Talk:dollar a gallon gasoline

I can sure use help--both with the English and with the models/math.

Hkhenson 22:55, 28 July 2008 (EDT)

Hi Keith!

I see your new pages and I haven't had time to read them properly yet -- looking forward to it, as this is a topic which interests me greatly. I'll add crosslinks etc. as they occur to me.

For linking to other pages in the wiki, use this form: Hundred dollars a kg or a page about getting gas down to $100/kg. If the page doesn't exist, the link will show up in red. (Yeah, I need to put this on the editing help page, and probably a lot of other stuff.)

I've linked to this article from Issuepedia's oil addiction page.

Cheers! --Woozle 19:32, 29 July 2008 (EDT)

Contact data for Keith Henson

hkhensonspam@spamrogersspam.spamcom 626-264-7560 (cell)

BTW, This work is not all mine. There are other people involved, but some of them don't want their names public about it yet.

Hkhenson 11:00, 6 August 2008 (EDT)

Hello Keith,
Very interesting and promising concept! One key question remains: when will man-made solar panels used for creating synthetic gasoline surpass the efficiency of plant-based photosynthesis?
Greetings,
Matt Browne
Science Fiction Author
www.meet-matt-browne.com
and fellow Lifeboat member

Hi Matt. The answer is a conditional yes to the photosynthesis question. Plants are less than 1% efficient in capturing energy. They do have the advantage that they grow from seeds and present a lot of surface area to capture carbon dioxide. Eventually we should be able to sell seeds for gasoline trees that you can plant next to your driveway, but not yet.

To put numbers on it, solar panels are certainly more than ten times as efficient as plants. Even the problems of making electricity into gasoline should not be worse than 50%. The other matter is that solar panels in space don't use any land and the rectennas don't block much sunlight so they can go over farmland.

Hkhenson 14:45, 15 September 2008 (EDT)

Biodiesel from Sewage

Consider every sewage treatment plant in the world. If you take the effluent that is going to secondary treatment there is about 1-kg/L (8.34-lbs/gal) of dissolved solids in a growing medium, water, as a resource for biofuels.

In metropolitan Phoenix, this is 10,000,000 gallons a day, this all nutrition for cyano-bacteria then algae to feed on, not a human food source, this renewable resource grows with population as few do.

So, you have billions of gallons of raw sewage that are immediatley usable as nutrition and growing medium for biofuels. This resource will never go away, it will take some engineering to have the machines capable of processing millions of gallons a day but there you have it, a natural resource available on earth, in space, wherever people roam. The fuel farm units will take up some land space but don't require arable land, fertilizer or pesticides.

There is no other resource that can offer the economics of using sewage. After the nutrition is gone from the effluent it's treated one more time back to potable and all that wastewater goes right back into the fresh water system, this means cities need that much less fresh water from costly supplies.

So, you get biodiesel and fresh water from sewage, there is no better source of fuel.