Thanks for reading my posts.

And for agreeing with most of what I wrote. You agree that we must reduce oil consumption. You agree that bio-fuel from hemp will cost $5.88/ gallon. (The cost of ethanol is irrelevent in the hemp bio fuel discussion, although it is an ingredient). The development of hydrogen fuel cell vehicles is reality, there are many of them on the west coast today.

The rest can be summed up in a difference of opinion. The amount of farm land lying fallow is not close to 48% of the land currently available, however even fallow land has cover vegetation, this is what the OP posting was about. Changing this land to aerable soil will cause an enormous output of greenhouse gasses.

Have a good night, probably will pop in later.

 

You should really read the thread first. It's actually about ethanol and the rip off that is taking place as the major oil companies move into it. Bio fules will cost $1.37 to produce and bio diesel from hemp seed is the only thing that would cost $5.80 per gallon but I think I can find you a source that says you can produce diesel from hemp alone not just the seeds. Cars can run on ethanol now.

And yes there is more than the 6% of land available right now. Much of it laying fallow and drawing government subsidies and the rest of it like I said undeveloped because there is no market for the crops that could be grown on it. Out here that would be replacing sage brush and grass that takes more than 100 acres to feed a cow for one year its so sparse with a plant that takes CO2 out of the atmosphere and puts oxegen back in. The west especially Wyoming, Utah, Idaho, Nebraska and Colorado have more than enough semi arid land to provide the 6% needed and the water to irrigate it although that would not be necessary in many places.

In addition one acre of hemp is worth four acres of trees when it comes to the manufacturing of paper so there would be a net oxygen gain there.

And there may be many hydrogen fuel cell cars on the west coast but not your average American can afford a $100,000 vehicle so they are at the present stage cost prohibitive.

 

I'm having a great night thank you. See you later

 

If you'd like to go off on a tangent about the big, bad oil companies - I'm game . . . but I'd prefer to compare the two solutions we've proposed (in response to the OPs ethanol 'news').

If we're going to invest in a long-term solution (and by long term, I'm talking in the hundreds of years timescale), I believe it is foolish to keep on burning anything else for fuel - FOOLISH! It simply isn't necessary, when we could put the same amount of investment into centralized hydro-solar programs on land practically unused for any other human purpose.

All the production is happening 93 million miles away - all we have to do is collect a small fraction of that potential energy, store it and distribute it. Absolutely clean - non-explosive - no agricultural impact whatsoever - no organic emissions whatsoever - it's basically boiling water and using the steam to power a generator. The upsides versus burning things for power are astronomical and even more compelling as the planet becomes packed full of people.

Hemp? maybe. Solar - Absolutely.

 

Gee we agree and I'm all for solar energy and think we should have invested vast amounts of resources in it decades ago. And as I have said many times the oilfield I work in has solar panels everywhere. Now they are mostly for things that require very small amounts of power but I've always thought it ironic that there are more solar panels being used out in the oilfields then there are in town.

But how do you power your car with solar power? Are we to that stage yet? See I have to go to work tomorrow and so do most Americans. And we are going to have to keep doing that. That's going to require fuel for our cars because another thing we Americans have not invested in is mass transportation which wouldn't really be feasible for myself and many others.

So while I'm a great believer in using all the alternative energy sources available to us, especially solar, that is only a fraction of the problem. We still need to develop alternative fuel sources for the vehicles we have now at least until the new technology provides some other form affordable transportation.

That's where hemp comes in or at least should. It is the best alternative for bio fuels and the one thing that is never discussed.

The other thing though is this is a mighty long time to just be discussing these alternative energy sources. Most of them have been around since the 1970's and have never been developed and implemented. The guy who invented the diesel motor figured it would run on hemp and Henry Ford when he built the model A made them to run on alcohol or ethanol. Instead we just keep depending more and more on oil. And we are burning what we made need someday for components.

In the meantime oil company profits have steadily increased and alternative energy sources have remained on the drawing and talking boards.

 

OK, we'll invest just enough in Hemp (or switchgrass) to get us to critical mass on electrically powered personal transportation - then it's all solar from there - how about that?

By the way, I'm not talking about the highly inefficient solar panels that you see for the most part - those silly things are lucky to convert 4%-6% of the potential energy into useful power, and it would take hundreds of millions of acres of them to put a dent in our current electrical usage (let alone our future usage). I'm talking about steam-powered electrical generation from solar collectors/concentrators.

You plunk these plants out in the middle of high solar potential areas (almost exclusively desert areas) and with 1/60th of the space, you can produce 8 times the electrical output of a traditional solar panel (including the amorphous crystal type panels). To put it in perspective, you could cover 2% of the earth's desert areas with these generation plants and they would produce electrical energy equal to ALL the planet's current power needs from every source (nuclear, wind, geothermal, hydroelectric, fossil fuels, you name it).

But we're busy subsidizing the upper middle class 'environmentalists' - and their 40 sq ft of solar panels on individual homes instead of investing that money in long-term solutions. Just dumb.

 

Why does it surprise anyone that the government would support a program that would damage the atmosphere?

 

I read recently about a new development in solar power, where the conventional panel has been reduced to a paper-thin layer that can just be rolled out over vast areas and plugged in.

If I can remember where I read it, I'll post up the link.

 

Hemp buries switchgrass and algae because besides the production of fuel it also provides fiber, building materials, chemicals and other things currently made out of oil.

I've seen these on the Science Channel and wonder why we are not pushing this technology on a global basis, instead of nuclear and geothermal. But instead where is the money and emphasis going towards for electrical generation? Clean burning coal fired generators and natural gas generators.

That's why I remain convinced that the oil companies are still calling the shots and have actually bought heavily into electrical generation.

I would of course disagree here and contend we are actually subsidizing oil company profits, but we've got plenty of time to talk about that.

By the way if you see the opportunity of a life time to buy into the greatest oil reserves known to man in the Colorado Rockies don't buy it. There is a huge amount of oil shale there but I don't see how they'll ever get it out until oil is $400/barrel.

 

Nevermind photovoltaic cells; this is REAL solar power....

http://www.enviromission.com.au/SolarTower Animation Metric.wmv

 

That's amazing!
I can't imagine it in the UK somehow though, where the main objection to wind-turbines is that they "Spoil the view" ...

 

I don't think its warm enough in the UK! The plan is to build five in the Australian outback - if its successful Australia to be the dominant world energy producing superpower (and be invaded by the US for "regieme change" because they will be part of a new "axis of evil") - Remember where you heard it first, get to the bookies and get money on it now.

 

You old cynic ....

 

Drive acrossthe high desert area of California, on I-40, tell me that the turbines there are a good use of the land. There are serious concerns about wildlife habitat destruction with the planting of the turbines and the disruption of free flight paths of many species of birds. The low frequency sound from the sails have also causedwildlife concerns.

And to top it all off, if it ain't the oil companies who profit, it's the aero-space industry, Boeing is a major builder of these turbine/generators. Also, one of the larger producers is Siemens, a small international business.

Without a doubt wind turbines can provide reliable electrical power without using non-renewable energy sources for the production of that power. The questions about the financial practiblity of the turbines and the impact on the enviroment in the manufacture, site construction impact and wildlife disruption are still being asked.

Perhaps someone can enlighten me on the answers to those questions.

 

I'm aware of these issues with wind turbines, and it seems that there are downsides to any method of energy production.

But the point I was making in my post is that "spoiling the view" seems to be the main public objection.

I just find that rather ironic ...

 

Whatever route we take for the future some big company or another will get rich - either from developing and implementing the technology, or from owning the land. You could easily argue that the only real way to avoid this would be for everybody to opt out and live off-grid.

Wind farms have been subjected to the NIMBY syndrome. Some people complain that wind turbines are noisy and say they are ugly and destroy the aesthetic qualities of the landscape. Perhaps the most serious concrete environmental problem with wind turbines, however, has been bird deaths. Birds may collide with the blades or they may be electrocuted if they land on certain parts of the generator. In California (in the Altamont Pass - I think? Help me out on this Californians/Americans) wind turbines have killed several dozen golden eagles and scores of other large birds of prey. Researchers are currently trying to devise systems that will solve this problem.

Bird deaths aside, the major practical drawback of wind power is currently the intermittent nature of wind. Although wind patterns for any given area can be determined and predicted on a seasonal and even daily basis, wind speeds and directions can be subject to rapid and wide fluctuations. On a seasonal and daily basis , the strongest and steadiest winds may not blow during the time for peak demand of electricity. Wind power has little chance of becoming a major or dominant source of electrical power until large-scale electrical storage facilities become readily available.

Despite its drawbacks, wind power capacity on a global scale continues to expand. In 1980, the global wind energy-generating capacity was a mere 10 megawatts; by 2005, it had grown to nearly 60000 megawatts and this growth showns no sign of abating. Indeed, even though wind power supplies only 1.5 - 2.0 % of the world's electricity, it is one of the fastest growing sources of commercial energy.

 

Are there any "DIY" type wind generators for rural areas.

If you visit a marina, you'll see countless wind generators and banks of solar panels, on virtually every kind of boat.

These supply a bank of batteries with enough wattage to power modest amounts of power for the daily use of the boater. The downside is the lead/acid battery banks and their manufacture & recycling impact.

 

Thank you Igor this was an educational experience for me and shows what is possible once we begin to think of things other than oil and coal.

I was watching this on the Science Channel not long ago and this was a viable option to what they use now which is mostly coal I think.

And yes if they corner the power or energy market and refuse to sell at a resonable price I'm afraid we will have to invade Australia to give them a chance to live in a free democracy.

I think I can. You are parroting the brainwashed message put out by the oil companies and supported by our own government.

Damage to wildlife and especially birds from wind turbines what a hoot. Visit any oil or natural gas field and look what is happening out there and then get back to me. You obviously have no idea of the environmental damage going on out there just out of sight of the public.

The only thing you are really advocating for or against with this rhetoric as to allow the major energy companies to continue to monopolize the energy market.

If you want to find more irony just go back several posts and look at the argument tenguy started with which is exactly what you just said their is a down side to any changes we make away from oil.

I firmly believe most of the objections to wind turbine generation are actually propaganda initially started by none other than the oil companies themselves who have tried to exploit the environmental concerns they routinely demonize or ignore in their operations.

Look at the concern for ruining scenic value for instance. Really spoiling the view somewhere is a bigger drawback than global warming? Please there is no comparison to the problems of climate change, the dwindling supply or oil and the corresponding increases in the cost of it.

Out here is the west if there are two things we have a lot of it is empty space and lots of wind. Yet we see very few wind turbine generators even though they have a bank of them that are doing a really good job of producing power near Laramie Wyoming.

Here's the real problem with wind turbines. If the public were to suddenly see the value of wind turbines they might also see the advantage of individual wind turbines that would drastically cut the cost of their electricity.

That would also be really bad for the oil companies which have now bought heavily into electrical power generation in the US.

 

My next-door neighbor happens to have one of those inefficient photo-voltaic panels on his roof, and that, coupled with a lot of passive-solar and energy-efficient design, enables him to sell power to PG&E most of the year. What difference does it make that it's relatively inefficient? Isn't it better that he and others like him don't have to rely on the electric power grid for survival?

And yes, he received a subsidy for the initial installation. Money well spent, if you ask me, and now it's built into the value of the home.

 

Out here we have a very incestuous relationship between the agricultural interests and the oil and gas industries. So there was this new idea to heat barns and lambing and calving sheds with heat pumps that relied on pumping hot water through rubber tubes installed in cement floors. It did add costs to their operations but turned out to be cost effective not to mention much more comfortable.

Then one farmer and only one decided to see if he could do the same thing with solar panels. He got a barn and shed that stayed between 50 and 60 degrees for free. But he also suddenly became almost unacceptable to his neighbors who suggested he had turned into some kind of tree hugging commie.

That is just an example of how entrenched the ideas against renewable energy are in the minds of many people.