Reviews for Practical Process Research and Development

The average rating for Practical Process Research and Development based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2020-12-31 00:00:00 David Brau Robert Zubrin is an engineer-polemicist best known for advocating exploration of Mars and points beyond. Here, he wants to free the US from it crippling dependence on foreign oil. His cheap and elegantly simple approach? A federal mandate that all new cars be flex-fuel, able to run off of ethanol and methanol in addition to gasoline. I picked up the book because I share his goal; after reading it I'm convinced in his approach. The book covers a lot of ground, some of it poorly. His chapter downplaying global warming is hopelessly out of date and relies on non-credible sources like Patrick Michaels. This may be a smart sop to his target readership, conservatives, but it hurts his credibility and neuters a strong argument in favor of his proposal. Likewise, Zubrin is wrong to dismiss conservation and hybrid cars as an important part of any solution. Zubrin's explanation for flex-fuel footdragging in DC is also inadequate. He says it's a knee-jerk libertarian revulsion to mandates. But no one ever accused the Democrat-controlled Congress of being overly libertarian. In fact, we already incent flex-fuel cars by lowering the CAFE standards for carmakers that sell flex-fuel models. A flex-fuel mandate would effectively remove this financial fillip, making carmakers more opposed to a mandate than they would be otherwise. Similarly, Zubrin criticizes some lawmakers for wanting the mandate to apply only to cars made in the US, rather than all cars sold in the US, without acknowledging that WTO rules may preclude the latter. Free trade is a bitch, huh? Zubrin is also a bit shaky on international economics. If his knowledge of ecology and statesmanship (as he calls it) are weak, he makes up for it with his engineering known-how. His description of chemistry of ethanol/methanol production looks, to the eyes this former ChemE, dead on. I can also recommend most every other aspect of this book. The stuff about fuel supplies in wartime was new to me, and riviting. The chapter on the hydrogen hoax is a righteous smack down. And the discussion of Brazil's enthanol economy, the negative geopolitical effects of our oil dependence, and the international development benefits of switching to ethanol/methanol are all eye opening. A good contribution to the policy debate, soon to be eclipsed (I hope) by Thomas Friedman's upcoming book, Hot, Flat, and Crowded.

Review # 2 was written on 2020-10-01 00:00:00 Yachika Jackson I first became familiar with Robert Zubrin through the Mars Direct plan, advanced in his 1992 The Case for Mars, which would see a highly economical spacecraft travel to Mars where crew members would live and work for a year and a half, this extended stay and the return flight enabled by the exploitation of Martian resources in situ. As someone on my friends list who reviewed the book said (and my apologies if I've got the phrasing wrong), the plan seems to be approximately technically correct but really doesn't supply a convincing reason as to why someone would like to travel to Mars, never mind (as Zubrin suggests) colonize it. Still, it was an entertaining enough read when I picked it up as a teenager. I picked up Zubrin's latest book, Energy Victory, with similar hopes. Most of the chapters were inspired by the reasonably informed technolibertarianism that I'd expected, although Zubrin did seem to be upset about hydrogen fuels and electric cars, did seem to be strongly in support of ethanol, and did make references the the profits earned by states like Saudi Arabia without investments in human capital. It was only when I neared the end that things took a decidedly odd turn, as Zubrin began talking about how developing alternative fuels was essential for the West because the Muslim East and its ideologies and religion failed to nurture individualism and freedom nearly as fully in the Judeo-Chrstrian West and how this belief system oppositional to us incorporates Baal and Marduk and how we're facing--in Islam as a whole or in Wahhabi Saudi Arabia, I honestly got confused at this point--must defeat by these malign forces by developing alternative fuels so as to deprive fundamentalists of money and-- I don't go looking for this kind of stuff. Really. All I was looking for in Energy Victory was a mildly provocative book-length treatise on energy futures directed towards a popular audience. This kind of conspiracy-theory geopolitics really is everywhere.