joe-90 said:
How about harnessing a black hole? Can I have a grant please??
Sorry, it's been done already - but the Romulans won't tell us how!
tosser said:
Scientists have discovered that oil may not in fact be a fossil fuel, it may come from the mantle of the earth which would mean we could have an endless supply.
It must be nearly twenty years now since I heard about the search for hydrocarbons buried way down in the mantle. The theory was that they got there while the solar system was still young and meteorites were raining down on the newly formed Earth. Some of these would have contained frozen methane.
The counter argument is that the methane would have boiled off instantly.
One of the proposed sites for a test hole was in Southern Sweden but I never heard any more about it so I assume that the project was abandoned. The trouble is that, even if we could find fuel down in the mantle, we would only have one half of the chemical reaction that is combustion. Do we have sufficient oxygen to burn it all - and what would we do with all the CO2?
tosser also said:
If you think about it methane is supposed to take 1,000s of years to form, but in a landfill site it can devolop within hours of rubbish being dumped there.
Methane contains carbon and carbon is made inside stars. Before you can have any methane at all, a massive star must complete its life cycle then collapse, blasting its outer layers into space. It is from this debris that our own solar system formed. Methane would appear when the bare atoms cooled, acquired their complement of electrons and began to stick together. So, in outer space, you need many millions of years to make methane.
Here on Earth we have a head start. Not only do we already have the carbon; we also have bacteria that feed on organic waste and release methane. They can do this within hours of their food being delivered.
