Rehab for the our oil addiction, the first of 12 steps

As that I am a fan of delivering bad new bluntly, they is no way to cut 75% of our Mid East oil imports, by 2025, unless… well hmm… unless we start building nuclear and coal power plants at the rate we build Starbucks and make everything we can find electric. However, coal and nuclear aren’t really the best solution since neither is all that clean, and too many things have to change for electric or hydrogen power to be practical. Now if someone finds a way to make a practical, low cost fusion reactor, in the next few years, then we a set cause besides the huge amounts of clean energy we can simple use CO2 captured from the air and steam as a reactor coolant, then pass this over if I recall an iron or nickel catalyst and bam you’ve make methane/methanol. Then we convert the cars to run on methanol and we don’t even have to really alter the fuel distribution and sale infrastructure very. (In theory making methanol is possible using fission reactors, but since they have to be run at very high temp and pressure to do this it isn’t all that practical with the current generation of reactors.) Why is altering millions of cars to run on methanol easier than getting them to run on hydrogen or electricity? Well most newer cars the change to methanol requires changing a few seals and hoses, plus telling the computer to inject more fuel. Sure methanol is a lousy fuel since it has very little energy (but it is very high octane) however by 2025 the car makers will have had plenty of time to figure out how to convert over to methanol, and the technological advances required are very small, and cheap. (Electric or hydrogen powered cars both require big changes not only to the cars and trucks but to the entire infrastructure.) Also, methanol is good reformer feed stock so fuel cell powered cars can fill up on methanol, reform it to hydrogen (and CO2) then make electricity. Easily available methanol helps the fuel cell people. Oh and by the way we don’t need fusion to make methanol on a massive scale, we can make it from oil and natural gas, it just isn’t “eco-friendly” if we make it from oil.

For anyone that has missed it I am saying the first step to kicking the oil habit is find an oil substitute, which can ease our transition away from oil dependence. Quitting oil cold turkey and going straight to electric or hydrogen require a level of will power that we won’t be able to muster until we can’t get a fix. Methanol, kind of rhymes with methadone, yes that is a coincidence, but it is an interesting point to end on.