On a good note, the cast comes off in one week. Also, I've dropped about 8 pounds this month, which will hopefully do a little to offset my reduced training volume.
On a dark note, I've followed through on my biodiesel research and have wandered off into viewing documentaries like Gasland on HBO (it's available on HBO on demand) and reading about the tar sands. Here's the whole story of oil (or natural gas) in a sentence: a few assholes get rich, some acres of land or gallons of water get spoiled, some people get cancer, some animals die, a bunch of people can afford to heat their homes inefficiently and drive their piece of shit cars.
When I first started reading about biodiesel, I imagined producing it in sufficient volumes to replace gasoline, or a large fraction of gasoline was not feasible, but in fact it looks doable. The current world production of vegetable oil is in the 10's of billions of gallons per year, while world gasoline consumption is in the 260 billion US gallon range. Presumably, lots more vegetable oil could be produced without a whole lot of trouble. (However, it's important to keep in mind that if vegetable oil were produced on the scale of oil, it would probably cause its own problems.)
What's next? Well, I'm a hands-on type of person, so I'll see if I can get my hands on a biodiesel car sometime soon and see how well it works.
4 comments:
I'm certainly not an expert in this field... or really any other. However, as with most that doesn't stop me from commenting.
The biggest negative I've heard about biofuels is they are a net energy loss. It cost more energy to produce them then can be generated by them. The reason they have not taken off is oil is cheap, and positive energy costs... not really perpetual motion, but at least it goes in the right direction. Oil has an extremely high energy density compared to biofuels.
...and there are a lot of folks making lots of money on this stuff.
The engineering side is to really include all costs involved in the energy equation. Where are the boundaries of the free body diagram. If you don't account for the production energy costs biofuels look really good.
I haven't dug into it enough to really know if biodiesel is a net energy gainer or loser. Of course, that would be an important consideration if it were to replace gasoline in any significant way. I think for biodiesel, the energy equation can work, where it doesn't really work for ethanol.
The problem with petroleum prices as a measure is that much of the actual cost is not included in the price, and may be not measurable--that's really what got me going with this. For example, how much would the price of natural gas rise if every well required an emissions control system?
Check out the table of energy densities in the good old wikipedia.
Biodiesel is actually pretty good.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_density
...and then we segue to nuclear power. Very cheap, until we regulated it to become expensive. Sure, the regulations are required for safety, but there are other options we don't look at for fear.
I admit, my energy density argument may have come from ethanol. Once you mentioned it.
I'm still waiting for the Hydrogen energy answer. The technology is coming along nicely, if it can get the "subsidies" that oil does.
The US still has the cheapest energies on the planet, if measured only on our individual wallet impact, not on TCO.
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