Quote:
Originally Posted by Ptmckiou
You don’t gain independence by continuing to rely on Stone Age technology. When we stop using fossil fuels so much, thereby utilizing more modern technology, OPEC will no longer rule our lives. Fossil fuels have gone their way with the model-T. Time to advance.
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Fossil fuels are used because they are abundant and relatively cheap. If and when alternative sources of fuels become economically feasible, And cost in the range of or preferably less than the fossil fuels, the trend will be to use them. But realistically America is far from that point and will not get there anytime soon.
We as private citizens oftentimes delude ourselves into thinking that a changeover is a simple matter. And, on a personal level, for many of us such a change consists merely of swapping in the smoke-belching Yamaha golf cart for a glittering new electric version. But even there, the electricity that powers our new toy often is not comes from a plant that produces electricity by--you guessed it--burning FOSSIL fuels!
Even going beyond that: our newfangled golf carts might run perfectly well on electricity but overwhelmingly, America's industry does not. Nor is it a simple matter of replacing fossil fuels with some other manufactured "clean" fuel. take trucking, for example. It is true that biodiesel has been used by the American trucking industry for two decades now. But that is a mix: 80% - 20%, with 80% being a fossil fuel. to move to a higher proportion of clean fuel would necessitate substantial changes to the engines of just about all of the trucks, and in any case increasing the proportion of clean fuel in biodiesel generates problems all its own, such as the fuel refusing to flow when the temperature gets near or below the freezing point. Railway locomotives face the same problems: currently as I understand it locomotives use biodiesel that is 95% fossil fuel. Anything more, and strange things start happening. and a 100% switchover to a supposedly "clean" fuel such as ethanol would require a complete retooling of just about anything and everything that moves: an internal combustion engine designed to burn gasoline or diesel fuel CANNOT switchover to 100% ethanol without being essentially remanufactured.
But let's take a look at that "clean" fuel. We gas up the old Family Truckster with a fuel containing about 15% ethanol and field grand that we are saving the planet. But are we? I hail from an area where producing ethanol for industry is a big (government-subsidized, of course) industry. Ethanol from corn! But what a lot of people don't know is that ethanol production in America is, at best, a 1-1 proposition. At best, it cost us as much to produce a gallon of ethanol from corn as we get back from selling it, with much of the cost of production itself going to fossil fuel use: The tractors of the farmers producing the corn burn fossil fuel, as do the trucks and trains hauling the corn to the plant and hauling the finished product away from the plant. Is this doing the planet a favor? Somehow, I think we are deluding ourselves.
Not only that, the gasoline and diesel fuel is far cheaper to produce than ethanol or biodiesel. An ethanol plant is essentially a huge moonshine still. The corn needs to be processed and fermented, then distilled to produce ethanol, which not only takes a lot of time but which itself has storage problems far greater than that associated with gasoline--ethanol has a far shorter shelf life than does fossil fuels. Gasoline is far cheaper to manufacture because essentially it is not manufactured at all: It is already present in the crude oil, and it is a simple matter with the process of fractional distillation, to set the gasoline, number one diesel, number two diesel, etc., free of the crude oil and sell it.
Ethanol as a reliable fuel source is possible, but definitely not the way we are doing it here in America. Brazil, for example, runs substantially on ethanol fuel, but they get their fuel by fermenting sugarcane, not corn, with sugarcane giving them a return of about 7-1, as opposed to the at best 1-1 return America gets from corn. America simply does not have enough sugarcane to make that viable. We do however have sorghum, which could produce a 2 to 1 return, but there again it would involve a substantial retooling of the production apparatus, from farm to plant, before this is economically feasible.
It is an easy thing to chant mantras about clean-air, saving the planet, etc. etc. Unfortunately, reality intervenes and probably hundreds of ways that the well-intentioned save-the-planet types have never even thought of.