Terry Blanton <[email protected]> wrote: But, have you considered how much cheaper it will be to pump oil from the > ground using a LENR source? :-) >
I have, actually. Pumping oil does take a lot of energy, but it is basically overhead for the oil company. It reduces the total amount of oil they can deliver, but it does not cost them anything. They don't have to pay for the oil. This energy is similar to the energy overhead it will take to operate a cold fusion device -- the energy used to trigger the reaction and run the control electronics. As long as the output from a cold fusion device is ~10 times greater than that overhead it makes no difference and costs no money. The only advantage to a higher ratio is you can make more compact devices with less waste heat. I am pretty sure that ratio will soon be more like ~100. After you finish pumping and transporting oil with oil tankers or pipelines, you then have to refine it. At that stage, the overhead cost of machinery and production with cold fusion will be about the same as with depolymerization, as I said. There is no advantage to natural oil. On the contrary, the depolymerization people have already earned as much as the oil company will earn, because they have a contract with the municipality to treat their garbage. In the next phase, you have to load the refined oil products -- gasoline or feedstock chemicals -- into trucks and transport it to the customer sites. Oil companies now have gigantic, centralized refineries close to where oil tankers offload, or where pipelines terminate. So the refinery is far from the customer, and you have to pay a lot to transport the product, by trucks or railroads. With cold fusion the synthetic oil equipment will eventually be installed right at the customer site. The only thing transported to the customer factory will be air and water. No transportation involved. No truck drivers or pipelines needed. Water is available everywhere at a cost much lower than any other chemical, and air is everywhere on earth. (Mars or the Moon will be a different story.) Depolymerization from garbage can also be decentralized more easily than conventional oil refineries can. Every city and town has a stream of garbage. - Jed
