Petrol $2.50 in 2009?

Aussiejeff said:

Wow! That's really gonna hurt the punters......

LOL AJ

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worth driving 1000km to get that 5c discount you reckon

- PS with a trailer full of jerry cans ..

PS I might start investing in jerry cans - could be worth a few bucks in 2018

I just bought some kero for $2.49 per litre...

Smurf1976 said:

I just bought some kero for $2.49 per litre...

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You still using those 1940's style kero lamps too??

We've stocked well up on candles, in the likely event that Brumby's gloom and doom regarding Vic's possible power outages next summer come to fruition...




AJ

Hi Guyz

Ive been watching a few movies recently on the issue, such as the Crude Awakening and Who killed the electric car and a few interesting things came up.
One guy in the crude awakening said that 'right now' if every car in the world was a hybrid we would still be using the same amount of petrol per day as we are now in 5 - 7 years from now, and if we were to power the whole world with nuclear power it would require 10,000 massive nuclear power plants and even with that, the entire world supply of Uranium would be used up in 10 years.

And one fact the car companies put forward which changed my whole idea on the electric is we started to use electric cars as mainstream it would be catistrophic for the environment, we would be moving from using a relatively clean source of energy to fuel our cars 'oil', into using a very dirty way 'coal', most electricity in the world is coal don't forget.

Probably I would say that the only viable ways to power the future is Hydrogen and Solar, if you ask me you can forget Bio and Wind to small and way way to capital intensive to use on a large scale. But even Hydrogen has a major draw back, what is the point of the car companies spending 10s of billions on hydrogen infustracture when there is no major demand for it at present. But I remember seeing something really amazing not long ago on CNN
were a scientist extracted the hydrogen from H2O just by using radio frequency generators, link below. And i think the only way forward for solar is if viable technology is found for Fuel Cells.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4TOVCtMx0XU

Cheers

Spartn

:viking:

I really hope this puts the nail in the coffin to some of the stupidest aspects of Australian society:

- the great suburban dream (which is only made possible with the availabilty of cheap petrol). The great Australian dream of owning a home can still co-exist with high petrol prices, we just need to dramatically modify what we live in (townhouses + apartments, not detached houses), where we live (not on the suburban fringe) and how we commute for every day needs:
- massive investment in public transport systems, with renewed focus from the Federal level.
- the death knell to militant resident groups like Save our Suburbs in Melbourne.

The Road lobby's seeing their free ride is almost over, just look at them mobilise:

http://www.theage.com.au/opinion/we...u-take-the-railway-20080712-3e65.html?page=-1

We'll take the freeway and you take the railway

* John Cox
* July 13, 2008

LIKE cowboys and farmers, road transport and public transport should be friends rather than enemies, as they fulfil different but complementary functions.

The major difference between the two modes is the extensive use of road transport by businesses. Business travel makes up 36% of all road travel, with one in four cars on the road being involved in some form of commercial activity. The higher costs of vehicle operation and travel time for businesses ensure that 67% of the resources used by all vehicles on our roads are actually business costs.

Higher business costs from road congestion is the major reason for investing in new roads, such as the east-west tunnel. Freeways have an important role in reducing business costs as fuel consumption (and greenhouse gas emissions) are 25% lower for cars and 40% lower for trucks on freeways than on stop-start arterial roads.

Crash costs are only one-third of those on arterial roads because there are two-thirds fewer accidents per unit of travel on freeways. Business time costs are halved because average speeds on freeways are about double those on arterial roads.

Economic benefits to the community from road investments, mainly through reduced business costs, are two to six times their cost of construction.

There is some competition between public transport and road transport in the movement of passengers, but it is less than one thinks, as they serve significantly different markets. Public transport focuses on journeys to work in the inner-city areas and education trips, while cars are used for shopping, social trips, journeys to work in the suburbs and business travel.

Census figures for Melbourne show that public transport journeys to work are predominantly radial, whereas the larger number of car journeys are circumferential — the average journey to work in cars is from houses about 22.6 kilometres from the city centre to locations about 17.7 kilometres away from home, with drivers travelling 14.3 kilometres between the two.

Women also use cars a lot to make "chained" trips: transporting kids, going to work, shopping and social visits, which is difficult using public transport. In the past two decades, about 85% of the increase in the number of car trips was due to women drivers, though there has been little increase in the total amount of car travel per capita in Australia for the past five years.

While many of the motoring groups support public transport initiatives, there is a strong public transport lobby that is opposed to any increase in the length or standard of our road system.

One of their arguments is that building freeways increases the total amount of car travel. This may be the case in other countries, but a comparison between car travel and freeway characteristics for all Australian capital cities proves that this is not so here.

Melbourne leads all other Australian cities in the percentage of their total travel on freeway and tollway systems — about 25% before the addition of EastLink. If freeways increase the amount of car travel, then we should find that the annual amount of car travel per person would be highest in Melbourne. ABS travel surveys show that Melbourne has the lowest annual car travel of all Australian capital cities (6170 kilometre per capita a year).

This is probably because Melbourne has more large suburban centres than other cities, so that most car travel involves only short trips to these centres for work, shopping and social activities.

This comparative study of Australian cities did show that more freeways increases the amount of travel by light commercial vehicles and trucks, but this extra travel at lower costs improves the international competitiveness of Melbourne, particularly in the services sector.

These lower costs are necessary, as one of the conclusions of the Eddington UK report on congestion was that a "successful services sector" was "the key to the UK's performance" in a "globalising world".

As there is little connection between public transport and road transport in Melbourne, the east-west road tunnel and other new road projects should be evaluated as stand-alone road transport projects.

Dr John Cox is the author of two books on road transport: Refocusing Road Reform and Roads in the Community.

^ 0wn3d.

spartn said:

Probably I would say that the only viable ways to power the future is Hydrogen and Solar

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The drawback with hydrogen though is that it takes a lot of energy to produce it. And if the energy to produce the hydrogen comes from a coal fired power station, you're still emitting carbon. If we are serious about reducing carbon emissions, we really need to get our power from some clean source. Getting Australia off it's coal dependence will be difficult though, since we have such large reserves of it, and since it's so cheap.

AlterEgo said:

The drawback with hydrogen though is that it takes a lot of energy to produce it. And if the energy to produce the hydrogen comes from a coal fired power station, you're still emitting carbon. If we are serious about reducing carbon emissions, we really need to get our power from some clean source. Getting Australia off it's coal dependence will be difficult though, since we have such large reserves of it, and since it's so cheap.

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Apparently there is a vast, under-utilised plague of wild brumbies in the outback...... carts anyone?

Neiiggghhhhh!!!




AJ

Aussiejeff said:

You still using those 1940's style kero lamps too??

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Not quite. An old kero heater in the garage. Only trouble is it's not really big enough when it's really cold but it's easy to pick it up and put it next to where I am.

spartn said:

And one fact the car companies put forward which changed my whole idea on the electric is we started to use electric cars as mainstream it would be catistrophic for the environment, we would be moving from using a relatively clean source of energy to fuel our cars 'oil', into using a very dirty way 'coal', most electricity in the world is coal don't forget.

Probably I would say that the only viable ways to power the future is Hydrogen and Solar, if you ask me you can forget Bio and Wind to small and way way to capital intensive to use on a large scale.

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World electricity is (very roughly) 40% coal, 22% nuclear, 18% hydro, 15% gas, 3% oil, 2% everything else. Those figures are from memory but should be pretty close.

That varies a lot between countries and even within the same country. Australia as a whole is about 75% coal, 15% gas, 8% hydro, 2% other (wind, landfill gas, oil, bagasse and so on). Those figures will vary with fuel prices, weather, plant breakdowns etc.

But within Australia we've got NT 95% gas, Tasmania 91% hydro and NSW about 92% coal. So a lot of local variation there. Go to King Island and it's around 50% wind. And there are places in Australia where it's 100% oil.

All that said, as far as efficiency is concerned electricity beats petrol any day. Even the worst power station burning the worst fuel (I'd better not name the plant) is still more efficient than petrol if you use that power to charge batteries to run an electric car.

But use hydrogen and the wheels fall off as far as efficiency is concerned. You'll need somwhere around 5 - 10 times as much electricity to do it that way (depending on the actual technologies used) compared with a battery system.

As for wind power being capital intensive, yes it is. So are ALL renewable energy sources other than biomass. But wind is a lot less capital intensive, and outright cheaper overall, than solar PV. Hence the power industry is building a lot more wind farms than PV.

As for biofuels, they don't scale. The energy you eat this WEEK is equivalent to about 2 litres of petrol. We're not likely to scale agriculture up anywhere near enough to drive around on corn. The best we're likely to do is keep burning firewood in a modest % of homes for heating plus make some use of crop wastes either for electricity or ethanol.

spartn said:

Probably I would say that the only viable ways to power the future is Hydrogen and Solar, if you ask me you can forget Bio and Wind to small and way way to capital intensive to use on a large scale. But even Hydrogen has a major draw back, what is the point of the car companies spending 10s of billions on hydrogen infustracture when there is no major demand for it at present. But I remember seeing something really amazing not long ago on CNN
were a scientist extracted the hydrogen from H2O just by using radio frequency generators, link below. And i think the only way forward for solar is if viable technology is found for Fuel Cells.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4TOVCtMx0XU

Cheers

Spartn

:viking:

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There is a big fundamental problem with taking Hydrogen from water and that is simply that for it to be useful, the systems needs to be a source of perpetual energy (which is of course, impossible).

Let me explain...

H = Hydrogen (H2 = 2 hydrogen atoms)
O = Oxygen

To get hydrogen from water, energy needs to be put into it to separate the H2 from the O (H2O + energy ---> H2 + O).

Once you have the H2, it needs to be mixed with O to burn, (the three components of fire are fuel, oxygen and heat).

So now we have, H2 + O + spark ---> H2O + Heat (yes water is a by-product of burning hydrogen).

So the whole process looks like this:

H2O + ENERGY = H2 + O ---> H2 + O2 + spark = H2O + HEAT

If the Heat energy at the end of the cycle is more energetic then the energy put into the system, then you have obtained free energy, which is impossible because no energy can be created or destroyed, simply converted from one form to another.

Another way of saying it:
It takes more energy to produce the H2 from water, then you can get out of burning it.

Another way for all you crazy investors out there:
Think of it as a legitimate riskless profit of 10,000% which is, likewise, impossible.

If it was worthwhile, it would already be done, over and over and over, and no one would ever have to worry about energy for the rest of space time :

Naked shorts said:

It takes more energy to produce the H2 from water, then you can get out of burning it.

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Totally agree. I wonder why BMW has that 7-series prototype though, probably just a PR stunt (bloody expensive one though).

The only way I can see H2 being useful is if it's essentially acting as a store of energy from another process eg solar, wind, tidal, (insert various green alternative here). H2 has relatively easy access to the base commodity (water) and can be condensed to a liquid and transported.

Explodes well too. :22_yikes:

Derrrr! I'm glad you're not teaching science - of course it takes more energy to produce the H2 than you get out of it! The second law of thermodynamics states that in any closed system the entropy always increases - in laymans terms, energy is always decreasing in usefulness.

Take the earth for example - the sun puts a hell of a lot more energy into the earth than we get out of it. Does the sun care? The energy we get out of the food we eat is even less as a proportion of the energy that goes into getting it into our stomachs from the paddocks.

The key point with H2 is that you set up massive solar arrays in the sunny parts of the world, of which Oz has PLENTY, which generate clean energy to make H2 which is also clean. Of course it's going to cost a bit, but at about $4 a litre for petrol we hit the breakeven point. That's at current efficiency levels for solar PV, etc which will only improve.

So at the rate we're going, H2 should be competitive in about two or three years, maybe 5. In which case, we should be cranking up our infrastructure to make this a reality.

jonojpsg said:

Derrrr! I'm glad you're not teaching science - of course it takes more energy to produce the H2 than you get out of it! The second law of thermodynamics states that in any closed system the entropy always increases - in laymans terms, energy is always decreasing in usefulness.

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Thank you. I didn't realise that everyone on here has studied thermodynamics/chemistry/physics.

subaru69 said:

Totally agree. I wonder why BMW has that 7-series prototype though, probably just a PR stunt (bloody expensive one though).

The only way I can see H2 being useful is if it's essentially acting as a store of energy from another process eg solar, wind, tidal, (insert various green alternative here). H2 has relatively easy access to the base commodity (water) and can be condensed to a liquid and transported.

Explodes well too. :22_yikes:

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I guess BMW did it because they are so green and clean! :
Who ever has the best top product, has really really good low-mid range products (in the public eye).

That is a really great idea in regards to storing energy as hydrogen. It would eliminate the need for inefficient, expensive, bulky batteries.

agreed explodes well too, as I learnt in high school physics