Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire Fuel - viable source?

yep. and conservation is found creeping in the backdoor, yet again.

use less, and adjust by wearing warmer, thicker clothes, driving less, buying more on each individual trip to town, etc.

in other words, the paradignm goes forward, with conservation a piece of the solution to the puzzle.

lot's of folks are beginning to ask if we shouldn't shift paradigms and re-think the oil paradigm??

i don't know, and don't own any stock in chevron, stihl, gm, or poulan, at least as far as i know.

the "debate" is whether we can continue the current paradigm with efficiencies, or should we invest a "new way?" i don't know.

the 10 lb calfs-head is no where near being worn out, and the sweetgum continues to proliferate, so there you go.

As long as oil is cheap alternative energy sources for transportation can't win in the free market, and thus, the needed technologies and infrastructure are not developed. Being oil alternatives take decades to develop into viable transportation systems, the free market alone leads to an abrupt, severe, and sustained transportation energy shortages the likes of which we have not seen in this nation accept maybe during WW2. Sorry to say, but in this case a proper role of government is to stretch out the transportation energy shortage so that it's not as abrupt, not as severe, and not as sustained. This was the idea behind H. Ross Perot�s 50 cent per gallon fuel tax when he ran for President in 1992. Make gasoline more expensive now so that alternative fuels could better compete in the market and become viable alternatives before oil starts to run out.

Then along came the idea that CO2 causes global warming, and from that, the idea of taxing all energy sources based on their carbon footprint with some of that tax money going to support alternative energy. This is supposedly the reason behind Obama's push for carbon cap and trade legislation, but he also wants to get his hands on more tax money.

Now if government restricted its cap and trade taxing to oil derived transportation fuels and used that tax money for alternative energy development and/or deficit reduction, I think many folks would support that. Fat chance of that happening, right?

it depends, in part, on whether the elected reps are pro-oil, or who have come to help lead us out of this morass?

given, that we are at the beginning of the end of the age of oil - paraphrased - what should we be doing next?

building more car plants, or building more infrastructure to support mass-transit?? it's a crying shame politics and self-interest gets in the way of critical thinking related to the future of humankind.

the coming end to the age of oil?? what could that possibly mean?

Any hope that genetically modified anything would ever be allowed to be grown in the ocean is nothing but a dream.

In a single engine the BTU rating and mileage of the separate neat fuels isn't relevant to fuel blends. Due to ethanol's higher octane rating it improves the thermal efficiency of gasoline and offsets the lower BTU content. Yep, there definitely are diminishing returns as more ethanol is blended in the fuel, but E20-E40 seems to be the line (depending on the engine).

As a neat fuel or high-percentage blend, the fuel efficiency of ethanol can be increased by increasing the compression ratio. Numerous studies have proven ethanol mileage can be on a par with gasoline. The trouble is that without a variable compression engine gasoline is excluded.



I took a quick look at the link - from what I read they used a gasoline engine converted to exclusive use of hydrogen/CNG blends. My point was engines that can burn mutiple fuels and blends interchangeably - driver's choice. To my knowledge, there isn't an engine that can use gasoline/ethanol and/or hydrogen/CNG based on the whims of the driver.

Sure it can, except we really don't have a free market. The true cost of imported Middle Eastern oil refined to gasoline is over $10 per gallon, not counting our young men getting shot up. The price supports and subsidies aimed at (and usually missing and hitting an oil company) the renewable fuels industry pale at what's gathered by the oil industry.

the future kinda/sorta points to electricity. of course, there are competing viewpoints.

and those pesky batteries. what a pain, without sufficient technological breakthroughs. nuclear power will likely heat the water ways, and batteries are expensive to ship, about like oil from the middle east in the supertankers.

russian stoves, heat the house in the morning and again at night...now, there's a practical solution.

As you know, octane rating has nothing to do with energy content, but only with the ability of the fuel to resist spontaneous combustion when mixed with air and compressed in a hot engine. Direct fuel injection, which is now becoming commonplace, has all but eliminated the octane advantage of ethanol over regular grade gasoline. Once again a technology advancement overcomes another shortcoming of the IC engine (and there are many). What we are left with is the physics that a gallon of gasoline contains 33% more energy than a gallon of ethanol. That fundamental difference can�t be overcome by technological tricks.

Bingo. It's also fact, not just physics. Ethanol don't cut it.

There will never be a viable alternative fuel source. As soon as any alternative fuel gets an advantage on refined fuels, all the ragheads will do is run the price down to rediculous levels, making refined fuels much cheaper, and running alternative fuel producers out of business. Anyone remember the 70"s????????

yep, i do. in the long-run we gotta go nuclear, whatever that means, or how best to define it.

we've gone from wood, to coal, water-power, oil, etc. the next step is once again very important. will it be a status-quo solution, or a brand new version?

and will there be several competing fuels, or just one main fuel. i like wood, dried properly, and split for the wood heater using wedges and splitting mauls. but that places me clearly in the minority.

for the masses, good winter clothes and mass transit ring a bell.

That's assuming that the reserves being reported by the various Arab countries are accurate. They raised their reported reserves so that they could also raise the amount allowed to be exported under OPEC rules, and have never decreased the amounts of reserves reported, even with large depletion rates and no new "elephant" or giant discoveries. It is questionable if the Arabs have as much oil reserves as they claim. I thought that it was quite telling that they could never boost worldwide production over 86mbpd even when it was $147/bbl in '08.

I believe pure electric and on-board generator electric vehicles (Chevy Volt) are the next generation of passenger transportation. Lithium-ion batteries contain no rare or heavy metals and have been steadily improving in performance. As demand increases so will innovation in batteries, motors, and controls. While batteries may never have the energy density of gasoline, electric vehicles are inherently more efficient at converting energy to locomotion, and thus, gain ground in that area.

One important advantage is that any fuel can be used to produce electricity as can solar, wind, hydro, geothermal and nuclear. The current grid has enough excess capacity in off-peak hours that nearly every single family home could charge one electric vehicle at night in most parts of the nation.

yep. the arguments revolve around how to continue to "commute" into the big mega-cities for work, driving individual cars, versus or compared to another way of getting to our jobs in the mega-cities.

beyond that, should mega-cities be allowed to survive? seriously.

allowing workers to work from home, or nearby office spaces might not require 300 hp. SUV's as a commuter vehicle.

bicyles, or "electric-vehicles" might be positive alternatives. when we're speaking about the end of the age of oil, what are we speaking of, exactly? the end of the mega-cities are included, or not??

Large urban areas are the most efficient living environment on a per capita basis. Short of drastically declining population, large cites are in our future.

Telecommuting seems like a positive development, but most jobs that can be done from home can also be done from India or some other low wage country.

Most public transportation fails on the basis of inconvenience, inflexibility, or exposure to the public (flu, cold, crime, etc). Experimental systems that allow riders to call an individual car from a queue and take it directly to their destination with no intervening stops demonstrates what's needed to replace private automobiles. Such transportation grids are economically viable only in urban areas, so suburban dwellers are left out, which limits the political clout needed to build them.

Perhaps there are some futurists who have thought all this through and can provide various scenarios of what the world will be like in 50 years. The most common scenario has been the one used in movie plots like Mad Max and Road Warrior, but perhaps the future, at least the near future, is not a bleak as the gold merchants promote.