Anablog

FAE extraordinaire and good ol’ boy Jon Dutra sent a link to this video of a gasoline-powered robot. This thing is really great. It shows what I have been saying all along—when it comes to energy density, it is hard to beat liquid fuels. Gasoline has 36 kWh per gallon. Even if an internal combustion engine is 33% efficient in converting heat to power, it is still 11 kWh of energy and that is way more than any battery pack of the same size and weight can supply. Check out the video, it is really cool. Be sure to watch long enough to see the guy kick the robot and have it recover. Class act, Boston Dynamics.

On a similar note I see the head of powertrain engineering for GM has come out saying that gasoline engines will be the primary vehicle power source for the foreseeable future. Notice that this guy is not the head of research or a scientist or a silver-tongued grant-sucker or some college professor. He is an engineer. Engineers have to create technology that makes economic sense. That is why fuel cells and electric cars are not yet ready for prime time. I am not saying they will never make sense, it is just that in 2008 and for the next few decades, they don’t make much sense other than niche applications.

This brings up considerations like peak oil. Peak oil is a concept crated by Luddites and fear-mongers who invariably want to change everyone’s behavior to what they consider a more moral and virtuous pattern. Me, I think there is nothing more beautiful than a soccer mom loading her kids into a big safe SUV and driving around town in order to maximize her choices in food, clothing, education and work. I’ll take freedom and choice over living in a cave any day. So the BS about peak oil is that it is a straw man—some absurd concept that does not really prove any valid point. Will we run out of oil? Well, that depends on your definition of oil. What about cooking oil? Is that peak oil? No? It burns just fine in my buddy’s Mercedes diesel. I can see that if oil is defined as Saudi Arabian light sweet crude, then yeah, one day we will run out of that. But it won’t matter because we will have some other liquid fuel to put in our cars. Maybe it will be extracted from shale; maybe it will be made from hemp. The concept of peak oil belies a stunning ignorance of natural resources and their extraction. Read a little Julian Simon. It is not like there is a big hollow chamber and we drain out the oil until it is gone. There is a whole range of extraction technologies that can get ever more oil out of the ground, albeit with a higher price. All the hysterics about peak oil is just rhetoric and Chicken Little BS. It is a good thing our ancestors didn’t have a concept like “peak flint”. After all, they knew that flint was the very best and most precious resource for making knives and spear pints. A society that purposely limited its use of flint would have fallen behind and rather then develop iron tools, they would be so busy regulating and hording flint that they would just get wiped out by the tribe over the hill who had enough sense to use all the flint they could get their hands on.