Your Questions About Sustainable Energy Solutions

admin answers:

There’s a lot of ways to have environmentally sustainable transportation. Given our current installed base of gasoline and diesel vehicles, the logical solution would be to synthesize gasoline and diesel from bio-mass waste and utilize the existing distribution networks and existing vehicles. The DoD does this with the Diversified Energy Hydromax gasifier and the Velocys Micro Channel Fischer Tropsche reactor to produce diesel and jet fuel from the waste generated at military installations. This is technology dating back to the 19th century so it doesn’t take a NASA Apollo effort to achieve environmental sustainability (Don’t get me started on the Apollo killing off 1950’s era Project Orion issue). However this does not sell more cars.

Just as with tail fins and the concept of model years, the introduction of new vehicle categories such as the Hybrid, Fuel Cell and before that the SUV, Mini-van, and station wagon lineages prompts the public to replace their vehicles earlier than would be justified on purely utilitarian and environmental considerations. This has driven the economic growth, generous employment and population redistribution that we have seen in the last century and arguably isn’t sustainable.

The question should be is economic sustainability even possible given our current expectations of continued economic growth? Can our expectations be changed? Unfortunately, the free market suffers from the parable of the commons and periodic economic collapse is inevitable in such a system.

admin answers:

The most exciting is biomass, which will lower the price of gasoline, along with other petrochemicals.