Fuel

We are all being hit by these high gas prices. People like McCain and Bush want to drill for more oil, even though it would take years for that oil to even get on the market. It is clear to me that alternative fuels are the answer, but there are so many variables involved here, and I will mention a few that you may not have considered.

Natural Gas:
I have heard that Natural Gas burns cleaner, but isn't it still harmful? And the biggest problem with it: Non-renewable. It is just another fossil fuel that isn't avaliable everywhere, and will eventually be depleted.

Bio-fuels (Ethanol, etc.):
Ethanol from corn sounded good at first, but from what I have heard it has nearly been trashed as a real solution. The problem is that it takes a LOT of corn to make a little fuel, and there are an enormous amount of food products that contain corn products. We do not want a fuel that will raise our food prices, or cause a shortage (which is beginning to happen in many countries anyway). Also, it may be good for us Americans, that grow a lot of corn, but it is not as readily avaliable to other countries, and if oil were to eventually dip below ethanol for them (ex. middle east oil might become less than ethanol simply due to shipping costs) then they have no incentive to stay with ethanol.

The most important topic I want to cover is Nitrogen fixation. Nitrogen, in its most abundant form, exists as N2 (Nitrogen gas) in the air. Nitrogen is vital for all living things (it is a necessary building-block of amino-acids) . However, only the smallest of living things (bacteria and other single-celled organisms) can actually convert Nitrogen from it's natural, un-usable gaseous form into an organic form. We cannot simply breathe in N2 and absorb it. The N-N bond is pretty hard to break. Therfore, up until 1910, all of the Nitrogen in every living thing was, at some point, converted by bacteria.

In 1910, Carl Bosch succesfully commercialized a Nitrogen fixation process that could be performed in a lab, without the use of any bacteria, and was mass produceable. The process was first patented by Fritz Haber, and is now known as the Haber-Bosch process. This was such an important find, that the two of them each won a Nobel Prize.

Why is it so important? Using this process, we can create fertilizer. Plants normally get their Nitrogen from the bacteria in the soil, and lack of Nitrogen from these bacteria would stunt their growth, but with fertilizer that is no longer neccesary, and we can pump our plants full of all the Nitrogen they need, getting maximum yield. 100 million tons of Nitrogen fertilizer is produced each year, and this fertilizer is directly responsible for 1/3 of the world population's food.

The catch is that this process requires natural gas. 3-5% of natural gas production goes into this process, and while that may not seem like much now, if we were to ever run out of natural gas, we would have no fertilizer, and 1/3 of the world's population would starve to death. It might not even take total depletion. Just an increase in demand of natural gas (if we used it to fuel our vehicles, or started using even more for fertilizer to grow bio-fuels) could raise the price of fertilizer to the point where many places in the world simply would not be able to afford it anymore.

And that is really just the tip of the iceberg. Do some research yourself, and you will likely be amazed by the many uses of fossil-fuels. From making plastics to creating electricity, fossil fuels have many important uses, and the depletion of fossil fuels would have a permanent impact on humanity, and would likely go down as one of the biggest most drastic thing to happen to the earth since the extinction of the dinosaurs.

It is clear to me that what we have to do is conserve our fossil fuels as much as possible. We must replace as many of it's current uses with alternatives wherever possible, reserving the fuel for only those processes that strictly require them. We also have no idea what kind of uses for fossil fuels we will find in the distant, or perhaps near, future.

It is like burning money to keep warm, when it could be used for so many other things, like buying wood....or simply saving it for colder days.