This thread is to collect techniques to save oil or to replace oil usage with other fuels, all in one thread.

Try not to get into debates, I just want one place for viable solutions.

No future possibilities. No government must do this. No what ifs.

Just present day solutions. I'll start.

I think several cultures have used this, but America does not.

Enclose the immediate sleeping quarters with a well insulating material.
In other words... build an insulated box around the bed so that the body heat is enough to heat the small space. Two people would heat it much better than just one.

You would not have to heat the whole home during even the coldest winters. Well, maybe enough to keep the pipes from freezing, but imagine your energy savings.

Build a still and produce your own Ethanol at home. Use solar heating if at all possible. When everyone needs wood for fuel wood will become scarce.

Use a motorcycle or moped designed to run on ethanol. You might get 80 miles to the gallon.

You likely could not make enough Ethanol to commute to work every day, but you would make enough to get to the store and back once a week.

Then again, if you car/van pooled and each person provided a gallon of Ethanol every week that might make a sustainable commute arrangement.
But, you would have to get to know your neighbors. yuk. : )

I heat my home with a wood burning stove and collect fire wood during storm season when it is on everyone's curb.

My water heats via passive solar and a coil around my wood stove for winter.

Actively seeking a 2LT engine for my toyota hilux 4x4 to convert to biodiesel

Your ethanol suggestion above is probably impractical because (shy of solar distillatoin of organically grown corn) it takes more energy to make ethanol than it is worth

I do subscribe to the enclosed bed concept though. Last winter before we had any heat at our house we kept a sheet hanging from the ceiling around all sides of our bed. The thin sheet created a membrane that definately helped retain heat.

"Shotgun" houses are an excellent way to keep cool in the hot summer. Open the front and back windows and they become wind tunnels. Also uninsulated wood walls and ceilings vs drywall with insulation behind keeps a home cooler in the summer with windows open. Most houses today are designed to be seal from the outside world and regulated with some form of climate control. Such sealed systems will fail when energy becomes scarce. A home that breathes will be in demand in the near future.

Also, subterrainian homes are something we need to work on at the local level in the future. Ground temperatures remain at 60 F which helps regulate home temperature.

With regard to the other "oil" products. Petro-fertilizer/herbicide/fungicide/etc. will have to be replaced with manual labor. The way it was in the old days. "We'll be forever loving Jah" Pulling weeds and planting seeds in the Garden.
Pharmicuticals, that whole industry is a joke. People who recognize homeopathic cures and herbal medicines will become the shaman and doctors of the future.

Totally on tangents now... but horses. There will be a lot more horses in use as transportation.

You also have to look at largers scale issues during this upcoming period. Warfare over declining reserves is going to make a real nasty and bloody global political situtation.

We've also backed ourselves into an epidemic in the making in so many categories that large scale fatalaties in upcoming years is eminent. Bird flu, monocropping leading to swarms; the interplay of meat markets, massive livestock production factories.

Well I have to go back to work... things are going to be very different. There will be a lot less of us. And I doubt anything we type here will be seen again shy of say a few print outs left in the rain.

I just try to find solutions to what it is I am going to do that day when I wake up and the power has been out for a week across half the nation, and now there are angry mobs in the street. I think this is where my interest in katanas comes from.

Sri Oracle.

PS

Something else I am working on is converting my home sewer lines to a biogas digester that produces burnable methane. About enough to cook with... not enough to heat a home by any means... though it would be if you incorporated waste from your donkey and cow.

[edit on 16-10-2005 by Sri Oracle]

About 70% of the fuel is use for transport (car & semi trucks).

I don't know the exact ratio of personal cars vs 18 wheeler trucks shipping goods all over the country, but I suspect it is not a negligible amount (for trucks I means).

Moving goods by rails bed rather than trucks is said to be 3 to 10 times more fuel efficient (moving it via water line is even more).

So, there is an urgent need to remove some of the transport going across the country from trucks to train, final local delivery will still be by truck, but at least the long distance will be done more efficiently.

You know, to some extend, it use to be like that before the "just in time" era, having warehouses on the road (destroying them and adding to road hazard, where company save money, make more profit, perhaps better prices for consumers, put at large dumping the problem to society).

If we do that, maybe it will means having your book from Amazon within a week rather than 48 to 72 hours, you can adjust to that.

But it will require investing into railroad that were left abandoned for years.

I think this will be a big step forward.

[edit on 16-10-2005 by PopeyeFAFL]

A friend of mine uses filtered vegetable cooking oil to run his 4 wheel drive, he swears by it and it dosent suffer from a loss of performance. As far as im aware he didnt even have to have the engine modified in any way. It doesnt work on petrol engines but will work on almost any deisel engine.
With a minimum of effort i think that the majority of deisel cars and trucks could use vegetable oil.

Last month, I did an experiment:

I just filled up the day before Katrina hit (at $1.07 CDN per liter), then all of a sudden the price went to $1.47 (even $1.54 at some place), so I decided to strictly use my car, just to go to work and do the grocery, near my place on my way home, to see how long I will last with one tank.

It was a big boring time, but I lasted almost 4 weeks (less 1 day). So I was thinking, that even if the price was to triple (to $150 CDN per fill up), I could reduce my travel quite a lot, and have the same fuel budget as before (except far less moving around).

Now I'm back to normal (approx 2 fill up per month at less than $50 CDN per tank, for a Pontiac Vibe 2005).

My point is this one:

I spend maybe half of my moving going from place to place to get the grocery, search or look around for the best price on stuff, or go to place to place to look at the best product to buy, get the best deal, etc.

It sound to me, when I see all these cars on the road and filling the parking lot of the big shopping mail, that this is very inefficient.

There are probably some good that you purchase on a repeat basis (maybe half of your grocery) and you don't really need to see them in real (your favourite cookies or soda pop, etc.), unlike buying banana or meats.

So for me, having all these family hopping in their cars to go the various shopping mail to purchase that portion of weekly good, has to be very inefficient in term of energy & time.

We need to get serious about using the Internet & clever distribution system. Maybe House need to have a secure box attach to them where delivery mini train on wheel will circulate around suburbia and deliver the good into that box (than it will be push inside the house, to avoid theft).

I'm not sure exactly what that business case will be, but the way we operate right now, will have to change.

Probably retail business will be reluctant, because lot of purchase are done at the spice of the moment (impulse buying) rather than conscious purchase that will occur if more and more people use a system like that.

I just now realized that my two previous posts were more on saving energy then ways to replace oil (the original post).

I read somewhere that if you add up all the alternative energy available right now, this will amount to 4 millions barels per days, compare to the 85 millions that the world is using right now (the USA is using 25% of that alone).

I think you need to bring on everything you can, solar, wind, hybrid car, (forget ethanol made from corn, it is an energy looser, so is the hydrogen car that is just an energy storage system, to produce the hydrogen in the first place, you need oil, at least this will be the case most of the time in the US) and nuclear energy, there will be no way around.

We will have to learn how to have a much smaller footprint in term of energy than now, not just finding an alternative energy and keep doing the thing we are doing.

We need to powerdown, if you like.

Having all necessary goods coming from thousands of miles away is insane. Rethinking our purchasing habits will have to go hand in hand with finding an alterante fuel.

Originally posted by PopeyeFAFL

it is an energy looser, so is the hydrogen car that is just an energy storage system, to produce the hydrogen in the first place, you need oil, at least this will be the case most of the time in the US) and nuclear energy, there will be no way around.

Theres ways around that we could use solar,wind,water to create the hydrogen and then its oil free. Infact Pond scum has a metabolic switch that allows it to convert water into Hydrogen. You could have massive farms of GM pond scum pumping out hydrogen for pretty much free.



[edit on 16-10-2005 by ShadowXIX]

I'm not sure if this is true, but Ive heard that we could use hemp, I asked my teacher and she just laughed at me, now i know hemp is used for making clothes, like flax, but ive been wondering if we could in fact use it for a replacment to oil, if we could it would be a very cheap solution, with little to no pollution, I think. And to make it even better, we could just grow it in feilds, easy as that.

but dont like call me stupid or anything, i seriously have no idea if hemp would work, so please help me out on that one

Also, i remebered seeing that post of the transportation of goods taking up 70% of the oil used everyday and that trains and such would work better, well that made me think, why not use megnetic trains, to the least of my knowledge they dont use oil, just hit the switch and it zooms away, so not only would it be saving oil, it wouldnt be polluting, and it would be getting to its destination alot quicker

I think that America as a whole is one of the main contributers so the oil problem and pollution, along with capitilism becuase ive read in a book i just got a few days ago called "forbidden truth" it said that even though America only has about 5% of the worlds population, it consumes about 40% of the oil
now that just way to much, I dont even see how we could be using that much, is oil like a new secret drug now? known only too America, do we have people sneaking around alley ways toking up on oil? geeze

flywheels

especially fused silica flywheels will replace conventional batteries in the future.

I've been looking into creating some form of flywheel that ran off of hot water generated by my rooftop passive solar, that in turn ran my ceiling fans during the summer.

We need to learn how to engineer a biological being which can poo out crude oil and eat dirt and drink salt water. This would put our oil concerns at rest. But since this won't be available for another 10 or so years, why not dig deep holes in the earth, thow our organic matter into and help speed up the geothermal process that makes oil in the first place? Why not? We will waste more oil than will harvest in return.

Face it, the end is here, run to the hills!!!!

I have been wondering how to avoid gas too. So far I am designing a steam powered, turbine, cylinder, electric hybrid to allow me to use any energy source. Ofcourse it looks like it will turn out to be a monstrosity but thats how I like it. I hope to be able to use: coal, wood, waste oil, alcohol, hydrogen, ect.
Maybe I could build it in 5 or 10 years?
,HVF

Hydrogen is a good way. Hydrogen powered cars run good, but you'll have to wait a while before you can drive one, the cars aren't very affordable now, but they should be affordable soon. As for the electric power needed for cities, Hydro-electric dams are decent and hydrogen-powered turbines would be good, if someone would develop the technology...

Frosty did you check out that link I posted?

I think an important thing to consider is not just replacements or alternatives for things derived from oil , but also the other things essential to your survival that will become scarce in the aftermath of a Peak Oil situation: -

Food for example: If the oil fed infrastructure collapses, there will be no food in the store to buy, because there'll be no way of getting it from farm/factory to the store because the hauliage and transport companies will have gone out of business, as will the farms and factories themselves. What little food there is will be most likely rationed by govts.
You can help yourself greatly by cultivating your own allotment, growing your own vegetables and fruits, and maybe even keeping some animals. I've just bought a house purposely with the biggest back yard I could afford (10x50 yards) with open heathland and forrest to the rear. Next year it will be be producing all manner of fruit and vegetables, and I'll plant an orchard on the land at the back.
Other ways to be prepared might include keeping a stock of non-perishables and staples such as pasta, potatoes, rice etc. and being ready to hunt/poach animals from the wild - back to basics!

There's some good suggestions already here regarding heating

Originally posted by sardion2000
Didn't anyone check out the link I posted above?

Yes, and it sounds like an incredibly promising way of producing plants for food and medical use. It doesn't mention though (or I missed it) how high thses minature farms would need to be stacked to match the yield of a 100 acre field. Any idea how high these thing would be?