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[gigabytelord]

What about hemp? It's a damned weed that'll grow in a huge number of climates and can produce a huge amount ethanol and bio diesel. It's drug effects would be irrelevant in a world without significant coal and oil stocks.

[cadbrowser]

Yes, but in this setting steam power has been removed thus removing railroads as a viable alternative.

It was removed? I don't think so...you need to re-read the original post, See Below:

Hundreds of Newcomen engines are in use already, and the new design by Watt is also starting to spread.

Newcomen Engines are steam engines. I am not understanding how some are saying that the railroad expansion would suffer during the same time frame.

We'd also have the American South producing fuel, fuel the North would massively depend on for its military industry. So instead of industrial North steamrolling the south, we would see huge problems in keeping the North running without southern alcohol. Also, while "Cotton dipolmacy" was a complete failure, "Alcohol diplomacy" would see France and Britain running to support the south, not unlike we see the US running towards any middle-east oilfield in peril these days...

That is an interesting point of view with regards to the North vs South. It is hard to wrap my mind around what this could entail. On one hand I could see Alcohol Diplomacy favoring the South as you are putting it, thus enabling a vast powerful political entourage (if you will) whereby the majority (North & South) would be in favor of slavery to a certain point. Once the industrial ball gets rolling (assuming for a moment the power of the South in this setting was more than enough to curb the idea of a Civil War) then, like I said before, slavery would become an antiquated system falling out of favor for machines over time. Spoiler

This would be like comparing the scenario from the perspective if the U.S. South was responsible for the majority of the global output of oil (instead of the Middle-East) back during that same time frame.

What about hemp? It's a damned weed that'll grow in a huge number of climates and can produce a huge amount ethanol and bio diesel. It's drug effects would be irrelevant in a world without significant coal and oil stocks.

Well sure, I mean, any leftover bio-waste from harvesting can be converted into Bio-Diesel. Hemp would be an excellent source. I'm not so sure as that is a pretty bold and specific claim to make regarding the THC relevancy. If, we take the ethanol based alternate history as focus, I would imagine (South being powerful) that there would still be restrictions for Hemp (moving forward in a historical fashion from the perspective of the "Religious Right") and could possibly be utilized in a highly regulated and controlled fashion. There are some species of Hemp that have an extremely low THC content.

[Purple]

Yes, but in this setting steam power has been removed thus removing railroads as a viable alternative.

It was removed? I don't think so...

He got rid of coal and oil. And without coal and oil as fuels he might as well have gotten rid of practical steam engines.

[Elheru Aran]

Yes, but in this setting steam power has been removed thus removing railroads as a viable alternative.

It was removed? I don't think so...

He got rid of coal and oil. And without coal and oil as fuels he might as well have gotten rid of practical steam engines.

Are you perhaps missing completely the fact that as long as you can make steam you can use a steam engine? No, they won't necessarily be as fuel-effective as a fossil-fuel powered steam engine, but they'll work just fine. The point of this thread is to explore alternative applications of technology without using fossil fuels.

[Simon_Jester]

Big stationary engines are still practical. The problems are:

1) Lack of coal and oil makes transportation hard, because there's no cheap high-density fuel to power mobile engines on ships, cars, trucks or planes.

2) In the late 19th and the 20th century, this in turn means that infrastructure development becomes harder- less steam shovels, bulldozers, or the like.

3) In turn, weaker transportation infrastructure makes it harder to create a profitable industrial economy. Goods are harder to ship from one point to another. Powered tractors and farm machinery are harder to get into operation and more expensive to run. Things like the automobile industry have to struggle with reduced demand and don't become such powerful drivers of the mass-production industrial economy.

4) Meanwhile, demand for fuel, specifically for heating, plays a major role in making it possible for people to live in industrial environments. Pre-industrial population levels are already high enough in some regions to deforest whole countries in search of firewood to keep houses warm. What will those people do after the last tree in, say, England is chopped down? Firewood can be imported at considerable expense from overseas, but this greatly increases the cost of living in a place like England compared to relying on cheap domestic coal.

All these things won't necessarily stop the rise of industrial technology, but we should be mindful of them.

[Purple]

Are you perhaps missing completely the fact that as long as you can make steam you can use a steam engine? No, they won't necessarily be as fuel-effective as a fossil-fuel powered steam engine, but they'll work just fine. The point of this thread is to explore alternative applications of technology without using fossil fuels.

Are you perhaps missing the broader context of the quote you are commenting on? It was a very specific comment regarding the applicability of said steam engines to railroads and pointing out that with oil and coal removed practical steam engines for railway use probably no longer exist. Specifically referring to the kind of rapid and fuel efficient railway traffic that drove the industrial revolution forward.

[madd0ct0r]

er guys.

coal and oil haven't been eliminated. 10% of the origional reserves are still there. espcially for coal, that's not an insignificant amount of energy.

[Simon_Jester]

Yes, but...

For one, you didn't actually make it clear whether every existing coal deposit just winds up with 10% as much coal in it, or whether 90% of all existing deposits (by volume) totally vanish. Also, if you poof 90% of the coal, you also poof a lot of the most easily, economically accessible coal- granted not all of it, but enough to greatly disrupt things.

Remember that part of the reason we exploit coal and oil so heavily now is that it was easier to get to them in the past. You literally used to be able to dig a well ~100 meters into the ground and have a gusher of oil under pressure shoot up out of the well. Coal used to be found in deposits on the surface in some places. The sheer abundance of these resources in the 19th century, and the ease with which they could be extracted without costly heavy machinery, had a lot to do with their utility and price.

Make them harder to get at, and they become less useful for bulk consumption. And if they are burned heavily, well... the tiny size of the total supply means they'll be more or less gone within a generation or two. Indeed, we'd probably run out of near-surface coal and oil before ever developing the technology to dig deeper for it, or to do things like build offshore oil rigs.

[Guardsman Bass]

Digging deeper might not be the problem, although you might see less environmentally friendly ways of do it. At least where the labor isn't expensive (not England), you could do open-pit mines and unsafe mining shafts. Getting coal for steel is probably going to be valuable enough to make that worthwhile.

4) Meanwhile, demand for fuel, specifically for heating, plays a major role in making it possible for people to live in industrial environments. Pre-industrial population levels are already high enough in some regions to deforest whole countries in search of firewood to keep houses warm. What will those people do after the last tree in, say, England is chopped down? Firewood can be imported at considerable expense from overseas, but this greatly increases the cost of living in a place like England compared to relying on cheap domestic coal.

That's why I mentioned larger-scale migration to the Americas earlier in European history. Not everywhere in Europe and elsewhere is going to get deforestation at the same rates, which means you'll still be able to theoretically build ships even if Great Britain is well on its way towards near-total deforestation. Which is not to say that you won't also see large-scale misery going in tandem with larger migration, especially with the Little Ice Age - lots of people will die for lack of fuel. But you'll see as much migration as possible before that, and a lot more pressure on the political leadership in places like Great Britain to export people out of the country.

Of course, it's worth remembering that the OP didn't just specify a lack of most traditional fossil fuels. We do have a lot more peat to work with for fuel, so it's not as if we're stuck with burning wood until we figure out how to extract and use petroleum.

[Elheru Aran]

To go in another direction.

I wonder if we might see a change in building methods? A transition from wood timber-frame buildings to adobe or stone? Fired bricks will be far more expensive with less wood available to fuel the kilns. Perhaps in areas where adobe is impractical, people would start going underground. Who knows, England might develop some authentic hobbit-holes of its own. One thing that you probably would see a lot more of with this environment though is that older buildings would either be much more carefully preserved, or completely taken apart for recyclable building materials. We might still have some historic structures that have IRL been gone since the 1800's.

Concrete is certainly a possibility, but don't you have to break down the original material (limestone, I think?) in some fashion? I believe they used to burn it, but I could be wrong...

We would definitely not develop structures such as skyscrapers or buildings with metal reinforcement for some time unless a method of cheaply producing mass quantities of steel comes out. Wood may take its place, but there are some limitations to building with wood that steel doesn't have. The method of laminating pieces of wood to make pieces such as arches may come into far more common use. I'm thinking large public buildings, industrial buildings, that kind of thing.

[Guardsman Bass]

You might see closer-built and bigger buildings in the cities because of that. It's more efficient to heat larger buildings built close together as opposed to a sprawling set of homes and tenement buildings. New York City in general tends to be much more energy- and heat-efficient because of that.

I just realized that Japan might have some interesting relevance here for how to run a prosperous, advanced proto-industrial economy with a paucity of coal. Pre-Industrial Japan had coal supplies, but aside from one or two mines most of them had poor quality coal and were located in difficult-to-extract regions. Most of the fuel for the Japanese populace came from wood for centuries.

If you can get that, then I'm confident you'll eventually industrialize. Water power will advance to the point where you've got industrial water-powered manufacturing as IRL, and if we develop generators and turbines then someone will figure out how to use water, wind, and in some parts of the country early solar-thermal power to generate electricity and use it to power machines and transportation systems. Nuclear Power would be a godsend for such a society, and spread like crazy once it's practical.

[Elheru Aran]

Japan really didn't have large-scale metalwork, though.

One of the biggest differences between pre-industrial and industrial is that you have that step from metal being largely a commodity produced by small foundries on a small scale, to large quantities of metal (namely steel) being poured and formed on a truly massive scale. This is very hard to do without a fuel as efficient and hot-burning as coal. Charcoal *might* do it in enough quantity, but you need the wood for other things too...

Proto-industrial is one thing, but we're kind of starting there anyway, aren't we?

[Elheru Aran]

Here's some hard numbers from some guys who really should know what they're talking about (a blacksmithing forum):

http://www.iforgeiron.com/topic/31997-b ... l-vs-wood/

Bituminious and anthracite coal: 11,000 to 15,000 BTU

Highest available charcoal noted (cypress and yellow pine): 10,000 BTUs (approximate).

Per cubic foot, wood has half the BTU's.

Here's another source for alternative fuels (PDF):
http://www.afdc.energy.gov/fuels/fuel_c ... _chart.pdf

Granted, that one has a lot of petroleum derivatives, but there's ethanol, methanol, biodiesel, hydrogen, etc on there as well.

Yet another good source that covers wood and such as well (PDF):
http://www.hrt.msu.edu/energy/pdf/heati ... 0fuels.pdf

From this latter it appears a surprising source of fuel may be rubber itself... 32-34 million BTU's per ton versus 26 mil in anthracite coal. Respectable. I think we just found our bio-fuel for driving industry, and it's renewable even.

[gigabytelord]

From this latter it appears a surprising source of fuel may be rubber itself... 32-34 million BTU's per ton versus 26 mil in anthracite coal. Respectable. I think we just found our bio-fuel for driving industry, and it's renewable even.

Holy... the rubber farms would have to be massive..

[Elheru Aran]

From this latter it appears a surprising source of fuel may be rubber itself... 32-34 million BTU's per ton versus 26 mil in anthracite coal. Respectable. I think we just found our bio-fuel for driving industry, and it's renewable even.

Holy... the rubber farms would have to be massive..

Well, yes. The farmable areas of the tropics, and then some, are probably going to turn into massive belts of rubber plantations around the planet. This does mean that tropical countries are going to suddenly become rather valuable colonial real estate. They might fare a little better than they did in OTL... or they might be far, far worse (think the exploitation of Belgium on a nigh-global scale).

[Guardsman Bass]

Proto-industrial is one thing, but we're kind of starting there anyway, aren't we?

Yeah, the scenario is broken in that regards. If it's already 1800 England and similar to our own except for much reduced coal and oil deposits and much more peat, then either this is just unrealistic and Alterna-England shouldn't look like this, or England in this scenario has just run through all of its serious extant coal deposits and is now facing a gigantic crisis of energy.

The latter might be solvable. Great Britain at that point is a relatively rich industrial power that might be able to finance a massive trade of coal imports in the short term from scattered deposits across their empire, or from other countries with less-mined-out coal reserves. Moreover, the drop-off in available coal supplies presumably wouldn't come as a shock by 1800, and they'd already be trying out the above, plus potential alternatives in burning crude oil from the Middle East and elsewhere (more whaling).

From this latter it appears a surprising source of fuel may be rubber itself... 32-34 million BTU's per ton versus 26 mil in anthracite coal. Respectable. I think we just found our bio-fuel for driving industry, and it's renewable even.

Is there any catch to it, aside from potentially greater tropical imperialism and the higher cost relative to IRL petroleum?