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Itoldyaso

Quite some time ago I wrote a column suggesting that old rubbish dumps would be the gold-mines and oil-wells of the future.

Now this article seems to lend weight to my theory by showing that plastics such as supermarket shopping bags may be used as fuel.

Although the energy return (after processing) is not too much over unity, the fact that there is a net energy surplus could be very important if we reach a stage where conventional fossil fuels are so close to exhaustion that they become unfordable.

I'm also picking that other discarded polymers would yield a far richer and more easily extracted source of hydrocarbon fuel than do the humble shopping bag.

Although technologies such as fracking have extended the life of some hydrocarbon sources and enabled others, we're still facing a finite source of such fuels and eventually they will become too expensive to consider as transport fuels.

While very impressive advances have been made in the area of electric cars, there's still a very long way to go in this area and these machines are not without their own environmental impacts.

Here in New Zealand we tend to forget about the massive pollution and long-term damage that electricity generation is causing elsewhere in the world.

While most of our power comes from clean renewables such as hydro, geothermal and wind -- other countries are simply not so lucky. China burns enormous amounts of coal and there are a surprising number of nuclear reactors scattered across the developed world -- each creating its own toxic pile of waste.

The only renewable energy sources available to many of these countries are wind and solar -- both of which have the enormous problem of inconsistency. Until we can come up with some practical method of large-scale power storage between generation peaks, such systems are only ever going to be supplementary to existing combustion or fission based energy sources.

On a more positive note... I see that scientists have taken another microscopic step towards the creation of energy via controlled fusion.

According to this PopSci story, the amount of energy released by the laser-triggered fusion reaction of deuterium and tritium has reached new highs -- but still falls far short of that required for practical use.

Still... another decade should see everyone driving around in fusion-powered (flying?) cars -- right?

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