[ExI] Whatever happened to peak oil by 2020?

[Adrian Tymes]

On Tue, May 7, 2013 at 1:33 PM, spike <spike at rainier66.com> wrote:

> Me too!  All three: ground based solar, nukes and wind.  My contribution is
> that we should park all of them way the hell out of the way, then use the
> power to convert coal or biomass  to liquids and synthesize ammonium
> nitrate, rather than send the power to the cities by cable.
>

Or simply synthesize gasoline.  It's a form that gets used (a lot), and
less conversions = less energy lost to conversion.  There are places
in the US, such as east-central Washington, where the cost of
a given KWh content of electricity is much less than the same KWh
in gasoline form - although in most of the US, it is the other way
around, sometimes substantially so.

Could one set up a gasoline synthesis factory there, to nail down (via
R&D) the non-electricity costs of making gasoline, then establish
other plants elsewhere w/privately owned wind/solar/etc.?


> Question please, for Europe hipsters.  Do you guys have some big open areas
> where there just isn't much of anything, analogous to the US desert
> southwest, somewhere in Europe?  If not, how about buying up some land in
> the Sahara and using that abundant solar and wind power down there?  That
> land would hafta be cheaper than sand down there, a few Euros per hectare,
> ja?  I know Asia has big stretches of nothing in some places.
>

A quick scan of Google Maps shows quite a few places - mostly
hilly or mountainous, where traditional European agriculture was not
of much use.  For instance, see the land around Fort William in
Scotland.
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