Well, it'd take more than a few to power a whole ship and crew, but yeah. You can theoretically use any source of energy to produce energon, even sonic vibrations, but unless you're drawing from a relatively concentrated source- something that could normally be used for power- the refining process would wind up using more energy than it produced.
Our main Earth-base was on the bottom of the ocean, so a lot of what we got was hydro-power. We were able to produce enough to sustain ourselves that way. I assume the Autobots used geo-thermal similarly, since their original Earth base was in a volcano.
Whatever you do, don't use coal, though. For some reason, energon derived from coal is incompatible with Cybertronian systems and makes your joints lock up. We found this out the hard way.
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[Who knew?]
Well, it'd take more than a few to power a whole ship and crew, but yeah. You can theoretically use any source of energy to produce energon, even sonic vibrations, but unless you're drawing from a relatively concentrated source- something that could normally be used for power- the refining process would wind up using more energy than it produced.
Our main Earth-base was on the bottom of the ocean, so a lot of what we got was hydro-power. We were able to produce enough to sustain ourselves that way. I assume the Autobots used geo-thermal similarly, since their original Earth base was in a volcano.
Whatever you do, don't use coal, though. For some reason, energon derived from coal is incompatible with Cybertronian systems and makes your joints lock up. We found this out the hard way.