Northeast Passage Becomes Viable Trade Route

There's a lot of money in converting one form of energy to another even if it results in considerable loss of energy. Take electricity for example, there is a lot of loss of energy in heat when converting coal to electricity. This is even more "wasteful" when the electricity is used to make heat, such as an electric stove, oven, or furnace. This loss of energy is recovered in the convenience.

With oil shale the loss of energy can be a non-issue if the source of the energy is in an "inconvenient" form. People like to drive cars. People like to drive cars for distances that are currently impossible for electric cars. If we can somehow find an "inconvenient" energy source that can be turned into a "convenient" one like gasoline then we have found a way to maintain the convenience of our gasoline powered cars.

From my understanding the means to remove the oil from the oil shale and oil sands is by heating the oil until it is liquid enough to boil away (to be condensed) or liquified (to be filtered out). This heat could come from a number of less convenient energy sources like natural gas, solar, geothermal, nuclear, or just burning some of the oil shale to recover the oil from other oil shale. This heating of the oil shale to recover the oil could be from heat that might otherwise be wasted from some other energy production or industrial process, turning an energy negative process into an energy positive one.

Some very real limitation of technology, physics, economics, etc. means that we will be burning fossil fuels for the next fifty years even if that means energy lost in the process. Airplanes need kerosene, cargo ships and trains need diesel fuel. The operational lifespan of these vehicles is on the order of decades. The infrastructure needed to support any other kind of fuel does not yet exist and will also take decades to shift. The US military thinks fifty years into the future on what weapons they build now. That means, barring some kind of war on the scale of WWII, what is on the drawing boards now will be in production in ten years, be used for thirty, and kept in reserve for another ten. This time scale seems nearly universal from combat boots to battleships.

There is no way that I can see moving away from an economy that does not run on hydrocarbon fuels in less than fifty years unless someone is already designing airplanes that run on liquid hydrogen, prototyping nuclear powered cargo ships, and planning out transcontinental electric rail lines.

This loss of energy is only a theoretical one. In reality, or economically speaking, there is energy gained in that energy is gained in a form that is useful (or just more convenient) and therefore valuable. The economics of energy is more complex than the physics. This is especially true when politics is added to energy and economy.

Source: http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdotScience/~3/mXeLZ0ulhpQ/northeast-passage-becomes-viable-trade-route

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