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I hope he has some bodyguards. If this would be true, there are a couple of countries with lots of oil that would not really like this idea to become reality.
by yaix 15y ago
I hope he has some bodyguards. If this would be true, there are a couple of countries with lots of oil that would not really like this idea to become reality.
But then, as the article says, chances of it being true are small, unfortunately.
- shin_lao 15y agoNot really. 1/You still need oil to make plastic 2/You're not going to go "all electric" any time soon
- yaix 15y agoLet's say the oil price would dive vertically. And with free electricity, you could make synthetics and synthetic oil cheaper than digging for it. For some countries this would mean ruin. (Not to mention the US, having just spend so much money to take over Iraq.) But it would also relax many international conflicts. Suddenly, nobody would be interested in the Spratley and Parcell-Islands anymore, for instance.
- shin_lao 15y agoYou're writing a science fiction story. Of course technology from the XXIInd century would likely disrupt the economy of the early XXIst century... Even if electricity were free (and cold fusion wouldn't make it free, you need to build a factory, have people operate it, build power lines, convert the electricity...), how do you make synthetic oil? Which property would that synthetic oil have? Could it work to make gasoline? Could we build plastic with it?
- yaix 15y agoCurrently usually from biomass or coal, see almighty wp http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synthetic_fuel http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synthetic_fuel The factories would not being build in the few countries that currently supply the vast majority of the oil the world consumes. A number of countries (Venezuela, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, to name a few) would lose 99% of their income overnight. Maybe its the wrong place to discuss the political implications of technical inventions here on hn, though. (I am a little annoyed that some people seem to just down vote anything they lack knowledge about. What do you mean by "science fiction story"??)
- burgerbrain 15y ago"What do you mean by "science fiction story"??" Science fiction is a genre of fiction dealing with imaginary but more or less plausible (or at least non-supernatural) content such as future settings, futuristic science and technology, space travel, aliens, and paranormal abilities. --http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science_fiction http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science_fiction
- jerf 15y agoYaix is correct. There's nothing magical about oil such that it can only be produced underground in the Earth. All the petrochemicals can be made via other processes. We know this because people have done it, some even at industrial scales. If you have enough cheap electricity, the oil problem goes away... but there's a lot of terawatts lying in wait behind that innocuous word "enough". But in the end, all significant resource considerations across the next couple of centuries come down to matters of energy, not atoms.
- burgerbrain 15y agoThe "futuristic technology" in this case is the cold fusion (particularly, the cold fusion being cheap enough that we don't care about electrical costs of anything), not the synthetic oil.
- yaix 15y agoAhm... that was the topic of the original article. Didn't you read it? On HN, comments usually refer to the topic of the article they are attached to.
- jholman 15y agoHmn. All _chemical_ resource considerations, sure. I agree that the oil/plastic thing is a no-brainer, with "enough free energy". What're you going to do about rare elements? Just apply nuclear reactors? Helium is easy, I guess, since we have no shortage of plans for fusion reactors that run at a loss. What about "rare earths", though?
- Symmetry 15y agoOil can be synthesized from air and water given sufficient electricity. I've heard a Canadian company got it down to just a few hundred dollars of electricity for a barrel of oil, though that ignores the capital cost of making the plant to do it.
- vetler 15y agoYeah, socialist Norway will dispatch their elite commandos to deal with the "cold fusion problem".