Zompist Bboard Again

Moose-tache wrote: ↑Thu Apr 29, 2021 5:03 am

zompist wrote: ↑Tue Apr 27, 2021 11:30 pm The plants, or the oil? Why would that be better? If it was, wouldn't we be powering everything with canola oil now?

IIUC, your plan was to create oil that future generations can use. Geological methods are slow and inefficient.

I don't get why people are hung up on efficiency, as if the proposal is to regularly include 3-million-year processes into our product cycles. Geological methods are extremely efficient in the sense that they're going on while your civilization is dead. Or to put it another way, the gap is there, and I'm interested in how it can be exploited. (We already do this, in the sense that we use fossil fuels created by accident.)

Using oil made by plants is fast and much more efficient, in the sense that you don't need to spend money moving rocks around. You absolutely could run a civilization on canola oil if you wanted to. We don't, but we could. Remember that period of modern history when the hot new energy source was the rendered flesh of large aquatic mammals? People even used penguin oil as a fuel source for a time (don't google that). Oil is oil.

Whales were a poor choice, because they're easy to hunt to death.

I don't know much about all this, but some Googling suggests that biofuels are big business, but have their own tradeoffs. E.g.:

* they're corrosive, and so have to be shipped by truck rather than pipeline
* they increase conversion of grassland into cropland, which releases a lot of carbon and stresses sources of water and fertilizer
* they compete with growing crops for grain, just as raising animals does
* they don't work as well at low temperatures
* it's by no means clear that they reduce carbon emissions

To be clear, they have advantages too, and for sf purposes we can imagine that a century of study will make them far more efficient. (Maybe I've read too much industry propaganda, but my impression is that the US's major biofuel, made from maize, is kind of a boondoggle.)

For my purposes, though, I want something that either requires no planning (e.g., it turns out that Precursor garbage dumps turn into fuel, yay!), or minimal effort and resources. That's why I talk about filling a mine with plant debris, if that works. I don't want megaprojects that require 20% of the energy production of the planet, or something.