[ExI] Oil will never run out

[Kevin Freels]

> so 
> >many time I wonder why people continue to use that phrase.
> 
> Unfortunately history has examples, Greenland Norse, Easter 
> Island, 
> and Mayans where things fairly well went down the drain.  I 
> happen to 
> be an engineer who is used to being given a problem and marching 
> orders to solve it.  But there are problems, backwards time 
> travel 
> and FTL travel that are probably in the "can't be done" 
> category.  Others such as diverting an asteroid collision 
> on short 
> notice can't be done if we don't have enough time.
> 
OK. Granted I was getting a bit over the edge. I'm glad you saw my point through the rhetoric.

> There may well be other ways, a vast scale up 
> of nuclear 
> power of a new design, the pebble bed reactors, might to it for 
> long 
> enough to reach some kind of singularity where we or our machine 
> offspring or some combination get smart enough to get more power 
> or 
> run on less.
> 
I'm very impressed with the pebble bed reactors by the way. I wish I could build my own. :-) These reactors look to be an excellent way to go for the short term. 


> 
> It's impossible to get as much performance out of batteries as 
> you 
> can get out of hydrocarbons.  If you think of them in 
> battery terms, 
> 65% of the battery come out of the air and you don't have to 
> carry 
> it.  Trucks on batteries?  Not likely.  Trains 
> can be 
> electrified.  Aircraft are being taken out of service by 
> the 
> thousands because of high fuel cost.

Which was my point. Thanks.

>> I put my money on the 
> >ability 
> >to find solutions to scaling up.
> 
> A lot of them don't scale up.  That was the point of the 
> exposition 
> on converting trash to oil, there just isn't enough trash.  
> There 
> isn't enough land do grow bio fuels.  

No. And it wasn't my intention to put trash generation or grass clipping up as the sole method of making fuels. I probably should have more correctly said gasoline produced from "some oilless method as yet to be determined". The picture I had in my head was of various methods being around all producing the same product. One way may produce a bit and get rid of a lot of garbage at the same time with the mass production still being carried out by specialized facilities. The "open source" part was a beautiful mental picture that would probably never happen and I should have left it out. The overall point was producing regular gasoline, diesel and jet fuel out of raw materials cheaper than the cost of drilling and refining oil. I really don't care if it's little machines, or gen en bacteria (is there a difference?). If it can be made by nature, it can be made by us more efficiently. 

>