Posted on 11/28/2007 9:56:31 AM PST by cogitator
I agree with that also. IMHO, ethanol in general is not a good solution since it's distribution is problematic.
The government is schizophrenic on this issue.
On the one hand they are pushing white elephant mass transit systems nobody wants to use, and municipalities are demanding light rail train boondoggles.
On the other hand the Federal DOT is getting ready for smart highways where individually owned automobiles are self driving. Essentially a personal robot chauffer.
They are not thinking about the big picture they are just thinking pork.
We pay the same prices for oil the Europe pays, it is a global fungible commodity. Europe gasoline prices are much higher primarily because of much higher taxes.
Take UK for example, until this past year they were an oil exporting country with the North Sea production. Look how much of their gasoline (petrol) prices are tax.
Fuel Tax in the UK
http://www.petrolprices.com/fuel-tax.html
I’m sure there is a way to get off of OPEC oil if we had the will. I have seen none with GWB.
Right now the high oil prices is helping pay for Iraq and I don’t expect that to change ant time soon.
The high gas prices are making all of us think about what to do which is good.
The answer will be a little bit of everything.
Electric cars, can get around 100MPG, coming in 2008
But we need cheaper batteries. Lead acid batteries with 1/3 the mass and 5X the life and greater storage.
We need better solar cells too.
Don’t forget the need to burn all types of fuel more efficiently.
http://paultan.org/archives/2006/03/14/bruce-crowers-6-stroke-crower-cycle-engine/
By using a second water injector, used every other power stroke, a gasoline engine can get around 40% better fuel efficiency and the engine needs no radiator!
But there is always Smokies hybrid vapor engine.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smokey_Yunick
http://grantwcooper.com/smokey.html
Why not you seem to trust OPEC? An illegal organization by the way, which no one seems to get upset with. Maybe because our oil price goes up with theirs?
I think OPEC is just short of pure evil but at least others can compete, with the government we have less choice.
I know the Green Luddities like to claim that they stopped the development of nuclear power in the US, and most people believe that is true. But the fact is they didn't stop nuclear. Market forces stopped it in the US.
In the 1960s and early 70s when the electric power industry was booming, utilities were building new plants to meet anticipated demand growth. They were building both nuclear and coal fired plants. When the recessions and economic downturns of the 1970s and early 80s hit, those demand growth projections went out the window and many utilities found themselves looking at decreased demand instead of increasing demand as many of their former "big customers" in heavy industry such as steel closed up shop. They simply didn't need all of the new capacity they had planned and that caused a host of plant cancellations long before Three Mile Island.
Then in the 1980s under Reagan, the government loosened the market controls it had on natural gas causing the supply of gas to rapidly increase. Electric utilities began installing gas turbines and building gas fired combined cycle generating plants at a small fraction of the capital cost of baseload coal or nuclear plants. Fuel costs were much higher of course than coal or nuclear, but the low investment and quick ROI allowed electric utilities, and eventually "merchant" generators like Calpine and Enron, to incrementally add megawatts to the grid without 'betting their company' on massive bond issues and long term construction cycles.
Today, the market is again changing. Natural gas prices are not nearly the bargain that they had been and supply is getting tight in some areas. In addition, much of the existing coal and nuclear baseload generating fleet (built between the 1950s and 70s) is aging. And with a good economy, demand is increasing. Hence we again have a market for new large coal and nuclear plants in the US. They will be built over the next 10-20 years.
Jane Fonda and Ralph Nader may think, (or at least want you to think) that they killed nuclear, but they didn't. At worst, they were a pain in the ass who simply made a lot of money for lawyers. But they didn't drive the US market.
Those 100 or so plants that are operating in the US now (and operating very well I might add) are all that the US market demanded. The markets in France and Japan are very different than the US --- mostly because they don't have the coal and gas reserves that we do.
Also keep in mind, more nuclear plants will do absolutely nothing to reduce our addiction to oil. They are a great way to make electricity. That is all.
bfl
I don't know about GWB, but I sure as hell don't see the will to get off OPEC from most Americans. I hear a lot of bitching and moaning, but nothing involving will power.
If we all cut our driving miles by 10-20%, OPEC would be forced to back down. Instead, we just drive more miles every year and then bitch more about the price of oil.
It's hard to blame a president for not doing what we refuse to do for ourselves.
Another way of saying nuclear? Cute. (Fusion would be great, too.)
Accurate point in #43. Thanks.
Yes, me too, since I only found the review today. At least the idea is intriguing.
I guess the author should check into how well Centrally Planned Economy's have worked out for places like the old Soviet Union and Cuba.
Our problem is too much Govt interference in the Energy markets NOT too little.
Which indicates you have no clue at all what you are talking about. Guess you never bothered to look into the President's Energy Plan that the Democrats fillbustered. But that right, for the pseudo Conservative Democrat Party moles hanging round here, facts don't matter. They have their talking points as issued to them by Hillary's campaign and they are sticking too them.
That is positively idiotic. The High Price of oil does nothing to put money in the US treasury. To claim the high price of oil has anything to do with Iraq is about as divorced from reality as it is possible for any supposed thinking human to get. The price of oil has absolutely NOTHING to do with "paying for Iraq".
Simply put you statement above is either pure idiocy or an out right lie.
From that entry
In the particular experiment when a bosenova was first detected, this procedure caused the BEC to implode and shrink beyond detection, and then suddenly explode. In this explosion, about half of the atoms in the condensate seem to have disappeared from the experiment altogether, remaining undetected either in the cold particle remnants or in the expanding gas cloud produced.
And then there is this http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1713017/posts
If the Bosenova can be produced at room temperatures and if the atoms don't disappear but instead convert to momentum in the expanding gas cloud, then voila', matter to energy conversion. All you have to do is put the expanding gas cloud through conductive coils to extract the energy.
Yeah, I know those are very big "ifs" but it's a more interesting concept than your average "let's do fusion or fission" post.
If you check the source link at the bottom, you will see another example of why Wikipedia is not a good source of information.
Still, when I was growing up I would read Heinlein's novels about such things and there is nothing in the laws of physics that says it can't be done. In fact, fission and fusion both rely on doing just that on a small scale.
I was using you to voice my frustration at the use of wikipedia as an information resource, sorry about that. I use wiki sometimes, but usually to find the links at the bottom to the actual information source.
Cheers.
Actually the best way to have energy victory is to directly convert matter to energy.But you would have to get the matter to be moving pretty quickly to...say...the speed of light...squared!
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