Matt (![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} dezakin) wrote,@ 2006-09-25 13:48:00 |
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Our robot overlords will be diesel powered.
So everyone knows eventually all the fossil fuels run out, the big question is when, and who cares.
Turns out it doesn’t matter as much as everyone thinks; There’s about 1 trillion tons of U235 recoverable from ores to power ordinary light water reactors, and that gives you 20000 1GW reactors for about 25000 years at the low end, enough to power 6 billion people consuming as much as the average fat American. When you start going into breeder cycles, your fuel supply stretches into the hundreds of millions of years. We're not even limited by fuel, but by how much waste heat we can dump into the night sky. I expect we'll figure out how to do solar power competitively sometime in the next two hundred and fifty centuries.
But then what people really seem to often worry about is the global petroleum infrastructure. There’s really no better fuel than diesel fuel. Its pumpable fuel that has a huge volumetric energy content. It’s just about the best way to store hydrogen when it comes to that. The only liquid fuels I know of that have higher energy density are hydroboranes, but they have the unfortunate habit of destroying engines with boron oxide and decaying into nerve gas. Not something I would recommend at filling stations across America.
Diesel is king, and gasoline a close second, with kerosene the preferred jet fuel. Batteries don’t even come close.
So what do we do when the oil starts to dwindle? Well, we start with unconventional oil like in Alberta oil sands, and shale bitumen. There’s plenty of that stuff for the right price. Then we start turning coal into diesel fuel, which many people surprisingly aren’t aware of.
But eventually those fossil fuels run out, and then what will we fill our airplanes and hummers with?
We’ll manufacture it from limestone and water.
CaCO3 when heated gives off CO2 and becomes quicklime, which is used in cement. You mix the CO2 with steam and do high temperature electrolysis, and get CO H2 on one side, which it turns out is syngas. Cook at the right temperatures under the right catalysts and syngas recombines to form very high quality hydrocarbons of whatever flavor you want. So how do we do this large scale? Nuclear powered heating for quicklime production and steam.
We’ll need all the cement by then anyways, and the interesting thing about the whole cycle is its carbon neutral. The quicklime, (and whatever cement you form) absorbs CO2 from the atmosphere like nothing else. The whole thing requires only the energy input for the quicklime and electrolysis, and by the time we need to do this we’ll have much of the infrastructure for the fuel production in place from the coal liquefaction plants and cement plants.
I imagine the cost of production would be maybe five to ten dollars per gallon… Expensive sure, but there will always be a demand for diesel fuel. When the robots begin their revolution, those killbots will be running diesel engines that had fuel generated by nukes, water, and limestone.
So everyone knows eventually all the fossil fuels run out, the big question is when, and who cares.
Turns out it doesn’t matter as much as everyone thinks; There’s about 1 trillion tons of U235 recoverable from ores to power ordinary light water reactors, and that gives you 20000 1GW reactors for about 25000 years at the low end, enough to power 6 billion people consuming as much as the average fat American. When you start going into breeder cycles, your fuel supply stretches into the hundreds of millions of years. We're not even limited by fuel, but by how much waste heat we can dump into the night sky. I expect we'll figure out how to do solar power competitively sometime in the next two hundred and fifty centuries.
But then what people really seem to often worry about is the global petroleum infrastructure. There’s really no better fuel than diesel fuel. Its pumpable fuel that has a huge volumetric energy content. It’s just about the best way to store hydrogen when it comes to that. The only liquid fuels I know of that have higher energy density are hydroboranes, but they have the unfortunate habit of destroying engines with boron oxide and decaying into nerve gas. Not something I would recommend at filling stations across America.
Diesel is king, and gasoline a close second, with kerosene the preferred jet fuel. Batteries don’t even come close.
So what do we do when the oil starts to dwindle? Well, we start with unconventional oil like in Alberta oil sands, and shale bitumen. There’s plenty of that stuff for the right price. Then we start turning coal into diesel fuel, which many people surprisingly aren’t aware of.
But eventually those fossil fuels run out, and then what will we fill our airplanes and hummers with?
We’ll manufacture it from limestone and water.
CaCO3 when heated gives off CO2 and becomes quicklime, which is used in cement. You mix the CO2 with steam and do high temperature electrolysis, and get CO H2 on one side, which it turns out is syngas. Cook at the right temperatures under the right catalysts and syngas recombines to form very high quality hydrocarbons of whatever flavor you want. So how do we do this large scale? Nuclear powered heating for quicklime production and steam.
We’ll need all the cement by then anyways, and the interesting thing about the whole cycle is its carbon neutral. The quicklime, (and whatever cement you form) absorbs CO2 from the atmosphere like nothing else. The whole thing requires only the energy input for the quicklime and electrolysis, and by the time we need to do this we’ll have much of the infrastructure for the fuel production in place from the coal liquefaction plants and cement plants.
I imagine the cost of production would be maybe five to ten dollars per gallon… Expensive sure, but there will always be a demand for diesel fuel. When the robots begin their revolution, those killbots will be running diesel engines that had fuel generated by nukes, water, and limestone.
