Re: Art, where's the buzz on nanotech saving America today?

Straydog wrote:


On Thu, 30 Mar 2006, Threeducks wrote:

Straydog wrote:



On Mon, 27 Mar 2006, Threeducks wrote:

Straydog wrote:



On Mon, 27 Mar 2006, BMJ wrote:





If anything, nano's dead and has been replaced by the hydrogen economy
and other high oil price chicanery cerca late 70s malarkey. What gives?
Have the spin doctors on Charlie Rose lost their will to b.s. till they
drop?




It isn't so much the hydrogen economy but anything to do with climate change and what can be done to reduce its effects. You may have noticed that biofuels




In Brazil, 20% of what goes into gastanks of cars is bio-ethanol. Today. Already. And, just about market priced with gas. No fantasy. All reality.


I'm not convinced this stuff is the way to go. It's more expensive than regular gasoline, and you get fewer MPG.



Do you deny that there will one day be a planet earth and the remaining petroleum will either be already burned up or so prohibitively expensive that we will have no choice but to burn something else, whether it be coal or renewable? Surely even if you made the assumption that all of the earth is pure oil, then at our present burn rate any kid who can calculate simple algebra would be able to predict the day when it will all be burned up.


I don't deny that we will eventually run out of oil. However, it takes energy to make ethanol. Does it take more energy to make ethanol than it does gasoline? The power you get out of a gallon of ethanol is less than a gallon of gasoline, so you have to burn more. Ethanol is currently more expensive than gasoline. How are you going to get people to use something that gives you less performance and less MPG and costs more money?


There are, to me, three factors at play here: i) Brazil has, right now, accomplished, if I read the article correctly and it was written correctly, the replacement of 20% of what goes into car gastanks with corn-derived ethanol, which means this is not a pipe dream but a working demonstration of feasibility on a large scale, ii) some $2 billion dollars went into this and that money came from loans (and some form of subsidy, IIRC) made for the purpose of building up this infrastructure, iii) pure, self-supporting "economics" need not be a prime factor if it is determined that a subsidy, tax incentive, or other "imperitive" is utilized to "make the wheels turn." This last item, iii, is important because modern societies really _do_ vote money for projects that are not or never will be "self-supporting economic" machines. Our whole Department of Defense consumes about $500 bil/year (not counting DoE nuclear weapons budgets) and has virtually zero $ ROI (so the rationalization has to be for other reasons, and in the context of our current little discussions here it has to be aimed at "dealing with" the eventual extinction of petroleum resources and the future price increases that will put gasoline out of the reach of the majority of people). OK?

We have an infinite amount of sun coming down. That isn't going to run out. Wind isn't going to run out, either. Corn? That takes energy to grow and we may very well run out of that.


There are a number of oils that come from plants. some cooking oils at the grocery store are from plants and are not outrageously priced and are quite pure and maybe a little thicker than diesel fuel. I don't know the
numbers but if gasoline (recall that India and China are just discovering
_cars_ and they like them very much, so the demand for gas is already
going up) prices go up another buck or two per gallon, I'm going to think
that a lot of farmers are going to get out their pensils and papers and
start figuring how to grow this stuff and get oils out if it, and sell
what's left over for some other use.


The guys who are basically

converting garbage to ethanol may have a market (and I applaud their efforts), but the idea of growing corn to make ethanol is a dumb one.



We'd better start somewhere and Brazil is ahead of us. I also heard on NPR radio some years ago that, of all places, Kenya generates more percapita electricity by solar cells than anywhere else in the world.


We could just line solar cells up in the desert if we wanted to. Plenty of sun and land out there. Even if the efficiency is low, if you have enough panels you can generate a lot of electricity.


And, as I suggested, if DoD budgets were made available for solar panelization in our badlands & deserts, we'd already have a large fraction of our electricity completely off non-renewable resources. And, all the technology is already in our hands. No breakthroughs, like CTR, are needed. And, no filthy smoke, exhaust, polution, ashes, radioactivity, etc.

If there is any trick in all of this, its political willpower and doing it the way the Brazilians did it without making a government boondoggle out of it.


The culture in Europe, Brazil, wherever is completely different from the US. Nowhere do people love their cars like they do in the US. We have made significant advances in engine technology over the last 20 years. Guess where it went? All of that added efficiency was gobbled up in higher horsepower engines and larger vehicles. NYTimes had an article on that today, BTW. In Brazil people are driving glorified golf carts, they use public transportation, etc. Not much political will is needed to push ethanol in Brazil. In the US, public transportation is almost viewed as being un-American.

Our government doesn't even have the political will to increase fuel economy standards even though the techonology is there and the cars could be built today. They are not going to switch fuels on us until we actually run out of gasoline.
.

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