By Steve Sommers
As with many Americans, I believe that I may have detected aflaw in the Bush energy plan. It seems that oil resources arevulnerable to weather that can shut down by a little bit ofrain. Well, okay, a lot of rain. And when you are dependent onone source of energy, that source can be disrupted and prices goup. By the way, could somebody tell me what doesn't cause gasprices to go up?
The fact of the matter is that if you bother to look aroundyou'd see that energy is - for all practical purposes -unlimited. Energy blows in the wind and falls from the sky andpops up from the ground, and beats down on you on a hot Summerday. Everything that can burn is energy. The reason we can't orwon't use it is entirely cultural. We could be self-sufficientin energy if we really wanted to. Think about this: If everybodyin our country, say, took all the money they spend on oil andgas and built themselves a wind-mill and bought an electric carthere absolutely would be no energy shortage - ever.
"But, Ste-eve," I hear you whining, "I don't want to build awindmill!"
Okay. I've got a solution for you polluters out there, too.Here's how it goes. I am a big fan of the Jon Stewart show. Acouple of times on his show he's made the quip that he can'tunderstand how people aren't able to produce oil a lot morecheaper since: "it's only carbon." He said that once to theformer New Jersey governor and then head of the EPA, whochuckled merrily and then did not answer his question. I wroteto him at an address I got off of the Internet and then got theletter returned, so, I'll tell you instead.
Thermal depolymerization, if I remember correctly, is the nameof the process. It was featured in Discover magazine in May 2003and the name of the article was Anything into oil. This articlediscussed how the process was being used to take biologicalwaste, in this case it was at a chicken farm where they took theunusable parts of the chicken and turned them into oil.
The way it works is that the biological/carbon containingmaterial is put into the device, a vacuum is created, and thewater on the material is boiled away. As this happens, it freesthe bonds of the carbon containing material and it is turnedinto oil. The vacuum is necessary so that the amount of energyneeded to cause the moisture to boil is greatly lessened. Thething looks like a huge tangle of pipes and takes up a lot ofreal estate, but it's really basic and simple technology that'sused in an innovative way.
The company, I believe, is called Changing World Technologies.At present it costs them twelve dollars a barrel to turn animalwaste into oil - which is a nice profit with oil at fifty bucksa barrel, however, it's still a whole lot more expensive thanpumping the same amount, which costs the oil company threedollars a barrel.
Discover magazine did an update on this company a few monthsback. They were attempting to build a demonstration facility buthad a setback when their contractor produced faulty workmanship(ie) pipes that needed a huge amount of re-welding.
It really was one of these things that sounds too good to betrue, turning garbage into oil. Well, you can look up thearticle for yourself, or I suppose have an assistant of yours doit for you.
Now, believe it or not: not all scientists accept that oil is,in fact, a fossil fuel or a limited resource. There is analternate theory that oil is not composed of decayed biomassthat seeped down into deep pockets in the Earth but rather is aresult of geological processes within the planet and it bubbledup into those same pockets. Time magazine had an article about ascientist named Gold who proposed this and was also responsiblefor some other unconventional theories that turned out to betrue. I forget what those theories were, maybe about comets. Ifiled his away in my mind and then forgot about it - becauseeveryone kept saying oil was a fossil fuel and it seemed apretty safe bet that they weren't all wrong. Although, I alwaysfound it odd that oil which would have to be created by anabundance of life is found underneath some of the world's mostinhospitable areas. (Deserts, frozen wilderness, deep, deepunder the ocean).
Then NASA came back and said that the probe they had sent to oneof Saturn's moons, Triton, had found seas of oil on the surface.Triton, they estimated, had temperatures of below two hundredand eighty degrees centigrade and a methane atmosphere. How didthat oil get there? Did Triton have a whole bunch of really colddinosaurs up there or was it maybe the result of geologicprocesses that might be similar to Earth's?
Okay. That's something for you to think about. It's an alternatetheory and I don't necessarily believe it, but you've got toadmit that it's pretty interesting
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