Posted on 05/03/2005 5:06:37 PM PDT by gogipper
As brainy as Americans can be, how it is we don't have a cheap alternative for energy that is clean is beyond me.
We should have some super fast way to re-charge batteries from solar sources.
We need to be imaginative and come up with stuff so we can tell the Arab countries to keep their oil.
BTTT
Solar microwave satellites would be an unlimited energy source.
Anybody ever read that book by Thomas Gold, theorizing that oil is a by-product of microbial activity and is therefore a renewable resource? Excerpt of interview below:
INTERVIEWER: Your most controversial idea is the non-biological origin of natural gas and oil. You put forth the position that dinosaurs and plants and the fossils from those living beings are not the origin of oil and natural gas. Your theory was first publicly referenced in a book by your colleague, the late Fred Hoyle, one of the world’s leading physicists and astronomers, in which Hoyle had a chapter entitled “Gold’s Ore Theory,” the ore referring to the porous spaces in the Earth. What first prompted you to suggest that oil and natural gas is generated from a chemical substance in the crust of the Earth?
GOLD: The astronomers have been able to find that hydrocarbons, as oil, gas and coal are called, occur on many other planetary bodies. They are a common substance in the universe. You find it in the kind of gas clouds that made systems like our solar system. You find large quantities of hydrocarbons in them. Is it reasonable to think that our little Earth, one of the planets, contains oil and gas for reasons that are all its own and that these other bodies have it because it was built into them when they were born?
INTERVIEWER: That question makes a lot of sense. After all, they didn’t have dinosaurs and ferns on Jupiter to produce oil and gas?
GOLD: That’s right. Yet, for some reason my theory was not heard. The old theory that it was all made from fossils had become so firmly established that when the astronomers had perfectly definitive evidence on most of the other planets, it was just ignored, especially by the petroleum geologists who had, by then, called these things “fossil fuels.” So once they had a name, then every body believed it.
INTERVIEWER: The oil geologists have carved a niche for themselves and they are perceived now to “know more” about how oil was supposedly formed from dinosaur bones than anybody. However, you have taken your theory (which argues against the traditional theory) and have gone one step further by saying that there is a biosphere; that living entities (fungi, microbes, etc.) are not necessarily just the ones we see on the surface of the Earth but that living creatures are deep in the Earth which could have given rise to creatures on the surface.
GOLD: I will tell you why this had to be so and why I became convinced. In the whole petroleum and coal story, there is this extraordinary paradox that all of these substances contain some biological material. But the chemistry in detail fits it better, as many chemists have said, with the theory of a primordial hydrocarbon mixture (say an oil or gas mixture) to which biological products have been added. That was one aspect that has been quite firmly noted by many Nobel laureate chemists and others.
INTERVIEWER: So every time they find oil deep in the ground and they analyze it chemically, they are effectively supporting your theory?
GOLD: Absolutely. That has been known, also, for quite a large number of years since the mid-1950s.
INTERVIEWER: Human skull fossils have been found in anthracite coal in Pennsylvania. The official theory of the development of coal will not accept that reality, since human beings were not around when anthracite coal was formed.
GOLD: That’s right. Coal was formed millions of years ago.
INTERVIEWER: However, you cannot mistake the fact that these are human fossils. Nonetheless, your theory explains how this could come about.
GOLD: The La Breatarpits in Los Angeles have saber toothed tigers and all kinds of things in them. But the only thing which, at the present time, you can see anything that would make coal of the kind that we mine (usually at a very shallow level) are the big tar pits and tar lakes, such as the one at La Brea and ones in Trinidad.
The coal we dig is hard, brittle stuff. It was once a liquid, because we find embedded in the middle of a six-foot seam of coal such things as a delicate wing of some animal or a leaf of a plant. They are undestroyed, absolutely preserved, with every cell in that fossil filled with exactly the same coal as all the coal on the outside. A hard, brittle coal is not going to get into each cell of a delicate leaf without destroying it. So obviously that stuff was a thin liquid at one time which gradually hardened.
The only thing we find now on the Earth that would do that is petroleum, which gradually becomes stiffer and harder. That is the only logical explanation for the origin of coal. So the fact that coal contains fossils does not prove that it is a fossil fuel; it proves exactly the opposite. Those fossils you find in coal prove that coal is not made from those fossils. How could you take a forest and mulch it all up so that it is a completely featureless big black substance and then find one leaf in it that is perfectly preserved? That is absolute nonsense.
INTERVIEWER: Where then does the carbon base come from that produces all of this?
GOLD: Petroleum and coal were made from materials in which heavy hydrocarbons were common components. We know that because the meteorites are the sort of debris left over from the formations of the planets and those contain carbon in unoxidized form as hydrocarbons as oil and coal-like particles. We find that in one large class of meteorites and we find that equally on many of the other planetary bodies in the solar system. So it’s pretty clear that when the Earth formed it contained a lot of carbon material built into it.
INTERVIEWER: Your book points out that there are all sorts of life forms within the Earth.
GOLD: It was an unthinkable thing, when this discovery was made, that there were life forms that did not depend on life on the surface, such as the process called photosynthesis where we find chemical energies created from the sunlight. That had been thought to be the only way life was to be supported. And here we find gasses and liquids coming up from cracks in the ocean floor which feed enormously intense forms of life, which includes quite large creatures. It is only because we found and saw some of these large creatures that this was discovered. However, the principal things that are living there are microbial, which feed the large creatures.
INTERVIEWER: To verify your theories, you participated in the drilling of an unusual oil well in Sweden. Please tell us about that.
GOLD: I was responsible for initiating the drilling of two quite deep wells in a huge meteorite crater in central Sweden. The reason I was interested in that was be cause it was in pure granitic rock with not a stitch of any sediment—nothing biological, just hard brittle rock.
To the average oil geologist that kind of area would be a wasteland.
They thought I was absolutely crazy to get the Swedes to drill there.
We were not able to produce commercial quantities of oil, because of the bacteriological content which clogged up the wells, but the bacteria which were living there were on the oil that was coming up. The bacteria that were captured at the various levels were just exactly those that would only reproduce at the elevated temperatures that, of course, occur at the various levels. There was no question that these were microbes from down there that were living, in fact, on the oil and gas as their principal food source and that this was their supply of energy.
Let me tell you why I was convinced. We first pulled up 80 barrels of oil, so this was not just trace amounts. Yet, I had been told by I don’t know how many traditionalists that this was an absolutely mad place to look for oil.
Meanwhile, based on the Swedish results, the Russians have drilled 300 deep holes in granitic rock of this type in Russia and found oil in most of them. The White Tiger field off the coast of Vietnam is producing at a very good rate now from granitic-based rock, so we know that this whole story is correct.
-snip-
We DO have that way - it's called nuclear power. Once again, the liberals won't allow it because it makes sense. They scream loudly enough, and often enough, even reasonable people start to listen to them. Global warming, anyone? Suckers...........How about "The oil is going to run out (fossil fuels, doncha know)!!"? OK, so just how many dinosaurs died on Titan to provide a methane atmosphere there? (Not to mention Saturn, Jupiter, Neptune, Pluto, etc.) Just ask any environmentalist to explain that one.
They need to either allow drilling for our own resources, or allow our technology to overcome the obstacle they just placed in the way. They can't have it both ways. Not anymore.
I don't care if we need to produce it from high octane methane Yorkies, it just needs to get done.
A lot of our homes are sourced with hydro-electric and as you say nuclear stuff.
Yep, we could use more in very securred areas.
What do we produce for autos?
Biodiesel for one. Secondly, the "oil from anything" thermal depolymerization process can make up for nearly 100% of our oil requirements just from agricultural waste, landfills, and recycling. That's off the shelf tech - nothing new to invent at all. It only takes political leadership with some integrity - which both parties are sorely lacking in these days. If that leadership doesn't present itself to the public, then the public needs to start actively looking for it while we replace the junk we've got today.
Now, if it is replenishable, then we only have to ensure that the consumption lags behind the replenishment rate.
"What do we produce for autos?"
We've got a lot of idle agricultural land reverting back to forest in my part of the country. There are various fuels that can be produced from feedstock. Price to market is the problem, as always. Biodiesel is somewhat more caustic than "fossil fuel" based diesel, but that can be surmounted with retrofitting, about $1,500.00. Or, you can mix the biodiesel with traditional diesel to avoid destroying seals and gaskets, and run it in a standard-issue diesel engine. If you are able and willing to make your own, from used restaurant grease or what have you, you could potentially have more than you could use for about 70 cents per gallon. Supply isn't sufficient for mass adoption though. Methanol is another alternative with a track history. Hate to sound like I agree with ecoweenies on anything, but growing our own fuel sounds like a winner to me, if the economics ever force us to do so.
"Solar microwave satellites would be an unlimited energy source."
Call me stoopid, but I've never heard of that before. Got a link that explains it all? My socialist BIL is always on me about, "It's all Bush's Fault that gasoline is over $2/gallon" so I'd like an alternate way to slap him down while keeping him preoccupied and out of my hair. Thanks! :)
But the cost to make it would be minimal or expensive?
Does the process cause almost no polution or is it dirty?
Someday, we WILL wind up not being able to extract oil. Best to start planning for that day now.
The upside is that without oil, Arab countries can only export sand and camel crap. No money for terrorism...
And the big problem with oil right now is refining capacity. Nobody wants a refinery in their backyard. NIMBY! NIMBY! NIMBY!
We have cheap energy sources, it's illegal to use them. The environmentalists will find reasons to ban any new cheap energy sources. Their agenda is not to stop pollution. It's to destroy Western Civilization.
We should get all our oil from Titan.
:-)
I agree that enviornmentalists are problems.
The big toxic issue is batteries. Though they are good for holding energy for ten or so years, to dispose of them becomes a major problem.
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