Replacing fossil fuels

[JohnsonsEvilTwin]

I can only suggest that you go to Africa as I have and look into African agriculture in the huge land area where it exists.
Please do not use the 'culture' excuse. It has unpleasant undertones. I have met many African farmers who obviously know far far more than you about modern agriculture.
To say you wish to leave Africans to make up their own minds about their agriculture is an insult to the inteligence of anyone who has had experience of the American controlled world food markets and the murderous effect this has on the population of Africa.
I have buried people in Africa because of the corrupt world food markets, so please do not make unqualified remarks on the subject.


Saying there is NOTHING to replace oil is absolute unadulterated rubbish.

Actually Autogyro I'm South African my friend. So I have a far deeper insight into what afflicts my country and continent than you will ever have.
So much for the "unqualified" comment but then you are known to be assumptive, which is not a great quality.

You mention "African culture" has "unpleasant undertones" in this debate. That is utterly ridiculous. Zimbabwe is a very clear example of African culture destroying the means to feed its own people. African indigenous farmers survive primarily as a subsistence farmer. This is not debateable this is factual.

Before 1980 Zimbabwe could produce surplus grain, today it cannot hope to feed its own. Why? Political change exiling Europeans (who were the farmers) and replacing them with local people who did not want to maintain the same commercial farming.
This is factual, whichever way you paint it.
Now its nobodies fault, Just that the majority of African farmers do not have the same goals as that of American or European Farmers.

What is "unqualified" is for someone like you to tell them how to do it! They know, what to do, they choose to do it their way as they have done for hundreds and thousands of years.
And should we go down the BIO-fuel route, its these very people that will suffer so you can have "green gas".

And 1 final point autogyro. Saying there is nothing to replace oil is absolute rubbish, I agree. But if you read what I wrote you will see I wrote "nothing to replace oil today".

Because going Bio fuel only today would be tottally irresponsible leading to famine in many parts of the world, nuclear energy is a pipe dream, Hydrogen is plausible but distant hope until we can produce hydrogen cheaply, elctricity is dirtier than oil(non nuke produced).

If there is another form of energy that is clean, easy to and cheap to produce, and wont lead to food prices rocketing, 6 billion people would love to hear it mate.

[autogyro]

Sorry JET, I bow to your experience of the greatest continent on Earth.
I have a good friend who lives in Howick SA and breeds polo ponies and a SA dentist so I will have to be careful.
I agree completely with you about the effect that the changes in Government in SA has had on agriculture. Much of it has slipped back into subsistence farming driven by the old tribal values.I am sorry I concluded your cultural comments as driven by the opinion held of Africans that I have met constantly in the so called developed countries.
However, I still believe the driving force causing this backward move, is corruption fed and controlled from outside SA and other African countries.
I am also aware of the risk when suggesting bio fuel crops be grown in Africa but this again is created by an outside controlled corruption that is common in Africa. The exploitation of the local peoples is of course common knowledge across Africa and in every field of agriculture, mining and general resource profiteering in every corner of the continent.
It should be possible to grow sufficient bio fuel crops throughout the world including the huge African land mass, without either damaging food crop production, the eco structure, or the people who rely on the land for their survival. There is sufficient land space and the reliance on liguid fuel in vehicles will slowly reduce anyway as centralised energy generation and electric distribution increases.
It is a huge task with huge complexity and no one crop or method of energy production is a silver bullet.
The bottom line is having the will to make the changes to alternate clean energy and overcome the problems. The main problem is not the technology or the people like African farmers, it is those who leech off oil exploitation and force delays in the present energy revolution.

[andrew]

I would actually like to see hydrogen fuel cells developed futher. Electric cars are a non-starter but I think that hygrogen would be a suitable replacement for petrol.

Hydrogen fuel cells are a mature technolgy developed by NASA for use in space ships that have ample supplies of high pressure very low temperature hydrogen available to fuel them.
It is the oil companies that are promoting and financing continued development of hydrogen as a road vehicle fuel. There are a number of corrupt reasons. First the technology has already been developed at someone elses expense. Secondly it is a simple matter to use either oil or CNG as a source of hydrogen to keep the oil companies profitable and three the oil companies are using the hydrogen banner to con the general public into thinking it is a Utopian and 'clean' source of energy and vehicle fuel when it is not. If any of you promoting Hydrogen for either direct burning in ic engines or hydrogen fuel cells can give one sensible clue as to how an infra structure can be built to handle liquid hydrogen at high pressure and extreemly low temperature. please tell us, as without it Hydrogen has no chance as a prime mover fuel.
If there are to be fuel cell vehicles to help the inevitable change over to pure electric, then they will be ethanol fuel cells. Ethanol fuel cells would be as mature as hydrogen fuel cells if the same amount of money were to be spent on them. Ask the oil companies why this is not the case.

I saw a while ago that hydrogen is already being used in the US and is doing quite nicely. Electric is a pipe dream. Electric cars have poor range and take far too long to charge. The there is the increased demand for electric, much of which is generated from coal or diesel fired power stations. Hydrogen is one of the most common substances around and refining it into a usable form for automotive technology is no harder than refining petrol. The only thing that comes out the exhaust in water so it is a win win situation. The hippys will love it as well as those of us who don't believe in global warming being caused by cars.

[xpensive]

Once the price for crude hits the 300 USD/barrel mark, I trust the market to regulate the situaton. If there is no plausible alternative fuel or other propusion system, the concept of one-in-each-car transportation will become a historical parenthesis, simple as that.

But there's little need to worry before that happens.

[JohnsonsEvilTwin]

Once the price for crude hits the 300 USD/barrel mark, I trust the market to regulate the situaton. If there is no plausible alternative fuel or other propusion system, the concept of one-in-each-car transportation will become a historical parenthesis, simple as that.

But there's little need to worry before that happens.

This whole energy debacle reminds me of an off the wall bizzare film I downloaded recently call Southland Tales with Sean William Scott and Duane "the Rock" Johnson.
The world is in a state of paranoia, and a group of very strange looking scientists develop "blue energy" that is massivley abundant, with no emmisions yet it can only be sourced from these "scientist".
If you can bear with some quite strange scenes, this film is very good and has a spot on soundtrack by Moby.

[xpensive]

This flick JET?

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0405336/

One thing is for certain however, making ethanol car fuel from crop is completely insane, not only morally corrupt, but it also has a pathetic energy-efficiency of only some 10% when taken the entire process into account.

The Swedish "green" party pushed the issue hard for tax-subsides during the former socialist government, helping to cut down Brazilian rainforests to grow sugarcane under terrible working conditions, as well creating an environmental disaster.

[Richard]

There are a several points here:

- Using less energy is more effective than trying to produce energy more efficiently.

- Industrialised ethanol production happens to be most effective in the habitat/climate zone that is also home to our last remaining rainforest. Not a good idea for bio-diversity.

- Autogyro's example of a self-sustaining farm is a great example of micro generation, we need more of that, but it doesn't help the 80% (?) or so who live in dense cities.

- There is a role for using fuel cell cars as micro-storage stations. You charge it during the day from a grid connected to a solar furnace in the Sahara, or you charge it at night from a nuclear power station. This brings efficiency gains to by smoothing peaks and troughs in supply/demand.

[Just_a_fan]

I saw a while ago that hydrogen is already being used in the US and is doing quite nicely. Electric is a pipe dream. Electric cars have poor range and take far too long to charge. The there is the increased demand for electric, much of which is generated from coal or diesel fired power stations. Hydrogen is one of the most common substances around and refining it into a usable form for automotive technology is no harder than refining petrol. The only thing that comes out the exhaust in water so it is a win win situation. The hippys will love it as well as those of us who don't believe in global warming being caused by cars.

Hydrogen is currently mostly sourced from fossil fuels so isn't that great.

natural gas: 48%, oil: 30%, coal: 18%, electrolysis: 4%
http://www.hydrogenassociation.org/gene ... chproduced

It could be sourced from water, as above, but that requires as much energy being put in as one will get out later plus the inefficiency losses. And storing hydrogen is quite tricky too. It has an annoying habit of escaping! Trying to store it as a liquid is hugely energy intensive, storing it as a gas limits capacity, storing it in another form adds a layer of complexity / losses.

Electric cars do currently have limited range and a long charge time, true. Perhaps what is needed is a change in expectations from vehicle users. Perhaps we'll have to get used to journies taking longer (just like they did in the past). Perhaps expecting to be able to drive 500+ miles in a day will be the pipe dream in future. How often do people do more than 100miles in a trip? How long do they spend somewhere between trips?

Most people (in the UK at least) won't do 500 miles a week in their cars. Range and charging issues aren't so problematic in those cases. If they drive to work within the car's range (and I'm betting the huge majority will do) then charging the thing during the 8 hours it's sat in the car park isn't an issue if the infrastructure is put in place.

The real answer is lots of lovely nuclear power to provide the electricity. Sure, there are issues with it but then there are issues with every aspect of life. In the UK we kill >2000 people a year on our roads, >100,000 with tobacco. Compared to that, nuclear power is as safe as you can get.

[Just_a_fan]

There are a several points here:
[...]

Being a little glib, if I may, you missed one really important point:

- there are too many people putting too much pressure on too small a resource. In this case the resource is the planet, not some subset of it such as energy.

We really do need to find an acceptable way to reduce total human population.

[JohnsonsEvilTwin]

This flick JET?

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0405336/

Thats the one
but 8/10 if you ask me

[autogyro]

There are a several points here:
[...]

Being a little glib, if I may, you missed one really important point:

- there are too many people putting too much pressure on too small a resource. In this case the resource is the planet, not some subset of it such as energy.

We really do need to find an acceptable way to reduce total human population.

Energy is the key to survival. With enough of it, the human race can expand into space and colonise other planets. The Moon and Mars would be the start.
Controlling population is important, in Britain we could start by controlling child maintenance. To many people have children just to live on benefits. In Africa they need children to work to survive. Give them a better agricultural environment and they could control their population as well. It all stems from the control the criminal world system has over development. This is the main area needing rapid change.

[xpensive]

Energy is the key to survival. With enough of it, the human race can expand into space and colonise other planets. The Moon and Mars would be the start.
Controlling population is important, in Britain we could start by controlling child maintenance. To many people have children just to live on benefits. In Africa they need children to work to survive. Give them a better agricultural environment and they could control their population as well. It all stems from the control the criminal world system has over development. This is the main area needing rapid change.

Oh please gyro, don't you ever get tired of your own confused ramblings on how you alone could solve the problems of the world?
You are just a conspiracy theorist, why you should find yourself a more appropriate forum than F1T for your political preachings.

[andrew]

Autogyro - are you David Cameron?

[WhiteBlue]

Energy is the key to survival. With enough of it, the human race can expand into space and colonise other planets. The Moon and Mars would be the start.

You must be a contemporary of Isaac Asimov to still live in such believes. People who were educated in the thirties thought with enough cheap energy mankind would start to live in heaven. The history of the 20th century has debunked that myth. The more and the cheaper the energy was for local people the more they have messed up their piece of the planet. Pick any place on earth where people live without electricity and fossil fuels (Bushmen of the Kalahari desert come to mind) and compare that to Mexico City (just to name any Megacity). I bet you any amount of money the average Bushman is healthier and happier than the average Mexico City inhabitant (replace with citizen of any other similar agglomeration).

If we had limitless energy we would have long damaged our atmosphere by unlimited burning of rocket fuel, poisoned the soil with agro chemicals and wasted the fresh water resources for whatever industrial uses we could find. In most cities I have traveled you cannot even drink water from the tap although you can buy any kind of sophisticated industrial product. Where I live now I never ever buy packaged water. It is available in tasty quality from the tap. If I feel hot I can jump into the next lake and don't have to mind keeping my mouth closed. It is a treasured piece of lifestyle for me.

It makes a lot more sense to me to learn using energy more intelligently than to find a way to make limitless energy available.

[010010011010]

It all stems from the control the criminal world system has over development.

So am.... is there a timetable, or a rota system or something im missing here? Because every day it seems its something else thats solely to blame for all the worlds problems..... in your mind anyway