The Cost of Oil

Last week the barrel of oil had its highest one-day increase ever. Every time that I hear news concerning oil prices, that always makes me realize how dependent we are on oil.

I try to imagine how we could get out of that dependency. The thing is, even if the governments of the seven or eight largest economies in the world were to buy back all of the cars and trucks in order to replace them with vehicles using alternate fuels, there would still be a lot of industry and processes requiring oil.

Besides, it would cost a fortune to buy back all those cars. And then, what to do with those cars? How could we recycle all of them?

An alternative would be to make the necessary changes to adapt those cars to run on alternative fuels such as ethanol, methanol, gasohol,  alcohol and even hydrogen.

The problem is that to produce those alternative fuels requires huge amounts of energy. Oil, on the other hand, is already there, all we have to do is pump it. But ethanol has to be grown as corn, then harvested, and then processed into fuel. The growing and harvesting is very energy consuming.

So the question is how can we make all of that energy to grow that alternative fuel? Fossil fuel again? You see, even replacing all the cars by electric cars, there’s still the question of how do we make all of that electricity?

In the United States only a small percentage of electricity is made by way of either hydroelectric power, nuclear power, and alternative sources of energy such as wind geothermal and solar energy. The bulk of the energy made into United States uses oil, gas, and coal.

For decades, environmentalists have been crying out for more use of solar energy. There are even some highly elaborate systems that would involve building huge solar arrays in outer space. These large arrays of solar cells would convert solar energy into electricity and transmit electricity, by way of microwaves, wirelessly down to earth to various locations around the globe, wherein  huge microwave collectors would collect the electricity being beamed down to earth and distribute it.

Of course, there are concerns that the strong beam of microwaves could create some sort of a health hazard because microwaves are what cook food, so any stray planes or even migratory birds passing through the beam would be cooked within seconds. Then again, it would be fairly easy to forbid air traffic to fly in those very  narrowly focused zones. Also, it is a relatively easy to map out migratory birds paths which are fairly consistent and build those collectors away from those paths.

Of course the occasional stray birds would have a problem but it is so likely that the bird would feel the microwave and fly out of the zone before any harm is done.  Although the beam is fairly focused there is always a little gray area of weaker signal surrounding the area of strong focused beam. So, entering a beam zone would occur gradually enough for a stray bird to fly out of it. The same would apply to land animals as well. The beam is limited as far as ground penetration is concerned. Besides, most of its strength is taken up by the collector, so the ground underneath would only have minimal stray radiation.

These are the primary concerns, healthwise. I am not aware of any other health concerns if the can arrange for a humans and animals alike to the avoid being in the direct path of the beam.

Another concern has to do with possible casting of shadows on the Earth’s surface when the huge arrays would pass between the sun and the earth. Given that the distance of a geostationary satellite would be about 22,000 miles above the earth, it would be fairly easy to position these arrays so that they would not cast a shadow on the earth.

There is always the question of cost and who would pay for that and so on and so forth. Then again, what costs results from us totally wiping out life from the surface of the earth?

Another way of generating electricity is to focus on multiple small sources of power generations. Recently, some engineering firms have proposed high-rise buildings that would capture wind so as to actuate wind chargers that would presumably produce more power than they would consume, so that they could actually sell excess electricity to surrounding residences.

It is very important to find ecologically friendly and cheap sources of electrical power that would help reduce the costs of producing alternative fuel because right now, the only form of fuel that doesn’t cost anything s biomass, which usually contain stuff that we want to get rid of anyway.

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