Re: Nothing like oil?

On Feb 17, 9:43 am, Jack Tingle <wjtin...@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
David Tate wrote:
Is there any SF, especially recent SF, set in a mid-future (200-500
years out or so) in which the fossil fuels have been used up, and no
really satisfactory substitute[1] was found to replace them?  I
suppose that would be post-apocalyptic steampunk of a sort...

David Tate

[1] A satisfactory substitute would have an EROI of at least 10 to 1,
a portable high-energy-density form usable for things like high-speed
air transport, no catastrophic environmental side-effects, and an
availability and economic cost to produce that would make most or all
of the current economy still feasible.

Yawn. I'm tired of this discussion.

Apparently.

We've had it in the appropriate technical communities since (at least)
the '70's*. What's ending are the supplies of cheap _petroleum_.

Right -- the only fuel we have with EROI and energy density adequate
to power our economy.

Nothing else is changing.

Isn't that enough?

As those run out and get more expensive, other, easily
understood substitutes (alcohol, syn-fuel, electric batteries, hydrogen
fuel cells, etc.) from non-petroleum energy sources can take up the
slack.

No, they can't. Not without orders-of-magnitude breakthroughs in EROI
relative to current technology. When it takes you .8 ergs to produce
1 erg of energy from a hydrogen fuel cell or biodiesel, you are not
going to replace 20-for-1 petroleum with that. The problem is
chemistry, not economics. Most ethanol produced in the US today
actually consumes more energy in its production than you can get back
by burning it.

You _will_ pay more for energy, maybe twice or three times as
much as today. Your standard of living will go down slightly.

Slightly? What were you planning to power the airplanes with? I'm
curious which alternative power tech that we already know how to do
can even come close to replacing fossil fuels.

The discussion we _should_ be having is how to manage this changeover.

You can't have that discussion until you know what you're changing
over to.

That's a political discussion, not a technical one. If we'd emphasized
it in 1980 when, instead, the US went back to sleep on this issue, we'd
be laughing at the stupid Arabs, and Hugo Chavez would be flacking for
some third rate discount fuel distributor, not Venezuela.

No, oil was going to equal power for as long as it lasted -- it's just
too much better than any other fuel for that not to be true. The
payback doesn't come for a few centuries; Chavez was safe.

Nope, we all had to drive SUV's, and no one thought about electricity
usage and fuel refinery capacity until California had to turn down the
air conditioning, a hurricane stopped production for a year in the Gulf
Coast, and Al Gore won an Oscar and a Nobel prize (Al Gore? Nah! Really?).

While you are certainly right about our energy profligacy, the
marginal volume of energy that goes for personal automobile
transportation by SUV rather than Prius, or AC to 68 degrees instead
of 75, is less than 10% of US energy consumption, and a tiny fraction
of the world's usage. Conservation can push the end of fossil fuels
back, on a "no longer my problem or my kids' problem" scale, but it
doesn't change the basic math. If we run out in 1000 years instead of
500, we still run out.

(Of course, since fusion is 50 years away...)

David Tate
.

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