I wonder...

[destroyerj]

As I was arriving at work this morning, something triggered me thinking about fossil fuels and how we'll at some point run out of oil and so on and so forth. I had my usual thoughts about the impact it would have on people getting to work each day or school or shopping or whatever, all significant impacts, but that hopefully we've got more electric

Comments

[gregstoll]

My uninformed guess is that planes use soooooo much fuel that it would be impractical with today's technology to have big enough batteries, even if there were electric jet engines (which presumably there could be).

[abstractseaweed]

I'm sure there will be a way for air travel to continue, although it may be several decades before it's again as cheap as we've grown accustomed to (it's not expensive yet, but within a decade it probably will be). We probably won't "run out" of fossil fuels in our lifetime, but they will likely become so expensive that using them ubiquitously won't be a cost-effective option.

Crops designed specifically for fuel production could be developed to produce fuel somewhat similar to what we currently use. Advancements in batteries, solar power, human power, cloud power, wireless power transmission, and anything else we can think of could help in the much longer term.

But yeah, this is all just uninformed conjecture and I haven't heard about any of this for air travel. I'm curious to know who is doing research in that area.

[djedi]

Right, from what I've read, the solution for airplanes is two-fold. First, we won't run out of oil for a LONG time; we'll just potentially run out of cheap oil in the next 30-40 years. There's tons of oil there that we know of, the problem being just that it costs more money to extract it. So airfare would just become progressively more and more expensive.

Second, biofuels, oil from corn, is a potential solution for airlines to use once cheap oil runs out.

[fartingmonkey]

http://cleantechnica.com/2008/08/27/swift-enterprises-joins-race-for-alternative-jet-fuel/

Apparently there is even a race!