Lord Zentei wrote:J wrote:You continue harping on alternative sources, buthave yet to show they're even feasible.
Yes, I have. I have pointed out that alternative sources are being used in a commercially profitable manner - specifically coal liquefication. Unlike ethanol, it is not climate dependant.
[/quote]
Commercially profitable does not equate to sustainable, feasible, and viable. Recycling french fry oil is commercially profitable, but there's no way it can scale to providing energy for our transportation infrastructure. Try again.
Xstrata recently considered purchasing 33¹/³% of the Cerrejón thermal coal operation in Colombia (“Cerrejón”), from Glencore International AG (“Glencore”) for a cash consideration of US$1.7 billion. Cerrejón produces about 32 million tonnes of coal. That suggests about 5.1 billion for the whole of Cerrejón, and about 640 billion dollars four four billion tonnes. The cost of the coal mines will be in the same ballpark as that of the liquification plants, in other words.
So that's about $1.1 trillion for the mines & liquifaction plants, which is the cheap part. Now here's a question for you, how do you get the coal to the plants and the oil from the plants into the distribution system? You're looking at many thousands of miles of new railroad tracks & pipelines, millions of railroad coalcars, and many thousands of locomotives. Oh yes, and those mines aren't going to dig themselves, you need to pay Caterpillar to build all the machinery to dig the mines, and Caterpillar needs to source the steel with which to build those machines. That ripples back through the steel industry which needs more coal for the blast furnaces & iron ore, which needs to be dug out from mines by heavy equipment, which needs to be built? See the problem?
Also, those 250 year US coal reserves? They've just gone down to 50 years.
Oh noes, we only have 50 years of coal based energy left, surely our civilization is doomed.
That's a best case scenario which assumes all our coal is antracit, which can be converted with 67% efficiency. A lot of the coal is of lower grades which have a conversion efficiency of 50% or so. It also assumes replacing 37% of transportation energy needs with synfuel, with no corresponding increase caused by the stepped up mining & coal hauling. Factor that all in and it knocks a good 15-20 years off the estimate. Then factor Peak Coal into it and it leaves about 20 years at most of sustainable coal liquifaction. But let's give you 35 years. What miracles do you have in store?
Yes, it certainly is. See, you seem on the one hand to expect me to point to a workable solution to the immediate crisis and on the other hand to provide a long term solution over multiple generations as well. Bad form:. If we have a solution for the next 50 years, your challenge has been met.
We don't have a solution for the next 50 years. There is no immediate solution. There is no realistic long term solution with less consequences than
The Shep Solution.