The Japs have perfected and patented a low emission low energy production process
of making fuel from brown coal. They are holding summits on it in Europe this month.
The italians, USA, India and others have been toying with synthetic fuels from coal for a long time but the Japs seem to have the upper hand as they are the worlds leading nerds.

It is well known that electric vehicles using well setup lead acid batteries and using coal
power electricity are still more efficient than todays fossil fuel powered vehicles.
The opposite is true of inexperienced Ecar conversions adopting the wrong lead acid batteries and using it to perform like ICE vehicles or ignoring the batteries limits.
Electric vehicles when mass produced will be as cheap as ICE vehicles if the consumer and certain Corporations allow it that to happen.

Oil companies around the world have been investing zillions on Algae based fuels where certain strands of DNA modded Algae that can produce up to 50% oil also investing on lithium batteries that are supposedly 1000 times more poweful than available today.
This is not cause oil is running out but to monopolise every segment of the market.

Some scientists in the 70s have reported we are heading into and Ice age and some
now have found the same thing 30 years later. Some scientists in the 30s stated
that health issues arise from air pollution some have made the same findings 70 years later. Industries looking for money will make women believe the pill and removing their uterus will stop cancer or a simple thing like Men are encouraged to use anti-perspirants with crap loads of aluminium (first recognized as a human neurotoxin in 1886 and an effective way of getting aluminum into your blood stream and brain is through the skin) so we dont smell as bad. Its not different in everything we touch.

Regardless of what is going to happen we are basically the most profitable sheep for the Farmers/Corporations that tell us to fear this and that for profit opportunities.

The only alternative for the Black Sheep against corporations are investing in automated Mini-ethanol and bio-diesel plants. They have been recently affordable and are proving popular with farmers and Black sheep :). However to make them sustainable we need to use
Bamboo or Hemp the fastest, insectice resistant, most productive, efficient species and important food/industrial crop in the world to avoid using too many hectares for fuel rather than food. If you dont know why companies like Du-Pont spent millions during the depression in the 30s to make Hemp illegal please look it up, Industrial Hemp is not Weed)

Anyway micro breweries hold promise as they are similar in the processes to making Beer or Alcohol so if you can afford the upfront costs you can have Mans most important fluids:

Fuel and

Well they are using Palm-oil biodiesel at home. It gets a little too gelatinous for some systems though, but it's great with the old diesel gen-sets.

Lihir gold mine in PNG also has it's own Geothermal power supply. Powers the whole island and it has HUGE potential.

Sick. Love the caveman #OOPS#. Ethanol wont work, if you knew how much rainforest they are destroying to produce the demand for it now, you wouldnt even consider it running 100% in the future. Not tree hugging its just a fact that highly fertile soil is needed for this stuff and it can only last for so long, that is: much shorter that fossil fuels! Unless they can sort it out biologically (but probably wont..). I heard in africa on the cheap that they have carbys that start the car with petrol and switch over to ethanol once warm, it requires a lot more heat than petrol to 'boil' or vapourise. Obviously the price of this stuff will go up with demand too, no doubt to ridiculous prices.

Get up when it's light.

Walk.

Kill a roo. Eat.

Sleep when sun goes down.

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.

Quote:

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

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.

beer just like in the movie the gods must be crazy

Methanol

Hi Guys

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

thanks
regards
sumith