Science and dystopian fiction writers are always viewed as someone wearing an armadillo shell hat while lining their vehicles and homes with tin foil. At least until they write something which becomes a mega-million dollar grossing movie. Then everyone wants to be part of their entourage.
One thing which I always remembered from watching Mad Max: Beyond the Thunderdome was the retort the little hog raising guy had for Mel Gibson.
Not sh*t! Energy!
As a species we have known many alternate forms of energy existed, but they were never persued. Some say it has to do with the money Big Oil pumps into politics and others say it is because nobody wants to do the job. In truth it is both and then some. It is really odd how some technologies go from widely used to shunned all because they become associated with a bad person or period in history.
Coal Gassification is one such technology.
Historically, coal was gasified using early technology to produce coal gas (also known as “town gas”), which is a combustible gas traditionally used for municipal lighting and heating before the advent of industrial-scale production of natural gas.
Yeppers, long before Adolf Hitler and other nasty leaders were forced to use it for war because their supply of Big Oil was cut off, pretty much everyone used it. The money being pumped into politics to kill this technology has been putting out a lot of spin about the evil mass murdering regimes which used it trying to subconsciously associate it with groups of people who commit mass murder. The simple truth is everyone used it at one point. America happens to be the Saudi Arabia of coal. We could easily eliminate our consumption of foreign crude inside of 3 years by embarking on a massive scale up of coal gassification but we don’t do it.
Another amazing thing is how nobody wants to know what goes into or goes on with a landfill. All most people know is that they don’t want one in their back yard. Major cities like Chicago are having their trash carted farther and farther away because developers built on top of everything, even the old landfills. Most people probably don’t know that for the next 25-30 years their refuse is going to provide electricity. I have even heard some talk of using modern directional drilling technology to put vented tubes into landfills created north of 100 years ago which do not have any kind of liner to seal them. One of the best ways to stop nasty stuff from the landfill getting into the water supply is to vent it into an electrical generator. In theory you can push enough air through the tubes to dry the trash out. Since we continually get rain and those ancient landfills most likely don’t have a clay sealing cap, they always need more drying.
It’s odd that we can only get alternative energy sources past the Big Oil lobbyists in the form of odor control legislation. This brings us to Thunderdome. They were using hog poop in a process much like the one described here to produce electricity. While it can be done with any kind of poop, hogs produce mass quantities and it is usually very liquid. Cow poop tends to produce more methane but is more difficult to obtain. If you tell people you want to put in a system to produce electricity from animal waste Big Oil and many other special interests will shut you down before you finish the sentence. If you tell people you want to install a system to dramatically reduce the smell of a hog operation people from town will come out and help you build it. Go figure. It’s all in how you sell it.
Now, we are going way past “socially acceptable.” Deep into the don’t-want-that-job-no-matter-what area. Brown grease. Yeppers. Click the link and read the Popular Science article. I’ve often wondered why city waste treatment facilities weren’t built to include methane-to-electricity systems. We’ve known how to do this for a very long time. The best way to control the cost of your waste treatment is to have it generate revenue.
British Columbia is going one step farther.
So far I have not heard of the tech we need both for deep space travel and to eliminate all of the problems associated with landfills and sewage disposal. Molecular recycling. Busting all waste down into its fundamental atoms and sorting them into containers for reconstitution in other forms. Perhaps that is a thing modern culture isn’t willing to fund but ultimately it has to happen. The new Battlestar Galactica brought the topic up, sort of. During the episodes when there was a water shortage, the Galactica was taking waste from other ships and “processing it.” Captain Adama said something along the lines of
Many of these ships weren’t built for deep space travel. There waste handling systems can’t handle all of the waste. Galactica’s waste handling is nearly 100% efficient so we take their waste and return them fresh water.
I didn’t look up the exact quote, so if I’m wrong don’t go into a tirade. The point is, deep space exploration cannot be achieved without being able to reduce all waste to the base atoms and store those atoms into one container per periodic table entry. You then need to have the ability to rejoin those atoms in any arrangement to make up what you need. Yes, simple things like HOH for water (H2O is actually HOH) and complex things, such as a steak. For a multi-year trip you need to be able to manufacture both food and medicine en-route. Everything from aspirin to antibiotics will need to be generated from recycled components.
Hopefully you neither have just eaten nor are about to eat when you read this.
