146 comments on Performance Governing: Getting Lucky and Staying Lucky
Comments can no longer be added to this story.
| Show without comments | PDF version
146 comments on Performance Governing: Getting Lucky and Staying Lucky
Comments can no longer be added to this story.
| Show without comments | PDF version
Search The Oil Drum with Google
Support The Oil Drum
Recently on TOD:World
TOD:Campfire
TOD:Europe
- Peak Gold, Easier to Model than Peak Oil? - Part I
- Carbon Capture and Storage
- Oilwatch Monthly November 2009
TOD:Canada
- In this house, we obey the laws of thermodynamics!
- The Round-Up: October 24, 2008
- Compressed Air Energy Storage - How viable is it?
TOD:Australia/NZ
- International Energy Agency calls 'Peak' on OECD Oil Demand
- Australian Senate: Peak Oil motion defeated 31:6
- The Bullroarer - Friday 20th November 2009
TOD:Net Energy
Blogroll
Energy Sites
- The Coming Global Oil Crisis
- Die Off
- Dry Dipstick
- Energy Bulletin
- From the Wilderness
- Life After the Oil Crash
- Peak Oil Crisis
- Peak Oil News and Message Boards
- Powerswitch
- Rigzone
- Matthew Simmons
- Wolf at the Door
Environment & Sustainability Sites
- The Daily Green
- EcoGeek
- Eco Street
- Green Car Congress
- Green Options
- green.alltop.com
- Gristmill
- RealClimate
- Sustainablog
- Treehugger
- WorldChanging
Blogs
- Casaubon's Book
- Cleantech Blog
- Clusterf
k Nation (Jim Kunstler) - The Cost of Energy
- David Strahan
- Early Warning
- The Energy Blog
- European Tribune
- GraphOilology
- Health After Oil
- jeffvail.net
- Mobjectivist
- Peak Energy (Australia)
- Peak Energy (USA)
- R-Squared
- Resource Insights
Finance & Economics Blogs
- The Big Picture
- Calculated Risk
- The Crash Course
- Ecological Economics
- Econbrowser
- Environmental Economics
- Infectious Greed
- The Mess That Greenspan Made
- Mish's Global Economic Trend Analysis
Organizations
Peak Oil Primers
Beware email scams!
Beware email scams claiming to be from this site. We do not have any job openings. If anyone contacts you about a job at The Oil Drum, do not reply to them, and definitely do not give them any personal information or send them money. Read more here.
“So one may almost say that the theory of universal suffrage assumes that the Average Citizen is an active, instructed, intelligent ruler of his country. The facts contradict this assumption.”
—James Bryce (1909, 35)
User login
Contact
- Content: editors at theoildrum dot com
- Tech support: support at theoildrum dot com
Personnel
- Editors: Nate Hagens, Gail the Actuary, Prof. Goose
- DrumBeat Editor: Leanan
- Contributors: ace, Engineer-Poet, Heading Out, jeffvail, JoulesBurn, Sam Foucher, Robert Rapier
- TOD:Campfire: Glenn, Jason Bradford
- TOD:Europe: Chris Vernon, Euan Mearns, Francois Cellier, Jerome a Paris, Luís de Sousa, Rembrandt, Rune Likvern, Ugo Bardi
- TOD:Canada: benk, Libelle
- TOD:ANZ: Big Gav, Phil Hart, aeldric
- Emeritus: Stuart Staniford
- Technician: Super G
License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.










GAIA Host Collective
Drizzt: Your ideas for developing a 150 MPG Car are a bit off track.
First, energy storage solutions, be they compressed air, batteries, flywheels, or hydrogen powered fuel cells, do not address the core issue/problem/paradigm shift:
Total BTUs available for use in our economy are going to shrink.
The dilemma in front of us is: how fast, how far, and how evenly distributed, the decline will be.
Second, turbines are not more efficient converters of fuel to mechanical energy. Their advantage in aircraft is light weight and mechanical simplicity (reliability), in electrical power production, reliability and low capital cost / MW (compared with a coal fired or nuclear power plant) are the reason for the growth in natural gas fueled electrical power.
Forrest
PriorityX
I checked your link RE the Air Car thinking it would be a three minute 2 or 3 paragraph summary. ACH! It was a whole discussion, and technical...I read it all. Thanks
Vacosvc
1. Drizzt: Your ideas for developing a 150 MPG Car are a bit off track.
2. The dilemma in front of us is: how fast, how far, and how evenly distributed, the decline will be.
Hmmm...I am not a mechanical engineer. I gave examples AND meantioned there are likely OTHER solutions that exist but have been bought & sat on by Oil Cos because increased auto efficiency would reduce Oil Profits. So...I still believe that 150 MPG is feasible in JUST two years.
Regarding your second point; MY point was that a fleet of 5 million cars getting 15o MPG would reduce the speed of the decline and allow more time to adapt with less trauma. A fleet of 100 million if built over time or in multiple countries would extend the decline proportionately more.
3. Second, turbines are not more efficient converters of fuel to mechanical energy. Their advantage in aircraft is light weight and mechanical simplicity (reliability), in electrical power production, reliability and low capital cost / MW (compared with a coal fired or nuclear power plant) are the reason for the growth in natural gas fueled electrical power.
Regarding point 3, please provide a link! I disagree, and will explain why.
A four cylander engine has four cylanders that go UP/stop, then DOWN/stop a total of two times for one compression cycle. Each time the cylander stops it will leach NET energy from the energy to get the cylander to go the opposite direction. A turbine engine has no corrosponding STOP part of its cycle; it is simply ON. This is also why a wankle engine is mechanically more efficient than a cylander engine; Wankle engines don't have a STOP portion of the combustion cycle. Another point is that due to the drastically simpler design of a turbine engine there are less contact points to cause frictional losses.
First comment here, but super efficient vehicles already exist and are being sold in Europe.
Has anyone heard of the TWIKE? I would buy one if they were sold in Canada. Top speed is around 55mph (85kmh). It uses electricity and gets the equivalent of 250-500 miles per gallon. This would great for transportation within cities for a tiny fraction of the energy being used now.
It looks like it's really fun to drive and they don't take up much space to park either. You can even get some exercise while driving one (no joke). They just need to produce a lot more of them. The discovery channel show Daily Planet did a good show on this one.
Here's a link:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brake_specific_fuel_consumption
I'm sure there are other links out in the ether, but this one has information on specific types of engines.