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Politics : Just the Facts, Ma'am: A Compendium of Liberal Fiction
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To: richardred who wrote (51500)9/23/2006 12:14:23 PM
From: Lazarus_Long  Read Replies (1) of 90947
 
I'm not arguing aganst switching off oil. The sooner we force the Arabs to eat sand and have no dependence on that part of the world (and I'd include Chavez in this), the better.

That CO2 may have come from the atmosphere and is simply being released back, but much of it would have been released much more slowly or not at all were it not used as fuel. Same with the H2O.

The present problem with cellulose is breaking down to simple sugar (glucose) that the enzymes used in the ethanol production process can work on. (Enzymes, not yeast, are used these days. Also, a reverse osmosis process is used to seoarate the ethanol and water, avoiding the high energy costs of distillation and producing purer ethanol [100% vs. a max of 95% from distillation]. Means exist to break down the cellulose to small chains of sugar molecules, but the final step of breaking them into simple sugar molecules is proving to be a problem.

Etahanol may be the only real choice. Electric cars could be powered by batteries and the electricity for charging produced by nuclear plants or hydro or solar, but battery technology is a problem. We have found no means of storing large amounts of electricity cheaply in spite of decades of research.
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