7 Responses to “Let’s Grow Some Oil!”

1. Kiey Posted: May 15th, 2008 at 9:44 am

   1 Next thing you know we are going to have to deal with big vegetable oil.

2. Cortharis Posted: May 15th, 2008 at 11:21 am

   2 Actually the global food market would be happier since food would be cheaper again. As is a lot of food growing crops are being replaced with biofuel crops and that’s pushed food prices higher. That and the cost of fuel going up has also added to the inflation. This could probably elevate a lot of stress.

3. Taellosse Posted: May 15th, 2008 at 4:10 pm

   3 I think Cortharis means alleviate in that last sentence–elevated stress is what we’re already experiencing. I heard about this a couple months ago, and thought it was pretty nifty. Your assessment is probably accurate regarding big oil companies and their response to something like this, but wouldn’t it be nice if corporations were actually smart? If they were, instead of trying to squelch this, they’d be hiring this guy on and funding him, so he could give them a replacement business model for their current, unsustainable dependence on a finite resource. Then, they could have a means of remaining in business once oil becomes too expensive to be a viable source of energy anymore–as is bound to happen eventually, if it doesn’t soon.

4. Kevin Bahrt Posted: May 15th, 2008 at 5:21 pm

   4 I am a bit unsure about the demands of algae growth beyond it needing water but from what I can see, you can grow this stuff with just water and without land, you could grow this stuff in the desert without taking up valuable food crop space. Hell you could probably grow this stuff on the moon, just think about the ads for one of those, “MOOOOOOON FUUUUUUEEEEL” I still think we should change our cities off of fuel based generators and onto stuff like geothermal, wind and tide machines, cause, you know, the cities aren’t going any where and we are using a power source that has the primary advantage of being very portable.

5. Jack T Robyn Posted: May 15th, 2008 at 6:52 pm

   5 We need to grab some of these (and other) technologies and set up a self-sustaining colony in the central Sahara. From there: artificial islands, arctic and antarctic colonies, independent orbital colonies, moon base. Adapt and fucking conquer, already, that’s how Western culture works!

6. Taellosse Posted: May 15th, 2008 at 9:37 pm

   6 I still think we should change our cities off of fuel based generators and onto stuff like geothermal, wind and tide machines, cause, you know, the cities aren’t going any where and we are using a power source that has the primary advantage of being very portable. Sounds great in principle, but there are a couple of problems with that. First, a lot of cities are not positioned such that there are convenient natural features that can be exploited for power, and even when they are, some of those methods are almost as environmentally questionable as setting stuff on fire. Wind power is fairly innocuous, so far as anyone knows, but hydropower rarely is (you generally have to build dams, which screws up river ecosystems pretty badly, or at least huge turbines, which aren’t too friendly to aquatic life forms that get sucked into them along with the water), and good places to tap geothermal energy are actually pretty rare. Another big problem is even where such methods are available, the efficiencies are, at least at the moment, pretty crappy. The reason why everyone uses oil, gas, and coal is because the ratio of effort to yield is extremely high–that isn’t the case with most renewable energy sources. Now, that isn’t to say that we shouldn’t be working hard to improve those efficiencies–I think we absolutely should–but that’s why we aren’t already using more of those kinds of energies–we simply don’t know how to get enough energy out of them to replace fossil fuels.

7. Kevin Bahrt Posted: May 16th, 2008 at 8:49 am

   7 Let me see if I can find a water machine link… ah wiki never lets us down. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tidal_power http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wave_power Anyway I figure we can feed the west coast off geothermal with that ring of fire dealie they got going, coastal can use tide and wave generators since waves rarely ever go off, hell you could probably adapt some of those turbines for use in a river without having to completely destroy the local ecology. The main problem doesn’t seem to be power generation so much as continuous power generation. Most green forms don’t generate power at a constant speed so you would have to either use a massive set of monitors and control mechanisms or an ass load of batteries to store and release the charge at the proper frequency and voltage. And solar power has those evil clouds as an enemy, one of the reasons solar is the goto source for electricity in space. Although fuel based generators may be more effective I think getting those damn dirty hippies to shut up is worth a bit of an investment.