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I'm not talking about growing plants directly for the production of biofuels, that is a silly proposition when there are mountains of unused organic waste being
by nanomonkey 2y ago
I'm not talking about growing plants directly for the production of biofuels, that is a silly proposition when there are mountains of unused organic waste being produced annually by nature and by agriculture. Utilizing the organic "waste streams" that already exist to produce fuel is quite sufficient for our storage needs. Agricultural waste, poop, dead trees and branches, dry grass or other "wildfire fuels" to produce methane, hydrogen and oil through gasification , fermentation and anaerobic digestion is simply low hanging fruit that is available to us right now. I've worked in this field, doing gasification, so I'm quite aware of what is possible.
Would you rather we burn grass and dead standing wood in natural environments to curtail wildfires, or would you rather it was used to make clean energy that is carbon negative? Yes carbon negative. You put carbon back into the ground through the use of biochar, where it is stable for thousands of years, and actually improves the soil.
Anaerobic digestion of all of your household waste (including feces) is also possible for production of all of your stove and heating gas.
Internal combustion engines aren't at their end of technology cycle. You should probably look into supercritical CO2 closed loop turbines if you think that we aren't still innovating. Regardless, by using an internal combustion engines, or an external combustion engine (Stirling engine, or modern steam engine) instead of a furnace, one can produce heat and power all in one unit from within your house or district (depending on how you want to scale things).
I love solar, I really do, as well as batteries. But you need to use everything at your disposal if you want to get away from petroleum.