Originally Posted by Pax Vobiscum
Sorry,
Loose rivets, you'll have to explain
why "it simply will not work". The carbon-based energy supplies exploited to date have been the 'easy' ones. This makes perfect sense - if oil from field A costs $10 a barrel and from field B it's $20, then field A gets exploited first. While oil remains at $15 a barrel, field B will never get exploited. For similar reasons, many fields have more oil left behind than has been extracted - it simply hasn't been economic to get it out of the ground.
Then there's oil shale - more potential energy than in all the oil discovered up to now (3 billion tons in Germany, alone) - see
World Energy Council. We'll need new technologies to turn this into a usable product, at present it takes more energy to extract it than you get when you burn it, but I'm an optimist
.
NB I'm no energy expert (maybe Loose Rivets, based in Texas, is), and I know there are several PPRuNers who are, so I now sit to be corrected!
Ah, it is possible I misinterpreted your post. What I thought was, an infrastructure set up to create fuel by other means. This is where I feel we are living in a dream world.
It puts it into perspective when one considers an area the size of Texas. It's certainly big, but the layer of any natural product would be minutely thin by comparison. Also, it's an area where it takes 8 acres to feed one cow...on a good day. (I seem to remember that in the UK we can get 8 cows on one acre.) Where will all the existing infrastructure go?
There is to my certain knowledge, an attempt to rework some old wells here. Oil company's reps are approaching folk who have rusting 50 year old equipment sitting on their farms. Indeed it is because of the new value of oil. It has always struck me as odd that America leaves a lot of oil in the ground while incurring $trillions of debt. But that's another issue.
There is of course intense research going into other forms of energy. We have discussed the JET experiment on pprune in the past. It is the total effort that I am questioning.
I'm rushing, so I won't make references by name, but some posts back someone seemed to imply that it's okay, we have enough to last all the living folk, and then some. What I see from the viewpoint of someone my age, is that this timescale goes by in the blink of an eye. I don't want my grand children, or even my great grandchildren in the scenario that I painted in my first post.