Current Gasoline/Petrol Price$

kbd512 · 2022-04-12 13:12:30

Calliban,

There are two plausible explanations:

1. The people who comprise Biden's administration, along with the dementia patient himself, are so mind-numbingly incompetent that they're not fit to run a lemonade stand, never mind an entire country. I sincerely hope this explanation is closest to reality, because the only plausible alternative is much worse.

Republican President Trump was asked to take a cognitive test, which he submitted to and passed according to the doctors who administered the test. Whenever we ask that Democrat President Biden submit to the same test, which all honest people know he will fail miserably, the Democrats pretend that a man who can't formulate a coherent English sentence has a "speech impediment" and that we're attacking someone with a physical disability. Yeah, speech impediments make you forget where you are, who you are, and who you're talking to. We all know that people who stutter don't know who they're talking to after being reminded multiple times in a matter of minutes.

2. If you listen to the rhetoric of these people, it's pretty obvious that they hate people. They don't hate them because their skin color is different or something like that, they just flat-out hate people, including themselves. If you truly hated people, especially your own people, then watching them suffer under your regime makes perfect sense. I think some of them get a kick out of this. I don't think that applies to President Biden, but the twerps who comprise his administration certainly seem to enjoy it.

Democrats have this self-destructive habit of falling into a stupor after they elect someone from "their team". They pay zero attention to the people they elect or have appointed by elected officials to represent them after the fact. They get all of their information from media sources they agree with. The media knows this and simply ignores every self-destructive act committed. Biden's energy secretary was cackling like a hyena over the high gas prices. I can't imagine what was so funny about that, because the policies of the administration she's in have directly caused that problem.

None of this stuff truly affects them because they have the tax payers footing their bills and their voter base is oblivious to the problems they cause. If they're not totally oblivious, then they can easily be thrown off with claims of "Russia did it" or other similar malarkey that everyone who is not spellbound by their cultish agenda can see. We were net oil exporters in 2020, but by the very next year when President Biden took office in 2021, we were once again net oil importers who were beholden to Russian oil imports, but the Russians somehow caused our energy problems. Now we're draining our strategic reserve that President Trump was intelligent enough to fill to the top when oil prices were lower, all to try to distract attention away from their absurdly bad policies.

Whatever the opposite of sane and moral happens to be, that's what these people do. If there's a food shortage, they try to make it worse by turning the food into fuel. If there's a fuel shortage, they refuse to allow the oil companies to drill for oil and point out that they have unused oil leases where the oil companies have already tested and plainly stated that there's no oil or no economically recoverable oil. If there's a health care shortage, then they implement policies that mandate the firing doctors and nurses who won't kowtow to their ideology. If there's a debt crisis, they want to spend more money than we've ever spent in the history of the country. At some point, accident or incompetence doesn't adequately explain this. Some of them must be evil.

People who are mentally defective or afflicted with anti-social personality disorders should never be allowed anywhere near power. Unfortunately, that would've excluded almost everyone in the Democrat Party, except for someone like Tulsi Gabbard. Since she was actually competent and not onboard with destroying the country in service to any particular ideology or agenda, she immediately had to be branded a "Russian agent" by the media to dissuade any rational examination of governance policy and philosophy or simple competence to do the job. The only clowns who were left, were the random idiots or anti-humanists that the Democrats put in front of the American people as their choices. These cretins are the only kinds of people who get elected, because they will do or say anything. They're a bunch of sadistic ambulance chasers with no concept of what life is like for anyone who is not "a dingbat just like them". It's a sign of the times. Ideology has overcome rationality, and this is the "new religion" to replace the "old religions".

SpaceNut · 2022-04-12 20:15:20

Calliban, its not that the Keystone pipeline is verboten, its where its going through which did not pass the army co engineers, the fact that existing connector lines are already leaking spills of oil onto the land and water.

Build it correctly and its not a problem....

kbd512 · 2022-04-12 22:46:53

SpaceNut,

Democrat politicians don't give a crap about oil spills or the environment. If they did, then we wouldn't be shipping that same Canadian crude by rail car to the refineries, burning a lot more oil in the process. They do care about paying off their campaign donors. It's a thinly-disguised pay off to Berkshire-Hathaway for the election campaign donations to the Democrat Party. Warren Buffett is not a multi-billionaire because he hands out piles of cash to people who do nothing for him.

Calliban · 2022-04-14 08:39:30

The world and Europe especially, will soon face a diesel shortage. This going to weigh very heavily on the economy.
https://www.globalresearch.ca/nato-sanc … er/5777305

kbd512 · 2022-04-14 09:36:36

Calliban,

If we stopped shipping things half-way around the world, would that free up enough fuel to provide the diesel fuel used by land vehicles in Europe and Turkey?

China's demand for diesel fuel must be poised to fall off a cliff. They're shutting down entire cities due to COVID.

Here's how I know your source is BS:

American LNG Is Not the Answer to European Gas Crisis

Climate change is the reason why we can't import American oil and gas, but Europe will continue consuming Russian oil and gas like it's going out of style. What a load of crap.

Your so-called leaders are talking about leaving you in the dark (their idea of "weaning Europe off Russian gas"):

Building LNG terminals is the wrong solution to the problem of weaning Europe off Russian gas. As E3G noted: “Make investments in energy efficiency an energy security priority and increase the ambition of and fast track key renewable energy and efficiency policy.”
We knew the solutions long before this bloody, brutal war: renewables, energy efficiency, batteries and EVs, together with new ways of organising and democratising our energy supply. They were the solutions then, they are the solutions now.

These clowns are stuck on stupid. Your ideologues blew mad money on "renewables" to become more energy-dependent now than when they started. They're blaming oil and gas for "renewables" (converted fossil fuels in magical plastic wrap) utter failure to provide reliable power. I guess Europeans really will have to freeze to death in the dark to break the spell of "renewable energy". Who am I kidding, though? These idiots would rather die than admit to their mistake. If the non-stop gasoline / diesel riots in France are any indicator, then this insanity will not stop until the "democratically elected" imbeciles are shown the door by the people who elected them. I do wonder how badly they have to screw up before reality finally sets in.

Calliban · 2022-04-14 10:03:58

Kbd512, Europe consumes 470 cubic kilometres of gas each year, about 40% of it imported from Russia.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of … onsumption

The US produces 831.8 cubic km each year.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of … production

To replace European imports from Russia, the US would need to increase its production by 25% and export that to Europe as LNG. Maybe that is possible eventually. But it won't happen in six months. And it will be expensive. None of the US shale basins are close to the coast. So pipelines would need to be produced and jetties and liquefaction facilities would need to be built on the Atlantic coast.

A lot of gas is flared in the US, not because it isn't valuable. CNG pipelines are expensive and US tight oil production is dispersed over large areas. Individual wells have such high decline rates that investing in pipework to harvest the associated gas is often unprofitable.

Last edited by Calliban (2022-04-14 10:18:06)

Terraformer · 2022-04-14 11:06:14

America could do it if they cut domestic use. I think it's fair to ask them to bear the weight of sanctioning Russia, rather than expecting other countries to pay.

kbd512 · 2022-04-14 11:33:25

Calliban,

I've been digging through your "globalresearch.ca" source and it's looking a lot like anti-western Russian propaganda. For someone who doesn't trust or particularly like Jewish people because you believe them to be tribalistic in nature and communist, it's pretty damn funny that you frequent a conspiracy website constructed by the son of a Russian Jew who immigrated from the Soviet Union. I've already listened to enough of the opinions of various authors from this site to know that they detest America and the West, and look favorably upon the Soviet Union. Every atrocity committed by the Russians in Ukraine is a "false flag", 9/11 was a "false flag", COVID vaccines are bioweapons, and the list goes on. It's just another steaming pile of anti-capitalist communist garbage fed into the brains of their unsuspecting victims, nothing more or less.

Your disinformation and conspiracy theory website appears to be the handiwork of one Michel Chossudovsky, son of Russian Jewish immigrant Evgeny Chossudovsky, who was a career UN diplomat, and Irish Protestant, Rachel Sullivan. It was said of Evgeny Chossudovsky, that "all his life he retained a patriotic attachment to Russia and a sympathy for Socialist ideas".

If you wish to understand the son, then understand his father and his mother:
Irish Times - Dr Evgeny Chossudovsky obituary - Writer with a distinguished UN career

It's always far easier to fool a man than to convince him that he's been fooled. Thus, it will be all but impossible to convince you that you've been fooled, but bubba, you been had. This stuff literally takes minutes to figure out, even for someone with near-zero interest in Russian propaganda or conspiracy theories such as myself. You have a computer, you're an engineer, and you have a functional brain. Use what you have and what you know to figure out the rest.

See how fixating on what you want to believe about someone or something hurts you?

Propaganda you agree with or wish to believe in does not make it correct. Judging a book by its cover is a terrible idea. Look at the content of a man's character, because all other considerations are so superficial that no adult worthy of the title should ever consider them.

This tool is another communist-wannabe and mouthpiece for Russia's propaganda ministry, and has appeared repeatedly on Russia Times, but I know you'll fixate on his choice of religion or his skin color or his ethnicity instead of simply looking at the man and seeing another brain dead commie who, despite all his education (indoctrination) and wealth, can't recognize a morally and financially bankrupt system when he sees it. They have bitter hatred for the system that gave them everything they have, because they can't accept that the idyllic system they envision can never exist.

Michel may know what he's doing (presuming his father, Evgeny, explained it to him), or he may not (blindly following ideological programming without ever knowing why). However, I'd bet almost anything that even he doesn't know why (how you discern ideological programming from freely choosing to believe in something). These are core beliefs, so some of it may never surface at a conscious level. Don't expect simple answers or that their explanation will make immediate sense to you. It may never make sense to you, not that that matters greatly. It's possible to know someone for a lifetime without them explaining why they believe what they believe, but believe you me, this is what motivates them to do what they do.

Why are you so fearful of these people, though?

Simply stop listening to them and they can prattle on forever without convincing anyone of anything.

That's exactly what's happened to CNN and MSNBC. They spewed so many obvious lies that they are almost universally ignored now, and seen for what they truly are- petty propaganda artists who detest capitalism, western constitutional nation-state morals and standards for behavior, and people who have serious self-hate or other mental issues. Basically, they're our ideologically poisoned dregs of society.

Void · 2022-04-14 11:34:08

That is not entirely accurate, we have gas production which does not produce much Oil or liquids, I believe: https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=49377

According to Peter Zeihan, we also have natural gas production in the Gulf of Mexico, which has been shut down for a later time.

In my opinion, it might not make that much sense to ship Natural Gas anyway, better to ship Oil, if you have the pipelines. And that would be a problem.

But for many fields Natural Gas is a waste product. So, then you can understand that it would not only be the Russians and ME producers who likely push our 5th column to block pipelines, it would also be USA producers who might not want to share the USA market with Canada.
All you need is a sacred something and some money under the table.

Canada is starting to get into Shale Oil now, but of course pipelines and market jealousy are still going to be an issue.

The most logical thing to me is to build more pipelines, and to consume more natural gas here in North America, and to export more oil, which is naturally a liquid.

We so far have rather cheep natural gas, and will likely benefit from it, but perhaps our market is saturated.

I can understand why Brits and others may get rather annoyed as to how things break. You have to struggle, and have had to, and we have all these benefits, that we don't so much disserve. But we had red necks and pioneers who developed the shale oil, in spite of what the "Best and Brightest, (Under the table 5th columnists)" would do.

Perhaps you could lure our "Best and Brightest" to some desert island and let them eat each other? Please?

Done.

Last edited by Void (2022-04-14 11:41:33)

kbd512 · 2022-04-14 11:51:41

Calliban,

Expensive or not, our energy infrastructure should receive appropriate investment to assure that America and our allies are supplied with oil and gas. Stop complaining about cost. Russia can decide to shut off the flow of oil and gas any time they please, no matter what anyone else does. Europe is not their only customer. China is perfectly willing to take all the oil and gas that Russia can supply. If Russia decides to shut off the spigot, does it matter at all how much new infrastructure costs?

Russia did this. America did not. Give credit where credit is due.

Edit:

Jettyless Terminals: Accelerating Alternative LNG Import to Europe

From the article:

The system consists of a single adaptable plug-and-play platform, the IQuay, a floating solution which universally connects to any vessel in any port, and flexible cryogenic floating hoses which connect the platform to the onshore terminal.
This field-proven system makes LNG accessible to locations with a lead time of 9-12 months for a new build, with chartering options to suit short-term demand. With a modular system, the Jettyless terminal is flexible to energy demand, and can operate in busy port and harbour areas without needing to build new port infrastructure. Additional benefits include:
* No fixed-jetty structure, platform or mooring dolphin construction and no loading arms required;
* There is no ecosystem interference or impact on the seabed, simplifying the permitting process;
* Dredging requirements are significantly reduced or non-existent as the vessel can be moored with minimal contact to the seabed (or onshore);
* Safety separation of the LNG loading process from shore is possible. The IQuay is unmanned during loading, which adds to a safer operating environment for personnel;
* Ocean operating conditions exceed those for a fixed jetty.
...
The system is also applicable to a diversity of fluids, so and LNG system is easily adapted for hydrogen, ammonia, or liquid CO2 for carbon capture applications.

Last edited by kbd512 (2022-04-14 12:33:44)

SpaceNut · 2022-04-14 21:07:00

Yes as its easier to handle than mining coal for sure for china growing industrial needs.

If 25% is accurate and the prices rise we typically will lower use which does give the net dip in use as a pseudo production increase. That means we need less than the 25% to achieve the goal to supply others with propane, natural gas ect...

We are now heading to warmer days as summer approaches and with that the normal cooking inside the home will decrease as well further creating the artificial surplus.

kbd512 · 2022-04-15 13:11:27

SpaceNut,

I don't think a cryogenic liquid will ever be easier to handle than coal, but for a given tonnage of fuel moved you get about twice as much usable energy from Methane than from coal. The problem with coal is that there's no practical way to power most of the equipment that moves it by using the coal, at least not without extremely fine ball-milling of the coal and mixing it with water to produce a slurry. This is a time consuming and expensive process, though. Coal contains a lot more Carbon, as compared to Methane or Propane, and while Carbon also combines with Oxygen during combustion in an exothermic reaction the same way Hydrogen does, we have practical limits on achieving complete combustion and on the total weight of fuel carried to power a mobile machine.

1 mole of Carbon combined with Oxygen releases 393,500 Joules
1 mole of Hydrogen combined with Oxygen releases 242,000 Joules

1kg of Hydrogen: 142MJ/kg
1kg of Methane: 53.6MJ/kg
1kg of Propane: 49.6MJ/kg
1kg of Gasoline: 46.4MJ/kg (not Gasoline mixed with ethanol)
1kg of Diesel: 45.6MJ/kg
1kg of Kerosene: 43MJ/kg
1kg of Carbon: 32.79MJ/kg
1kg of Ethanol: 30MJ/kg
1kg of Anthracite (coal): 26MJ/kg - 33MJ/kg

That's another way of saying you need to burn about twice as much of the absolute best grades of coal, by weight, as compared to Methane to generate equivalent thermal energy. Weight tends to be the enemy of moving machinery, so other fuels were used when they became widely available. That's also why we quit using so much of it to generate electricity and saved more of it for making steel. You can make steel without using coal, but doing so requires even more energy. Methane also releases half as much CO2, or less, as compared to burning coal.

In piston engines, excess Carbon in the coal slurry would badly coke the piston face, valves, cylinder head, and cylinder walls above the top ring on the piston, as well as contaminating the engine oil in record time. This would create hot spots on the piston face or cylinder head that could ignite the next squirt of coal slurry before the piston is in the optimal position for the next combustion event to occur, so spark ignition would be impractical without frequent Carbon removal. Engine oil with excessive Carbon deposits is not good for engine life. Coking has also been a problem for gas turbines and rocket engines.

That only leaves external combustion engines, which were used in trains or ships or stationary power plants before diesels and gas turbines. Virtually all trains and ships switched from coal to diesel after that technology become available, even if they burned bunker fuel. Now we have trucks and ships powered by cleaner CNG or LNG. If there was an economic way to convert Methane into Propane, then LPG would be an ideal low-Carbon content fuel that virtually all internal combustion engines can use- spark ignition piston engines / compression ignition piston engines / gas turbines / rockets. External oxy-fuel combustion engines, burners that heat water or salt or supercritical-CO2 to produce power using around 95% pure Oxygen, can also use LPG. The oxy-fuel process reduces the volume of effluent gas or combustion products by about 75%, and the drastic Nitrogen content reduction, as compared to normal air, also reduces NOX production.

We need to start recycling the atmospheric CO2 and turning it into fuel, so that we're not dependent upon drilling activities for our petroleum products.

MIT engineers develop a new way to remove carbon dioxide from air

We will use solar thermal power from the Midwest to locate our new refineries out in the middle of the desert, away from the coastlines / fault lines and away from farm land. We'll install pipelines that feed into the existing pipeline network to supply LNG, LPG, Ammonia, gasoline, diesel, and kerosene to terminals on the east and west coasts, so that we can feed petroleum products to our factories, and to overseas customers in Europe. If we start now, the rest of the world can continue to fight over dwindling petroleum resources while we assure our uninterrupted supply for the foreseeable future.

Since there is little rainfall and reduced corrosion / oxidation rates as a result, we will also use solar thermal to recycle steel and other metals by liquefying them using direct solar thermal power. If it's good for preserving the aircraft in our boneyard, then it'll also help us store steel products.

Important industrial gases used by our space program will also be captured and liquefied here, such as Oxygen, Nitrogen, Argon, and Helium.

Thermal energy will be stored in molten salts or generated from plant products will be stored and used at night to continue to produce power for running the facilities.

This will be national infrastructure owned by our government but administered by private corporations for a fixed profit, via 5 to 10 year contracts, on behalf of our government, similar to our government arsenals that make low-cost / high-volume munitions for our military. It will become part of our military industrial complex, allowing us to operate fleets of aircraft and ground vehicles without concern about the global oil supply. If we require more fuel or electricity, we will simply scale-out the facility. It will cover parts of Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada, and California.

tahanson43206 · 2022-04-15 13:30:43

For SpaceNut re #462

This post by kbd512 is hereby nominated for the Best of topic for kbd512.

Your call...

(th)

kbd512 · 2022-04-15 23:12:30

tahanson43206,

Before you get too excited, we're talking about filling approximately 808 Olympic-sized swimming pools (660,000 gallons; Sunoco Logistics Nederland Terminal has individual tanks with that type of capacity) with petroleum products, every single day. The tank farm at Cushing, Oklahoma has a tank farm with 80 million barrel crude oil capacity, which is 3,360 million gallons. Our total throughput needs to be about 533 million gallons per day. For us to return to pre-COVID petroleum consumption rates, about double that.

As I take stock of this nonsense about converting nearly everything to electric, it's apparent that it's just empty happy talk. We have no practical ability to do that, because as high as our daily consumption rate is, the battery energy storage materials consumption would be astronomical. We don't have a like-kind replacement for petroleum products, and any bovine excrement to the contrary utterly lacks the best aspect of BS, namely the Methane it contains.

MIT's CO2 capture method consumes 278kWh/t of CO2 captured. 317kg/CO2 per barrel of oil, minimum. 12.7M gallons of oil equates to about 4,025,900,000kg / 4,025,900t of CO2 per day. 1,119,200,200,000Wh/day, so 1.2TWh/day. You get an average of about 0.24GWh per square kilometer of solar panels per day, so you need 5km^2 of solar panels. However, that's for photovoltaics at 25% efficiency. Direct solar thermal power provides considerably more energy than that, meaning 90% of the reflected sunlight is turned into thermal power. Divide by 3 and that's about the equivalent land area required for solar thermal. We'll call it 2.5km^2 to account for any inefficiencies. We're going to use the simpler trough-type solar thermal panels with single-axis Sun tracking. Excess thermal energy will be stored in crushed rock. The working fluid for the entire plant will be supercritical CO2. It's an atmospheric CO2 capture plant, after all. All required electrical energy will be extracted using supercritical-CO2 turbines.

The US Navy method that extracts CO2 and H2 from seawater would require about 2TWh (edit: 2TW of constant power) of power per day to supply 20M barrels per day (total US daily petroleum products consumption prior to COVID). This method may use a bit more than that, but what matters most is that we capture and use the captured CO2 to make money. We have a clockwork-predictable supply of petroleum distillates that is agnostic of any drilling activities. If we never drill for any more oil, we have a perpetual lifetime supply. The total land area claim for all of the refinery portion of the facility is around 4.5km^2, or about half the land area usage of a single GigaFactory.

Refinery capacity will be split over 5 different US States with intense sunlight to assure that even a singular nuclear strike is insufficient to remove all refining capacity. The ultimate aim of the program will be to supply all US and all US ally petroleum consumption requirements. Basically, by end of construction, each of the 5 states will produce enough petroleum products to supply the entirety of the US, so 4/5ths of all production will go to US allies. The greater the quantity of petroleum products produced, the greater the tonnage of CO2 captured from the Earth's atmosphere.

We will construct or locate underground caverns to use as LCO2 reservoirs to constitute the US CO2 Strategic Reserve (the feedstock for our petroleum products). Seawater requires no strategic reserve. If we ever run out of seawater, that's not a fixable problem. Similarly, we will build out LOX and LN2 Strategic Reserves for our Space Force and Mars colonization efforts. So long as we're processing billions of liters of seawater every day, we will also extract the Lithium, Magnesium, Uranium, and CO2. The defense-specific end goal of the program is to drastically slow or cease importation of all strategic materials and to rebuild heavy industry (forges and foundries), stop burning coal, stop using steam for power generation (end-of-service for all coal and nuclear power plants using water as coolant / thermal power transfer), start-of-service for tiny footprint oxy-fuel sCO2 gas turbine power plants that generate baseload power, and to use lighter / lower-CO2 products for power generation and vehicles, primarily LPG, which can power all types of internal and external combustion engines with minimal modifications, while extending service life of engine components and engine oil. LNG cannot remain liquid at room temperature and Ammonia, while also storable at room temperature, is badly needed for agriculture. Traditional gasoline, diesel, and kerosene will still be produced in quantity until engine conversions can be completed.

If it's not obvious, the output from all 5 plants will equate to about 100 million barrels per day. That's sufficient to meet total global demand and end all requirements for drilling activities. For a time, we may continue extraction of heavy crude oil from Canada for tar and other heavy distillates that would require more input energy to produce, but total output meets total demand.

Russia and China have little hope of meeting future demand from existing supplies, which will become more expensive every year as our costs remain fixed, so they will also be forced to buy petroleum products from America. We will only sell finished products, which will also serve to destroy their domestic refining capabilities, so they will lose money on every barrel they refine. Hopefully, that dissuades them from invading their neighbors.

We're doing this for a variety of reasons:

1. Providing true and lasting energy and strategic materials independence that disincentivizes wars over energy (since the input products come from the atmosphere and the ocean, we will never run out)
2. Removing incentives for continued extraction and refining activities (we will repurpose all of these companies to run operations at the plants; we still need drilling for establishing our CO2 reservoirs)
3. Removing incentives to fight with neighboring countries over energy supplies (if you invade your neighbor, then we stop shipping petroleum products)
4. Removing CO2 from the atmosphere in a way that makes money, rather than costs money (the key to all economically successful strategies for mitigating the worst effects of climate change)
5. No wholesale changes to existing energy infrastructure that are either too costly or simply won't work within a definable timeframe (thus far every attempt to convert transportation or infrastructure to electric or electronic machinery has utterly failed to decrease total energy consumption, and that is the most pressing problem since resources require more and more energy to transform as they're depleted)
6. Over time, we will build out solar thermal to supply electricity as well as petroleum products, but we will not increase electric output by orders of magnitude in a decade or two (electrification is a laudable goal if the end result is more maintainable / more reliable / less energy-intensive, but thus far there's no sign of that actually happening)
7. No obscene levels of environmental pollution associated with endless streams of electronic waste products (and virtually all of this stuff starts life as a byproduct of cheap coal or gas and ends life in a landfill because it requires even more energy to recycle than it does to make it from scratch)
8. Solar thermal power plants last at least as long as nuclear thermal power plants (this is a critical point, because even if the electronics last for 25 years, the traditional power plants that they purport to replace lasted for 75 years or more; over time, the constant churn only assures that the technologies continue to cost more because they require more energy investment)
9. Uranium and Thorium supplies are conserved for space power and propulsion for colonization of places like Mars, where solar simply won't get the job done in a practical manner
10. Without solar thermal, we would have to build-out approximately 10,000GW of nuclear power, which will never be practical to do over the next 10 years (and we appear stuck on using water / steam for coolant / thermal power transfer, which will always be sub-optimal for power plant safety, thermal efficiency, and materials consumption for the power generating equipment)

There will not be any night-and-day progress on batteries or solar panels over the next 10 to 20 years. The technology will gradually improve, so new and improved variants of the existing technologies will be forthcoming, but batteries will not likely become like-kind replacements for fossil fuels within our lifetimes. Fusion power may become viable in 20 years, but there won't be any garbage trucks or aircraft powered by fusion reactors. In the meantime, for everyone to own electric cars and "recharge them" the way we "recharge" gasoline powered cars, the electric grid infrastructure would have to increase by at least a couple orders of magnitude. That will become increasingly impractical without the cheap fossil fuels that made cheap solar panels and batteries possible. If we're not getting our Lithium from seawater, then there's nowhere near enough Lithium, either.

All transportation represents 15% of our total greenhouse gas emissions, so the absolute maximum effect that electric cars could have is almost meaningless. America already cut its emissions in half by switching from coal to natural gas. Simply using solar synthesized LPG instead of gasoline will cut emissions by 15% to 20% if no other changes are made. Using a lighter plastic vehicle chassis can cut fuel consumption to 1/3rd of present levels and sequester the Carbon used to make the car within the vehicle's chassis. Whatever CO2 reduction benefit electrification could have had will be lost to all the additional manufacturing and infrastructure that must be created, unless someone is naive enough to think that we're going to start producing 100X more electrical power to make an all-electric fleet practical while reducing our emissions by 50% or more.

1. Making more stuff requires more energy, period.
2. No energy efficiency increase has actually resulted in consuming less energy, period.
3. At some point, you have to drive a stake in the ground and say, "This is what we have, and this is what we can feasibly do with it."
4. We can't make any type of practical battery that comes within a country mile of the gravimetric energy density of LPG, and all moving machinery is greatly affected by its own weight.
5. We can't make any type of battery less costly than a solar-heated rock for storing energy. If battery cost was the issue, then Lead-acid was the solution that checked off the greatest number of boxes, but we're not using those for grid-scale storage because even they are far too expensive to use for that application.
6. We can't make any type of practical photovoltaic that approaches the 90% sunlight-to-heat conversion efficiency of a sheet of polished Aluminum reflecting sunlight into a metal tube above the reflector dish. We can make photovoltaics much lighter if cost is no issue, but when it comes to civilization-level infrastructure, cost is always an issue. Despite all the games played with costing, all of it ignores the fact that without energy storage of some kind, solar will only ever provide power 25% of the time.
7. We can't make a more thermally efficient fission reactor that uses water as the coolant and thermal power transfer working fluid.
8. We don't know how to make a functional fusion reactor or matter-antimatter energy conversion device.
9. We know we have a resource problem that will eventually ruin us financially, even if climate change turns out to be the greatest hoax of all time. Even if we weren't nearly certain that we would melt all the ice and flood out most of the coastal areas, the oil and gas supply is only decreasing over time.
10. We know that the civilization that we built and enjoy today was not possible without oil and gas. If the environmental issues can be dealt with, then we can at least maintain our present standard of living by recycling the combustion products so that the next combustion cycle can continue.

Most of us like clean drinking water, sanitation, enough food to feed everyone, modern medicine, reliable transportation, and all the good things that came from electrical power and electronics. If we want all of that to continue without an entire series of miracles transpiring within the next few decades, then we'd best get on with this process of recycling our atmospheric waste products to assure that all the achievements from industrialization are still readily available to our children and their children. If the kiddos eventually come up with better longer-term solutions to our intractable energy problems, then great, but they won't get there through energy poverty, so let's not set them up for that great big fall. There's no guarantee that all the king's horsepower and all the king's men can put civilized society back together again.

Last edited by kbd512 (2022-04-16 09:56:09)

Calliban · 2022-04-16 06:09:37

The MIT technology does look impressive. From the link you reference, the researchers believe they can eventually get 20,000 - 50,000 charge - discharge cycles out of the electrodes. Being able to produce an energetically cheap stream of pure CO2 from air, certainly makes synthetic fuel production a lot more realistic.

If you use heliostat based concentrated solar power, it should be possible to raise temperatures of 800°C needed for thermochemical water splitting. The resulting H2 gas can then be used to produce methanol. Overall reaction:

CO2 + 3H2 = CH3OH + H2O

Hot methanol vapour can then be passed over the appropriate catalyst to yield dimethyl ether, which can be burned in compression ignition engines.

2(CH3OH) = CH3OCH3 + H2O.

This technology would allow any locality with plenty of sunshine and access to water to produce its own supply of synthetic fuel. Exactly how much it would cost and how it would perform on an EROEI basis, I do not know. This is a technology for the world's hot deserts. Maybe Western Sahara, North Australia, Death Valley and places that are similarly hot a cloudless.

I would agree that sensible heat storage is a 'sensible' way of getting the best utilisation rate out of the chemical plant. It allows a 300MW(p) solar thermal plant to produce a round the clock power output of 100MWth. This is easy to build. Big steel silos, filled with coarse rocks with an inert gas like CO2 providing heat transfer at ambient pressure. The silos can be insulated using a thick berm of sand.

Last edited by Calliban (2022-04-16 06:24:07)

Void · 2022-04-16 07:00:52

Very encouraging.

SpaceNut · 2022-04-16 13:52:15

Well done with your 2 very fact fill large posts kbd512
I see from the table that diluting hydrogen gets less energy but unless we capture the exhaust we are going to soon have no water or hydrogen to make use of in the future.
Solar concentrated heat energy would be a better efficiency than PV panels for the reprocessing of co2 as Calliban has indicated as well..

SpaceNut · 2022-04-16 13:54:41

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/2022 … ps-growing

https://www.vox.com/recode/23023671/ev- … st-charger

The death of the gas station

As EVs hit the road, gas stations will have to adapt or risk going out of business.

kbd512 · 2022-04-16 20:57:18

Aston Martin Executive Says Electric Cars Aren’t Viable

Instead of completely writing off EVs, Reichman views them as a bridge to something that’s actually viable.
...
What Reichman believes to be the future is hydrogen fuel cells and biofuel, with the possibility of similar technologies emerging. Porsche has been moving in the direction of biofuels, and it’s not the only one.
...
Reichman is a respected authority in the automotive industry, having been head of design for Aston Martin since 2005. He knows more about this topic than politicians, political pundits, and everyone else who have been feeding the EV hype machine for years.

Gas stations will be dead, but the new Rivian R1T EV truck can't tow a Tesla Model S in a trailer for 100 miles. Okay, Bert. Okay.

SpaceNut · 2022-04-16 21:19:03

I thought that it was funny that the writer thought that electric cars were the reason. The actual reason were long in the books for some as the communities and amount of profits were continuing to shrink for those that went under. Such things as fuel efficiencies were also another of those reasons.
Biofuels have been around for diesel substitutes from the back door grease removal pits.

kbd512 · 2022-04-16 21:29:39

Electric motors and electric vehicles predate practical internal combustion engines. We stopped pursuing EVs way back when, because the requirements to extract better performance were impractical. Fast forward 100 years and EVs are still impractical. That's why they cost 3X as much as a gasoline powered car. If electronic gadgets on wheels are the future, then the future is far fewer cars for far fewer people. That's going backwards in time to the age of horses and carriages, which were also beyond the financial means of many of that era, not forwards to a future with more transportation for more people.

SpaceNut · 2022-04-18 21:08:58

Today was a sudden jump in price at the pump from the $3.89 a gallon which has held for weeks now to it arriving at $4.04 tonight with out a reason for its change.....

Calliban · 2022-04-20 11:19:55

WTI oil price has retreated to $102/barrel due to a combination of weak Chinese economic conditions and large release from the strategic petroleum reserve.
https://www.zerohedge.com/energy/wti-ju … w-jan-2021

Whilst everyone wants cheaper petrol and diesel, the SPR release is clearly a cynical ploy, designed to keep oil supply shortages from completely crashing the economy before the US midterms. It is politically very cheap for Biden to do this, but it comes with an increase in strategic risk for the US. The SPR is there to supply strategically important users like the military in times of war. Better hope that that doesn't happen!

One thing the president has not done is the one thing that would actually help - allowing construction of the Keystone XL pipeline. That would allow delivery of the Canadian syncrude needed to blend light tight oil and produce a crude of acceptable viscosity and density for refiners. So that pipeline would remove an important bottleneck that is preventing US production from recovering more quickly. But he would lose too much face if he did that. And apparently losing face is more important than the lives and livelihood of millions of working class Americans. Wouldn't want him to look bad though. That clearly is the most important thing in the world :-)

Last edited by Calliban (2022-04-20 11:27:05)

SpaceNut · 2022-04-20 17:27:11

If the path and construction to be used were changed it would be already built but that is the issue when you want to pass through the current path.

SpaceNut · 2022-04-22 20:18:09

Went to get gas this morning but the auto computer change from corporate locked the equipment out so had to go with what I had in the tank to work and home. Much to my surprise it did so and still had a little bit still in the tank. I did stop this evening and purchased fuel at the lower price of $3.91 down from the morning cost which was $4.04 if it had been purchased before they changed it.

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