Plants that produce oil? I've just seen a 2 parter about that on BBC1
Glasses please
Boffins in Philadelphia, America have come up with a radical new plan for biofuels. Rather than the cars of tomorrow running on various forms of alcohol, sunflower oil, algae etc, the scientists propose that they should instead be fuelled by burning tobacco. "Tobacco is very attractive as a biofuel because the idea is to use …
Solar voltaic panels generate electricity directly. Concentrated Solar Thermal panels generate electricity via heat concentration. Solar heating panels substitute for heating fuel or electricity use by providing hot water. None of these applications are useful for generating fuel for very light and mobile applications, i.e. aircraft. Surface transport may become convertible to sustainably generated electrical use, e.g. through trams and railway electrification and vehicle battery technology. But air transport can't accept the low power to weight ratio of batteries, so to avoid net CO2 release, some kind of biofuel production is needed for sustainable air transport.
Plants may be inefficient solar panels. But they're inefficient *self-assembling* solar panels. Admittedly they're also generally disposable, but fortunately each plant also makes several ready-to-install copies of itself called "seeds" so you can make as many as you want. Neat trick, huh?
They are most definitely cheaper than solar panels! I think its more the fact that there are hundreds of millions of cars and trucks out there that get SFA benefit from solar panels. If electric cars become as convenient and economical as diesel & petrol driven vehicles i'm sure people will start to buy them. But a worldwide fleet transition is a 30 year project, and a project that we haven't even started with yet!
Oil companies are bastards, even to their own employees. They'll use additives to kill their users and envronment (albeit slowly) and once oil runs out, they'll have nothing left but to shift their line of work to something slightly less bastardy, like real estate, or used car sales. Or religion.
Instead, we'll hand over the reigns to the tobacco companies, who like the oil mongers, have a primary self-interest in money, but are more than happy to kill their users quickly instead of slowly, and spend a substancial amount of their profits on PR work to make their cancer-riddled users feel good instead. On the upside, they kill the environment marginally more slowly than oil.
So that makes it all right.
So, in that case, I welcome our new tabaccy overlords to the top of the energy foodchain.
Now, excuse me while I cough a lung out or something...
Makes me laugh how people think tobacco smoke is so much more dangerous than any other smoke. At the end of the day would you rather be locked in a room with me smoking or your petrol engined car with the engine running? I know which I'd choose. Unfortunately I don't get a choice about inhaling the tonnes of poisonous gases being pumped into the atmosphere everyday by car drivers.
Want to save the world
Step 1
Construct massive, very long Tunnels under a Deserts using TBMs
Step 2
Fill with salt water from the rising seas!
Step 3
Grow billions of tons of Algea
Benifits:
Vast areas of unused land that are not used for food production.
Solar power availiable to run the whole production process
Poor parts of the world hit by Global Warming will turn into deserts so perfect places to build Production Plants that provide jobs and investment in local economy!
Oh wait, this wont make rich evil corporations even richer!
:(
Only IIRC tobacco is *very* energy intensive to cultivate. Lots of fertiliser and quite vulnerable to infections (althouth Nicotine seems to make quite a good natural pesticide).
Looking at the breakdown of cigarette smoke some time ago it did seem to me that controlled burning would probably give a nice synthetic mix of chemical raw materials quite like synthetic crude oil, and a rich playground for catalyst chemists to manipulate them.
Itf they think it can compete let's see it.
OTOH hemp is a weed which grows quite well (I'm told) almost anywhere in the world.