i neither agree that there is an energy shortage or that oil takes millions of years to create. oil is a soup of hydrocarbons that occur naturally as part of the carbon cycle. the more we use the more is created. it isnt destroyed. the more we burn, the more carbon in the atmosphere. the more carbon absorbed by plants the faster plants grow (ask greenhouse owners about raising carbon levels). the more plants grow the more carbon in the soil. ethanol after all is plant sugars with the carbon bonds broken. all fuels are hyrdo carbon chains.. methane ethane cetane propane octane....
the second point is oil companies were making a profit selling oil for under $10 a barrel six short years ago before the oil money families assumed power in america. now they rob us blind with $70 a barrel while outlawing free energy sources like nuclear power, which despite the oil propaganda is plentiful cheap renewable and safe.
there are vast reserves of oil that have been withheld from tapping in order to create a false sense of an energy shortage so that the oligarchy of oil families can continue their destruction of OUR wealth for their benefit. As we sit right now gasoline costs 17 cents per gallon in venezuala and 6 dollars in england. how can this be and do you now understand why people like pat robertson call for venezuala's president to be assasinated.
let us not fall for their lies of their contrived shortages, but let us call a spade a spade. they seek to control us and turn us into their serfs while they live fat off our labors as they keep free energy sources from us and sell the oil of this planet that they claim as birthright to us for their excess wealth and profit while reducing our families to poverty. I have a lister engine based genset to save my family from their cruelties
dude, not wanting to get in a flame war or anything, but...
my old man was chief engineer for south east asia for P&O logistics group that supplied all the rigs out there with stuff like drill pipe etc, before that he was in tin mining in malaya, and after that coal mining in what was then zambia, so I grew up in oil and engineering, and hung around geologists and oceanographers and shit.
repeating what was told to me, all oil (and all coal for that matter) is always found UNDER rocks that are millions of years old (sure, some sometimes weeps to the surface through fissures, but the reservoirs are UNDER old rock) and there is a direct correlation between how old it is and how good it is, old good coal is anthracite, younger poorer coal is lignite
(any of this is wrong or a misinterpretation or simplification, blame me and my memory)
so unless you personally discovered oil laying under rock that is only thousands of years old I'm gonna go with what I "know"
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carbon is an element, and it makes a compound with many other elements, and lots of natural processes do this all by themselves, but it is slow and very few of them result in anything you can burn in an internal combustion motor.
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nuclear is IMHO the only hope for humanity over the next 50 years until we get fusion on commercial scales.
thing is, petrol and diesel are simply amazine fuels, they are INCREDIBLY cheap to get per gallon, especially in the starting phase of production before peak oil where all you do is drill a hole in the right place to get a gusher
petrol and diesel are also incredibly energetic per pound, and being liquids are incredibly cheap and simple to bunker (store and transfer)
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there are still vast reserves but my opinion is we already used half the oil there is, trouble is demand today is higher than ever in history and still rising, so something is going to give.
yes OPEC got greedy in 1973, and yet 86% of fuel cost here in the Uk is tax, still doesn't change the paragraph above
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the real problem is not all oils are the same, the sweet saudi crude was honey, the north sea oil for example was shit, great for making PVC, crap for petrol, there have been no new major field discoveries in the past 30 years, everything they have discovered is relatively small and, far worse, not primo quality for making petrol andd diesel
the nest big problem is the size of most of the saudi fields is bullshit, cos OPEC quotas were set in proportion to field reserve size, the instant this came in all middle eastern fields magically doubled in size...... smell a rat?
the next big problem is extraction, for some years now saudi has been having to pump water down to displace oil up, and many people say they have been doing this too fast, which is damaging the wells, in any eveny each extra barrel is costing more and more to extract, and is lower and lower quality, it's been some years now since saudi was the biggest oil producer supplying the USA for instance
iraq has about a quarter of the worlds remaining oil, iran has about a tenth, and about a quarter of the worlds remaining gas (as in LPG not gasoline) and the real reason saddam invaded kuwait in gulf war one was the kuwaitis were under drilling (angling the bores sideways) into iraqui reserves... I'm making no moral calls here about either gulf war or anything related or allegedly related, just telling it like ir is
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you talk about "big oil", you'll miss the point, they are not oil companies, or petrol companies, or diesel companies, they are in the business of selling energy, and they are selling it in a form that we are junkies for.
I can turn on the telly and see jeremy clarkson ejaculating all over the completely stupid new W12 maybach 1000 bhp supercar, sure, anyone who can afford a million dollar car could care less if it ran on chanel number 5, doesn't stop practically everyone I know lusting after one so badly if you owned one and screwed their girlfriend they'd be happy to take a life from you and discuss her performance in bed....
they could spend ten times the money telling everyone injecting 2o lbs of silicone into your testicles (idiots do this stuff believe it or not) until they're bigger thn a football is a neat idea, and the only takes would be those who would do it anyway and those who need "warning, contains hot liquid" on a coffee cup
we LOVE petrol and oil, we grew up with it, so to us it's as normal and as much a god given right as oxygen
cept it aint.
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I bought two of these
http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/1993-RENAULT-19-RT-TURBO-D-RED_W0QQitemZ4610876193QQcategoryZ9861QQtcZphotoQQrdZ1QQcmdZViewItemrenault 19 non turbo indirect injection all mechanical engine systems diesels
I paid less than 200 uk pounds each, why?
because no one wants them... not flash enough, not fast enough, not fast off the line, not cool.
sure, "big oil" and "big motors" advertise and promote the hell out of their shit, but, the target audience just laps it up, can't get enough, they were born that way....
my dad had a dennis steam truck, he didn't thinks that way, his first "real" vehicle was a rudge ulster motorcycle
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try and sell a bicycle to a chinaman now, he'll piss on your feet
he wants a lexus
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dude, I'm not trying to rain on your parade, and I'm not claiming that corporate "personalities" are anything other than psychopathic, and it's great you have a lister, but if you plan on using it to save your family, you'd better have weapons of mass destruction too to keep the hordes at bay while you have light and power and they don't
everything going on in the world is more easily explained by mass stupidity than the black helicopters you occassionally see
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the way I see it, if I live another 40 years, the real challenges I will see society face are.
1/ rapidly decreasing economic viability of liquid petrol and diesel as a MOBILE fuel source.
2/ we can in theory nuke / electric everything static, if we start building fast enough, the longer we leave it, the fatsre we will have to do it and the more (safety and efficiency) corners we have to cut (top tip, the UK is already in the shit in exactly the same way as someone credt carded and mortgaged up to the hilt, it's only a question of time till the red letter lands)
3/ hydrogen is NOT a fuel, you goota liberate it from water, its a bicth and expensive to bunker compared to petrol, and you just doubled the installed nuke capacity required to make it
4/ battery powered, no matter how efficient, is NOT a fuel, you just doubled the installed nuke capacity required etc
5/ "renewables" are a joke, the entire UK renewable capacity for the last five years won't power one medium sized aluminium plant for one month, I don't plan on living on lentils and wearing animal skins any time soon
6/ "biodiesel" is a joke, unless you plan or turning the globe into a fuel farm, and I don't plan on giving up meat and veg and running off duracells instead
7/ our real problems are efficiency, or lack of it, currently the US citizen is king of per capita energy usage per year, but the rest of the planet wants the same as you guys and you guys don't want to live on lentils etc
8/ in the real world, see SUv sales, NOBODY is going to get more energy efficient unless you squeeze them financially until they have no choice, that will happen all by itself, for me listers and old cars that cost nothing and so 50+ mpg is just a way of staying ahead of the curve without working too hard.
9/ closest I'm going to get to a political statement, middle east, nigeria, russia (see that shit about the gas pipeline last week?) and south america, they have energy reserves under the ground, we want them like an addict, shit is going to happen, we'll get them, but the process will increase the cost per kwh
10/ I had a graph, could post it here if you like, world trade centre day, the main UK electricity grid output over time, you should see the MASSIVE spike when everyone picked up the phones.... telecomms systems use 10% of Uk electricity, no telecomms, no civilisation.... you got packet radio on long wave and a computer and fuck off big antenna running off that lister buddy, come back? what's your 20?
11/ hate to say it, but the only thing I can see that will take the pressure off is something like a global flu pandemic that wipes out 20% of the population
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bottom line on all this, listers aren't going to save you from anything for more than a few days, however, what you LEARNED from playing with listers could well make you one of the most valuable people around if the shit hits the fan
I live in the UK, and guns are illegal, so the whole survival thing is a non starter here, population density is too high too, and apart from the obviosu engineering parallels between gunsmithing and enginesmithing, and the popularity of gun ownership in the states, I'm willing to bet there's a disproportionately high number on "gun nuts" on these forums, cos owning an running a lister now is like the story goes.......
(the story)
two guys, one sound guy and one camera guy, in africa, filming lions, both dressed for it and wearing heavy jungle boots, after a while it becomes apparent one of the lions is going to charge and eat them for dinner
both guys look at each other and get ready to run for their lives
then the sound guy squats down, pulls off his boots and starts putting on his trainers
camera guy starts laughing "you'll never outrun the lion in them"
sound guy replies "I don't have to outrun the lion, just you..."