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from the worlds-first-commercial-electric-beaver dept.
The Guardian is reporting;
The world's first fully electric commercial aircraft has taken its inaugural test flight, taking off from the Canadian city of Vancouver and flying for 15 minutes.
"This proves that commercial aviation in all-electric form can work," said Roei Ganzarski, chief executive of Australian engineering firm magniX.
The company designed the plane's motor and worked in partnership with Harbour Air, which ferries half a million passengers a year between Vancouver, Whistler ski resort and nearby islands and coastal communities.
The recycled 62-year-old de Havilland Beaver seaplane is designed for short hops of 160 km or less, which represents the majority of Harbour Air flights. They're looking to save millions on costly maintenance and downtime. Harbour Air hopes to convert most of their airplanes after certification.
(Score: 2, Troll) by The Shire on Thursday December 12 2019, @03:47PM (41 children)
That electricity has to come from somewhere and since no one has the common sense to embrace nuclear it's certain that the bulk of that electricity was generated by fossil fuels.
You've just hobbled that planes endurance and actually wasted more energy charging its batteries than you would have used by simply filling its tanks with jet fuel. Only about 5% of Vancouver's electric comes from wind/solar/hydro. This means you're burning MORE fossil fuels to charge those batteries and get that plane to it's destination than if it had a combustion engine.
And if their goal is to save on maintenance then they're in for a rude awakening. Constantly charging/discharging batteries like that for fleet use will result in a huge expense both in the cost of new packs, the disposal of old packs, and the high voltage engineers required to work on those systems. They claim they shuttle half a million people a year to those destinations, and at 7 per shot (the max passenger count for that aircraft) that's just under 72,000 trips or 200 a day. A combustion engine will hold up far better under that kind of load than any electric.
(Score: 3, Informative) by khallow on Thursday December 12 2019, @03:51PM (7 children)
British Columbia and the US Northwest has massive hydroelectric power.
(Score: 2) by The Shire on Thursday December 12 2019, @06:42PM (6 children)
Massive hydroelectric power is still a tiny fraction of the grid. And hydro has no place to expand, virtually all viable hydroelectric locations have already been exploited.
(Score: 2) by DeathMonkey on Thursday December 12 2019, @07:08PM (1 child)
I consider 9/10 to be a rather large fraction. [cer-rec.gc.ca]
(Score: 2) by The Shire on Thursday December 12 2019, @07:15PM
BC has a population of 5 million. At best Hydro is serving 30%.
So yea, there's that too...
(Score: 2) by barbara hudson on Thursday December 12 2019, @07:26PM (3 children)
This is Canada, not the US. Quebec is almost exclusively hydro, with wind being built up. And yet we're still building dams. No coal-fired plants. Maybe a few peaking gas turbines ... and they'll be phased out for battery storage eventually because gas turbines are so expensive to run and maintain that they can't be used for main generation capacity.
Nobody wants their kids sitting for an hour each way on a noisy diesel school bus. Nobody wants to sit on a diesel city bus when they can take one of our air-conditioned hybrids, or the newer all-electrics slated to come into service soon.
Ask yourself why subways are electric. Not as noisy as diesels, and you're not going to die of carbon monoxide poisoning. Diesel-electric trains instead of diesel-only locomotives? Cheaper to run. Electric street and home lighting instead of gas from Sherlock Holmes' time? Cheaper, lower maintenance, easier to automate.
Even gas stoves are going to have to go because of indoor pollutants.
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(Score: 2) by The Shire on Thursday December 12 2019, @07:38PM (2 children)
BC imports power from the us. Hydro is truly a fantastic source of power, there's no question of that, but hydro alone doesn't do enough. You cannot expand hydro to meet an expanding demand for electricity, hydro is already doing as much as it can. Filling that gap will require another source of power generation and right now the only 24/7 sources of such power are fossil fuels and nuclear, neither of which are in the good graces of the climate alarmists.
Flying electric planes, cars, and buses are great so long as the source of that electricity is also clean and efficient. I just don't see how even Canada, with all it's hydro, will be able to keep up without also going nuclear.
(Score: 2) by barbara hudson on Thursday December 12 2019, @11:40PM
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(Score: 1) by Goghit on Friday December 13 2019, @02:24AM
Old statistics. B.C. used to import power to meet domestic demand but hasn't needed to for some time. We still import power from the PNW when it is really cheap, conserving water in the reservoirs until the price increases then use the water to export electricity at a profit. We don't need to do this to meet local demand, but profit is profit.
The Site C dam in the Peace River while controversial will bring on line a significant increase in power generating capacity, fueling our Teslas and allowing us to tell Alberta to take its tar bitumen tankers and get stuffed.
(Score: 4, Informative) by barbara hudson on Thursday December 12 2019, @04:06PM (5 children)
Second, Vancouver Island has 5 hydro electric dams, and transmission lines that bring in electricity generated elsewhere.
Third, new batteries are running way over their expected lifetimes, and they can be repurposed or rebuilt, same as there's a thriving industry to rebuild lead-acid batteries for cars And forklifts.
Fourth, this is to fill a very specific niche, and it's already been costed out.
Fifth, they already have 40 airplanes so once the conversation is done, it's only 5 trips a day per plane, and many will be well under the maximum distance. This is for local puddle-jumping for tourists.
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(Score: 2, Informative) by deadstick on Thursday December 12 2019, @06:06PM (1 child)
The turboprop model would like a word. In fact, Harbour Air has a few of them.
(Score: 2) by barbara hudson on Thursday December 12 2019, @06:50PM
The turbo props Harbour Air has are not DH2s. Look at the nose - there were 60 DH2s produced with turbine engines, and there are conversion kits from 3rd parties, but they all have an extended nose.
It would make more economic sense to sell any DH2 turbos to other operators or swap them for piston-engined variants, especially if the piston engines of the trade-in are shot, since you're going to replace the engine anyway.
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(Score: 2) by DeathMonkey on Thursday December 12 2019, @06:38PM
90% of electrical generation in that province is hydro! [cer-rec.gc.ca]
+6% biomass/geothermal
+1% wind
(Score: 0, Troll) by The Shire on Thursday December 12 2019, @06:54PM (1 child)
Quite so on the jet fuel, my error, but I think the point was made.
True, but they only produce roughly 4% of the total grids energy needs.
If you think lead is toxic it's nothing compared to what you will find in the current generation of lithium batteries both during manufacture and recycling.
https://www.wired.co.uk/article/lithium-batteries-environment-impact [wired.co.uk]
From the article: "In Ottawa, transport minister Marc Garneau said ahead of the maiden flight that he had his “fingers crossed that the electric plane will work well”. If it does, he said: “It could set a trend for more environmentally friendly flying.”
This is meant to be a pilot program (pun intended) to somehow make air traffic more "environmentally friendly" (which is the opposite of what's really occurring).
The number of planes is irrelevant. It's the total load on electric motors and the aggregate depreciation of the batteries. 72,000 trips by air, which is a very power hungry method of travel, will result in a huge amount of industrial waste. And charging efficiency on those batteries is around 80% meaning that you now have to generate 20% more power using fossil fuels just to keep those batteries topped off. And that efficiency drops along with the age of the batteries so it just gets worse from there.
(Score: 2) by barbara hudson on Thursday December 12 2019, @07:36PM
This is Canada - not California. BC has tons of hydro power, so there's no need to make a one-to-one equivelace between electricity used and fossil fuels to generate that power.
Other dams fill most of the rest of the grid. That's why you have hydro towers strung all over the place. And why BC sells surplus power to the US. Same as Quebec.
People normally don't build urban metropolises in the isolated areas that dams tend to be located in.
Same as people don't have sprawling pig farms in the centre of major cities.
As more batteries need to be recycled, businesses will jump in to make money. One of the problems they're having now is that electric car batteries are lasting longer than projected, so they can't operate their facilities at peak efficiency. But that will come. Same as it did for companies that specialize in only rebuilding fork lift batteries, and companies that retread tires for heavy equipment.
Is an electric airplane that's juiced from hydro power greener than a diesel pickup truck? Looks like it.
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(Score: 3, Informative) by barbara hudson on Thursday December 12 2019, @04:13PM (3 children)
SoylentNews is social media. Says so right in the slogan. Soylentnews is people, not tech.
(Score: 0, Troll) by The Shire on Thursday December 12 2019, @07:01PM (2 children)
BC Hydro serves about 1.5 million of the 5 million customers in BC. And 60% of that is fossil fuel generated power imported from the US western internconnect because hydro is seasonal and can't maintain the load on its own.
And lets be honest - the entire population of BC is smaller than most US cities and their urban surroundings. And being heavily mountainous, it's a special case where hydro is an important source of energy, but it's in no way a thing that can be pushed out globally.
(Score: 2) by barbara hudson on Thursday December 12 2019, @08:00PM (1 child)
BC is a BIG net exporter of electricity [biv.com].
Electricity doesn't have to be exported globally - just to the US border and beyond. Or consumed locally, as in this case, displacing fossil fuels.
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(Score: 3, Interesting) by dw861 on Saturday December 14 2019, @05:23AM
I once went on a tour of the BC Hydro Burrard Thermal plant in Port Moody (before it was closed). They burned natural gas during periods of peak load, because it was comparatively fast to turn "on" and "off".
On that tour I learned quite a few interesting things. I was quite surprised to hear that late at night, when demand for elec is low, BC hydro closes all of their dams and lets water accumulate behind them. When they do that, they purchase cheap electricity from Washington State's Hanford nuclear plant (which can't be turned off).
Then, the next day during peak times when electricity is in high demand (and expensive), they open up the dams and produce as much electricity as they can. If they have excess, so much the better. They take a lot of profit selling that power "back" to the US at a premium.
Depending on when Harbour Air recharges their batteries, those might be nuclear-powered float planes.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 12 2019, @05:27PM (20 children)
Want to know how to kill fossil fuels? Send demand skyrocketing. Paradoxical, but true. Oil is a finite resource. As demand skyrockets, prices will rise. But as prices rise, it makes alternative energy sources (such as solar) that much more economically viable. This will result in an ever larger portion of all new energy facilities being renewable sources. Beyond this, the global demand for energy is also going to rise in the coming decades. China's developing, India's developing, Africa will someday develop. As these countries develop their consumption is going go up up and away. And this is ignoring all the sorts of new energy consuming technologies that we'll inevitably invent over the coming decades. Air conditioning, computers, microwaves, dish washers? These things would have sounded like magic to people not that long ago, and the inventions of the future will likely seem similarly unimaginable to us today.
Fossil fuels aren't going to be killed by some half hearted treaties, doomsday prophecies, and a screechy teenager. They're going to be killed by their own demand. And the faster we get there, the better. Anyhow, trying to stop global warming by reducing emissions is never going to happen in any case for the exact reasons as above. China, for instance, emits less than half of the CO/capita as the US/Canada/Australia/etc do. But they're responsible for the most emissions simply because of their population size. Those emissions are only going to increase alongside India (who currently has something like a tenth of our emissions) and even Africa pulling up the rear - all emitting like beasts as a product of their greater population levels.
So we should try to reach the inflection point where fossil fuels lose their viability as rapidly as possible. Save the planet - encourage everybody to get a 10mpg SUV!
(Score: 3, Insightful) by DeathMonkey on Thursday December 12 2019, @06:41PM (1 child)
If the goal is to makes prices rise then we have the perfect tool at our disposal: tax the crap out of it.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 13 2019, @06:21AM
This doesn't achieve anything for numerous reasons.
1) Localized to a single nation. The sharp increases in the coming years will be coming from nations that would not voluntarily damage themselves - China and India in particular.
2) Limited support. Many would oppose giving a government trillions of dollars. Earmarks change as soon as the government wants some (see: Alaska Permanent Fund [wikipedia.org]). Even of those that think they support a carbon tax, many would find themselves quickly backpedaling when prices at the pump double or triple and they're constantly reminded that they can solve this problem by simply rolling back the tax. It's like war - people tend to support it when it's glamorized and promises a quick victory. When the reality of it kicks in, support plummets.
3) Open to lobbying. Even if the tax did pass, it's something that can simply be rolled back or undermined by lobbying. Our politicians are for sale, and the price is far less than the resources available to fossil fuel industries. This process is made much easier by #2 and #4.
4) Petrodollar. Going to abbreviate this one to keep this post succinct, but the US economy is heavily 'subsidized' by the global fuel economy. This is a big part of the reason we talk a big game on terms of reducing emissions but do pretty much nothing.
5) Loopholes. The carbon taxes that have come close to passing were 'revenue neutral.' That means the government imposes a carbon tax on the fossil fuel industry while giving them benefits and tax reductions in other fields such that it's effectively revenue neutral. In other words, it has 0 effect. And as it's chipped away it will result in a 'carbon tax' gradually turning into a defacto tax-break for fossil fuel industries. There's a reason Exxon has been one of the more vocal advocates for a carbon tax.
(Score: 2) by barbara hudson on Thursday December 12 2019, @07:02PM (10 children)
Just look at the tar sands. At $100 a barrel, hugely profitable. At today's prices, hugely unprofitable, even with government subsidies and a government exemption from carbon taxes.
The major oil companies are planning to expand production over 30% - but the market isn't going to expand by 30%. The best part is their expansion will make prices drop even more, making their operations even more of a bad investment.
Saudi Arabia knows this - why do you think they're selling off Aramco? They know that demand wil be way down long before their wells go dry in 60 years.
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(Score: 2) by The Shire on Thursday December 12 2019, @07:27PM (9 children)
That's the dumbest thing I've heard today. Here's the actual rundown:
Electricity generation costs in $/MWh (2019)
gas/oil: 40.8
Wind: 48 (onshore) 124.6 (offshore)
Solar: 48.8
Fossil fuel is still 20% or more cheaper than "renewable" sources. It also benefits from an enormous existing infrastructure both in power plants and vehicle fuel supplies that our current electric simply grid cannot support.
And at the risk of laboring a point that gets made over and over again - wind and solar are not continuous sources of electricity and also require significantly more land to achieve the same power density as fossil fuels. And hydro is pretty much at it's limit of exploitation, it requires very specific geologic conditions to be viable.
The only source of power that that makes any sense in a CO2 free era is nuclear, but all the tree huggers have an irrational fear of it, even while screaming about how the earth is being destroyed by fossil fuels.
If people REALLY cared about the environment we would be seeing fast tracking of nuclear power around the world.
(Score: 2) by barbara hudson on Thursday December 12 2019, @07:49PM (8 children)
Why aren't you quoting the cost of generating electricity by hydro? Oh, I see why -it's by far the cheapest.
Stop excluding one of Canada's largest energy resources, that still has a long way to go in terms of dam building. After all, this article is set in BC, not California.
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(Score: 2) by The Shire on Thursday December 12 2019, @08:14PM (7 children)
Because my figures are the LCOE values (Levelized Cost of Energy) which includes all expenses related to the particular energy source including the cost of building and operating the power generation facility.
(Score: 2) by barbara hudson on Thursday December 12 2019, @08:19PM (6 children)
And yet when I look on wikipedia, hydro still comes out cheaper all in, because the plants tend to last for generations and the costs can be amortized over 50 years or more. Unlike coal, natural gas, etc., which need fuel and maintenance involved with the burning of said fuel.
Once it's built, hydro has NO fuel costs.
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(Score: 3, Informative) by The Shire on Thursday December 12 2019, @11:43PM (4 children)
Wind and solar have no "fuel" costs either, but they have high install and maintenance costs and require huge swaths of land. I'm not arguing that hydro isn't great, just that it isn't anywhere near plentiful enough to supply enough of the energy needs to displace fossil fuel. It's just not a solution to an electric economy.
Only nuclear provides an emission free and essentially unlimited electrical supply 24/7.
It's important to remember that coal, oil, and gas account for 85% of worldwide power generation. Hydro accounts for 7% and there's no where to build new dams. So while it's a noble goal to switch everything to electricity, you still have to find a source of power to replace that 85%. Hydro, wind, and solar, even if you push hard, they're not gonna do it.
(Score: 2) by barbara hudson on Friday December 13 2019, @03:27AM (3 children)
There's not enough nuclear fuel to supply the planet for even 100 years. So forget that.
Dams just keep running and running.
Winds just keep blowing and blowing.
Tides will keep on until the moon approaches the Roche limit - humans will be long gone by then.
Solar will keep on as long as the sun shines.
Geothermal will keep on as long as uranium keeps fissioning in the earth's crust and core.
Biomass will keep growing even without human intervention.
You keep using US stats for energy sources. The US is less than 5% of the world's population. And becoming irrelevant on the world's stage as it seeks to be even more isolationist and less dependable as a partner.
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(Score: 2) by The Shire on Friday December 13 2019, @04:44AM (2 children)
The combined uranium and thorium deposits of the United States would be enough to power the world for at current energy demands for some 100.000 years. And we have stockpiles of already mined ore right now that could power the world for roughly 1,000 years. Gen 3, and particularly Gen 4 reactors are extremely efficient. In fact, Gen 4 reactors, some of which are already coming online in China and India, are even capable of "burning" existing nuclear waste. The only thing standing in the way of taping this resource is irrational fear and bureaucracy.
Not all the time they don't, not enough to spin those giant turbines. And the sun, especially in Canada, is far from constant. Hydro and geothermal have already been exploited to their maximum capacity and still only provide a tiny fraction of our energy needs. Nope, none of those will fill the 85% hole that fossil fuels currently does.
The US GDP is the largest in the world. With just 5% of the population we account for more raw economic power than all the European nations combined, nearly double that of China (which btw is the #1 consumer of fossil fuels). So where is Canada in that list? It's less than 1/10th the US. So don't be so quick to dismiss the US as being "irrelevant", no country believes that. Canada was quick to jump on board the USMCA now wasn't it. We love Canada down here in the US, but only as the harmless, quaint, and often funny little buddy to the north.
You might also want to brush up on the difference between protectionist policies vs isolationist. The US has strong trade agreements around the world including with Canada - that's not isolationism. And the idea that the US shouldn't negotiate such agreements for her own benefit, as all nations should, is ludicrous on its face.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 13 2019, @06:48AM (1 child)
You're leaving out one critical components in your nuclear advocacy there: price.
Nuclear is plausible (I say plausible because once you factor in the build/decommissioning/'contingency' and other costs it's aggregate cost is not pretty even if its MW/h cost while operating is nice) right now because uranium is, relative to demand, widely and readily available. Should nuclear gain in popularity this would radically change. There is a lot of nuclear fuel in the world. For instance there's even uranium in seawater, but it's incredibly expensive to extract. Breeders also introduce other issues. They are both extremely expensive and extremely volatile. The greater level of enrichment offered by breeder reactors is the source of both of these issues. It results in greater deterioration and maintenance, and also means that an accident (which will happen at scale) could be catastrophic. The greater level of enrichment also means reactors could be used, or easily modified, to produce weapons grade nuclear material.
No idea what you're talking about in terms of US reserves either. We definitely do not have stockpiles of uranium. Uranium is primarily relegated to Eastern Europe, Africa, and Australia. 'Mideast 2.0'.
Anyhow the long and short there is that the overall price is going to skyrocket if nuclear becomes the norm for energy production. So it's somewhat self defeating unless you ignore this, which companies who advocate for nuclear are very much willing to do because they'd effectively be too big to fail and could rely on the government ensuring they don't fail. Higher costs tend to result in higher justifiable profit margins so it's win-win for them. The only loser would be the consumer who sees their electric bill or price at the electro-pump go up, up, and away.
Alternative? Again, solar. The intermittentcy of the power is not an issue. You have 'kumbaya' solutions like world-wide high energy direct voltage current lines meaning there is never a nighttime, but you also have local solutions like artificial hydro-electric. I fully agree (with the unstated but implied comment) that batteries are not a viable solution at scale, but that's hardly an issue.
(Score: 2) by The Shire on Friday December 13 2019, @09:45PM
The vast majority of the cost of nuclear plants comes from red tape associated with the plants layouts. Westinghouse figured out a way past that buy designing a modular plant called the AP1000. Four of them have been built and connected to the grid in China already where they were fast tracked. In the US, two such reactors ended up getting canceled because, unlike China, it's become a national sport for tree huggers to tie these plants up in court. Even so, per megawatt, it's actually cheaper to build nuclear than it is to build offshore wind turbines. Weird right?
As for fuel stockpiles you have to remember that only 5% of the uranium in a fuel rod is actually "burned" before being pulled and sent for processing. So just in the fuel reprocessing sector alone you have about 20 times as much fuel as our reactors are currently using. But more importantly, newer reactor designs like you would see if we fast tracked nuclear, are much more efficient. When you get to the Gen4 reactors like the LFTR you're talking about a 95% burn rate and that's using Thorium 232 as the fuel. In fact, India plans to have 50 such thorium reactors online by 2025. And thorium does not require enrichment nor is it particularly radioactive and we have massive amounts of it all around the country. Ironically, many of the mine sites we would normally develop for the rare earths used in all our electronics are not exploited because they contain large amounts of thorium which the NRC regulates. So allowing such mining to take place has a dual benefit. And of course there is also the enormous number of nuclear weapons that get decomissioned as they age. Weapons grade uranium has to actually be diluted in order to work in a reactor. Bottom line - just in the US there is more than enough nuclear fuel to power as many reactors as you care to build for as long as you need.
I know people love to embrace solar as the utopian green power source but people ignore the downsides. It requires huge amounts of land to viable, so you're basically going out and strip mining vast tracks of land and planting these panels there. The damage to the ecosystem would be astronomical. I saw a study that said if England wanted to meet it's power needs with solar it would have to convert 1/4 of their entire land mass to it. And roof top solar is no answer. It helps, but when you throw an electric car in the mix you're talking about a roof top install taking three days to recharge your car. And then there's the failure rate - chinese panels last only about 5 years. Can you imagine the scope of the problem of disposing/recycling that many panels every 5 years? Never mind the toxicity of the chemicals they contain, or the chemicals required for their manufacture. Hell, if you think Uranium is scarce - trying to build enough panels to fill the gap left by fossil fuels, it just can't be done. We dont have the materials or the manufacturing capacity to handle it.
Clearly I'm pretty enthusiastic about nuclear but I think the points are compelling. Pushing renewables is admirable, but nuclear is the only emissions free energy source that reasonably be expected to replace fossil fuels over the next 50 years. I see no reason why we shouldn't be fast tracking both.
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Friday December 13 2019, @02:47AM
Unless you have econazis who want to blow up perfectly functional dams, and who have the political clout to do it.
My cynical little voice opines that this is more about depriving others of the benefits of stored water than about making nice with downstream fish.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 3, Informative) by The Shire on Thursday December 12 2019, @07:12PM (6 children)
Not as finite as you might think. New oil/gas fields are being discovered that could supply demand for the next century. This is why the US has now become a net exporter of fossil fuels. If you sent demand skyrocketing it would just make even more oil fields economical to develop.
Just this past month Iran announced discovery of a new oil field thought to contain 53 billion barrels. And Japan recently discovered an offshore oil field containing another 50 billion barrels.
I'm afraid there is plenty of oil to go around for the foreseeable future, regardless of demand.
(Score: 2) by barbara hudson on Thursday December 12 2019, @07:51PM (4 children)
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(Score: 3, Touché) by c0lo on Thursday December 12 2019, @10:38PM (3 children)
Burn those hydrocarbons and condense the water. (grin)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Friday December 13 2019, @02:09AM (2 children)
Yielding water and CO2. Think we could make it into soda water? Really fizzy stuff? To put into the cans involved in another discussion on this site?
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Friday December 13 2019, @02:35AM (1 child)
Depending on the initial composition, you may end with a strongly carbonated soft drink (if you burn methane), or a liquefied carbon dioxide with traces of water (e.g. if you burn Hexa-peri-hexabenzocoronene [wikipedia.org]).
Just don't try to burn graphene or buckyballs, you'll die of dehydration.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Saturday December 14 2019, @10:46PM
As I said, really fizzy stuff.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 13 2019, @08:33AM
One thing to keep in mind about these numbers is that they sound enormous from our perspective. They are not. Currently the worldwide consumption of oil is about 100 million barrels per day. [wikipedia.org] That's trending upwards and as India/China/Africa economically develop it's going to skyrocket upwards. So 50 billion barrels of oil is enough to supply the Earth for less than 1.4 years. And that is, again, at current levels - which are only going to increase. Another reason that increasing demand is paradoxically the best way to kill fossil fuels.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Reziac on Friday December 13 2019, @02:42AM (1 child)
And I was wondering about fallback and redundancy as compared to a IC engine, and relative reliability under, say, suddenly bad weather, or mid-air restart conditions.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 13 2019, @06:47AM
It is still a single engine aircraft, so it can't really be worse in terms of redundancy. Not air-breathing so it can't get a clogged or drowned intake or supercharger. There is no fuel pump to vapour-lock, spark plugs to foul, or cylinders to flood. Overheat would still be a problem, but that can happen with IC engines too. An electric motor doesn't have a starter so unless the battery is dead or there is an electrical or mechanical fault preventing it then restarting shouldn't be any different than on the ground, but IC won't restart without fuel or if damaged either. The only real downside I see mechanically is that an electrical fault is likely to be more severe than IC due to the greater current availability but even that is offset by the lack of volatile fuel to burn.
TL;DR Electrics have far fewer moving parts than IC engines do, so there is less to break. The only reason mid-air restart would be less likely to succeed is because most of the non-fatal failure modes have been eliminated. That is, if it quits at all then Something Really Bad™ happened that an IC engine wouldn't recover from either.