Guru
You need only look at the American of William McKinley's day to se what things would (optimally) look like without oil.
Here's a thought.
If there were no oil, Iran and Saudi Arabia (and indeed most of the Moslem world) would go back to being the dusty, fly-blown backwaters they had been for the millenia before.
ObamaTax Delendum Est
Analyst
How much oil is used to produce electricity?Originally Posted by livefree
How much electricity is used for transportation? Hydrogen is difficult to store, batteries and capacitors are too big, and too heavy.
Oil is the fuel of choice for transportation because of it's energy density. Nothing else comes close.
CO2 neutral transportation fuel must be an oil made from atmospheric CO2. The only way we can do that today is with plants, and none, not even algae, provide the yields suitable as an alternative.
Guru
What concerns me is the diminution of agricultural efficiency as oil leaves the scene.
A tractor or combine with a really, really long extension cord?
Maybe in dry country a coal-fired steam combine, but then crops don't grow well in dry country.
Things could get hungry...
ObamaTax Delendum Est
Guru
In the US almost no electricity is produced from the combustion of refined petroleum products. Maybe in some remote villages in Alaska and parts of Hawaii.
We could electrify our railroads and even the Interstates. Coal-fired ships could fill the gap, but aircraft would be in a world of hurt.
ObamaTax Delendum Est
Analyst
That's an extraordinarily idiotic projection since it rest on the absurdly wrong assumption that there are no alternative sources of energy available. I just posted a good study on how we can power the entire planet from renewable sources.
This thread and just about everything you post seems to have come straight from the fossil fuel industry propaganda pushers. All your pro-oil, anti-renewable screeds are, basically, just fact-free corporate insanity and they all get refuted by actual evidence.
LOL....so history is not your strong suit either, it seems. At a time in Europe called 'the dark ages' when our ancestors were literally barbarians, the Islamic world was in the middle of a cultural and scientific renaissance.
History of Islam
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Three centuries after the death of the Islamic prophet Muhammad, the Arab Caliphates extended from the Atlantic Ocean in the west to Central Asia in the east. The subsequent empires of the Umayyads, Abbasids, Fatimids, Ghaznavids, Seljuqs, Safavids, Mughals, and Ottomans were among the influential and distinguished powers in the world. The Islamic civilization gave rise to many centers of culture and science and produced notable scientists, astronomers, mathematicians, doctors, nurses and philosophers during the Golden Age of Islam. Technology flourished; there was investment in economic infrastructure, such as irrigation systems and canals; and the importance of reading the Qur'an produced a comparatively high level of literacy in the general populace.
During the Islamic Golden Age (c. 750 CE - c. 1258 CE) philosophers, scientists and engineers of the Islamic world contributed enormously to technology and culture, both by preserving earlier traditions and by adding their own inventions and innovations. Scientific and intellectual achievements blossomed in the Golden age.
In the later Middle Ages, destructive Mongol invasions from the East, and the loss of population in the Black Death, greatly weakened the traditional centre of the Islamic world, stretching from Persia to Egypt, and the Ottoman Empire was able to conquer most Arabic-speaking areas, creating an Islamic world power again, although one that was unable to master the challenges of the Early Modern period.
"The modern conservative is engaged in one of man's oldest exercises in moral philosophy;
that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness."
-- John Kenneth Galbraith
Analyst
?!? - No oil alternatives!!!!
Maybe you missed it because I didn't use large, colored, bolded type.
What killed the golden age of Islam was the move into dogma. Science, and it's innovations, were replaced by "the Book". A thriving population walked eyes open into poverty.
History is repeating itself.
Analyst
It wouldn't make any difference what you use since you are simply and ridiculously wrong.
Your understanding of history is what is dogmatic and really skewed. While some aspects of their religion probably played some part in the decline of Islamic civilization, ignoring the repeated Mongol invasions and the devastating effects of the Plague on populations is extremely idiotic and narrow minded. Estimates are that over a third of the population of that area of the world died in the initial outbreak of the Black Death.
"History repeating itself" and "a thriving population walking eyes open into poverty" might be good descriptions of those Americans who've been duped by the fossil fuel industry into denying AGW and thinking that fossil fuels are our only viable choices, so that we continue to waste our nation's wealth on foreign oil when we are surrounded by free energy resources just waiting to be tapped. All because of these idiotic rightwingnut dogmas about renewable energy being somehow "liberal".
"The modern conservative is engaged in one of man's oldest exercises in moral philosophy;
that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness."
-- John Kenneth Galbraith
jack4freedom liked this post
Analyst
In reality, most of the electricity produced in the US comes from the combustion of the three main fossil fuels, coal, natural gas and oil. What is your point in trying to limit the discussion to just "refined petroleum products"?
And BTW, what planet do you live on anyway?
Electricity in the United States
US Energy Information Administration
Fossil Fuels Generate Most U.S. Power
Coal is the most common fuel for generating electricity in the United States. In 2010, 45% of the Country's nearly 4 trillion kilowatthours of electricity used coal as its source of energy.
Natural gas, in addition to being burned to heat water for steam, can also be burned to produce hot combustion gases that pass directly through a turbine, spinning the turbine's blades to generate electricity. Gas turbines are commonly used when electricity utility usage is in high demand. In 2010, 24% of the Nation's electricity was fueled by natural gas.
Petroleum can be burned to produce hot combustion gases to turn a turbine or to make steam to turn a turbine. Residual fuel oil, a product refined from crude oil, is often the petroleum product used in electric plants that use petroleum to make steam. Petroleum was used to generate just over 1% of all electricity in the United States in 2010.
"The modern conservative is engaged in one of man's oldest exercises in moral philosophy;
that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness."
-- John Kenneth Galbraith
Analyst
This thread is about the world without oil.
Electricity from oil makes up only 1%. Oils prime use for energy is transportation, and home heating.
http://www.powerscorecard.org/tech_d...?resource_id=8
The CO2 from transportation is just about equal to the CO2 from coal for electricity. The solutions above reduce CO2 production by a little over half.
http://www.epa.gov/climatechange/emi...co2_human.html
There is no viable alternative for transportation fuels because only oil has the necessary energy density.
Really, what is the alternative?
What would the world be like without transportation? What happens to the food supply, to the economy, to the standard of living for people already living on the edge?
Last edited by Not Amused; Feb 22 2012 at 06:59 PM.
Correspondent
A few of you seem convinced that mankind wouldn't have advanced without the use of oil, or that we (humans) couldnt have built the modern society we now enjoy without it.
This broad assumption is based on the observance that since everything around us is made possible by hydrocarbons then therefore, we couldn't have done it without it. To quote a know it all teenager "only a idiot couldn't see that." Well, yes, everything around us is reliant upon the use of Fossil fuels, but its not because oil is this magic liquid that was generously bestowed upon us God. No, its because we built our economy around it, and to continue to beat a dead horse, its simply due of the sheer abundance of it.
Could we have continued to advance as a species without Oil? If you say no, then you are seriously underestimating human ingenuity. As far as we know the Universe is made up of two things, Energy (this includes matter and particles) and empty space, that's it. So is oil the only we could extract usable energy from the cosmos efficiently? I highly doubt that, and if fossil fuels wasn't so (*)(*)(*)(*) easy to burn, I truly believe we would have found a better way by now and we would have continued to build and grow as a species. Why haven't we found a better way yet? You can go the ole' oil suppression conspiracy theory route, or the more likely scenario is that we don't feel the need rush it because we already have fossil fuels. Don't forget that wood was the first source of thermodynamic energy used and hydroelectric was the first source of large scale electricity production in this country.
Last edited by alaskan_sol; Feb 22 2012 at 09:09 PM.
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