar.com/index.htm
http://energy.sourceguides.com/businesses/byP/ev/ev.shtml

This is really good....Homemade solar cells...Oovonics anyone.
(http://www.fuellesspower.com/solar_cell.htm)....screen printed
solar cells. NOT as effecient as monocrystals....but Sooo cheap
that it dosen't mater. So even if you need 3 &1/3 of these to do
the work of one monocrystal...for the same money you can make
32 of these.
http://www.homepower.com/
Bob Crane is simply as good as they come. http://www.ccrane.com/

As you may have guessed by now i'm something of a bug on this.

[bobo]

hmmmm check your links please, there seem to be errors

[zeocrash]

ok the book is up on the FTP in the misc directory
misc\life after the oil crash.pdf
have a read and tell me that you guys think. Also I'd be interested to hear your opinions bobo, working for an energy company and all

[zerok]

Isn't there a energy rich seaweed?

You don't waste valuable land. Just take your boat, go fishing in the ocean, dry the stuff and burn it.

[warmage]

Dear bobo:

I checked the links and they all work.
I have Windows XP Professional.....all the latest updates right off of Bill Gates
website....so lets see if we have what I would call, laboratory reproducibility.

I right clicked on the link...then I moved the pointer down to the, "open in new window" on the drop down menu, and left clicked the link.
I also tried only dropping down one choice and used just, "open", worked ok.
So i tried just left clicking with the pointer, this is the method most people use. It worked great!
If they keep sticking, you may need to purge your cookies.

[undertow]

That site on homemade solar cells looks like a scam, they wont give you any info unless you buy it. :p They also suggest running a car on water. :rolleyes: I wish I had a dollar for everytime someone came up with that one. As for oil:
http://www.energybulletin.net/primer.php

www.dieoff.org (http://www.dieoff.org) A little light reading ;)

Oil looks to be peaking sooner rather than later, the doom and gloom predictions could IMO be averted though. Nitrogen fertalizers are produced from natural gas because it is cheap, coal could also be used as a hydrogen feedstock in gas shortages, or even electrolysis from water at a much greater cost. However coal requires oil to mine, increasing more so as the easy to get stuff is mined..... I'm still sitting on the fence.

[Anthony]

Yes, the links work.

The fuellesspower website is unfortunately full of bullshit though. I don't like the idea of paying for information, and someone selling information that people can use to make $100,000 a year always gets my BS detector going.

The "build a 5000W inverter from shit lying around your house!" got me suspicious, and then the car which runs on unprocessed tap water, and the perpetual motion machine "gravity motor" finished things off.

[bobo]

Yeah the link works fine, temp glitch I suppose.

This solar cell that can be screen printed would be a japanese patent? I fully agree with Anthony although I'd be tempted to buy this piece of shit just to see what scam they pulled.

Printable solar cells is what everyone is looking for, and the so-called bulk hetero junction solar cells come close to plastic printable cells. There are problems though, among others the conducting and semiconducting polymers involved aren't that stable in sunlight ;) So... we may yet hear a lot about BHJ cells in the near future but if they had been possible I'd have heard it on the solar cell congress I visited last month.

[tmp]

We need more nuclear power plants NOW ! Alternative technologies
have never matched nuclear power for energy density.

[meselfs]

I can't stand sites that say BS like "science proves we are soon doomed."

May be true, unlikely, but they do it for attention, and there are people who love doom type ideas, such as that old Y2K shit (I rarely use that word, so you know I mean what I say).



Anyway, in my opinion research must be done in fusion. I think it's the ultimate power source of the future.

Concerning hydracarbons as a chemical, methyl hydrate is the way to go. By calculation, there's enough methyl hydrate to lat over 170000 year (I double checked thos 0s ;)). It's nessecary to mine also because global warming might cause it to melt, and we all know how horrible methane is in the atmosphere...

[Pb1]

That might pose a slight problem: more methane released from the hydrate and burned --> more global warming --> less hydrate still in the ocean. I have to admit, though that is does sound like an interesting idea. The problem with this much fuel (besides the greenhouse gasses) might be a lack of oxygen to burn it.

[Bugger]

The only problem is that the methane hydrate (of which you say there is a 170,000 year supply), consisting of methane molecules trapped under enormous pressure in ice as a clathrate, are on the deep ocean floors, especially the trenches off east Asia. Tapping them would provide enormous technical problems to overcome. From floating drilling platforms, somehow kept in position with tethers or otherwise, would have to be suspended a pressure-resistant pipe with an enclosed drilling head and rotating cable several miles long, to reach the hydrate deposits. On the drill-head entering them, pressure inside the pipe would have to be greatly reduced by means of a powerful vacuum pump, in order to induce the methane to bubble out of the hydrate so that it can be piped to the platform. Then, either the methane would have to be liquefied and shipped in refrigerated spherical pressure vessels as liquefied natural gas (LNG), or else it would have to be piped (probably along the sea floor) on to a land-based natural gas supply network.

[nbk2000]

The hydrate could be mined like a solid at depth, lifted to the surface, and allowed to desolidify into water/gas at near atmopheric pressure, and liquified into the pure gas under pressure for transportation in tankers.

[meselfs]

That might pose a slight problem: more methane released from the hydrate and burned --> more global warming --> less hydrate still in the ocean. I have to admit, though that is does sound like an interesting idea. The problem with this much fuel (besides the greenhouse gasses) might be a lack of oxygen to burn it.

The methane may leak into the atmosphere, and methane has 40 times the greenhouse effect as CO2. For now, burning it may seem smart...
With the help of Siberia, oxygen should be no problem (I'm talking about photosynthesis...).

Mining it would be tricky indeed Bugger, but I think it'd be good for everybody. It'll last much long and burns much cleaner then gasoline.

The only trouble is the low boiling point and less heating value then gasoline, but I think that's Ok. Big companies can easily burn methane instead of, for example, coal. Such setup would be lower maintenance too.

[James]

Appearently the latest (http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/11/23/0553238&tid=126&tid=14) wrinkle (http://www.eetimes.com/at/news/showArticle.jhtml;jsessionid=KGP11Z2FQNY3SQSNDBESK HA?articleId=53700939)in solar power is using strirling (http://www.stirlingengine.com/) engines.

[FUTI]

I heard that Russia started exploatation of ice captured methane clathrates some time ago...anyone to confirm and give more info or link please?
I wonder why did they bothered that much, after all their country has 1/3 of world gas reserves as I remember. Anyway biogas production is my favorite, next to ethanol and biodiesel on the renewable resource list.

[RoDuS_1488]

check this out, heres an excellent diy solar power generator on the cheap:
http://www.instructables.com/id/EKJZG6CQR1EYMW0Q9Z/