That reminds me, time for my medication...

They have been using ethanol based fuels for a long time but if they could make it more affordable to convert a car to electric then I would give it a go for sure. I thought I might get away with it for around $4K or mabey $5K but I was dreaming. More like $15K+ for a decent setup. It's a shame but do you really think that alternatives haven't already been discovered? I remember about 4 years ago a guy invented a self propelled generator using magnets that could produce most of the power for his house and was almost maintenence free. A few weeks later it fell off the grid and no evidence of it anywhere. When the wells actually dry up they will release all the new gadgets and start rheeming us all again from a new direction.

i was watching austar (foxtel what ever) and jay leno was on there, he said when asked about what he thinks about fuel fastly running out " its like the horses, when the car came along it freed up the horses to be enjoyed" im just wondering what will be in place after the cars are gone.

Hey Sean slip a couple this way

Hi Guys

Ha ha no worries will try to run Datsun by hot water

thanks
regards
sumith

Methanol

beer just like in the movie the gods must be crazy

ok - I'll play - they can make fuel out of coal. It's not as efficient a process as crude oil of course - but it is doable - it's economically viable enough that the nazis looked at it during ww2 and sth africa did during the era of trade sanctions. Add 'necessity' to the mix, and no doubt hte process could be made more efficient.

EVen extrapolating for a growth in population (and there are limits to what the planet will support food wise, so we don't necessarily have to look beyond a world population in excess of 20 billion, in fact it'll likely not get near it) the US alone has sufficient coal reserves (and that's just the stuff they know about, who knows what more exploration will find) for a couple of hundred years.

Add to this that peak oil is a theory and far from proven. There's also the issue that fossil fuel being fossil fuel itself is a theory. There's competing theories that the planet has a radioactive core (highly likely given volcanic activity some 4 billion years after the earth settled out here orbiting the sun) and that the crude/oil is a byproduct of radioactive decay and processes. This is _partially_ supported by the fact that there are (and by no means is it _all of them_ ) oil wells that were considered empty circa 1950s that now have 'refilled' for want of a better term.

The thing is causing panic about running out of fuel is good for environmentalists - there is a lot of research grants to be had 'proving' global warming and peak oil etc - but try getting funding to prove it's utter rubbish, and it's good for oil companies because they can justify upping the prices 'hey not much left, and we are spending heaps researching the alternatives, and looking for more oil'

Basically what I am saying in all this is that this won't actually affect us, it won't affect our grandkids. It likely won't affect their grandkids - they'll still be using hydrocarbon fuels like we did now, just the production/source might have changed.

Solar won't work (for powering homes, which is a little bit of a tangent), as it would require such mass storage as to be impractical. Solar cells need to be clean, and the amt of water that would take would be an environmental disaster all by itself. It's also a problem because even a 1kw rated cell (not the correct term probably) will only actually produce about 10% of it's theoretical peak on any given day due to cloud, angle of the sun, and a bunch of other factors.

Ethanol based fuels are 'around' basically because they are govt subsidised. they aren't a particularly efficient option, but with everyone running around scared about global warming (sea levels were meant to rise 10cm or something by 2010, according to the alarmists circa the late 1990s, well we are in 2009 and there's a mm or 2 tops in change, i.e. negligible. I guess the remaining 9.9cm will happen in the next 6 months - not) - well it's easy to get govt concessions. Bio-diesel works, to a certain degree, but by it's very nature not everyone would be able to produce significant amounts of it.

battery powered cars - just too inefficient - the batteries themselves are a huge weight to carry around, and what they don't tell you is they last a few years tops - less with higher rates of discharge. Worse still - if we adopted electric cars en masse - it'd take _massive_ upgrades to power stations to supply the needed power to recharge them. It'd even require infrastructure change to get enough current into each house to charge enough capacity for any serious daily distance work.

I'm just barely able to remember it, but in the 1970s they had huge global scares about running out of oil - right around the corner. And oil prices soared, and there was a significant impact on car manufacturers when the public (ostensibly for the fist time, esp in the USA) turned away from bigger cars and toward anything smaller that used less fuel. But funniest of all - they also warned that 'just around the corner' was a global ice age. Yep the planet was going to freeze over. Want to know what the cause was? hydrocarbon emissions/pollution. Now magically when that turned out to be scare tactics, now lo and behold, the exact same emissions are going to cause global warming.


I'll happily take bets with anyone that before 2020 global warming will be seen in just the same light that the imminent ice age of the 70s pseudo scientists was by the 1990s.

Quote:

Whoa... Steady on there big fella. We all know that the universe popped into existence some 5000 years ago.

Once we get all the bugs with room temperature super conductors sorted, nucular fusion will be the go. A fusion gererator the size of a shoe box will power your house for ever and it will use anything as fuel. So we sort out the power issues along with global warming, waste management and what to do with grand aunt tilly when she falls of her perch.