Newt and Conservative Republicans: $2.50 gas.
Your choice.
Posted on 02/28/2012 7:55:36 PM PST by sheikdetailfeather
February 28, 2012
Newt Gingrich's lower gas price promise
2012 candidate guarantees he can lower gas to $2.50 a gallon and explains how he will do this
(Excerpt) Read more at foxnews.com ...
I think that he can do it with a combination of more US drilling, coal-to-oil, shale oil,and refining tar sands.
Newt here. Newt Now. Pay Less.
I liked that speech.
His idea is a good one. Very doable.
Newt and Conservative Republicans: $2.50 gas.
Your choice.
Must be something going on with gas. 3 of the 7 stations I pass on my way home had cars packed to the street. the price per gAllon was $4.27 - $4.29.
One station had gas for $4.33 and zero cars in the lot. Another had gas for $4.37 and again, zero cars in the lot.
4.11/4.23/4.33 in Sacramento, CA. per a text message I got about an hour ago from a friend.
High Gas Prices: Obama’s Half-Truths vs. Reality
Newt is not even promising pre-Obama gas prices.
Gas was well under $2/gallon when Obama was elected. It was $1.61/gallon in December 2008, according to gasbuddy.com.
Newt is right. Unchain oil production, refinery production, nuclear and coal for power gen and we will be sitting on an oil glut just like after the Oil Embargo. Add in natural gas as motor fuel. It is coming and will prove to lower fuel costs, with one caveat unless nobama gets re-elected We have so much NG and we have the easy technology to use it for cars and highway trucks fuel. Brazil did it with sugarcane ethanol because they had an abundance of sugarcane, we can do it because we have an abundance of natural gas. The rest of the world, with access to NG will follow and we will see a gigantic drop in prices for oil.
I filled my car up in San Jose before going home. Don’t recall the price but thought “ that was almost a hundred bucks. I could swear it cost $60 to fill up just a month ago.”
The National Petroleum Council (NPC) estimates that 1.124 trillion barrels are still left underground, of which 374 billion would be recoverable with current technologies.
I can’t stand O’reilly any more, because he thinks he’s smarter than Newt, or most other guests, and he always seems to think he knows what is going to happen in the future in certain scenarios, such as the future of the oil supply and prices.
I think right now we are in one of those “perfect storms” which will be partially cleared when Hugo passes and when something shuts up the Iranians.
The folks who know will tell you we are not in a oil or fuel shortage, its the panic speculators and real shortage in refinery capacity in the USA. Some minor refinery in Washington has a fire and the whole nation gets a dollar a gallon bump, WTF??? It has been impossible to get any new refinery permits for years.
Both are just some of the reasons I am 100% for NG fueling for transportation. Its plentiful, its currently distrbuted almost everywhere, doesn't require much refining and its a fuel we would probably never run out of. Want a shock? Look up Hydrolyzed Methane. Just off our coasts is a million times more methane than we have ever burned. Not to mention methane itself is a for real natural renewable fuel source.
Sorry about the “overboard” rant!
I worked in exploration in the oil fields on 5 different continents. There is not "one magic" bullet to solve the problem. However, the United States sits on a vast amount of energy if the government would let us drill and mine it. We have enough energy stores to be totally independent. The following is a list of energy stores available for us to use. The stores are listed in the order of ease of extraction and thus price.
1. Brakken and Eagle Ford shale oil that is extracted via horizontal drilling. Time frame to bring on line is just a few months from drilling to production. This one is easy and most of the infrastructure is in place to do this today. We currently need many more drilling rigs to exploit this. We can build them. In addition there are other source rocks like the Brakken and Eagle Ford in other basins in the United States and for that matter other countries of the world. One problem is our refining capacity. Due to the EPA we have been unable to bring new refineries on line. Thus ironically if we were energy independent it would be necessary to export the oil for refining and then shipped back to the United States as gasoline and diesel etc.
2. Shale gas from the Utica shale,the Barnett shale the Eagle Ford Shale and other basins in the United States. Today the cost of an equal energy value of gas is 1/7 that of an equal amount of energy from oil. To put this in perspective a gallon of gasoline is selling for about $3.00 today excluding tax and profit. The same amount of energy from natural gas is selling for about 50 cents. The reason for this is simple. We have found more damn natural gas than we know what to do with. This natural gas can be converted in liquid fuels suitable for internal combustion engines or we can use it as compressed natural gas to fuel our vehicles. The engineering for this is nothing new and is very simple. It will take considerable infrastructure investment to brink it to market if used as high pressure compressed natural gas. It will also take considerable infrastructure investment to deliver this to market as gasoline. This would involve major refinery changes to go from gas to liquids. Once it is a liquid the normal distribution system is the same because it is now gasoline. However, there are energy losses in the conversion of gas to liquids. Thus the most energy efficient method would be to use high pressure natural gas for the internal combustion engines.
3. Offshore drilling in the Gulf of Mexico, off the East Coast and West Coast of the United States. There is a hell of a lot of oil and gas there but the United States Government has not allowed us to drill much of it.
4. Shale oil from mined deposits in Colorado, Wyoming and Utah. There is 200 years worth of oil there. The mining and extraction is easy. The conversion to usable petroleum product takes a lot of energy. We would have a 82% conversion efficiency meaning that of 100 % of the energy value of the product 18 percent went into the mining extraction and conversion of the shale oil to a usable product. See following link for numbers on this and surprisingly these numbers are from the DOE. Scroll down to figure 1 for these valuesDept of Energy document
5. Coal to gas and liquids. We have hundreds of years of coal reserves. From coal we can make, gasoline or use it as a direct fuel in power plants. The original coal powered plants were very dirty. The new plants are clean and efficient. Coal to gas has considerale energy loss in conversion. It take a lot of energy to do this but the energy loss is only 35%. The one thing that nuclear power plants are very good at and very efficient is the production of heat. If nuclear power plants provide the direct heat (no conversion to electricity) the efficiency of coal to liquid and or gases would be very effective.
6. Wind power and Solar Power is here and is available. It can not compete in a free market. It is too damn expensive. If you need to subsidize it, the free market can give you other sources of power cheaper.
7. Nuclear Power I put last for political reasons and not cost or engineering. Nuclear power plants are expensive as hell mostly because of govenment red tape. However, this source of power is actually very cheap and the disposal problems of spent fuel rods is not an engineering problem but a political problem. This form of energy production needs very tight regulation and monitoring. The reality of politics makes this source of energy problamatical. The recent disaster in Japan with their nuclear reactors was a result of poor engineering and lack of government standards. The reasons for the poor engineering was basically the fact that the supervisory function of the government was bought and sold by the operators of the plants.
The solution is engineering and financial. Any nuclear plant must be designed to "FAIL SAfE" if there is no coolent or electrical power to the reactor. The nuclear plants in Japan did not have this. This is not a problem of engineering but a problem of cost. If the producers of nuclear power were totally responsible for any accidents and this responsibility backed by insurance this would never happened. Insurance companies would not insure an instalation with such poor safety engineering.
If global warming is driven by CO2 (it really is not). We are doomed even if the United States did not put one damn molecule of CO2 in the air. China and India have far exceeded us in this department and will continue to put even more CO2 in the air as they become great industrial nations. The reason I mention this is that each and every complaint about increased power from carbon based energy is attacked because of global warming. Global warming has not happened in the last 12 years and the CO2 levels have continued to increase. ???????????????
Great Post!!!!
Most of the nation’s oil shale reserves rest under the control of the U.S. government – a legacy of a 95-year old Congressional Act. In 1910, Congress passed the Pickett Act, which authorized President Taft to set aside oil- bearing land in California and Wyoming as potential sources of fuel for the U.S. Navy.
I hate to say this because I know it’s going to end, but I filled up yesterday for $3.01 at Sam’s in Aurora, Colorado. On the radio the other day, they said it’s because we have been getting it from ND and Canada and that we have refineries here. I was nearly on “E” and it cost $60 to fill up. That’s not great, but so much better than what the rest of the country is having to pay.
What’s going to end?
Our relatively cheap gas here in CO. They said on the radio that we will be going up soon in line with the rest of the country.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.