As with many Americans, I believe that I may have detected a
flaw in the Bush energy plan. It seems that oil resources are
vulnerable to weather that can shut down by a little bit of
rain. Well, okay, a lot of rain. And when you are dependent on
one source of energy, that source can be disrupted and prices go
up. By the way, could somebody tell me what doesn’t cause gas
prices to go up?
The fact of the matter is that if you bother to look around
you’d see that energy is – for all practical purposes -
unlimited. Energy blows in the wind and falls from the sky and
pops up from the ground, and beats down on you on a hot Summer
day. Everything that can burn is energy. The reason we can’t or
won’t use it is entirely cultural. We could be self-sufficient
in energy if we really wanted to. Think about this: If everybody
in our country, say, took all the money they spend on oil and
gas and built themselves a wind-mill and bought an electric car
there absolutely would be no energy shortage – ever.
“But, Ste-eve,” I hear you whining, “I don’t want to build a
windmill!”
Okay. I’ve got a solution for you polluters out there, too.
Here’s how it goes. I am a big fan of the Jon Stewart show. A
couple of times on his show he’s made the quip that he can’t
understand how people aren’t able to produce oil a lot more
cheaper since: “it’s only carbon.” He said that once to the
former New Jersey governor and then head of the EPA, who
chuckled merrily and then did not answer his question. I wrote
to him at an address I got off of the Internet and then got the
letter returned, so, I’ll tell you instead.
Thermal depolymerization, if I remember correctly, is the name
of the process. It was featured in Discover magazine in May 2003
and the name of the article was Anything into oil. This article
discussed how the process was being used to take biological
waste, in this case it was at a chicken farm where they took the
unusable parts of the chicken and turned them into oil.
The way it works is that the biological/carbon containing
material is put into the device, a vacuum is created, and the
water on the material is boiled away. As this happens, it frees
the bonds of the carbon containing material and it is turned
into oil. The vacuum is necessary so that the amount of energy
needed to cause the moisture to boil is greatly lessened. The
thing looks like a huge tangle of pipes and takes up a lot of
real estate, but it’s really basic and simple technology that’s
used in an innovative way.
The company, I believe, is called Changing World Technologies.
At present it costs them twelve dollars a barrel to turn animal
waste into oil – which is a nice profit with oil at fifty bucks
a barrel, however, it’s still a whole lot more expensive than
pumping the same amount, which costs the oil company three
dollars a barrel.
Discover magazine did an update on this company a few months
back. They were attempting to build a demonstration facility but
had a setback when their contractor produced faulty workmanship
(ie) pipes that needed a huge amount of re-welding.
It really was one of these things that sounds too good to be
true, turning garbage into oil. Well, you can look up the
article for yourself, or I suppose have an assistant of yours do
it for you.
Now, believe it or not: not all scientists accept that oil is,
in fact, a fossil fuel or a limited resource. There is an
alternate theory that oil is not composed of decayed biomass
that seeped down into deep pockets in the Earth but rather is a
result of geological processes within the planet and it bubbled
up into those same pockets. Time magazine had an article about a
scientist named Gold who proposed this and was also responsible
for some other unconventional theories that turned out to be
true. I forget what those theories were, maybe about comets. I
filed his away in my mind and then forgot about it – because
everyone kept saying oil was a fossil fuel and it seemed a
pretty safe bet that they weren’t all wrong. Although, I always
found it odd that oil which would have to be created by an
abundance of life is found underneath some of the world’s most
inhospitable areas. (Deserts, frozen wilderness, deep, deep
under the ocean).
Then NASA came back and said that the probe they had sent to one
of Saturn’s moons, Triton, had found seas of oil on the surface.
Triton, they estimated, had temperatures of below two hundred
and eighty degrees centigrade and a methane atmosphere. How did
that oil get there? Did Triton have a whole bunch of really cold
dinosaurs up there or was it maybe the result of geologic
processes that might be similar to Earth’s?
Okay. That’s something for you to think about. It’s an alternate
theory and I don’t necessarily believe it, but you’ve got to
admit that it’s pretty interesting
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