New way to make crude oil

Definitely cool research, but "soon" is not accurate. The volume of crude oil that's processed every day in refineries around the US is enormous. Compare that to the small lab-scale stuff being done at PNNL.

Also, nothing will change till there is nothing left in the ground. The industry has spent billions of dollars developing what's in place now and will milk that for all they can in order to make the most on that investment. After that, they may retrofit to incorporate this technology, but that won't happen until change is forced.

Unfortunetly blondie speaks the truth. If you ever do a calculation on how much biofuel/hydrogen/ whatever alternative there is needed to replace the ammount of gasoline we use, u'll vomit and then cry.

Holy Crap. Blondie im surprised someone on this website actually knows how much we use in natural resources and no matter what we try to replace it with there will never be enough. SO yeah...FUCK.

Ya, I agree. "Soon" was a bad word to use. I even saw that it isn't anywhere near soon to be applied into everyday use. But at least everyone can stop worrying about what will happen when we use all the oil out of the ground.

The problem has changed in the last few years. It is no longer what we do when fossil fuels run out. With the new tecniques it will be many many decades before we will even have to worry about a "shortage". The problem now is what will we do when we realize that we can't keep altering the earth as we are and expect to continue to live on it.

I think the problem is still the ACTUAL fuckin problem. ie when you burn it does it give off emissions?

I know this is naive, but lets consider how much new technology gets created during war - when the entire nation has a common goal. If people were to forget just about their income and profit for a couple years and decide its time to create a green fuel and retrofit the plants to produce that, I have no doubts that it is an achievable goal.

That's crude

Straight from Milton Friedman's mouth, the only foreseeable crisis to change our reliance on fossil fuels is running out of fossil fuels, if it were to change before then we would need some other sort of crisis which no one has been able to foresee.

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This doesn't solve anything. It's actually counter-productive. It's better to spend time, energy, and money on finding cleaner, larger-scale energy sources than trying to do this useless shit.

First, depending on whether you include processing as a net emissions cost, biofuels can have a net zero emissions because all the CO2 released in their combustion was consumed by the plants themselves. If you count processing, than its not net zero, but still blows fossil fuels out of the water.

Second, nearly across the board biofuels emit less of everything than conventional hydrocarbon fuels. Less particulates, less carbon monoxide, and less unburnable hydrocarbons.

Third: fine, it's fine to say that its better to spend blah blah on cleaner, larger-scale energy sources, but there's a difference between electricity and transportation energy. You can make an electric or hydrogen car but neither are as versatile or as reliable as a hydrocarbon-powered car, which is a more manageable change from what we have today. Widely implementing anything else is wishful.

You say that, but with the technology we have today, or will have in a couple years, we could easily have electric cars that are nearly as effective as gas-powered cars. Look at Tesla. Its cars compete with almost every other car on the market. The only limiting factor is its price, but that will be affordable soon enough.

Moore's law says that computer power and efficiency doubles every 18 months. That's incredibly fast, and that could apply to many other technologies out there.

I'm not saying that oil is completely useless, or will ever be, but I'm saying that there are much better technologies out there, so we might as well move on.

I'd argue that there aren't better, proven, technologies. Yes, Tesla has made fantastic innovations, but a couple things need to be considered.

First, the price - as you mentioned, its a pretty harsh threshold.

Second is the longevity of the car - most cars nowadays last 200,000+ miles, most more. Tesla estimates about 150,000 miles on their cars.

Third is energy capacity. For transportation, sometimes you need to go more than 300 miles. With "charging stations" few and far in between, this can be problematic until further infrastructure is developed. Gasoline is widely deployed and the infrastructure can be easily adapted to biofuels.

Fourth is energy source. The energy generated to "fuel" a Tesla isn't guaranteed to be clean. Coal makes up most of the energy market in the US (and the world). Tesla has no agreement with the energy sector that says "every car we sell will be powered by solar/wind/hydro etc." It's likely natural gas or coal, which wreaks its own havoc on the environment.

There is no good answer to this question, and while you're right, it's valuable to investigate other avenues, that does not mean that it is stupid to investigate this one. Biofuels have massive potential to be the first step away from fossil fuel (note: not hydrocarbon) energy, a step that will lead us towards more futuristic energy sources.

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Also, that's not what Moore's law says: it says that the number of transistors on an integrated circuit will double every two years. This may trend with power/efficiency but is definitely not the same thing. #nitpick.