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Hm. That actually raises a good point—how long until militaries can operate without gasoline and diesel? Or even significantly reduce their use? Hard to imagine

Hm. That actually raises a good point—how long until militaries can operate without gasoline and diesel? Or even significantly reduce their use? Hard to imagine anything competing with petroleum there in the mid-term future, which mean subsidized production will continue to be necessary to any state that wants to be able to self-sufficiently field an army worth having at all. I mean I guess there's ethanol from plants. Maybe all that corn subsidy stuff actually makes sense in a long-term strategic sense, then. Though you can ramp that up inside a year if you need to and probably much faster by rationing food & feed use of existing corn to repurpose most of it for fuel, so that's probably not what they had in mind and it is just a form of corruption. Crazy, though, if arable land becomes directly correlated to ability to support armored divisions.

marcosdumay 7y ago
Well, there exist carbon capture and artificial fuels. I imagine those will take over crop ethanol as soon as solar gets cheap, for no other reason than that one can extract 100 times more fuel from the same land and there is no upkeep of a biologic system.
cartoonworld 7y ago
No chance in the short term, really. There's a lot of old hardware running around on reserve bases, and thats at least! All those turbines run avgas or something like diesel, not much of an aircraft person but I can't say for certain. It would certainly be a great challenge to replace all those turbines, and its not just the fuel. The synthetics have different properties, and it might be the case that all the rubber dissolves on your Sikorsky, fuel liners disappear out of the exhaust, and hopefully whatever whiz-bang alloys we've been producing hold up. Who's to say, it's probably classified. Imagine telling your people they're gonna lose the battle tested and well supplied turbines and power plants all over all the forces with something conceptually new. Large naval vessels and submarines can at least run nuclear, but there isn't yet a reactor small enough for a gunboat or a helicopter afiak. Plus, can you imagine the battlefield hazards that would create? Suddenly, it looks to my eyes like a lot fewer people getting rescued when your reactor takes some HEAT and goes supercritical. Luckily we can try the batteries or whatever out in out cars and lawnmowers first, as a handy side effect developing the currently-nonexistent alternative infrastructure. It wouldn't really be too unreasonable to consider EV and alternative fuels a national security priority, but good luck with that, I say to myself.
pm90 7y ago
Military consumption pales in comparison to civilian consumption though. I can see most large armed forces being OK with using whatever Oil and Gas is produced domestically. Smaller nations without access to oil have a problem, but they probably have smaller armed forces too.

marcosdumay 7y ago

Well, there exist carbon capture and artificial fuels. I imagine those will take over crop ethanol as soon as solar gets cheap, for no other reason than that one can extract 100 times more fuel from the same land and there is no upkeep of a biologic system.

cartoonworld 7y ago

No chance in the short term, really. There's a lot of old hardware running around on reserve bases, and thats at least! All those turbines run avgas or something like diesel, not much of an aircraft person but I can't say for certain. It would certainly be a great challenge to replace all those turbines, and its not just the fuel. The synthetics have different properties, and it might be the case that all the rubber dissolves on your Sikorsky, fuel liners disappear out of the exhaust, and hopefully whatever whiz-bang alloys we've been producing hold up. Who's to say, it's probably classified. Imagine telling your people they're gonna lose the battle tested and well supplied turbines and power plants all over all the forces with something conceptually new. Large naval vessels and submarines can at least run nuclear, but there isn't yet a reactor small enough for a gunboat or a helicopter afiak. Plus, can you imagine the battlefield hazards that would create? Suddenly, it looks to my eyes like a lot fewer people getting rescued when your reactor takes some HEAT and goes supercritical. Luckily we can try the batteries or whatever out in out cars and lawnmowers first, as a handy side effect developing the currently-nonexistent alternative infrastructure. It wouldn't really be too unreasonable to consider EV and alternative fuels a national security priority, but good luck with that, I say to myself.

pm90 7y ago

Military consumption pales in comparison to civilian consumption though. I can see most large armed forces being OK with using whatever Oil and Gas is produced domestically. Smaller nations without access to oil have a problem, but they probably have smaller armed forces too.