/sci/ - Science & Math

Hippie status:

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[ ] Told
[X] Told of the Rings

Hartmut is ignoring that the Sun outputs so much energy compared to what humans consume that even inefficient processes suit human needs.

Talking about biofuel inefficiency is idiotic at best, we could make cars considerably more fuel efficient while maintaining a high quality car and high safety standards. In fact, the plans to make one have been around for around 15 years or so, google "Hypercar"

>>5282139
but he's a NOBEL WINRAR!

>>5282139
but will it be fun to drive?

>>5282167

I dunno, probably. I mean it almost definitely won't have the cool revving noises that a gas car has but it'll be a peppy little thing that doesn't have to ramp up to speed.

>>5282111
>electricity our only hope

As a dual degree ME/EE I believe you should kindly leave and never suggest using electric vehicles ever again.

Regards,

The Engineering Community

Its important that the goym beliefs in false things.e

>is electricity our only hope?

It's all about energy return on investment (EROI). Which he points out on biofuels is terrible, and for most electricity production is also poor, when you do a honest calculation of all energy inputs, and long term maintenance.

>>5282223
Because of battery life?

>>5282223

Induction motors >>> ICE

Regards,
The Non-Dicksucking Community

0/10 ,
unruffled equanimity

>>5282167

yes, the power from the motor is near instantaneous where as in a combustion engine the revs need to climb to deliver more power

>>5282223
unruffled equanimity

Did you guys hear about that russian scientist who got kidnapped because he made a plasma battery which he could fuel his entire home with for a year?

There has been like 10 plasma research scientists killed in the last 3 years.

>>5282269
"Dimitri Petronov"

look up that name you dumb goyms.

>>5282216
>mfw it has no speed to ramp up to

I'd be fine with biofuels if they didn't encourage the fucking corn subsidies. Biofuel engines are less efficient and wear faster than petroleum ones (petroleum combustion products lubricate the engine), but they'd be a solid alternative if we can start building engines specifically optimized for biofuel.

>>5282223
why's that? I don't see the problem with small electric commuter cars.

>>5282282

>make car lighter using better steel, or even carbon fiber in a couple years
>electric car can now move faster and has better range

Carbon fiber prices are about 14 dollars per pound compared to steels 40 cents. This is a large price gap, but carbon fiber saves on material because it's considerably stronger than steel.

>is electricity our only hope?

No.

Hybrids using a battery to act as a range extender improving the efficiency of ICEs is.

I dont get why we don't just use diesel and petrol. we already have the infrastructure and all the needed technology for it. and it can easily be replaced little by little over the following decades as oil runs out by diesel and petrol made from other sources such as sugarcane and algae.

Elon Musk, in the Q&A section of his recent talk at Oxford (download here: http://www.oxfordmartin.ox.ac.uk/videos/view/211)) also said he believes all biofuels are useless.

His point was that putting energy into biofuels is an inefficient way to use the suns energy, and then getting it out is also inefficient. He compared the efficiency to solar.

>>5282353
How do you even manage to maintain autonomous respiration?

Basically, [corn] ethanol is obtained from burning methane, coal, diesel fuel, gasoline, corn kernels, soil and environment. We destroy perhaps as many as 7 units of free energy in the environment and human economy to produce 1 unit of free energy as corn ethanol, and make a few clueless environmentalists happier and a few super rich corporations richer. The story is even worse for switchgrass ethanol.

(As quoted from http://www.theoildrum.com/node/9619 )

>climatesanity.wordpress.com
sounds like a totally unbiased, reliable and completely accurate source
the only conclusion the actual scientist reaches is
>The growth of such energy plants will undoubtedly lead to an increase in food prices, which will predominantly hit poorer people.”
Which is a completely accurate statement due to basic economics and not even remotely close to the point the author is trying to make, that biofuels are completely useless and will never be good for anything ever

>>5282139
From the article
>it would be even much better to reforest the land used to grow energy plants, because at a 1% photosynthetic efficiency, growing trees would fix around 2.7 kg of CO2 per square meter, whereas biofuels produced with a net efficiency of 0.1% would only replace fossil fuels which would release about 0.31 kg CO2 per m2 upon combustion!

He makes the relevant calculation, i.e. the total benefit to the environment of growing biofuels, vs the total benefit of leaving a forest as it is.

As to fuel efficiency, similar arguments could be made for electric (in particular battery weight) so I don't know what your point is.

>>5282353
...wow

>>5282414

bro, the guys has a Nobel prize!

doesn't everyone on /sci/ masturbate on Nobel?

>>5282111
>>5282404
>>5282396
it is foolish to use the food production infrastructure to grow fuel precursors
it's just like running a car on its starter battery; it works, but not for long...

>>5282401
nice. not refuting the point but calling me an idiot. do you have any real issue with my statement other than just irrational hate?

>>5282421
wow what?

>>5282428
you are literally retarded. you did not make a point, you made a retarded, incredibly obvious and basic statement that an 8 year old could have come up with. i sincerely hope you are really high or something because otherwise you are really astonishingly retarded.

>>5282433
then why dont we do it? why do we focus on other technology?

>>5282439
Fear, consumption is too great to be suddenly replaced.

>>5282439
>why don't we use diesel and petrol instead of diesel and petrol

>>5282458
Fear? of what? consumption of what?

>>5282439
because we ALREADY HAVE conventional combustion technology and limited biofuel infrastructure stretching out the fossil fuels we already have and it is still awful for the environment

and if you are asking why we dont just switch entirely to biofuels in the future read the fucking article

>>5282464
>why do we spend massive amount of money of electric cars and bio-ethanol if we dont have to?

>>5282470
how is diesel produces from CO2 in the air bad for the environment? and the article is about making ethanol from biomass, not about direct diesel from CO2 production.

>>5282458
Well the US consumes a good amount of petroleum every year. And we know how much land water and sun is required to make certain amounts of bio-diesel. In order to replace the whole US consumption of petro from organic fossil fuel to bio-diesel is simply too great of a task. It might even be wasteful and inefficient, hence the fear.

>>5282476

>>5282478
and solar panels and wind turbines dont use that much land? for the whole of the US you only need a small citys worth of land for diesel. and no changes to any other technology as are needed for electric cars, hydrogen cars and so on.

>>5282416
That's a bullshit calculation. Tree-based carbon fixation reaches a steady-state relatively quickly where it can't fix more carbon; the limiting factor here is space to grow trees, and we just don't have enough.

And the point of biofuels is that while they do release CO2 into the atomsphere, it's at worst a net neutral CO2 release, because the biomass they use to create the biofuels is derived from the existing CO2 store, and that if we're not fixing carbon, at least we're not putting more into the atmosphere.

And besides, presenting the two as a dichotomy is stupid; who says we can't do both? We can't grow trees everywhere; grow switchgrass in places trees don't like to grow.

>>5282481
again, no rely? are you retarded?

>>5282487
*reply

>>5282484

solar plants are built on already tree uninhabited surfaces ie deserts, home roofs. similarly for wind turbines

>>5282482
Forests are net carbon sinks, even in steady state, just google it.

As for biofuels, he already said they were net carbon sinks, just not as much as forests. (And this is already taking into account both the carbon fixed, and the fossil fuel use that was eliminated)

>And besides, presenting the two as a dichotomy is stupid; who says we can't do both? We can't grow trees everywhere; grow switchgrass in places trees don't like to grow.
I don't know how much land would be left, but perhaps you could inform me since you clearly have all the answers.

>>5282484
Actually lets do some math, stats say 62 million vehicles. Lets say 30% used for construction, semi, and heavy machinery, they use diesel at 10m/gal...lets say the REST, 70% uses electricity, and calculating effiency of the motors and average travel time you get consumption, and that you mentioned would be fulfilled by windmills and solar panels. So, you can prlly crush the numbers. Id its going to be a bit more than a city's area worth.

>>5282476
are you literally too retarded to read the article in the OP
i am serious
please try to explain what you got out of reading it because i seriously do not get how you could have possibly interpreted it to have no fucking clue at all what it said
>>5282472
because WE ARE GOING TO RUN OUT OF DIESEL AND PETROL you hopeless fucking moron.

im honestly starting to think you are trolling and seeing how retarded you can pretend to be before people catch on that you are trolling

>>5282508
Oh, my bad, I was misreading the quote, I thought he was saying biofuels are net carbon producers.

And I guess I was wrong about forests being sinks. Time to hit the books again, my info is getting stale.

>>5282484
If your talking about the Joule Sunflow-E fuel, at their estimates of 10,000 gallons/acre/year, and a FHC estimate of around 700 gallons/person/year (for 200M drivers), then we would need 140M acres of production. Compare that to the 3M acres of land used to produce all the vegetables grown in America.

>>5282528
Also compare to the 66M acres of developed land in the US, so it's not just a small city you would need, you would need DOUBLE the combined area of all the cities in America.

>>5282504
25,155 TWh/year = 10^20J/year = 2.7E17 J/day, about a third is for transportation, thus 1E17J/day

1kW/m^2 in solar energy means that at 8h a day of sunlight and with 10% effective we have 2880 kJ/m^2, or 2.88E12 J/day per km^2

you thus need around 30000km^2, a city is around 1000km^2 thus 30 cities. 30~1, its the same order on global scales.

this is assuming 10% for the algae. last i heard it was up to 30% lowering it to 10 cities.

>>5282528
>>5282539

But don't get me wrong, if these guys are legit and not some sham, and can actually deliver a diesel fungible at ~$50/barrel, then they really are the best option going, and if I had two cents to rub together I'd put both into their stocks.

>>5282519
>WE ARE GOING TO RUN OUT OF DIESEL AND PETROL
no. algae makes diesel, we are not running out of it.

>>5282556
Let us say that 10 cities is best case scenario, that means we have to build up all the necesary inflastruture to supply this flow of energy. The means and capital certainly will not come from the powers that be, ie, the oil corps and their lap dogs the us govt.
This brings us to the point of fear. Which I have to emphasize is because should this transformation ever takes place it will free the stranglehold of these oilmen on the us domestic and foreign policy and might possibly put them out of business. Such thinking is heretical and is discouraged.

>>5282556
Let us say that 10 cities is best case scenario, that means we have to build up all the necessary infrastructure to supply this flow of energy. The means a lot of capital and man power. The capital certainly will not come from the powers that be, ie, the oil corps and their lap dogs the us govt.
This brings us to the point of fear. Which I have to emphasize is because should this transformation ever takes place it will free the stranglehold of these oilmen on the us domestic and foreign policy and might possibly put them out of business. Such thinking is heretical and is discouraged.

>>5282564
That not really the issue either, it's not about running out of crude oil, we are actually hitting production limits.

http://www.theoildrum.com/story/2006/11/15/83857/186

Li-air batteries
LED lighting
LFTR

Now throw money at it while I go to communist prison for saying it

>>5282585
>that means we have to build up all the necessary infrastructure to supply this flow of energy.
we can do this over the next 100 years.
>The capital certainly will not come from the powers that be, ie, the oil corps and their lap dogs the us govt.
the oil corps can do this to get more money, they already have most of the tech needed so why would they not want to expand?
>This brings us to the point of fear. Which I have to emphasize is because should this transformation ever takes place
this isnt even a real transformation as it will be entirely invisible to people using diesel, it will happen internally in oil corporations.

>>5282607
>Li-air batteries
thats shit.

>>5282272

In other news, nobel prize winning biochemist receives a new hummer as a gift from "a friend".
Heh, but seriously. Just because one guy says it's not possible doesn't mean he's right. I'm sure Newton said plenty of stuff that was wrong

>>5282612
May as well elaborate, I haven't herd much else in terms of promise

Already installing the LED lighting though, like I'm living in the future

>>5282624
newton thought light was a particle, not a wave. What a pleb

>>5282624
>>5282628
See any of the alchamel or theological stuff Newton wasted most of his life on.

>>5282482
>>5282508
>>5282520
>Biofuels are a net carbon sink

That's not true, the biomass itself may be carbon neutral, but the fermentation to ethanol releases CO2. Also not taken into consideration is the transport of these fuels which also adds to the carbon footprint, and in the case of corn, the processing of fertilizers can make biofuels more carbon emitting then the fossil fuels they displace.

>>5282609
Saying that the oil corp will do this so they can get money is underestimating their need for control. They know how dependent American is on petrol, that is why they don't expand.

I can only offer this example to you. In Europe they used to have 2-3 cylinder diesel engines that were very efficient and were quite popular there. And because of the oil crises in the 80s American wanted to import them so they can save on gas money. Guess who stopped that.
Even now europe makes a lot of cars with better mileage in diesel and guess who makes it their daily job to block the imports of these cars? Diesel is easier to refine and its cheaper than petrol in europe but guess who made it more expensive?

After the 80s the corps realized how important it was to become totally depended on petroleum, its all about control. Should they change America's consumption of fossil fuel, they would lose that control, not only on America but the rest of the world too. Petroleum is just too ingrained.

They call it black gold for the reason that its what controls the world, just like gold did.

Another analogy is from Dune, from the author of that book actually, the spice of dune refers to the modern day gasoline.

It may sound like conspiracy theory but its actually not, its in plain sight, but since the corps are so dastardly they don't even need to try to hide it.

related: its where gold comes from

>>5282660

Your analogies are flawed, as is your historical research. Cars in the US from the mid 70s to the mid 80s got very efficient, it wasn't until the birth of the SUV that we started seeing efficiency losses again.

>>5282716
But that doesn't disprove my point. It actually helps to explain that it was during the 80s that the need to control petroleum came into being.

list of some engines we couldnt get.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Volkswagen_Group_diesel_engines#Three-_and_four-cylinder_EA111_
diesels

>>5282111
the answer to that question varies locally
in Florida where the EnergyMilitaryIndustrial complex has massively subsidized electricity, refrigerated homes are taken for granted
in New Hampshire today many homes are heated by cordwood, water heated by gas, and only refrigeration and entertainment powered by electricity
hydrogen is really the ticket, by is commonly derided as "only an energy storage medium"
well our Sun is merely a energy storage device, but we don't deride it...
please allow me to propose an ideal system
let's generate hydrogen through electrolysis of water
let's liquefy the hygrogen
let's transport the liquid H2 through a coaxial cryogenic pipe which bears a central superconductor
these "super-pipes" could easily be CoLo'd with existing petro/electrical rights-of-way
whenever excess H2 is produced we could use it to pump water up the hill, to be released through dams to generate peak demand electricity

>>5282294

Industrial Engineer here.

>Carbon fiber
>Better steel

Its more complex than you think, you little scientist. Your logic applies to aluminum vs steel, you can not simple compare densities directly on efficiency. While steel does not require like Al a good design structure (more volume material) to qualify as standards requires (experiments, iso, etc).

More than the weight the critical factor would be the cells developments, batteries development. You cant develop better motors with a significance on cost-efficiency-time, what we see today would be more or less what you would see in 20 years.

Just as transistors development which is fast, cells development is fast. The oxides, salts and structure used 4 years ago are more cheaper now and obsolete. This is not a common electric car because energy is stored on chemicals like hydrogen. From chem energy to electric energy to mechanical energy is less loss than chem, caloric, mechanical. Or even what some folks here want to said nuclear/oil combustion, caloric, electric, chem (lithium batt), electric, mechanical.

So yes cell ares the future. They get more power efficiency and cheaper every year.

>not native english speaker btw

<span class="quote deadlink">>>528271[/spoiler]
And emmisionr regulations, and safety device regulations