Animal waste is insufficient in quantity to really solve any problems -- it's dramatically more efficient to simply turn animal food into biogas rather than feeding the food to the animal and turning the animal into biogas. It's only worth using waste if you're already producing the animals for some other purpose, and while it may improve the profits of the food producers, it won't solve energy problems.
biodiesel
- Thread starter parmasson
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mbrinkhues
SOC-14 1K
Biogas may not solve the problem. But Biogas plants attached to the human waste treatment plants can supply at least part of the needs. Today the CH4 is burned of and wasted.
The technologie to use the gas is an old hat. You can burn the stuff in a conventional oil-fired plant (Actually a mine around here did that with CH4 from the coal for a while) or you can get fancy and use fuel cells.
And dual-use of animal wastes isn't a problem either. The stuff needs to be gathered/stored anyway. You can extract the Methane, the rest is still useful fertilizer.
And while it might be more efficient to use the animal feed directly, it is considerably less tasty.
mbrinkhues
SOC-14 1K
As mentioned above, from a sufficiently advanced world, fusion is the Bees Knees.
Solar panels, wind turbines, and hydroelectrics might be more difficult to use to run a technological society. I'm not sure. I do believe that all current industrial production is done via fossil fuels. I imagine it would be a great burden to have to run industry entirely off of sun, wind, and water.
Suffice to say that the price for everything goes up, up, up. Anyone done studies on this? At what mass-production point does the price for producing PV panels (or roof shingles or whatever) level off? </font>[/QUOTE]At least part of the Ruhr Valleys power is supplied by a number of large hydroplants, the Möhne-, Eder- and Sorpe Dams. You know, the ones that where attacked by the DamBusters.
I'm thinking a clever and exploitative set of world engineers would seek to create a greenhouse effect, to the point where the colony could have fast-growing sugar-based crops for raw fuel material production in the tropic zone, and nice, filling grain crops for food in the more temperate zones.
In their spare time, they can produce ultralight wind turbines and photovoltaic roof shingles for residential and commercial use, solar-thermal water heating for hot water, underground thermal taps for moderately cool water, flywheels for energy storage, and uber-efficient OLED and fluorescent lighting.
It might be a bit expensive. But with some luck, said colony could sustain a tech society.
In their spare time, they can produce ultralight wind turbines and photovoltaic roof shingles for residential and commercial use, solar-thermal water heating for hot water, underground thermal taps for moderately cool water, flywheels for energy storage, and uber-efficient OLED and fluorescent lighting.
It might be a bit expensive. But with some luck, said colony could sustain a tech society.
Since biodiesel is most often made from vegetable oils, I'm not sure what your point is. Biodeisel has some advantages over straight vegetable -it works in any diesel, without any conversion or modifications to the engine or the fuel system -- just put it in and go. It also has better cold-weather properties than SVO . Converting vegetable oil to biodiesel requires only lye (NaOH) and wood (methyl) alcohol in a simple transesterification reaction.
Of course, with suitable (i.e. military) diesel engines, you can also run on a blend of lcohol and vegetable oil with little or no engine modification.
