[ExI] Dark Matter

Adrian Tymes atymes at gmail.com
Thu Nov 14 03:43:13 UTC 2013


On Wed, Nov 13, 2013 at 3:56 PM, spike <spike66 at att.net> wrote:

> Highway 50 had enormous potential as a showcase location for ground based
> solar.  It’s about 600 km of paved two-lane with a good solid base under it
> and very little rain, little cloud cover ever out there in that big old
> desert.  What we could do is use all those Chinese PV factories’ output,
> install ground based PV a km or more either side of the road, collect the
> power every km or so, use the power to convert low-grade bituminous coal
> from Wyoming and Utah or biomass from California’s Central Valley to liquid
> hydrocarbon fuel.  Autonomous trucks would haul in water and feedstock,
> then haul out Diesel oil.  Since the trucks are autonomous, we could use
> smaller trucks to preserve the road, or even do stuff like taking standard
> tanker trucks and retrofitting the big Diesel engines with smaller ones so
> that the trucks cruise at 80 kph instead of the usual 110-130, so that
> alone would nearly double the fuel economy in hauling out synfuel.
>

Better: pipelines.  Since you have a stationary power source, let the water
& feedstock flow in and the fuel out.  Over flat enough land, angle them so
the water & feedstock pipes go down, and the fuel pipe up, about a
centimeter for every kilometer horizontally, and you might be able to pool
the fuel & have water/feedstock pumped out at existing towns, possibly
piped straight to gas stations, greatly decreasing the infrastructure
needed.
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