John McCain, Read This - Is Washington and Big Oil Burying This?
By GordonTaylor Posted in Energy — Comments (30) / Email this page » / Leave a comment »
When I received an email from a friend of mine in Alabama, I was skeptical about it's contents, it was a cut and paste for a newspaper article claiming a Tifton, Georgia man had discovered a way to may $0.25 a gallon fuel.
So, I visited my local Yahoo search engine, and it appears the story is true, at least at face value.
It seems the only outlet to pick up the story was the WND.
Some snippets and a link to the article.
How cheap you ask? Well, I didn’t put that part in my article, but let me tell you I think he could probably make it for 25 cents a gallon — but the government would most likely never allow that. The reason he could make it that cheap is because the process is so simple and the materials are essentially free. All he requires is a big tank (think of a silo, maybe), a handful of this bacteria (well, I don’t know that the recipe calls for a handful) and some tree limbs, corns husks, or any of those other once-living things that we dispose of (called bio-mass). Mix the bacteria and the bio-mass together, stir around a little and out comes gas. That simple...
...Do you doubt that he can do it? Let me tell you, I believe he can do it. The U.S. defense department believes he can do it. On April 15, J.C. was invited by the defense department to speak at the World Wide Energy Conference held in Arlington, Virginia. He was up there talking alongside speakers from ExxonMobile and the National Science Foundation.
He must have given a good presentation, because shortly afterward my phone starting ringing. The first to call was Joe Kovacs with WorldNet Daily. He wrote an article headlined: National news media burying amazing oil breakthrough? The last one to call was Herman Cain. He is a news columnist, businessman, politician and former CEO of Godfather’s Pizza. He is also a substitute host on the Neal Boortz radio talk show. He called to say the story was HUGE and to ask for J.C.’s phone number. I think this thing is finally starting to pick up speed.
Here is the article in the Tifton Gazette.
Lets make some phone calls, find out if this is true, and if it is, WHY aren't we hearing about this. I must ad this caveat, I am still skeptical.
The reporters name is Jana Cole and the phone number is 229-382-4321
More when I get off of the phone.
and continut to NOT drill at home for oil?
Artificial intelligence is no match for natural stupidity
Artificial intelligence is no match for natural stupidity
But I have seen these before. If he has something the world will literally beat a path to his door. There would literally be no stopping it either.
"Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom must, like men, undergo the fatigue of supporting it."
-Thomas Paine: The American Crisis, No. 4, 1777
Artificial intelligence is no match for natural stupidity
Mr. Bell's credibility will grow by leaps and bounds when he gets his website up & running.
But let's not discount what's possible from the man that brought Powdered Peanut Butter to mankind.
Seriously, the best take I found on Mr. Bell's process is at the Barking Moonbat Early Warning System. And no, they don't conclude that Mr. Bell is a B.M., just that other researchers are working on genetically modified bacteria (E. coli, mostly) that are programmed to produced fatty acids without the acid -- hydrocarbons.
There is more stupidity than hydrogen in the universe, and it has a longer shelf life. - Frank Zappa
Its amazing when I was in school it might have taken me days to do the research now I can do it as a lark.
But woodchips run from $60->$80 per ton and wood has a little less than a third the heat of combustion of an equivalent weight of gasoline.
So it would take say $200 of wood waste to produce an equivalent of ton of gas. A gallon of gas weighs about 6 pounds that gives us about 60 cents or so for raw materials just on first blush.
I don't see how he is going to produce a gallon of anything from wood for 25 cents a gallon.
"Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom must, like men, undergo the fatigue of supporting it."
-Thomas Paine: The American Crisis, No. 4, 1777
people who are unfamiliar with 'overhead' expenses in business.
One of my friends got 'schooled' in this concept when he remarked about the high cost of food at a restaurant. Unbeknownst to him was that one of the people around him owned a restaurant. After a listing of all the costs associated with running the restaurant he listed the food ingredients last. He then noted that he could double the portion size, which would raise his cost less than 20%, increase the price by only 50% and his customers would think they got a great deal! (The look on my friends face was priceless!)
Why,oh why don't we teach basic economics anymore???
Malo periculosam libertatem quam quietum servitium
The bacteria's magic is in transforming the wood chips, banana peels, bagasse, whatever, into a more energy-dense form.
[How we train the little buggers to excrete 89 octane is beyond me...]
But just on the basis of mass, he purports to convert 2 tons of organic matter into 5 barrels, or roughly 1500 lbs of fuel, a 38% yield. What happens to the other 62%, I don't know, but I suspect solid waste & CO2.
Note that the process also takes temperature and pressure, which aren't free.
In the case of ethanol, as an example, the process takes so much energy that you have to burn natural gas to make it. The ethanol is such a poor fuel, you'd consume it all, and then some, if you used it as a fuel in the process.
There is more stupidity than hydrogen in the universe, and it has a longer shelf life. - Frank Zappa
The heat of combustion of Gasoline is 47 MJ/Kg
The heat of combustion of wood is 15 MJ/Kg
2 tonnes of biomass has roughly 27 gigajoules of available energy
1500 lbs of gas has 32 gigajoules of energy.
So the little buggers have around 125% efficiency.
Usually when I see efficiencies better than a hundred percent I lock up the check book.
"Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom must, like men, undergo the fatigue of supporting it."
-Thomas Paine: The American Crisis, No. 4, 1777
"Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom must, like men, undergo the fatigue of supporting it."
-Thomas Paine: The American Crisis, No. 4, 1777
I have been watching the alternative energy fields for quite some time and the same roadblocks happen all the time.
1) Some one "discovers" you can make fuel from something cheap.
2) As soon as you start consuming the cheap stuff, it is not so cheap anymore. (Supply and demand anyone?)
The easy example is ethanol from corn. Look at corn prices.
The same thing happened to oil but it just took a LOT longer.
I have been watching hydrogen based technologies very closely over the last 5 years. There have been some pretty good breakthroughs and the direction is to be able to use as many source "fuels" as possible. Here is a quick summary:
1) Several companies have developed devices to break down water into hydrogen using solar cells. This process takes time but if enough units are built, it becomes effective. (The units are the size of a gas pump)
2) Other devices have been invented to break down gasoline and/or natural gas into hydrogen. These could be installed at existing fuel stations to help in transition.
3) Honda is currently leasing fuel cell vehicles in California. I believe Honda is currently leading the industry and will be first to market. The vehicle is quiet, non poluting and (most important for Americans) not a golf cart sized death trap.
To me, the way forward is to be able to create fuel anywhere without depending on one place in the world. I would love to see "atomic powered" (nuclear) vehicles but the green weenies would wet themselves over that use of technology. LOL.
“.....women and minorities hardest hit”
But even broaching the idea for discussion runs smack into two phrases that are not to be uttered in the world today:
Genetically Modified and....
Hydrocarbon
Others in this thread have talked about the overhead costs and without a detailed analysis of the process he's talking about, I don't even know how efficient his method is. If he has a working example of a "gasoline still" based on his principles he should make a website about it, run a car with it, do something to promote himself to show people that it can be done.
The next step in publicizing his idea would be not to have the Associated Press decide the newsworthiness -- he'd have to make a working example and take it to car shows, universities, etc. Not too hard if he's really on to something. There are people who would provide the material support for that kind of a promotional campaign.
Beyond that, the stigma against genetically modified anything and hydrocarbon anything is most likely the reason this story was never even mentioned by the Associated Press. As with all of these things, I'm skeptical but I would challenge the inventor to make a working example. A single car fueled with his gasoline with some handouts and a good paint job, on a whistlestop tour across the United States, would be a good way to promote the idea -- if he really believes it could work.
Beyond that, I have three words about the real alternative energy source this country should be doing more to produce, the words that I'd really like to hear John McCain say on the campaign trail. They are:
Inertial. Confinement. Fusion.
But among all of the other alternative energy sources the world has ever studied, only thermonuclear fusion energy has the slightest chance of satisfying central power station requirements in an energy hungry world, while avoiding using a commodity that people use for food, and while avoiding producing hydrocarbons.
And while avoiding enriching uranium.
And while avoiding needing an enormous refining network.
And while avoiding the NIMBY problem.
And it's about time people stopped calling it Star Trek technology. It's been on the backburner for 50 years because it would truly alter the political landscape: the United States could probably satisfy most of its power generation requirements with a relative handful of fusion power plants. This means the bureaucrats would have much less power than they do now over the price of energy.
And *that* my friends is the main reason why salt has been poured on its tail by both political parties. If we invested 1/10th of the Health and Human Services annual budget into developing it, we'd have it in a decade.
That's a bold statement, but I believe it's true.
Because if fusion power could be made safe and reliable, the cost of producing it, per kilowatt-hour, would be so low that the government could tax it heavily while *reducing* people's overall energy costs.
Nobody will talk about it, primarily because there are too many politicians involved at the national level in energy regulation to really want something that good.
It's worthy of some continued research, but unless there is some practical model that uses fusion while producing more energy output than it took to maintain the fusion, it's not something to place your bets on.
Fission reactors need to be built NOW in order to provide the energy needs of the country NOW. If fusion research somehow manages to bust the break even energy point, then we can talk about pushing fusion.
P.S. You can build your own back yard fusion reactor. And it works! Google Philo T. Farnsworth and Fusion and I'm sure you'll find detailed plans as well as find working examples of the same.
Socialism doesn't work. It looks nice on paper, but it's been tried and it's failed miserably every time (usually accompanied by widespread death and suffering).
Proud member of the V.R.W.C.
And I say that with respect.
But consider this:
The National Ignition Facility has recently revamped their website to fall into line with a Republican administration that emphasizes national defense first. Several years ago, the NIF was touting stockpile stewardship and safe, clean power as their #1 goal.
The Democrats want fusion research to continue with big lasers because they can say they're funding it to keep our nuclear arsenal safer (that's the Flower Child part.)
The Republicans want fusion research to continue with big lasers because they can say they're funding it to develop exceptionally lethal laser weapons and produce critical engineering data useful for missile defense (that's the Tip of the Spear part.)
Neither side wants it to succeed as a practical energy source because it would completely alter the global geopolitical balance of power if it was to succeed. The first consequence of a successful fusion power reactor program would be to truly end America's reliance on foreign oil. That means we'd have no reason to forward-base our military in places like the Middle East. We'd also have very little reason to maintain fleets of aircraft carriers to police the world's supply traffic in petroleum products: we could MAKE petroleum products from scratch.
It is not because it's technically impossible or that it couldn't be done if it became a national initiative. It is because of politics, political favors, and global strategic concerns that it is not being touted as a power source.
John H. Marburger III was pictured in Scientific American several years ago with a model of a Tokamak on his desk. And that is where the Bush administration has intended fusion power to stay while they are in office. The next administration will not be any better: they'll wait until the French get close, and then it will become an A-1 National Strategic Concern.
In the meantime the politicians from both parties are far too beholden to the current subsidy regime for boondoggles like corn-based Ethanol and other boondoggles like windpower and solar to move themselves very much.
Every time I bring this subject up, you've said the same thing. The propaganda works!
Even if what you say is true, there has not been a practical fusion reactor built. Starting a massive program to make it happen is all well and good, but what do we do in the mean time? And what if they still fail to find a practical approach after all that massive spending?
I say build the things that we know work NOW to meet our current and near term needs. Then look at other technologies to replace them in the future. That technology may be fusion or it may be something else, but I wouldn't want to place our entire future on a bet on unproven technology.
Maybe I'll put it like this... let's say Xerox comes to you and says they are researching a new printing process that they expect will cut the costs of production of your jobs in half. They swear it's only a few years off and all they need is for you to put your money into funding their research, then they'll sell you the first printer when they finally build one that actually works. Do you give them your money or do you go buy an existing printer to so the jobs you have now?
I've been burned a few times on investing in technology that never seems to make it out of research phase. Build something that works and I'll jump on the bandwagon.
Socialism doesn't work. It looks nice on paper, but it's been tried and it's failed miserably every time (usually accompanied by widespread death and suffering).
Proud member of the V.R.W.C.
It's funny that you mention Xerox....
Maybe I'll put it like this... let's say Xerox comes to you and says they are researching a new printing process that they expect will cut the costs of production of your jobs in half. They swear it's only a few years off and all they need is for you to put your money into funding their research, then they'll sell you the first printer when they finally build one that actually works. Do you give them your money or do you go buy an existing printer to so the jobs you have now?
That is exactly the problem that the inventor of Xerography faced. In fact it was the reluctance to believe him that delayed Xerography's progression by more than a decade. Nobody thought it would work. Nobody was willing to invest in Chester Carlson's idea.
Fusion power is an even bigger idea, by several orders of magnitude, and I have the feeling that's why it might take several orders of magnitude more time before people realize what they're dismissing.
You can read the Story of Xerography [1.62 MB PDF] but here's a snippet:
Carlson had a hard time finding investors in his new invention. He was turned down by IBM and the U.S. Army Signal Corps, it took him eight years to find an investor, which was the Haloid Company later to become the Xerox Corporation.
The Haloid Company? Who the heck are they? Nobody even knows or remebers their name today, but every time you make a photocopy or print with a toner-based printing device, you are looking at the invention they had the vision to fund.
Carlson was proved right only after a discouraging ten-year search for a company that would develop his invention into a useful product. It was the Haloid Company, a small photo-paper maker in Rochester, N.Y, which took on the challenge and the promise of xerography and thus became, in a
breathtakingly short time, the giant multinational company now known to the world as Xerox Corporation.
...
The Haloid leaders also took great risks in opting to develop xerography. They put up much of the company's modest earnings, and millions of dollars more in outside investment, to develop the first xerographic products.
Notice that line about millions of dollars more in outside investment. That's 1947 money: $10 million dollars in 1947 is roughly equivalent to $100 million today. And that was just the price for printing some words on a piece of paper. I expect practical fusion power to cost quite a bit more.
people. True, it took him a while to convince people that they could make a profit building it, but at least he had something to show them. I'm asking for something similar. Just produce more energy than it takes to start and control the reaction, then I'm in.
Socialism doesn't work. It looks nice on paper, but it's been tried and it's failed miserably every time (usually accompanied by widespread death and suffering).
Proud member of the V.R.W.C.
Just for fun, here's a current picture (taken just minutes ago!) of one of our big Xerox machines, a venerable old 4890 highlight color 92 page-per-minute laser that we use for certain work.
Even though it's old, it's a workhorse of a production printer, particularly for jobs that need to be done inexpensively. This one has recently developed a flaky, false jam detection problem and the nonvolatile memory battery is geflunken, so we've got the service manuals broken out and we're waiting for the part.
Now if nobody had ever listened to Chester Carlson, we'd never have that machine. The fact that it took him more than a decade to get an audience and some investment tells me that there's a hell of a lot to be said for perseverance. :)
On a "can it work?" level, there is absolutely no doubt in my mind that it does.
First of all, hydrogen bombs wouldn't work without it.
Second of all, you can go outside during the day or at night from any location on this planet and see abundant evidence that it does.
It's literally the most obvious thing in the world.
I have some doubts if fusion can be used to made a practical power plant. As I said the energy required to start and contain a controlled fusion reaction is larger than the energy produced in the reaction. No one has yet figured out how to change that, let alone converting a large percentage of that energy into electricity. Get above 100% output to input and I'll get more excited about it.
Socialism doesn't work. It looks nice on paper, but it's been tried and it's failed miserably every time (usually accompanied by widespread death and suffering).
Proud member of the V.R.W.C.
I hope you don't take it that way. For a long time I've wanted to do a tour and an interview with some of the people in Princeton at the Plasma Physics Laborator and at the National Ignition Facility and really do an indepth feature here at RedState and The Minority Report.
And then let people decide whether all these folks with Ph.Ds are just chasing a figment of their imagination.
I think you just inspired me to take the next step and get that ball rolling. Maybe your grandchildren will thank us both. :)
I DO support basic research into the topic, but just don't believe it's going to be a practical energy source any time soon.
Socialism doesn't work. It looks nice on paper, but it's been tried and it's failed miserably every time (usually accompanied by widespread death and suffering).
Proud member of the V.R.W.C.
fusion works. There are scientists out there who have been studying and reproducing fusion reactions for decades. The problem is simply that the science behind reproducing a fusion reaction without excessive inputs does not exist yet. We don't have the knowledge to even begin talking about the technology yet. This is still the realm of scientists, not engineers yet. If you want to solve our current energy problems we need to look at technologies that already exist, not ones that may exist in 100-200 years in the future, if ever. We have fission reactors, we have renewable technologies, we have clean coal technologies.
That's not my intent here, and it never has been. My hope has been that we can get people talking about fusion power again as something other than a laughingstock.
That laughingstock was largely caused by the Pons and Fleischman Cold Fusion debacle as published in the New York Times and in many other places. I think it did an enormous amount of damage to the field, and I don't certainly don't want compound that.
What I want to do is have people get beyond these kind of bigoted parables and start thinking seriously about it again. Only if we're thinking about it and not in mocking terms will we get people to invest their intellectual capital and their physical capital into making it happen. And if does happen, it'll the the best thing that has ever occurred in terms of energy production. So we should stop berating it as the bastard child of alternative energy. It'll never get anywhere if that keeps up.
We have not had fusion on the back burner. Fusion power has been on the front burner for somethingliek 50 years.
If I stacked up the Scientific American and Popular Mechanics articles trumpeting the arrival of fusion power 'in just a few years', I could probably not see over the stack, and I am not short.
Fission, meanwhile, has been quietly and safely and cleanly producing power for about that same period of time, and excpet for Chernobyl- a plant with flaws no serious naiton would ever approve-has operated just fine.
Fusion is a boondoggle, and if it ever does work will not prove to be clean or cost effective - until we have some really major engineering and possible physics- breakthroughs..
I trust claims and stories like this not at all.
But lets really look at the process, it is public information and is already being done.
Fuel, tree limbs, what not, free but someone has to pick them up, deliver them, process and put them in the tank. That takes labor.
The tank. That is a facility. It takes money to build the facility, the piping, maint shops, offices, fencing, property and with that comes utilities, payroll, office staff, taxes, OSHA, insurance, health benefits, vacation, retirement plans, social security, workmans comp, safety guys, maint guys, managers, handlers.......
He is basing his costs on the fact everything is paid for and his only overhead is probably him. On a large scale or even one that might produce a few thousand gallons a day his costs would go up. I believe the actual cost to "make" gas is only around 2 cents per gallon. He is looking at his direct cost not his burden rate of production and that is the real "cost".
Also consider we consume 200-300 million gallons every day in this country the extrapolate the amount of limbs, twigs, and garbage it will take to make a dent in that. Also where does all this come from after the first couple of days?
I like the techonology, no doubt, and I'm sure it will have its place in the market but as I tell all of my trainees, "Do the math!"