Ok this is a purely hypothetical question, but assume that at some time in the future we find large hydrocarbon reserves an asteroid in the asteroid belt (a really large one, that can't easily be moved closer to earth), at a time where terrestrial oil resources are scarce and the price of oil has mushroomed. There would be a strong demand to mine the reserves on the asteroids, but how would we get at them? And more importantly how would we get them back to earth? If you want a large supply of oil you couldn't really use space-bound supertankers because the cost would be astronomically silly.

Could you fire the oil out of some sort of gun? That would get the oil to earth orbit but the oil would diffract at the 'barrell', meaning collecting it would be seriously hard work.

Would it be possible to assemble the oil into a ring in earth orbit? That would be a sight to see.

Cheers,
Zac.

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the solar system

I may be wrong, but finding an asteroid with hydrocarbon deposits may be next to impossible. All the coal, oil, and oil shale deposits here on the Earth are the result of bio-mass. Not sure about Natural Gas.

ETA: Natural Gas is also a fossil fuel.

I have no opinion on this (not qualified) but there is a growing number of people who are disputing this (originally from a Wall Street Journal article):

http://www.oralchelation.com/faq/wsj4.htm

Interesting. Any geologists on the board?

Well, there is an astronomer mentioned:

And...

I'm no geologist, but I did sleep at a ... no I slept at home last night, never mind.

I wonder, since extracting the oil probably leaves cavities. I would think some or a lot of the "refilling" is oil being squeezed out of the cracks in the surrounding rocks. But's that's an off-the-cuff thought.

I seems remember water is frequently pumped in to maintain pressure. But is that done in the desert?

Edited to typo a correct.

Well; one of the articles did mention that they have evidence that it is coming from below and not from the sides.

So; maybe we have a lot more underground, so, why not use it up? After all, the major byproduct is only CO2.

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This ties in with this thread.

All the same, if we assume for the moment that non-biological processes create oil, those processes are still highly unlikely to be at work in the asteroid field.

I will say though, at this time, the evidence in favor of abiogenic oil is slight and circumstancial and the evidence against quite convincing.

I would love it if abiogenic theory was correct though.

Well, "surrounding" does count down. As I said, it was just an off-the-cuff thought.

Me, too, sort of. It would be nice if we (civilization) would quit screwing around and develop some truly modern energy sources. But in the meantime, I sure would hate to see civilization collapse through lack of oil.

I like my toys as much as the next person.

It also makes colonizing and/or terraforming Mars a bit easier if it is non-organic and naturally occurring as I'm assuming Mars would have just as good of a chance to have some too.

It's a bit of a stretch to call Gold a "respected" astronomer. He had a long history of dubious theories even before "The Deep Hot Biosphere". The small handful of ideas which were sort of vindicated get all the publicity, but there were hordes of ridiculous misses for every supposed hit.

Regardless, getting back to the original topic there's a lot of methane in outer space and it's certainly not biogenic. For example, Titan has lots of methane. I can't see any plausible scenario for importing hydrocarbons to Earth, though. It makes more sense to use solar energy to create biodiesel or maybe even hydrogen fuel.

A la Pennzoil - Marzoil.

I know you´re posing an hypothetical question, but I think that by the time we´re able to freely hop from asteroid to asteroid and call the solar system our living room, oil will have disappeared from the energy matrix.

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That's right.

And even if we have a hydrogen economy at some time in the future, there will be no advantage in mining hydrogen from Jupiter or even Uranus and sending it to Earth; the energy consumed in extracting it from a gas giant's gravity field and sending it across the solar system would be more than the energy obtained from the hydrogen itself, so it would be better not to bother.

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by the time we could even regularly get to the asteroid belt without too much trouble, we would have evolved past the need for dirty hydrocarbons. we will have developed "free" energy sources that give us enough energy to do whatever we need to do in any given week. everyone would be happy, and we would only work to better ourselves, with no thought to profit. we would have the ability to transport across the solar system without even getting on a ship of any sort.
it would be the perfect utopian Star Trek universe.

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....and so you stumbled on the solution for terraforming Mars: Build millions of SUVs from the native iron-oxides all over the surface and let global warming serve a human purpose!!!!

or maybe just a bunch of hydrocarbon burning power plants.

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Hydrocarbons, yes. Oil, no.

Carbon in various meteorites is generally insoluable. That is, you're not going to get oil out of it. Well, it would be easier to get oil out of various rocks you probably have around your house than most meteorites.

Supppose it is only Jupiter's gravity that is the issue?

I'm thinking of a one-time expenditure of energy to put a big hollow rock in an orbit that regularly passes close to Earth and to Jupiter (some micro-corrections needed from time to time, perhaps). This expenditure is amortized over the lifetime of the rock (hopefully centuries or more)--and the per-load cost is that of getting the hydrogen from jupiter to the rock, and from the rock back to Earth.

Todd

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Todd (Bowie, MD, US, North America, Earth, Sol System, Vega region, Local Bubble, Orion arm, Milky Way Galaxy, Local Group, Virgo A Cluster, Virgo supercluster, the universe in which spock is clean shaven)

Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum sonatur.

personal page: http://blog.astrosketches.info

And what does that solve?
Whether it is a rock, or a balloon, that mass of hydrogen still needs to accelerate out of Jupiter's gravity. If it is transferred from the rock, then you still need to restore the rock's speed by the same amount as you would have without the rock anyway.

And; you have moved all your acceleration costs from being amortized over many journeys to a single, huge, up-front expenditure to get the rock in the proper orbit.

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I don't think you quite understood tdvance's idea. He's asking what the deal would be if Jupiter's gravity were the only issue. Your retort is that his proposal doesn't solve the issue of Jupiter's gravity. Well...duh! That was the whole point!

The answer tdvance was looking for is that the energy required to lift the hydrogen out of Jupiter's gravity well totally overwhelms the potential kinetic energy which the hydrogen could provide.

In the upper atmosphere, Jupiter's escape velocity is around 60km/s. That requires an input of 3,600 megajoules per kg of hydrogen lifted (assuming perfect efficiency). In contrast, the energy of the hydrogen fuel is only 143 megajoules per kg.

Apparently not. Tdvance's post sounded to me like a proposed solution to counter the problem that eburacum45 pointed out.

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The asteroid-go-round (AGR) would not solve the problem of delta-v (change in velocity) needed to match the speed of the hydrogen carrier to the speed of the AGR. Even if the AGR gets very close to Jupiter, it's still whipping by at a tremendous speed. If the hydrogen container is somehow lifted to orbital hight, it's still left unmoving in the path of the oncoming AGR and wham! oops, there goes all your hard work. To accelerate a large mass of hydrogen (or anything) enough to move it away from Jupiter and toward somewhere else, whether it's carried on an AGR or not, still requires the same amount of energy.

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Actually, in a sense we do have a free energy source already, for at least the next few billion years. We have this huge fusion reactor, which requires no work at all on our part, sending out a phenomenal amount of radiation in our direction day in and day out. We already harness it to some extent, but simply using that energy more effectively will probably give us essentially unlimited power if we want it. For example, building solar panels in space and beaming the energy down to the earth. There may be technical difficulties, but it's by far a more realistic solution than doing something like mining hydrogen on Jupiter or trying to find hydrocarbons on asteroids.

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Yes. And even if the scenario were feasible and fuel was imported to Earth, an equal amont of oxygen would also need to be imported to burn it all. Otherwise we'd end up with all our current O2 tied up in combustion products.

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"If this were play'd upon a stage now, I could condemn it as an improbable fiction."
Shakespeare, Twelfth Night
"The Mayan symbol for "book" looks a lot like a triple hamburger, but I've never seen them claiming it as proof the Mayans had Big Macs." - KaiYeves
"Distance doesn’t matter much in space, where if you just start a thing off with the right kind of shove, sooner or later it will get where you want it to go." -Frederik Pohl, Mining the Oort

That would also add to sea level rise, as burning imported hydrocarbons or hydrogen would make water.

But be careful beaming energy down to Earth; too much and you mess up the heat balance of our little world.

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We still have the whales…………….

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As Noclevername pointed out, there is very little advantage to “Cyclers” (as they are called). Ignoring the Jupiter gravity well for the moment, if you are going to accelerate your load of hydrogen to catch up to the cycler (AGR), you might as well continue on to Earth with the tanker. Same on the other end. And, you save having to transfer the hydrogen twice.

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This may be offset by the reduction in greenhouse gas output from an all-solar (mostly) economy. Depending on the means of transmitting, it should be possible to minimize the waste heat lost during beaming. More energy kept in useable form means more efficiency and better cost-effectiveness, too.

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"If this were play'd upon a stage now, I could condemn it as an improbable fiction."
Shakespeare, Twelfth Night
"The Mayan symbol for "book" looks a lot like a triple hamburger, but I've never seen them claiming it as proof the Mayans had Big Macs." - KaiYeves
"Distance doesn’t matter much in space, where if you just start a thing off with the right kind of shove, sooner or later it will get where you want it to go." -Frederik Pohl, Mining the Oort