Biofuels

[Anonymous No.2668361]

Hey /sci/, what do you guys think is the most viable sustainable biofuel for the future?

[Anonymous No.2668363]

Uranium

[Fr 87 No.2668369]

Combustion based biofuels are just stupid.

Geothermal, solar and nuclear based energy are the ways to go.

[Anonymous No.2668371]

>>2668363
this

[Anonymous No.2668380]

I personally think biofuels are over-rated. I think hydrogen is a much better way to store and transport energy.

Though, it very much depends on the country. Ethanol seems to be working for Brazil.

[Jim Profit !DgnrydpFYU No.2668383]

Anything that corporations can artifically control so they can constantly raise the prices for no fucking reason whatsoever. That's why gas sucks.

Oil is not only finite, but requires a lot of mining and shipping. Thats why they love it so God damn much. When the oil runs out, (and they will wait till the very last minute to introduce a new viable energy source) they'll probably use electricity, or "oil" in the sense of vegetable oil/cough syrup, or something else they can monopolize and claim finite resources is a good excuse to make everyone pay 1/3rd their paycheck just to get to fucking work.

I really hate to have to get up on my communist soapbox about this. But seriously... if people didn't have to go to work, how often do you think they'd use gas? If I told you, that I'd provide you with food, shelter, means to entertain yourself like free WoW and shit, you could still have a girlfriend and fuck her, a lot more time to fuck her now... and all you had to do was the job the state assigned you, didn't have to work overtime or any of that shit unless you were specifically called too, and we'd provide you with so many gallons of gasoline for luxory purposes to drive where you wanted too... how would you react?

Then we'd have so much fucking oil, we wouldn't know what to do with it.

[Anonymous No.2668396]

>>2668363
>>2668369
Do you think there are sufficient reserves of uranium for it to be sustainable? Or should a new technology be developed?

[Anonymous No.2668401]

I can't see biofuels having anywhere near the market share that oil has now. Maybe it'll be useful as jet fuel, but cars are moving in the direction of pure electric, and it seems kind of silly trying to use them as a replacement for the other important petroleum products like fertilizer.

[Anonymous No.2668402]

>>2668383
That's why I think solar energy will never be big

[Anonymous No.2668407]

>>2668396
Short answer: yes

Long(er) answer: Uranium supplies are sufficient to last us for centuries, even without reprocessing. A thorium cycle will last even longer.

[Anonymous No.2668420]

>>2668383
>how would you react?
I'd tell you to go fuck yourself and maybe kick you in the balls.

[Anonymous No.2668430]

salt water. there's gotta be something we can do with salt to produce energy. even if it's just some kind of HT fission

[Anonymous No.2668440]

>>2668383
the problem with communism is there's very little room for consumerism. and i love being a consumer.

[Anonymous No.2668447]

>>2668430
according to Bill Gates who is behind Terrapower which is a building a traveling wave reactor, simply by filtering seawater, you would be able to get enough uranium to power civilization forever, and it would cost less than current coal power if you used the traveling wave reactor.

nuclear power is the only way to go. any resources or creativity put into these marginal other ideas is being wasted.

[Anonymous No.2668459]

corn ethanol

[Anonymous No.2668469]

>>2668380
>I think hydrogen is a much better way to store and transport energy
>Hyrdrogen better way to store and transport

O rly? Highly reactive and prone to leaking out of sealed steel containers?

[Anonymous No.2668468]

>>2668383

You are a fucking moron. You bitch about corporations controlling gas prices then say the godsend fix is letting the government control everything.

Your utopia is broken. But you would probably bitch about anything that doesn't entitle you.

The one thing I agree with is the comment on fuel. It is a commodity that is traded 8 times a day and raises in price when they fucking want to raise it. Everyone is saying Libya is the reason for the hike. We get most of our oil from Canada and fucking Mexico.

[Anonymous No.2668484]

>>2668447
Sorry to be downer, but Bill Gates isn't a nuclear engineer and Terrapower is tiny startup marketing an unreasonably complicated design that none of the big players in the nuclear industry are even looking at. This is fringe junk. If you want to talk about nuclear power keep things a bit closer to reality.

[Anonymous No.2668519]

the problem with nuclear power is it's finite. oh sure it'll last our life time and a few dozen generations beyond ours but it's not a solution. just a quick fix.
I don't know enough about science and stuff to say for sure, but what about all that 'mining asteroids for hydrogen' stuff that science fiction authors seem to love?
Is hydrogen not feasable in the short term?

[Anonymous No.2668532]

>>2668519
>the problem with nuclear power is it's finite.
So is solar when you get right down to it. So what if nuclear will only last us a few hundred thousand years?

[Anonymous No.2668537]

>>2668519
oh, maybe you havent heard, but there's this thing called the "sun". its actually a huge ball of gas putting out insane amounts of power 24 hours a day.

might be easier to get power from it than "mining astroids for hydrogen" which we could get from the air.

[Anonymous No.2668564]

For at least cars we will always use some sort of chemical based fuel, it's by far the cheapest, most stable, and energy dense. The only thing that will change is what chemical and how we make or burn it. Electric cars are not the future, advanced diesel hybrids are. The big advancements in "saving the planet" will come from power production and gradual changes to the social infrastructure. Sources: EE major.

[Anonymous No.2668575]

>>2668564
>Electric cars are not the future
Oh Reginald...

I disagree!

[Anonymous No.2668577]

The ethanol love in this thread is pissing me off.

Biobutanol is our best bet for a renewable fuel from a bioprocess. Its energy density is higher than ethanol and almost as high as gasoline. It has a lower vapor pressure than ethanol, and overall mixes better with gasoline. This cannot replace fossil fuels but it can helps us make them last a bit longer.

[Anonymous No.2668582]

>>2668577
You didn't even read this thread.

[Anonymous No.2668609]

>>2668575
Not in the realistic future, current battery technology isn't sustainable enough to power the world's vehicles and if you are an eco-nut producing said batteries is just as bad as burning gas.

Long term sure, if we develop some sort of sci-fi "cold fusion core" maybe but there isn't anything like that on the horizon. So for now it's bio fuels.

People, the idiots they are, seem to think the world can/will drop gas as fast as the world dropped VHS. But in this case at the time being dropping gas for electric to power our vehicles would be like dropping Blu-Ray for a VHS.

[Anonymous No.2668621]

>>2668609
Yes, well you can manually rewind the VHS but not the Blu-Ray.

[Anonymous No.2668630]

>>2668621
>doesn't know how to rewind a Blu-Ray

[Anonymous No.2668679]

>>2668630
He doesn't know that he's been trolled

[Boomer !!bcdVCSUmpgT No.2668698]

>>2668679
>doesn't know what trolled is

[Anonymous No.2668709]

>>2668698
doesn't know bout my gifs

[Anonymous No.2668715]

>>2668709
sauce on gif, wants to know if its head comes off

[Anonymous No.2668717]

>>2668575

>he doesn't know how much energy is in gasoline

Seriously, every time you fill up your tank you're transmitting a few MW worth of electricity. Do we have batteries that can store that sort of power without being the size of a pump station or without costing a luxury car's worth on its own?

[Anonymous No.2668738]

This is why we need to invest more in genetic manipulation.
The future isn't biofuel, electric cars or solar energy. It's 4 seat horses, luxury mounting lizards with mp3 players and giant multipassenger eagles with seat belts and air bags.
And you will only need to feed them human babies for energy.

[Anonymous No.2671177]

coal

[Anonymous No.2671186]

nasa should start paying for themselves with helium 3.

[Anonymous No.2671221]

>>2668459
you should shut up corn ethanol creates as much pollution as oil, but since it will theoretically never run out, there will be nothing to force us into green.

[Anonymous No.2671231]

>>2668738
You're a man of the future.
I admire your talent of simultaneously advancing humankind and trolling PETA.

[Anonymous No.2672756]

air breathing batteries is the way things should go.

[Anonymous No.2673424]

>>2668361
Electric cars are not the future, at least it doesn't appear that way right now. Batteries are expensive, heavy, and very dangerous when accidents happen. The cage required to house batteries add a LOT of weight. If we find a way to store solar energy and run our cars off of that, it might be cool, but it's a ways off.
Starch-based (corn) ethanol is a joke. It takes more energy to harvest it than it produces, but even if I give it some leeway, it's carbon neutral, it doesn't help us in the long run. Plus, it takes food off the table and into spoiled brat's gastanks.
If our understanding of plant cell walls increase, cellulose-based ethanol or biobutanols are some promising candidates. America has a lot of agricultural land, being able to grow energy-crops domestically puts our farmers back into business and someday may allow for the everyday Joe to grow some of their own fuel. It still has a way to go before it becomes viable, however.

[Anonymous No.2674303]

helium-3, lol

[Anonymous No.2674356]

Mr. Fusion

[Anonymous No.2675510]

Wow there are a lot of faggots in this thread misinformed about electric vehicles.

[Anonymous No.2675533]

Does hydrogen beat batteries in energy/volume?

[Anonymous No.2675539]

No. Either batteries or hydrogen from electrolysis. Plants are shit-tier for making fuel. If you have enough electricity, you have better options.

Brazil is doing OK with sugarcane ethanol though. But trying that with corn is insanity.

[Anonymous No.2675543]

>>2675533
energy/volume depends on the pressurization, if we're talking about a tank of hydrogen. Energy/mass? I'd have to look it up. But I would be surprised if batteries were anywhere close.

[Anonymous No.2675548]

>>2668715
Look closely at the lower-left corner.

[Anonymous No.2675557]

>>2675539
Algae and Chinese Tallow are good plant producers. By comparison, ethanol is utter crap.

[Anonymous No.2675559]

Nuclear fusion.

Nuclear fission splits atoms in dangerous and messy ways. But fusion releases in ways that are both clean and safe.

[Anonymous No.2675562]

Hydrogen fuel cells, hydrogen produced at hydro-electric dams and massive solar farms in the desert.

Wood gas and wood gas synthetic fuel processes (methanol-mobil, fischer tropsch-cracking).

Alcohol

[Anonymous No.2675575]

some form of oxygen breathing battery.

[Anonymous No.2675578]

the only problem i have with nuclear is the waste it leaves.
its not like regular trash where you can just bury it somewhere you have to have a special storage area for that. Until we can fix that problem i will stay miles away from a plant

[Anonymous No.2675588]

biofuel is not sustainable.

Ethanol is only slightly viable because it bootstraps off preexisting infrastructure. US farms were already paid to destroy large portions of their crops in order to regulate prices.

[Anonymous No.2675594]

>>2675578
Nuclear "waste" is recyclable.

[Anonymous No.2675597]

>>2675578
Coal burning kills more people than nuclear power by far. It even releases more radiation into the environment.

[Anonymous No.2675604]

>>2675594
how is it recyclable

>>2675597
thats because coal is used en mass. If we used nuclear like we used coal and its waste isnt re usable then we have threat of our ground water being contaminated by radiation. Im not saying coal is the best option but i dont want to trade one problem with another

[Anonymous No.2675606]

Somewhat related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4PcIt0FPvWQ
Mechanical storage systems should help for vehicles.

[Anonymous No.2675610]

>>2675575
>>2672756

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JakwxDXUjyw