Reply To: T-shirt designers unite and take over

[Brian H]

dash wrote:

And then 10 years after mass production starts, oil consumption will be way down and the price will be close to the cost of production–that is about $5 a barrel or so.

I’ve always been a fan of the idea that if cheap electrical power were available, why not capture CO2 from the atmosphere and water from the ocean and synthetically produce hydrocarbons? The advantage is we’ve already got the distribution infrastructure in place plus a lot of vehicles that run on oil.

I expect further improvements in big capacitor storage. Lithium batteries and whatever that are currently used for electric vehicles — what a joke. They take a huge amount of energy to make, they’re heavy, and they wear out because they require chemical changes to take place in order to charge and discharge.

Big capacitors, on the other hand, just store charge without any chemical reactions going on. Nothing to wear out. And they’re getting cheaper and denser all the time.

I think there will never be a hydrogen economy. Rather I expect vehicles to shift from oil/gasoline to electric using dense capacitors. Just my opinion though.

Even without oil being used to power transportation, there are endless other uses for it. Plastics, fertilizer, lubricants to name a few. Those applications won’t go away.

Such an exciting future awaits us. I wish it would hurry up and get here!

-Dave

The downside of dense capacitors is slow or very fast leakage. That charge wants to move! And the new nanowire batteries are much lighter and not subject to most of the current generation risks. And don’t sneer at a 125mph 220mi Roadster! The batteries and housing are about 900/2600 of the car’s weight, and the motor is another 115 lbs, for a total of 1015/2600. What is the engine weight of a petro-vehicle?

ESS and other dense capacitors have a ways to go before they are demonstrated not to be short-circuits waiting to happen. 😉 IMO.