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53 comments on The Coal Crunch is Materializing
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53 comments on The Coal Crunch is Materializing
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I am a new contributor to this site, but have been an avid reader of the posts here for about a year.
I wanted to respond to Cslater8's question regarding any silver bullet ideas with a question of my own: What do people on this site think of the genomics angle?
For those not familiar with this, the genetics research pioneer, J. Craig Venter, and some MIT scientists are apparently working on coming up with a synthetic fuel source from artificial DNA. This is a kind of synbio process that makes use of so-called biorefineries and involves the use of large amounts of bacteria, as opposed to drilling through the earth's core at the bottom of an ocean.
From what I have read, such a fuel could also be designed in such a way that it would also capture its own carbon emissions. Talk about a silver bullet!
Is anyone familiar with the effort to create such a fuel and, if so, what are the chances of it happening in a timeframe that will enable us to avoid all Kunsterian emergencies, long or otherwise?
Hi, Risksorter.
Like other technologies that are coming onto the scene now, this one will likely bump into the limits of the system as it is now.
The bacteria presumably require nutrients and to replace the amount of liquid fuel we are using they would require a lot of nutrients. Currently, however, we are eating those nutrients ourselves and may not want to share them with the bacteria.
Each direction we turn there is a limit. Such is how it is just before collapse. All the buffers have been used up.
Best,
Andre'
Andre:
Thanks for tackling my question.
But what if those nutrients you describe come from something we are not already eating -- like seaweed or algae. Something that has not or cannot be over-farmed -- at least until we've had a chance to tap into the energy conversion cycle at a deeper, more fundamental level.
As energy is all around us, it is essentially a question of finer as opposed to grosser access. There may be ways of buying time, while pushing the process in the right direction. Given science, we cannot rule out the possibility of progressing towards a solution, as opposed to regressing to more primitive living conditions.
I am neither a cornocopian nor a believer in technology as a substitute for fuel, but we can never rule out the possibility of the kind of fortuitous breakthrough that the discovery of oil, itself, represented.
If we can come up with the R&D $, we can at least take a stab a this. Another six months of high fuel and food prices, and a lot of people -- even some influential ones -- will begin to wake up.