Where are we headed?

[Harry P.]

Hmmm............

Are you saying that you know of some secret, infinite stash of oil that will magically never run out?

From the story you cited:

A geochemist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts says she believes that hitherto undetected gas and oil reservoirs lying at very great depths within the earth’s crust could stave off the inevitable oil depletion much longer than many experts have estimated.

What that says is that we might not run out as soon as previously believed... but we'll still run out at some point.

[GTMust]

Well guys, I guess I really stirred up an intellectual hornet's nest with this one! It's very interesting to read and consider everyone's point of view.

Maybe out of these kind of discussions, someone will actually figure out how to keep our favourite subjects going long into the future, way beyond our lifetime and those of our descendants.

(Poo is a definite possibility.... methinks!)

Here's to a better future.... cheers!

[Jairus]

Diesel, produced from synthetic sources, burns very cleanly and is about as efficient as crude oil diesel.

Just what is a "synthetic source"?

The moment industry starts utilizing this source in any large qualities it will be taxed, regulated and the price will be ran through the roof!

For the moment I believe the closest thing we have come to a replacement is hydrogen fuel produced by hydroelectric or solar and nuclear power.

Hydrogen is nothing more than a storage device. In other words it requires the same amount of electrical energy to produce it as it gives back on the road burning it. But the differences are the range of the automobile being much greater than batteries.

Hydrogen is produce with nothing more than electrical current and.... water! Lots of both and plenty of infrastructure already in place to support it.

Plus it can be burned in the normal combustion chamber of todays cars with a different delivery system.

hydrocarbons are little more than heat and water vapor!

10 years ago they were touting it's praises, but today I hear nothing about hydrogen fuel.

Only about electric cars with a short 50 mile range and very expensive batteries.

I wonder why?

Could it be the battery manufacturers have lobbiests in Washington?

[LDO]

Just what is a "synthetic source"?

The moment industry starts utilizing this source in any large qualities it will be taxed, regulated and the price will be ran through the roof!...

No, it won't. There is no conspiracy to keep everyone in America "grounded". The whole world runs on oil. People need to move about the country...and the planet... in order to make money and pay taxes.

[Greg Myers]

[Greg Myers]

The 100 MPG Carburetor Myth

• There have been numerous books and plans written purporting to "reveal the secrets" of the famous "200 mpg carburetor," a device supposedly built in 1935 by Charles Nelson Pogue of Winnipeg, Canada.
  
  As of this writing Mr. Pogue is in a nursing home in Winnipeg, Canada. Several of our customers have visited with him. Each came away with a slightly different story.
  
  Mr. Pogue actually did manufacture a carburetor he titled the "Winnipeg" in the late 1930s; 317 all told. One of our customers had one and claimed it delivered 35 mpg on a Ford Mustang with considerable loss of power; however, he agreed to let us have it for testing and we are still waiting.
  
  There are two problems with the "Pogue principle," which is being touted in high mileage seminars and books all over the country.
  
  The first is that the Pogue carburetor violates the first law of thermodynamics, a commonly accepted scientific postulate that has been with us since 1830.
  
  The law is written as follows: U = q + w
  
  Or, in simple English, if you have chemical energy in a system (U) in its expenditure, it must equal q (heat) plus work (w). That is, if you have 100,000 BTUs in a gallon of fuel in which you then burn the end products—in a system operating at 30% efficiency—you will have 30,000 BTUs of work and 70,000 BTUs of heat.
  
  Anything you put inside the combustion chamber can do only one of two things during the ignition stroke.
  
  Produce energy (mechanical movement) during the reaction.
  
  Absorb energy (leave out the exhaust as heat) during the reaction.
  
  There has been a lot written about the "unburned particulates" furnishing the extra fuel for the extra 50 mpg or so, but if you’ll check the Fish dynatune emissions levels you’ll see there aren’t enough of them to get you another 300 yards down the road.
  
  The second problem encountered with Pogue-type devices is that—in some instances—they actually predate the carburetor.
  
  Let’s elaborate in both cases.
  
  Back before the carburetor as we know it came into being in the 1890s there were several novel methods of getting fuel into the engine.
  
  One method was using a kerosene-soaked rag to drip fuel into the engine.
  
  Another method—that became quite common—was allowing air to pass over the surface of gasoline and then to be sucked into the engine. Sometimes a valve—called a "mixing valve"—would be positioned between the fuel reservoir and the engine. The valve would pop open when the downward motion of the piston created enough suction.
  
  This method—and variations of it—have been touted all over the United States in "100 MPG CARBURETOR" seminars sponsored by various individuals as being the "ultimate" in sophisticated fuel systems, usually with exhaust heat or radiator water added to "vaporize" the fuel much more effectively than a standard carburetor.
  
  There are a number of things wrong with the concept of such a "100 MPG" system.
  
  The first is that the gasolines in use during the days of the mixing valve were far more volatile than the ones in use today. Some of you may remember when you could stand ten feet away from an open pan of gasoline, light a match, and watch the gasoline immediately catch fire.
  
  Gasolines were changed in the 1930s with the advent of the catalytic cracker now used in petroleum refining. Carburetors like the Pogue, which depend on easily vaporized gasoline, simply will not work with today’s gasolines.
  
  The second seminar-taught error is the method of using exhaust heat or radiator water to heat the fuel to the "vapor" point to extend the mileage. Warming or preheating fuel does have some value, but it’s limited.
  
  Consider using hot water from the radiator to vaporize the fuel first.
  
  Today’s gasolines do not completely vaporize until they reach 450º Fahrenheit heat, while the maximum temperature of the water in today’s pressure radiators reaches only 250º Fahrenheit. You just can’t heat a substance to 450º Fahrenheit using a 250º Fahrenheit heat source.
  
  At least, not on this planet.
  
  Exhaust heat works a bit differently.
  
  It is the function of an internal combustion engine to change chemical energy into heat, and then the heat into mechanical movement. If the heat is not changed into mechanical movement it simply leaves—as heat. Any time you feel heat coming off an engine you are feeling wasted energy. The exhaust ports of an engine that operated at 100% efficiency would be ice-cold to the touch since ALL the heat would have been changed into mechanical movement.
  
  Which means that the more efficient your engine is the less exhaust heat you’re going to have.
  
  For example, if you have 600º Fahrenheit exhaust heat produced by one gallon of gas over a 20-mile trip and you use "exhaust heat" to "vaporize" the fuel and go 60 miles, what produces the 600º Fahrenheit heat for the next 40 miles?
  
  If you answered "two more gallons of fuel," go to the head of the class!
  
  Seriously, there are ways to go several times the distance on a gallon of fuel (none of them involving carburetors); it’s just that the foregoing examples aren’t two of them.
  
  In short, Charles Nelson Pogue was a machinist with no formal training in thermodynamics and may have actually believed that what he was attempting would work.
  
  All a carburetor can do is meter and atomize fuel in correct proportion to air.
  
  Any further increases have to come from increasing the thermal efficiency of the engine itself (such as raising compression) or reducing rolling friction. And this last is why a diesel locomotive with steel wheels will go ten times as far on a gallon of fuel as a diesel truck of the same weight with rubber tires.
  
  For Pogue—or any similar carburetor—to go 100 mpg on a gallon of fuel on a vehicle normally going 20 mpg, the air/fuel ratio would have to be in the neighborhood of 75 to 1 or better.
  
  Any second-year college chemistry student knows that.
  
  

[Greg Myers]

50MPG?

[LDO]

The 100 MPG Carburetor Myth

Who said anything about 100mpg carburetors?

[Casey]

to answer the question....................

everyone is going to Hell

see ya when you get there

I'll bring the handbasket.

Seriously, lock and/or delete this thread please, Mods....we all know where threads like this end up.

[Greg Myers]

Who said anything about 100mpg carburetors?

Jairus comment "Only about electric cars with a short 50 mile range and very expensive batteries."brings to mind the same Government conspiracy the 100MPG carb did years ago and is still going.Oh yeah, "where are we going?". In circles, what is new is what is old.It$ all about money.

[Jairus]

No, it won't. There is no conspiracy to keep everyone in America "grounded". The whole world runs on oil. People need to move about the country...and the planet... in order to make money and pay taxes.

I agree, there is no "conspiracy"! That would take a central leader or thought process with an ultimate goal.

This is just normal everyday corruption, greed and self-righteous environmentalism that is the problem.

In other words: "chaos" reigns rather than "control" in my opinion.

[Greg Myers]

No More corn?

[GTMust]

Seriously, lock and/or delete this thread please, Mods....we all know where threads like this end up.

I don't get your comment..... what's wrong with open dialogue? That's how some of the best ideas get created. If someone posts an improper reply, it can be deleted individually.

[Harry P.]

I agree with Jairus' comments on hydrogen-powered cars. That technology was all the rage just a few years ago, and now nothing.

What happened???

[SuperStockAndy]

I HATE electric cars.

If we run out of fossil fuel, we run out!

[Drake69]

Hopefully it all won't lead to this...

[Harry P.]

As I said, this isn't gloom and doom, or conspiracy, it's just that we have a 100-year pattern of use with one technology, and it's going to take a LOT of work to come up with something that can do everything we rely on from that technology,

That's the thing... we've gotten so used to gas-powered internal combustion engines and become so reliant on vehicles that use that technology that it will take many years for the world to switch to another technology in any significant numbers. It's not that the current technology is necessarily the best technology... it's just the technology that we embraced over 100 years ago when gas-powered cars won out over steam-powered and electric cars. Back then, gas-powered cars were more convenient to use (and safer) than steamers, and they had the advantage over electrics in terms of range and ease of refueling. Plus, oil was dirt cheap, there was no such thing as OPEC, and we figured we'd never run out of the stuff. The gas-powered internal combustion engine "won" the technology war by virtue of circumstances, not necessarily technological superiority.

So now, we're dealing with the fact that we need people who don't like us much to supply us with the oil we need (want?)... the price of gas is becoming a factor for many people, and we now realize that hey, wait a minute... oil is not an endless, cheap resource.

We'll switch to something else eventually. The "oil era" will probably be nothing but a chapter in the history books one day, a quaint bygone time that people will read about and think how crude that technology was. The big switcheroo is not going to happen in our lifetimes, and will probably be a gradual thing, slowly taking over and replacing our oil-burning vehicles... but it's going to happen.

Like I said, there's only so much oil in the ground, and they ain't making any more of it.

[Guest Johnny]

Seems the "dino" idea has been dispelled (won't find that in the MSM) and the earth is still making more! There is more out (or down) there than our's and the world governments would like us to think! Just sayin'!

[Harry P.]

Seems the "dino" idea has been dispelled (won't find that in the MSM) and the earth is still making more!

What's your source for that statement?

[Bernard Kron]

This may seem beside the point to many, but the real megatrend to watch here involves the issue of personal transportation and its inherent inefficiency on many levels. The revolution that the horseless carriage created was, above all, the emancipation of the individual to travel when and where they wished, at least relative to where they had been able to go before. Horses were very expensive to keep, requiring land, food and care on a constant and time demanding scale that was huge compared to what the horseless carriage had to offer, even in its earliest forms. Much of the public policies of the first half of the Twentieth Century, expansion of paved roads, fuel taxes to pay for them, the creation of gasoline serving infrastructure, etc., were spearheaded by businesses that sought to profit from this emancipation.

Today, in China and many other fast-developing countries, where it is a matter of policy to develop a middle class along the lines of those seen in the developed world, we see an explosion of personal transportation, first the bicycle, then motor scooters and motorcycles, and now the rise of the personal automobile. These countries are rapidly building out roadways, fueling infrastructure, etc. They appear to be emulating what we did a generation or two ago.

The discussions regarding sources of energy and the technologies to support them are very much to the point. Personal transportation, in a world whose population is exploding, is rapidly putting enormous demands on known technologies, perhaps for now at a rate that is out-pacing technological developments.

The love affair with automobiles I have had since I was a child has always been with the car as a form of personal expression and independence. That's why I have always loved automobile racing, hot rods and sports cars. All of these are intense forms of self expression and personal independence. So, like all of us on this thread, now I am becoming aware of a time when the assumptions that underscore this enthusiasm may rapidly come into question.

We already see the precursor of the loss of personal transportation as a societal norm in the emergence of technological design parameters as a matter of public policy. The earliest examples were the result of political influence by the insurance companies who created the 5 mph bumper law in the vain hope that this would reduce repair costs (it didn't, simply shifting costs from many small, cheap repairs, to fewer, far more expensive ones). The impact on automobile design was immediate, restrictive, and dramatic. The early energy crises brought about narrow speed limits and fuel mileage restrictions, followed by environmental concerns and their related emissions laws. All have had huge impacts on the novelty and variation available in automobile design, a well as adding tremendously to the initial cost. Recently, in Europe, the actual shape of the front of a car has been effectively legislated by laws seeking to protect pedestrians from being pulled under the car during low speed impacts at crosswalks.

Combined with globalization, the result of all this has been the homogenization of automotive design. Today's cars are, more often than not, cookie cutter variations of each other, not so much because of the lack of human creativity, which I believe remains constant, but because of these policy initiatives.

My point is that as long as the population of individual drivers continues to expand all these concerns will continue to intensify and serve to support the politicization of automobile design parameters. Whether the future lies in the rebirth of public transportation as an important public initiative, or the creation of hyper-efficient private modes of transport, I can't say. Probably it will be some combination of both, revealing private transport to be the relative luxury it has always been. Regardless, a reactionary response will not be acceptable. The genie has already escaped from the bottle. Things will be far different from how they appear today. I'm just grateful to have been alive during what I think will prove to have been a Golden Age of private transportation.

Edited June 2, 2011 by Bernard Kron

[GTMust]

That's the thing... we've gotten so used to gas-powered internal combustion engines and become so reliant on vehicles that use that technology that it will take many years for the world to switch to another technology in any significant numbers. It's not that the current technology is necessarily the best technology... it's just the technology that we embraced over 100 years ago when gas-powered cars won out over steam-powered and electric cars. Back then, gas-powered cars were more convenient to use (and safer) than steamers, and they had the advantage over electrics in terms of range and ease of refueling. Plus, oil was dirt cheap, there was no such thing as OPEC, and we figured we'd never run out of the stuff. The gas-powered internal combustion engine "won" the technology war by virtue of circumstances, not necessarily technological superiority.

So now, we're dealing with the fact that we need people who don't like us much to supply us with the oil we need (want?)... the price of gas is becoming a factor for many people, and we now realize that hey, wait a minute... oil is not an endless, cheap resource.

We'll switch to something else eventually. The "oil era" will probably be nothing but a chapter in the history books one day, a quaint bygone time that people will read about and think how crude that technology was. The big switcheroo is not going to happen in our lifetimes, and will probably be a gradual thing, slowly taking over and replacing our oil-burning vehicles... but it's going to happen.

Like I said, there's only so much oil in the ground, and they ain't making any more of it.

Harry, I like your thinking and it basically follows up on what I was trying to say in my original post. I'm sure society will eventually find an answer, and it'll probably be something we aren't even contemplating now. Hopefully, the "oil" era will last long enough to allow me to drive my collector car V8's around a little longer (on a very limited basis, of course!).

[Rob Hall]

Reality is complex.

Lots of interesting 20th and 21st century developments have been touched upon in this thread...everything from government regulation to the evolution of the auto industry, the growth of suburbia and decline of rural areas, transformation from the agrarian age to the industrial age to the information age, globalization, all fascinating subjects.

Cars are better than they have ever been today...lots of choices, efficiency w/ power, etc. We live in truly interesting times.

Edited June 1, 2011 by Rob Hall

[mikemodeler]

Like Rob said, some great points have been made here in this topic and it will be interesting to see where we do go over the coming years.

What will be interesting to see is how the government finds the money to pay for roads as the demand for gas declines. It was recently discussed in DC that maybe a move to a mileage tax would be a better way to collect funds for roads in place of fuel taxes as the slumping economy and higher fuel prices have resulted in lower revenues. The reality of it all is that fuel taxes ARE a use tax- the more fuel you use, the more taxes you pay. A mileage tax is the same thing, just called by a different name.

Don't be surprised to see a mileage tax imposed at some point in the very near future as electric and other alternative fuels become more commonplace. It will also probably result in another new government agency being formed to track the miles driven by consumers and we all know how well that will probably work.

[Harry P.]

Don't be surprised to see a mileage tax imposed at some point in the very near future as electric and other alternative fuels become more commonplace. It will also probably result in another new government agency being formed to track the miles driven by consumers...

If that ever happened, you can almost see it now: the operation of the new federal agency in charge of collecting the mileage tax will wind up costing the taxpayers more than the revenue generated by collecting the mileage tax. In other words... not a revenue gain, but a revenue loss! You just know that's what would happen...

[mikemodeler]

If that ever happened, you can almost see it now: the operation of the new federal agency in charge of collecting the mileage tax will wind up costing the taxpayers more than the revenue generated by collecting the mileage tax. In other words... not a revenue gain, but a revenue loss! You just know that's what would happen...

"I'm from the government and I am here to help." One of the three biggest lies ever told!