When petroleum gets expensive enough, and political pressure gets high enough,
I'm sure new fuels and means of locomotion will come along. They may be exotic
fuels of the future like solar, hydrogen, chemical reaction (batteries =
electricity) or nuclear; or they may just be refining fuels and methods of the
past, like coal, methane, steam and electric power.
I've always been intrigued by how well early steam cars compared to gasoline
internal combustion cars of the era, but that the steam cars never really got
developed. Not even as far as railroad and maritime use. We put all of our
eggs in the petroleum basket.
I've also been very intrigued by the way people in third world countries
convert old jeeps and leftovers (what we determined to be "junk") to run on
methane, and make them run by throwing garbage, mango peelings and donkey dung
into the tank. I wonder how much methane one day's worth of garbage from Los
Angeles, Chicago or New York City could generate for fuel use. Instead, we
spend billions of dollars to just get rid of it.
We have just not found it necessary to correctly use mother natures gifts to
us, whether they are high-tech or overlooked low-tech Years ago, I had a cabin
in the mountains of North Carolina with a pretty nice stream along one property
line. Everybody laughed when I spent time building a water wheel, connected to
an old Mopar alternator, and wired to a couple of tail light bulbs hanging on
the front porch. Yet every time we went up there, all I had to do was pull the
pin and let the waterwheel start spinning, and we would have free electric
lights for the entire two weeks that we were there.
DickJ
In East Texas
Rich Fox <v4gr@rcn.com> wrote:
One thing we do have is coal. Most of these alternate fuels are merely a way
to turn coal into something that can be used in cars. You could burn coal,
generate electricity, use that to make Hydrogen. Of distill lots of corn or
other starch. I don't know what that would do for the air, but someday oil
will get to expensive no mater if it's diesel or gasoline. By then we will
be getting serious about new fuels. I have seen pictures of the coal turbine
that I thing Union Pacific built and pulled trains with. Way to much carbon
build up. Rich Fox
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