turboplanner

We've already done wonders with Ozone, and CO2 emission from cars. Power Stations, and some manufacturing processes need the same legislative motivation wqhich worked for the automotive industry apparently painlessly.

You're reducing FT to desperation now, so what has to be done to get solar power back on track as our primary source of electrical energy?

Well how's this for logic? My electricity supplier installed a smart meter, and supplied wonderful information about how I could use it to reduce my power bill, mainly by using power in the middle of the night. So I started by buying a Hot Water System - not a cheap one but one designed for Off - Peak use When I asked the HWS supplier how its timing was set for off peak usage, he didn't know ("No one has ever asked that before") So I went back to my electricity supplier, who said the appliance must be wired directly to the smart meter. That has cost me $300.00 so far. My electrician couldn't find a tab to connect to, so he phoned the electricity supply company. They told him that I had to order an off peak connection, then they would come out and fit it, then he could come back and connect to it - which didn't improve his mood on the day at all. The electrician had never connected to a smart meter off peak connector before. In talking to the electricity supplier, I was warned that an off peak supply connection wouldn't necessarily save me money, because when I ordered and off peak connection to be fitted, my base tariff would automatically increase. So they suggested I should think through whether the saving on the hot water service at night, would offset the higher rate for ALL my other lights and appliances during the day. The answer of course was that I would be paying more if I got an off peak connector. I'm just wondering if tens of thousands of people who have smart meters are just assuming when they pay extra for an "off peak" appliance, that they will save money................

You're so subtle FT, only ever mentioning your Party in the most circuitous way, even to the extent of expecting a spelling mistake in Labor at the bottom of the pyramid, (also spelled incorrectly "Labour" at the Party's Shrine of history Theme Park at Barcaldine), but now it comes out that we're going to get Tania shoved down our necks. The Arctic ice by the way varies considerably year by year due to the weather conditions we are all familiar with. In the Southern Hemisphere Australia actually knows what the cyclic change is, is any because a CSIRO Satellite constantly measures the ice.

FT might be a busy right now defending an empty airport with no aircraft and no passengers, which he doesn't want, from and ISIL attack, while at the same time giving a pom, Anthony Abbott a good kicking on behalf of his mate Kevin 07.

So let's see to details, let's see some proof then.

Interesting comment at my local mower repairer's this morning when I was looking at the alternatives to replacing another carby due to permanent gumming up of the fine orifices (out of reach of needles, wires, compressed air etc). He does big volume repairs, has no problems with carburettors from older engines which used Leaded fuel, but those after are usually repairable if left with petrol in the tank for some time due to the ULP additives, so no alternative but to throw away the implement or fit a new carby for an average $100.00. I'm going to have an engine start and fuel tank empty once a month otherwise I might as well just tear up $100 bills; pretty disgraceful attitude on the part of the oil industry.

B5 and B20 biodiesel is available from Rocklea, (might be available in 200 litre drums). Phone 1300 784 009 to find out if it is suitable for your vehicle. ight work in your Nissan but I'd want to be convinced by Caltex that it would work in a common rail setup (not sure if the truck I saw overheating due to computer confusion was on part biodiesel, or a 100% mix). I'd start by getting the price and unless there was a substantial financial reason for going for it, I wouldn't be a test dummy.

The camp fire part is correct as we know, but the atmosphere certainly isn't a gradient, but layers, some of which are extremely cold, and some of which are extremely hot (see link for distances and temperatures.) http://www.weather-climate.org.uk/02.php Before NASA was set up ex Peenemunde rocket specialists under US management, I Think in the US Army discovered this in a test programme where they fired dozens of rockets straight up to the edge of Space, and realised they had to find a way to make long distance rockets (space orbit and beyond) immune to the extremes of metal expansion and contraction on the way up and back.

I use Castrol M with Methanol, and that's worked, with good reliability for some years. Not saying M will work with Ethanol, but a possible.

It's been available in Capital Cities for about 4 years, The link is a brochure suggesting it would be available in 100 locations by 2011. http://www.caltex.com.au/Media%20Items/BioEflex%20FAQ.pdf

I haven't checked the price though, probably 2c/litre cheaper than straight petrol to allow a totally seamless change as post Peak Oil starts to ramp up the cost of petrol price cycles. I'm still waiting for solar-electric

Looks like it's all over for you dinosaurs, just build an E-flex compatible motor.

We were a little behind the times with our discussion on Biofuels: Caltex is selling now in Australia: Caltex Bio E-Flex which contains up to 85% ethanol produced from: Waste starch from wheat processing Molasses from sugar production and sorghum So we have pulled way ahead of Brazil! Other blended product are: Caltex Bio E10 unleaded petrol which has 10% ethanol Bio diesel made in Australia from used cooking oils and animal fats Caltex blends this with standard diesel to produce: B5 (5% biodiesel) B20 (20% biodiesel)

I agree with you that government tax imposts should be lifted on sunrise industries to assist with development, however at some point tax/excise does have to be considered in the financial model because petrol/diesel produces such a huge government income. I'm in favour of dropping all excises and taxes from "fuel" used in transport to encourage decentralisation and Australian tourism, and replacing that income by something like increasing the GST. The net reduction in costs of megalopolis, and increase in income for country towns would offset the amount needing to be replaced by a percentage, and create a sustainable need for public transport to country areas. Comments like "politicians not worth the oxygen they consume" apply to some of our best friends like Gordon Rich-Phillips who is doing so much for our Victorian aerodromes, and don't take into account just what a difficult job a politician has with the need to be across around 300 different portfolios on a daily basis - for example what action would you take to address the current ice crisis in the communities which has reached the proportion where ice residue is now measurable at Melbourne's western sewerage plant? Just taking Gordon as an example. I walked into his office one night after a meeting, and he was sitting there exhausted with a stack of A4 paper in the middle of the desk, and told me he had to read all of it and make recommendations by the next morning's Cabinet meeting. Apart from that, we are not a communist country - if there are developments or changes they will, and should come from industry. And since the fright of the 1979 fuel crisis where some people put about a story that the world was running out of fuel, Industry has spent hundreds of billions of dollars looking for transport alternatives from four cylinder Commodores and V8's which ran on four cylinders at lower speeds to all the alternative power supplies we could think of. Slightly ahead of this search for an alternative to the oil industry, came the discovery that exhaust emissions were killing us from lung cancer, and that took over as our primary objective, aided by draconian government legislation, and that now becomes an important consideration in redesigning the power source for the automotive industry - we couldn't wait for the wonder fuels. In 1975, Methanol, the staple racing fuel which has survived to the present time due to its lower fire risk could have been used in a car simply by altering ignition timing and opening carby jets up to about twice the size of petrol jets, and fitting a bigger fuel tank. Methanol is made from carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide and hydrogen - environmentally a very attractive source. However, it would be more problematic today with current emission systems and our return to late 1940's car shapes which would not have enough tank space. The key tooling ingredient of a car is its floor pan - all the engineering flows from there, and floor pan tooling is amortised over decades, so putting a decent boot back on a car is a time issue, and if, as I suspect the current shape has a long nose to make the mandatory progressive crumple rate cheaper, and a short boot to fit into parking spaces, it could be more than a time issue. So before considering an alternative fuel for combustion engines these are some of the issues we need to consider: Flash point - the type of burning which will take place in the combustion chamber, and so combustion heat (example: burnt valves on long distance with LP Gas) Lubrication - petrol and diesel both provide a measure of internal lubrication (example: LP Gas) Amount of fuel burned for the required power - (Example: Methanol 2 x petrol, CNG) Type of fuel vessel - (Example: armoured tank required for CNG) Emission standard compatibility - quite a few alternatives cannot meet Euro 5 standards, and those standards are not going to be reversed Emission equipment compatibility - (Example waste cooking oil) So, back to your biofuels: I would consider waste cooking oil to be one of these, and while it will work very well in your old tractor doing work for virtually zero cost, it has some disadvantages. It solidifies on cold nights so requires a blowtortch under the tank, or internal electrical element to melt it before an early morning start - something which could be overcome I gave a recent example of a truck which has 22 computers sitting boiling at a fast food outlet. The transport operator had modified his fleet of sophisticated trucks to burn the waste cooking oil from the fast food chain in a mutually ecstatic example of greenness and sustainability. These days we get to Euro 5 emission standards by using a common rail (tube) of diesel pressurised to around 20,000 psi (which by the way will kill you if you try bleeding by cracking the injectors). From this rail computers decide what phase the engine is at, open the injector and control its volume. Where previously an injector pump was gear driven to send a shot of diesel through the injector at a given point, now there may be three injector bursts during each cylinders compression/ignition stroke, the last one being to burn waste carbon. The computers also periodically retard the injectors sending a massive flame down the exhaust to burn detritus off the catalytic converter and this is currently terrorising unsuspecting drivers who experience a sudden power loss and massive flame out of the exhaust. So when waste cooking oil is introduced to these sophisticated engines the reaction is for the computers to tell the engine to boil. Fuels refined from plants were seriously considered at the time of the 1979 fuel crisis, by in reports I was reading about a decade ago when looking at the bigger picture, the amount of arable land required to produce the amount of fuel we consume was non-viable, and would just get worse as the world population grew and required more land to grow food. Brazil was the shining star in the 1980's, hoping to totally replace oil based fuel with ethanol, but I notice that 30 years later they have only managed to get up to 20% ethanol into petrol - not much different to what we are doing here. There were great expectations from Jojoba in Victoria in the 1980's, with a former Premier, Dick Hamer promoting plantations to investors, who I assume died poor. I looked up the Fischer - Tropsch process which my friend Wiki describes as extracting synthetic fuel from coal, natural gas, biomass The future of the Latrobe Valley Coal field is pretty much tied to the "fuel from coal" concept, so Fischer-Tropsch is alive and well there. The Bass Strait and North West Shelf gas fields are now supplying Methane scrubbed of Butane etc so that could be a cheaper supply than the Fischer-Tropsch process at 1 c to 2c per litre. Biomass crosses over into plant based which I've covered above, but sewerage plants produce big volumes of biomass full of pathogens and heavy metals which have passed through our systems. Melbourne Water has suitors who want to use its biomass for fuel production. These are some of the areas I've noticed along the way working in the transport industry. All of the above is based on retaining the internal combustion engine which has become an incredibly costly piece of equipment. I'm in favour of moving towards alternative power such as electric motors, and the most tantalising "zero cost" fuel is solar. I've been watching the progress of the Darwin - Adelaide solar race now, which started with unltralight streamliners which trundled along the road, then became so fast that they were required to observe a 130 km/hr speed limit, and then, since most of them just sat on 130 km/hr were required to have upright seating to absorb some power pushing the wind out of the way. So far the only negative is the horrific complexity and cost of the electrical system, but I can envisage a B Triple truck with print on solar generators all over the trailers giving us cheaper freight for consumer goods.

What are you referring to as biofuels Dafydd?

Well you want to see Mexico - four year olds begging in the street to a prepared script.

Don't worry too much about the Bible bashers, sure there was a boom in TV shows, which really were money grabbers, but I've never seen much in daily life, or too many churches for that matter; more beggars in the streets, unswept dirty footpaths which we wouldn't tolerate, and dirty piles of snow in the streets all winter.

Perhaps if you went back a bit further and read some of the comments there you would understand the retaliation. I've never been called filth before in my life, and if someone throws out an unprovoked and totally inaccurate label, I'm going to retaliate.

It's intriguing, it was Lithium Propane in the 1960's, but morphed into Liquid Petroleum around the time of the 1979 fuel shortage crisis (which was manufactured by suppliers) I suspect it was a marketing name to ease petrol users into thinking it was much the same as petrol (there was a lot of discussion about cars running on gas potentially blowing up) CNG is compressed natural gas - pure methane and is sold in Australia as an alternative fuel, but is struggling because: It burns slower so power is down around 10% compared to it's equivalent diesel engine. It burns a lot more volume than petrol, so bigger tanks are needed, and that leads to space problems. It is compressed flammable gas stored at 2000 psi, so needs very strong tanks, and that leads to weight problems. I was involved in trialing an 8 tonne truck with CNG conversion around 1989, and it worked OK, was about 10% down in power which was OK for local deliveries, but had limited range, and if it ran out of fuel, had to be towed back to one of two CNG supply location in Melbourne. The CNG marketers tried selling factory based compressors and mobile compressors (you can connect to your natural gas supply at your home, but it hasn't been a success so far because of all the obstacles mentioned above. This is a good case study for anyone thinking about introducing any new system, electric or otherwise into the Australian transport scene where people travel from anywhere they are to anywhere they want to be and expect a full infrastructure in between. SCR (Selective Catalytic Reduction) is another case study in how a new product can be introduced, and has been successfully established in Australia within about ten years. In this system a tank of urea is fitted to the vehicle and urea is injected into the exhaust system behind the engine, and this cleans up the exhaust emissions. Its advantage is that being away from the engine there is no reduction in engine life, and more powerful, more fuel efficient and less costly "dirty" engines can be used and still produce clean exhaust emissions. The downside was that everyone was scared they would be caught in a town without an SCR pump, but in a research exercise I did in 2008 for a sales training programme, I found the Urea suppliers had set up a network which would allow a truck to travel anywhere on Australian highways within tank range except for the Qld/NT run to Darwin, and drivers could get a pack to go in the truck for that leg - so the supply infrastructure was in place before the product really needed it.

Meth would love it over there; he could get right up the Mongols and other filth who put lights on streets and highways when they already have sustainable lights on their cars, and explain to them they are just making the Chinese and other filth rich by buying all that manufactured product, and how China now has thousands of millionaires who travel the world in corporate jets, stay at Sheraton Mirage, and how the Chinese build those lights from steel manufactured by Australians - the filthy ones, who buy speedboats and Jet skis and eat down at McDonalds, and how the Americans and other filth have secretly used McDonalds to take over Inner Mongolia. PS I was shocked to find a sparrow drinking from a sheep trough this morning and gave him a Winchester ear ache, unfortunately blowing a hole in the bottom of the trough, and potable water is pouring all over the place. Went to the local steel supply to buy a patch, and they are all out. Something about Steelmark having sold all their steel to China for environmentally friendly and sustainable lighting in inner Mongolia.

The fossil fuel industry was always going to defend its turf, but the anti global warming backlash got its legs from vocal community members as a result of the stupid IPCC strategy of releasing provably false information, and the vehicle primarily used for the backlash was the emerging social media, which has also produced massively incorrect information until we have the present situation where no one knows what's going on. I haven't seen any bible bashing going on; maybe its just random in northern NSW. Any survey of Americans would show a low interest in anything except the town hamburger joint - no trend there; but there always have and always will be some of the most brilliant minds in the world which motivate the others to follow.

Haven't had a chance to do any more looking. Maybe it was a lubricant, certainly would have been a small percentage of the propane mix at that price, and possibly was harmful to health.

...especially the anecdotes written by the Grimm borthers.

or.....only a post by FT - it does say anecdotal and it looks like it has been done by a practical joker.