No of course it isn't a viable solution right now. But neither were lots of other things we use daily now when they started. But if we wait till oil and gas become scarce where will we be? We need to be developing alternatives now.
Yes and eventually we will run out of oil that is economically viable to get. When that does happen it would be much better if we already had alternatives in place. Like I said at this point this is far from a viable option. But if there is a cheap clean option for electrical generation developed maybe it would be.
Yes absolutley. I was just questioning if you seriously think bringing fuel from Saturn's moon is a more viable option than developing alternatives here.
That completely ignores the cost of these practices. We've been doing it for a couple centuries and the toll on the planet is devastating. It's so serious that we are approaching an end game here.
Probably true because we have no choice but to wean ourselves off of a carbon based energy cycle to more sustainable systems.
Why not put our efforts into alternatives here instead of bringing hydrocarbons from another celestial body to pump into our atmosphere.
That really is the only alternative. In order to be sustainable we need to change from global linear economies to circular economies. And it looks like investors are starting to demand this.
So because that is how it has been done for the past 100 years or so we should bother to look for different possibly better solutions??? Where do you think we would be if everyone had that mentality? We certainly wouldnt have an internet to discuss this on. We wouldnt have cars to drive etc etc.
Broad statements that ignore the fact that huge amounts of energy are used to harvest, store, refine, distribute and transport in-ground petroleum and even more for tar sands petroleum. And that is before the subsidies kick in that keep it affordable and totally ignoring the health costs. The linear model simply doesn't work. We can't keep extracting resources, using them and dumping the waste into the air, water and land. That one way model is not sustainable. $hit in your bed for long enough and it will become uninhabitable.<<Fine you dont like this particular solution. It may never result in a viable fuel but we will never know if we dont look into it. And personally i would rather the us be on the cutting edge so we can benifit from the rewards instead of simply following others. Things will change no matter what you want.
Look at the economics. You are using electricity to make a liquid fuel. In short, you are using a very expensive manufactured energy source to replace a fuel that is efficiently pumoped out of the ground at low cost and refined and transported at low cost.
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Even more ridiculous, our environmentalist friends are just chomping at the bit to use their hallowed "renwable" energy from solar and wind to make electricity at vast cost and reliability issues, and propose to use that very high priced energy to make another even higher priced energy.
It's absurd.
