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(when gasoline hits $5/gal in the US, odds are excellent that we'll all be driving less)

Didn't we say that about $3/gal too?

http://money.usnews.com/money/blogs/flowchart/2008/3/7/the-repercussions-of-4-gas.html

Just a few years ago, auto-industry futurists thought that $3 gas would be a game-changer, unnerving consumers and forcing dramatic changes in their choice of cars and driving behavior.

That article's also a halfway decent read by the way.

Gas is pretty bad now, but it's been worse and we still consume quite a bit.

Highest Recorded Average Price:
Regular Unl. $4.114 7/17/2008
DSL. $4.845 7/17/2008

Saying we'll consume less when we hit $x/gal is absolute bull-hockey. We'll continue to drive as much as we always have until an alternative becomes cheaper (electric if we get cheaper power ie nuclear? excellent public transportation maybe?) or until we literally *cannot* drive.

That's likely true, but the OP was talking the Middle East, not OPEC.

2009 imports from OPEC = 1,743,143 (thousand barrels, 40.8% of total imports)

non-OPEC = 2,523,967

Canada = 904,914 (46.1%)

Middle East (only) = 743,399

http://www.eia.doe.gov/dnav/pet/pet_move_impcus_a2_nus_ep00_im0_mbbl_a.htm

The U.S. could, not without some pain and effort, stop buying from the Middle East countries, and as its total OPEC imports are steadily dropping every year, it eventually will wean itself off most of that oil over time as its imports from other sources, mostly Canada, increase.

You are probably referring to Hubbert's Peak. His prediction was for peak production in the US, and was mostly on target (which is admirable for a prediction 50 year ahead). The curve has been adapted to several regions, with correct predictions. The peak global production, using Hubbert's curve, is predicted for 2005, and it seems to have indeed ocurred.

Mind you, peak production isn't the same as "running out". There's still a lot of oil out there. It's just that now it's clear we must find an alternative, and we have a couple of decades left.

Of course. Human civilizations are about 3000 years old, but industrial civilization is only 200 years old. Only in the past 100 years has large-scale resource extraction, large enough to make a big dent in potential supply, been feasible. The really rich ores, like veins of copper with over 1% metal, are long gone. Over the next century, lots of stuff is going to run out. Oil production peaked in 2005. There hasn't been a major new energy source in the last half century; just improvements on previous ones.

The "free market will solve all problems" crowd was insisting that peak oil would never happen. But it did. The price of oil has tripled without an increase in supply.

Dependence on Mideast oil? That's bullshit. The majority of U.S. comes from Canada, Mexico and Nigeria. It could stop importing oil from the Mideast tomorrow if it really wanted to, but doesn't probably for political reasons.

http://www.eia.doe.gov/pub/oil_gas/petroleum/data_publications/company_level_imports/current/import.html

The one full of ... ignorance ... is you. The market for oil is integrated worldwide. Supertanker transport is virtually free. Which means that every barrel sold anywhere affects the market on the other side of the world.

As a thought experiment: Imagine the Arab world goes into a huff and decides to stop exporting oil. Europe and Asia therefore have to turn to the next-closest source, Nigeria/Mexico/Venezuela. Since many more people are now bidding for the Nigerian oil, they can afford to put prices up. Since the oil market is so efficient (remember, transport is cheap), prices go up massively even in Podunk, Alaska and Armpit, Texas. The American economy crashes without ever having imported a drop of oil from the Middle East. QED.

Dependence on Mideast oil? That's bullshit. The majority of U.S. comes from Canada, Mexico and Nigeria. It could stop importing oil from the Mideast tomorrow if it really wanted to, but doesn't probably for political reasons.

http://www.eia.doe.gov/pub/oil_gas/petroleum/data_publications/company_level_imports/current/import.html

Do the math. Soybeans have a yield of 48 gallons/acre per year.

The US uses 378 million gallons of gasoline per day.

378000000*365/48=2874375000

This means you need 2874.375 million acres if you used soybeans to grow the same amount of fuel. Which is 4.491 million square miles. Well the US has a land area of 3.794 million square miles. So even if you razed the entire US and turned it into a giant soybean field you would not be able to manufacture enough oil.

This is just something I wrote on the back of a napkin. I did not include the higher volumetric energy density of biodiesel as a factor in the calculations. But I did not include the fertilizer manufacturing costs either. Nor did I add the other uses of petroleum to these calculations.

You can use other things than soybean oil. Like peanuts, rapeseed, or jatropha. But you will still need to devote more land area to fuel production than the total land area used for farming in the US to produce this amount of fuel. Crop fuels can only supply a fraction of the total demand.

If you use crop fuels you will need to reduce fuel consumption, reduce the number of cars and miles driven, or use some other measure of rationing the supply. Since we live in a market economy this simply means the price of fuel will rise a lot. The middle class would likely stop being able to own cars.

The end result is that what you will see in the market, if we run out of conventional petroleum, will be oil made from tar sands, natural gas to liquids, coal to liquids, or some other cheap fuel. Not vegetable oil.

Oh and ethanol is even worse.

How many geothermal plants would the US need to produce 100 exojoules?

I can ask the same about LFTR plants. It takes the same amount whether they're nuclear plants or wind farms if they are of the same size. If it takes 1000 wind farms then it takes 1000 LFTR plants. Exo? Do you mean exa, (peta X 1000)? I see Google returns both.

If we extracted geothermal energy at that rate how long would it take to deplete the extraction sites and how many new wells would we need to drill every year?

Well let's see... The Geysers Geothermal Resource Area in Napa and Sonoma Counties has been producing geothermal energy since the 1960s, between 40 and 50 years. The Department of Energy, DOE, says the oldest nuclear power plants in the US still operating was licensed in 1969. They are licensed for 40 years, and license renewals are for another 20 years. Now how long do geothermal energy plants last? The geothermal plant at Larderello, Italy has been operating since 1904. Or 1913 according to wiki. The Wairakei Power Station in New Zealand has been operating since 1958. That rounds up the top 3 oldest geothermal power plants. Each one is older than the oldest nuclear power plant still in operation.

Also let's look at Old Faithful Geyser in Yellowstone, it was named in 1870, so it must of been erupting regularly by then.

If there are any more objecting questions I don't know what to think, except maybe you object to geothermal. Maybe because you own shares in nuclear power but not geothermal. Me, I don't own any shares but if I were to buy energy shares I'd buy geothermal, solar, or wind but not coal, natural gas, or nuclear power. At that, I'd try to buy shares in Chinese manufacturers, maybe Brazilian, Indian, and or Russian. BRIC.

Falcon

It is all just a matter of being dependent on other countries natural reserves vs. funding it with tax money.

Bullshit!!! Coal gets more federal subsidies than any other energy source in the US. That is unless the cost of war is included, in which case it's petroleum. Nuclear power is second, unless farm subsidies for corn, which is a bad feedstock, based ethanol is included. Each receives multiples of billions of US dollars in taxpayer money. Yet until Obama became president all alternative source, except the fore mentioned corn based ethanol, had to share about $1 Billion. Rep Edward Markey brags "My Climate Bill 'Has Huge Subsidies For Clean Coal! Huge!'" In it he lists some of the subsidies various energy sources get. And Chevron CEO Dave O'Reilly agrees to lobby with Sierra Club to end coal subsidies. The article originally published in Reason: Free Minds and Free Markets" then published online by CATO Institute: Individual Liberty, Free Markets, and Peace titled "Nuclear Energy: Risky Business" starts with "Nuclear energy is to the Right what solar energy is to the Left: Religious devotion in practice, a wonderful technology in theory, but an economic white elephant in fact (some crossovers on both sides notwithstanding)." Another CATO article, Hooked on Subsidies, first published in "Forbes" says how the Nuclear Power industry is as the title says, "hooked on subsidies". Even in countries where nuclear power is big, China, France, India, and Russia it's state actors or the government and not the market that decides what gets built. In brief the US Department of Energy answers the question How much does the Federal Government spend on energy-specific subsidies and support? By fiscal year 2007 all forms of renewable energy got $4.9 billion in subsides, $3 billion of that for ethanol. All other sources had to share the other $1.9 billion. Now how much did coal get? Refined coal got about $2.4 billion and with another $854 million on other coal. And nuclear power got $1.267 billion.

You say you're in Germany. The article Spain slashes solar energy subsidies laments that Berlin decided to continue to use nuclear power. And that Madrid slashed solar subsidies. Another says the same in Germany, Germany to cut subsidies for solar energy .

Personally I'd rather see all energy subsidies eliminated. ALL!!! Let a freer market decide winners and losers not government. What governments can do is make sure the markets are kept open as long as they can compeat, and they pay all their costs including external costs.

Falcon

I find two faults with your observations. The first (isn't really yours as it's so common) is equating the 5% of energy use as foreign oil with "only". Seems to me that combining the energy used to generate electricity and that used to transportation (and industrial/other "energy uses") is flawed in that it's too general of a statement. Pulling that 17% of our fuel out of our transportation infrastructure would be a plenty big problem without stockpiles/rapidly increased production.

And at the same time (still the first fault), you even downplay nuclear's contribution, since it's purely for electricity currently (ignoring a few cases where the heat does get used in other ways). Nuclear is 19-20% of the total electricity we use in the US.

Additionally, you seem to maybe be a bit behind on the nuclear news front (but I approve of your sources... so maybe we just interpret stuff we've both seen differently). Recent polls of Americans have shown increases in favorable views of nuclear power (especially the last 5 years), and that rating's over half* **. Additionally we're kind of on track to build new reactors. There are at least a dozen currently in the approval process (expensive and tedious in the US, alas), with construction starting sometime in the next 5 years (probably sooner, but NRC is slooowww).

*(my source is a non-free nuclear industry mag "Nuclear News", alas)
**Fears are more evident when discussing the more general "radioactive stuff" subject, e.g. more negative poll responses..

That's actually a misconception. Oil from "Persian Gulf" countries only accounts for 17% of foreign oil consumption, which is a mere 51% (same link) of our total oil usage, which is only 59% (Liquids + Natural Gas) of our total energy consumption. That makes Persian Gulf oil a mere 5% of our total energy usage. Our Nuclear usage is more than that (8%, second link), and everyone knows we hate Nuclear in the US.

The connection between our interests in the middle east and our oil needs is tenuous at best. What we really need the balls to do is build more Nuclear plants. Here China is again a great example, with 23 new reactors presently under construction.

That's actually a misconception. Oil from "Persian Gulf" countries only accounts for 17% of foreign oil consumption, which is a mere 51% (same link) of our total oil usage, which is only 59% (Liquids + Natural Gas) of our total energy consumption. That makes Persian Gulf oil a mere 5% of our total energy usage. Our Nuclear usage is more than that (8%, second link), and everyone knows we hate Nuclear in the US.

The connection between our interests in the middle east and our oil needs is tenuous at best. What we really need the balls to do is build more Nuclear plants. Here China is again a great example, with 23 new reactors presently under construction.

Oil production of Iraq: ~2.5 million barrels per day .

Oil production of Iran: over 4 million barrels per day.

Therefore: totaloil leaked into Gulf, over a period of two months, was less than two day's production for a mid-ranking oil-producing country. To put it another way: you'd have to take out 15 rigs of that size to have the same effect on world supply as a major war in the Middle East.

If coal becomes a limited supply they can always burn oil.

Oil is a lot more scarce than coal at the moment. After oil becomes too expensive for anything but airplanes we will probably still have another 20 years of coal supply.

Electric cars currently do not remove the requirement to burn oil.

Only one percent of electricity in the US is from oil. 48% is from coal, 21% is from natural gas, 20% is from nuclear, 6% is from hydroelectric, 1% is from wind power, and 1% is from burning waste wood and garbage. The states with the most expensive electricity use mostly natural gas and/or nuclear. The states with the cheapest electricity use coal and/or hydroelectric.

A "year or two ago" you were very wrong, and are still very wrong.

Burning coal for electricity produces an order of magnitude more CO2 than oil does. Coal isn't going to run out anytime soon.

PS: No, that doesn't mean that it's perfectly OK to drive a gas guzzler. It's *attitude* towards energy that counts, and the "it's OK so long as you can afford it!" attitude is what's causing the USA to use an order of magnitude more energy per person than the rest of the developed world.

I crunched the numbers on this a while ago ( http://www.mobileread.com/forums/showpost.php?p=619831&postcount=11 ).

Given that each hardcover book releases ~8.85 pounds of CO_2 ( http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/emeraldcity/2008/06/paper-vs-paperl.html )

And a Sony ebook reader (I used the weight of my old Sony PRS-505, 9 ozs.) requires ~16 pounds of CO_2 to manufacture (CO_2 footprint for energy: http://www.eia.doe.gov/oiaf/1605/ggrpt/carbon.html role in manufacturing: http://www.energybulletin.net/node/49730 and ratio of 12 to 1 for energy usage to weight: http://www.epa.gov/oms/climate/420f05001.htm )

Reading 3 books on an ebook reader (which otherwise would have been purchased as printed books) puts one ahead (of course in a library situation this is ameliorated by the sharing out of the book among many readers).

That said, I mostly read public domain classics which I get from sites like www.mobileread.com

William

Oil-burning power plants don't use refined gasoline for electrical production, at least power plants that are "main" producers on the grid mixed with other electrical sources. Perhaps as back-up power supplies that are used intermittently during peak power demand, but not something that is intended to be used on a daily basis. In fact, most of what a power plant uses is the left over "sludge" from the refinery that can't be used in other circumstances or has very light refining.

Refineries use a variety of energy sources to power their facilities as can be seen on this chart: http://www.eia.doe.gov/emeu/mecs/iab98/petroleum/fuel.html

Regardless, what isn't being shown is that it takes several gallons of crude oil to produce a single gallon of gasoline... provided that the refinery is using petroleum at all in the production of its products. Many use electricity, coal, and even natural gas for the energy needed for the refining process. My point is that the refining process consumes an incredible amount of energy and you certainly consume more energy through that process than is even possible to extract from the gasoline when it is finished.

Another chart that I can show you is here: http://www.need.org/needpdf/infobook_activities/IntInfo/ConsI.pdf

On page 3 of this document it blatantly states that nearly half of the energy stocks produced by a refinery are consumed in the process of refining petroleum. It also states that petroleum refining is currently the largest consumer of energy in American industrial processes. It isn't a trivial amount of energy.

My point is that those who complain about hydrogen being incorrectly compared to gasoline and other "energy" stocks as a fuel source aren't really comparing all of the actual costs involved and that hydrogen as a fuel source may even come out favorable from a pure production viewpoint... or at least not nearly as bad of a source. You also have to separate the notion of an energy source from a fuel source... which is two different things entirely.

Besides, petroleum has too many beneficial uses that sticking it into a furnace of some kind and burning it (speaking broadly including an internal combustion engine) seems to be the most wasteful thing you can do with the stuff.

BTW, I never said that it was uneconomical to burn two to three gallons of crude oil to produce a gallon of gasoline. I just suggested that the raw energy used in the processing of that fuel is more than can possibly be extracted from it when it is finished.

What's wrong with nuclear as an energy source? Nuclear could completely replace fixed sources of energy production that currently rely on carbon fuels. Hydrogen could be used for mobile applications where a nuclear reactor is not needed or feasible.

Unfortunately, I think you underestimate the scale of what you are suggesting. Nuclear supplies about 20% of the United States' electrical power. But electricity is itself only about 40% of our total energy consumption - the rest largely being transportation fuels, heat, and industrial. In total, the US consumes approximately 100 quads (quadrillion BTUs - a terribly arcane unit. It's also about 105 exajoules) of energy. Nuclear right now supplies about 8.3 quads, and that's all electricity. To replace all the rest with nuclear would require a twelve-fold increase in nuclear capacity - at least. To replace just our petroleum consumption would require enough nuclear to roughly double the entire US electrical grid.

Is that really how we want to solve our problems?

I was listening to a BBC program on the radio yesterday where some researcher was saying there has never been an incident like this with hydrogen fuel cell technology. Well now there has. He also made other claims, such as that hydrogen is "emissions free". I would like to remind everyone who bought lines like that in the past that hydrogen is made using electricity with a thermal efficiency (including compression) of around 45% at best.

I would also like to remind everyone that the majority, around 64% of the worlds electricity is produced using fossil fuels.Don't believe the hype

oil rich middle east country says its 'short of energy' and needs nukes to make electricity.

you buy that? really?

sometimes things are really simple. this is one of those cases.

or, can you please explain the 'need' for nuclear power in a mid-east oil rich country?

http://www.eia.doe.gov/cabs/Iran/Oil.html

according to that, they have more oil than they know what to do with!

wtf! why is the world allowing them to create ww3? seriously. they are on record saying they will destroy 'the west' if given a chance.

this is lunacy. glass parking lot? not likely - unless its in the west, a few decades from now.

In the grand scope of things, 1B gallons over that time span is piss in the ocean.

1B gallons / 31 gallons per barrel = 32,258,064.5 barrels. Thats less than the US consumes in 2 days.

Somewhere around 60% of our electricity usage is simply moving heat around. Either producing it where it's cold or removing it when it's hot. There are far more efficient and cheaper ways to do this.

http://www.eia.doe.gov/emeu/reps/enduse/er01_us.html

Stop the heat moving; insulate everything. Internal and external walls. Roofs, floors, refrigerators/freezers. If not vacuum panels, research into the production of really cheap aerogels for building, DIY materials and domestic devices would probably do more to reduce electricity usage and bills than solar panels.

There will be 50,000 US troops there through 2011; no doubt after 2011, there will still be troops there. If you need something to compare this to, you know the "yellow / orange / red" alert the idiots flash on tv? This is like that. A superficial change in announced status that means absolutely nothing.

Iraq is presently seventh among all nations in the amount of petroleum products exported to the US. That tells you exactly what will happen with our troop presence: nothing that would allow that status to diminish by dint of action by the natives.

I'm undoing some moderation, but whatever.

This is the freedom that people have with gasoline cars today and it is nothing more than delusion to expect that, on a large scale, people would ever willingly give that up.

But I think it's also crazy to say that electric vehicles becoming popular means that we are give that up. How many households with two vehicles can you think of? Granted, there are plenty with only one (including myself; I live alone), but at the same time, according to this, the most common number of cars to have is three, and 2/3 of the US has either two or three vehicles.

That site puts the average number of cars per household at 2.28 (this may exclude households that have none); this 2001 DOT study puts the average number at 1.9. According to it, the average number of cars in households with only two people is still 2.0.

Does every one of those cars have to have the freedom to take substantial road trips? No way. Probably a majority of 2-car households could change one for an electric and basically never notice that they can't take long road trips using both cars at the same time. One electric car for going around town and one gas car for long distances would probably cover the usage needs of 2/3 of 2-car families. And that's not even considering ones with more cars. The only thing that gives me pause there is families with, say, a pickup truck for hauling around town and a standard sedan for longer trips -- neither of those roles would be easily taken by an electric vehicle.

Here is a pretty little graphics for American subsidies.

Hate to rain on the parade, but if you compare that graphic to a breakdown of energy sources, it's pretty obvious renewables are getting a much larger subsidy per unit of energy produced. I dunno why people who make charts like yours insist on comparing numbers in such a skewed way. It's like claiming the Johnsons with a food budget of just $250/mo are somehow more frugal than the Smiths who have a food budget of $750/mo. Leaving out the fact that the Johnsons live alone, while the Smiths have 20 people living in their household. My belief is you can convince more people with intellectual honesty than by tricking them with statistics.

Agreed on the stuff about pollution and externalized negatives.

The article gives almost no information about what the funding is used for other than: renewable good, fossil fuels bad. If you look at the current renewable power production in the US it is 7% of the total and coincidentally the total funding worldwide for renewable energy is roughly 7.5%. While you can argue about giving more funding to renewable energy, they article gives zero information about what the money is used for. The funding could have been used for implementing cleaner technology on existing power plants (oddly enough they won't disappear overnight no matter how much you want them to). Just this year the EPA passed Boiler MACT II which will require large capital costs to install additional environmental equipment.

If you want to make the largest impact possible to reduct emissions you can't neglect your current power grid.

You seriously underestimate.

A U.S. Gallon of gasoline weighs roughly 6 pounds and a U.S. ton is 2,000 pounds. Simple division gives you a "ton" of gasoline as something like 333 gallons. Gas prices can be pulled from http://www.eia.doe.gov/petroleum/data_publications/wrgp/mogas_home_page.html . Back of the envelop gives you an average price around the U.S. of something like $2.80.

Again simple division of 15000 / 2.80 and the result is 5357. Multiply by 6 for 32142 pounds, divide by 2000 and you get *16* tons!

At today's prices you could buy, roughly, 16 tons of gas for $15,000.

Do you feel smarter now? :-)

I'd recommend looking at this post.

First, the nuclear power industry pretty much has the best safety record going. Per dollar of product produced, it kills the least amount of people. Let's see, in the past decade it's killed, what, 3 people (the 3 Japanese workers in a reprocessing plant that got stupid by using a steel bucket instead of the multi-million machine intended for the purpose). Just this year, in the USA, for oil and natural gas we have the Deepwater horizon, which killed 11. China regularly loses hundreds each year, we lost 25 in the explosion at Massey this year. 34 miners lost their lives the year before in various incidents.

Second - Let's look at Yankee Rowe - third commerical nuclear reactor. Shut down early due to concerns that the reactor vessel might be becoming brittle.
Cost: $36M in 1960, $209M in 2k dollars
Decommission: $450M($567M), worst case. $320M($403M) is the 'basis average'.
During it's life, Yankee Rowe produced 34 Billion kwh, achieving a sub-performing 74% capacity factor - most of the newer reactors still in service are well over 90%.
So, going by an average 3 cents a kwh, that's $1.02B in electricity produced. That leaves $244M for operations and profit during it's time. So not very expensive, though not as good as would be hoped. If you go by the worst case decommission costs. Basis average would be a lot better, as would it have been if the reactor had lasted it's expected lifetime.

Third - You have got to be kidding me. 19.4% in 2007

Fourth - So nuclear power needs loan guarantees to proceed. Wind and Solar power need cash subsidies, often in excess of half their cost! Heck, your 'clean coal' got more subsidies than nuclear - $29.81/MWh for 'clean coal', Solar $24.34 and wind around $23.37, nuclear got only $1.59/MWh

In total dollars:
Refined Coal: $2,156M
Solar: $14M
Wind: $724M
Nuclear: $1,267M

The biggest problem with coal is air pollution. There is technology available to reduce pollution to negligible levels, but nobody wants to use it because it's "too expensive". Instead of flushing a few Billion down the toilet with nuclear power, we could put that money into clean coal technology.

Still have the problems with fly ash and such, so it's still not 'clean', and at that point your 'clean coal' is more expensive to install than nuclear, as well as more expensive to operate.

I'd recommend looking at this post.

First, the nuclear power industry pretty much has the best safety record going. Per dollar of product produced, it kills the least amount of people. Let's see, in the past decade it's killed, what, 3 people (the 3 Japanese workers in a reprocessing plant that got stupid by using a steel bucket instead of the multi-million machine intended for the purpose). Just this year, in the USA, for oil and natural gas we have the Deepwater horizon, which killed 11. China regularly loses hundreds each year, we lost 25 in the explosion at Massey this year. 34 miners lost their lives the year before in various incidents.

Second - Let's look at Yankee Rowe - third commerical nuclear reactor. Shut down early due to concerns that the reactor vessel might be becoming brittle.
Cost: $36M in 1960, $209M in 2k dollars
Decommission: $450M($567M), worst case. $320M($403M) is the 'basis average'.
During it's life, Yankee Rowe produced 34 Billion kwh, achieving a sub-performing 74% capacity factor - most of the newer reactors still in service are well over 90%.
So, going by an average 3 cents a kwh, that's $1.02B in electricity produced. That leaves $244M for operations and profit during it's time. So not very expensive, though not as good as would be hoped. If you go by the worst case decommission costs. Basis average would be a lot better, as would it have been if the reactor had lasted it's expected lifetime.

Third - You have got to be kidding me. 19.4% in 2007

Fourth - So nuclear power needs loan guarantees to proceed. Wind and Solar power need cash subsidies, often in excess of half their cost! Heck, your 'clean coal' got more subsidies than nuclear - $29.81/MWh for 'clean coal', Solar $24.34 and wind around $23.37, nuclear got only $1.59/MWh

In total dollars:
Refined Coal: $2,156M
Solar: $14M
Wind: $724M
Nuclear: $1,267M

The biggest problem with coal is air pollution. There is technology available to reduce pollution to negligible levels, but nobody wants to use it because it's "too expensive". Instead of flushing a few Billion down the toilet with nuclear power, we could put that money into clean coal technology.

Still have the problems with fly ash and such, so it's still not 'clean', and at that point your 'clean coal' is more expensive to install than nuclear, as well as more expensive to operate.

If you wanted to knock terrorism into last century, you'd have to do two things: leave Iraq and Afghanistan, and form a new Manhattan style project to harvest energy directly to the sun to end our oil addiction. Of course, those things are nearly impossible for the US to do, since it only seeks power and money.

Not really sure what link Iraq and Afghanistan have with ending oil addiction. First, Afghanistan doesn't even import crude oil into the US. We're there due to war.

Now, while we do import crude oil from Iraq, it's roughly 5% of our total imports; same as An-freakin-gola. Guess who the number one and two importers are? Canada, followed by Mexico, which account for roughly a third of crude imports.

As for knocking terrorism into the 20th century? Forget about it. There will always be groups and peoples on either far edge of the bell curve who think they're being oppressed, or don't like the way Group X does Activity Y. Information, tolerance, and compromise are keys to eroding terrorism; not simply packing up and saying, "Good luck with that military power vacuum!" in a couple of invaded countries.

http://www.eia.doe.gov/pub/oil_gas/petroleum/analysis_publications/primer_on_gasoline_prices/html/petbro.html

Sorry, prices have NOT come down since the wars with Iraq and Afghanistan. Gas prices were about $2.00/gal around the 2001-2003 period, and now sit above $3.00. Crude prices were in the $20-$30 per barrel range, and now sit around $50-$60. What is your definition of "prices have come down"?

As for "oil flowing more freely": http://www.eia.doe.gov/aer/txt/ptb1105.html
Iraq hasn't really upped it's production in the last decade, and in fact has dropped from it's peek prior to the war.

I think you need to research your points, as you seem to just make assumptions based on no evidence.

I have not forgotten it, I just recognize the infeasibility of it. Even over a 40-year build out, we would have been hard pressed to build enough nuclear power to displace petroleum as an energy input even for today's usage, let alone synthesizing petroleum replacements.

This graphic is particularly informative. Alas the units are a bit archane (quadrillion BTUs, or quads, as a measure of energy. One Quad = ~300 terawatt-hours), but you can see the relative proportions easily enough.

Electrical energy is about 40% of our total energy consumption in the U.S. Transportation is about 30%, industrial ~20%, residential ~10%. The U.S.'s energy comes about 37% from petroleum, and only about 8% from nuclear. So, to replace the energy petroleum gives us, we'd need to have about 6 times as much nuclear energy as today, or about as much energy as we get from coal and natural gas combined. Most of that natural gas goes to heating and industrial processes, not electricity production. That's just energy for transportation and heating - it doesn't begin to cover the petroleum we use as feedstock for various industrial processes.

If my math is correct, it's about another 1200 GW of installed nuclear capacity - about as much power as the entire US grid currently produces. At a cost of several billion per GW of nuclear plant, that works out to a couple trillion dollars. So not only would our total electrical production need to roughly double, but it would leave the grid about 2/3 nuclear-based. I know that there is precedent: France's electric grid is 80% nuclear. But France's electrical power output is a relatively tiny amount of energy compared to US's nuclear capacity today.

Nuclear power is not a panacea, end of story.

Why does everyone think of nuclear power (or coal, or natural gas, or renewables) and oil as some sort of zero-sum game? Oil is used for three things mainly: transportation fuel, heating fuel in some parts of the country, and as a raw material for industrial processes. Nuclear power is good for one thing: generating electricity. While I will admit that there is plenty of small ways that we can trade off oil usage for nuclear-generated electricity, there aren't many wholesale ways of reducing oil consumption via nuclear. Are you going to heat your New England home with nuclear electricity? Will you create plastics feedstock from nuclear electricity? Even though in both cases one can do these things, we aren't about to because it's cheaper to do them using oil.

The big one is electricity, and I for one am pessimistic that we'll see a wholesale shift away from gasoline/diesel (i.e., more than 1/3 of all vehicles on the road propelled by electrical power)in anything less than 25 years.

And even then, it's not like we'll magically be trading nuclear electricity off for only imported oil. Oil is a global commodity. The determining factor of where the U.S. gets its oil from is where how much it costs. If it's cheaper or more profitable to bring it by tanker from the Middle East than it is to pull it from the Gulf of Mexico, you can bet that is where we'll get most of it. In truth, where does the U.S. import most of its oil from? Canada. Mexico provides us with as much oil as Saudi Arabia. We get more from non-OPEC nations than we do from OPEC [lots of stats here]. I am glad that the summary used the term "dependence on oil" rather than the more politically useful "foreign oil". I just wish that everyone else could wrap their head around it.

Nuclear power makes up 20% of energy production in the US. 49% of it coal, 22% gas (both dirty energy).

From EIA:
Coal Maintenance costs: 0.67
Nuclear Maintenance costs: 1.46
Coal Fuel costs: 2.30
Nuclear Fuel costs: 0.57

Coal total production costs: 2.97
Nuclear total production costs: 2.03

So nuclear is the cheapest day to day energy producer (obviously it has large upfront costs) even compared to coal. And it is by far the cheapest of the clean energies. As for the subsidies, Nuclear produces 14x as much energy as Wind and 1000x as much energy as Solar.

And even given all that I was unable to find data that showed total Nuclear subsidies so high compared to 'renewables' subsidies. According to the EIA's site in 2007 renewables got 4.9billion and nuclear got 1.3billion in tax breaks and subsidies. Gas and coal each getting more in subsidies as well than nuclear. http://www.eia.doe.gov/oiaf/servicerpt/subsidy2/pdf/execsum.pdf

Could you get some numbers to back up the claim that solar or wind comes even remotely close to nuclear power in terms of costs per kwh without any subsidies? Because I'm pretty sure there are no such figures from unbiased reputable sources (IEA/EIA/OECD). (FYI all of my info was from eia).

I just checked 4 of the boxes we have using KillAWatt and they are each 7 to 8 watts while on. I put all 4 together on a power splitter and it totaled 31 watts or 7.5 each on avg.

So if you're using 32 at 8 watts each (256 watts/hr) and lets assume they are left on 24/7/365 (8760 hours*0.256kw/hr = 2242.56 kw/hr a year) and you're paying 7.97 cents per kw/h in Indiana ( As a municipality you probably pay less) ( http://www.eia.doe.gov/electricity/epm/table5_6_b.html ) - that should equal .... 2242.56 * $0.0798 = $178.9116 a year - or about $5.59 each. And then $3 * 32 units * 12 months = $1152 a year. Or about $1330.91 for 32 units each year ($41.59 each per year).

No solution I can think of that will cover the distances you specify will cost less than paying for the units. This is especially true when you factor in the cost of your time and effort and whatever technology you implement will not be replaced for free if it breaks.

Er... so according to this link
(energy information administration: http://www.eia.doe.gov/ask/electricity_faqs.asp)
Residential refrigeration accounts for 8% of residential power.

According to this chart
(same source: http://www.eia.doe.gov/emeu/aer/pdf/pages/sec2_6.pdf)

Residential accounts for about 20% of energy usage.

Putting those figures together, residential refrigeration accounts for 2% of total energy usage.

This seems like a rather insignificant proportion.

A far larger energy hog is residential AC and lighting. At about 6% of national energy consumption.

Er... so according to this link
(energy information administration: http://www.eia.doe.gov/ask/electricity_faqs.asp)
Residential refrigeration accounts for 8% of residential power.

According to this chart
(same source: http://www.eia.doe.gov/emeu/aer/pdf/pages/sec2_6.pdf)

Residential accounts for about 20% of energy usage.

Putting those figures together, residential refrigeration accounts for 2% of total energy usage.

This seems like a rather insignificant proportion.

A far larger energy hog is residential AC and lighting. At about 6% of national energy consumption.

BTW, I thought that you might find the geothermal map and natural gas map interesting:
Gas Map and of course older heat map.
This would not benefit everywhere, HOWEVER, the geo-thermal map is an older one and we do not really know how good these things are. Basically, by pushing the approach that I suggest, we may actually find more heat pockets. At the very least, in parts of east texas, and then through the rocket mountain region and California, we will see loads of geo-thermal production.

Half the imported US oil comes from an OPEC nation

The top five source countries of U.S. petroleum imports are Canada (19%), Saudi Arabia (12%), Mexico (11%), Venezuela (9%), and Nigeria(85)

43% of the oil in the US comes from the US.

Where your oil comes from is more of a regional thing - west coast, some from Mexico, alot from Alaska and California, some from the Great Basin and Great Plains

http://www.eia.doe.gov/ask/crudeoil_faqs.asp

Renewables need subsidies because current fuels, coal/gas/nuclear, don't include the full costs of their use in the prices.

Are you arguing that the renewable fuels, which generally enjoy subsidies orders of magnitude higher than coal, gas, or nuclear, aren't subsidized enough?

Heck, for that matter, how does nuclear not cover it's full costs? I could see arguing about the waste - but France, Japan, and other countries manage to dispose of it(normally they reprocess it). Yucca Mountain is a boondoggle caused by the government... The deal, passed more or less unilaterally by the government, was 'pay us $X per Mwh produced, and we'll dispose of the waste'. It's gotten so bad the nuclear companies are suing the government for failure to perform the contract.

A source

$666 Million for 27.7 Billion kwh of electricity. Around 2.4 cents per kwh. Nuclear got 1.267B, but produced 794B kwh. .16 cents per kwh.

Heck, just use the chart:

Nuclear: $1.59 per Mwh
Wind: $23.37
Solar: $24.34
Refined coal: $29.81 (wtf? aren't we trying to reduce coal use?)
Natural Gas: .25
Coal: .44

Unfortunately, the information you link to undermines your case.

The most significant source of renewable power in the United States is hydroelectric power (it accounts for 67% of all renewable power in the US). The amount of hydroelectric power produced in 2008 is the same as it was in 1969.

From 2003 to 2008, the percentage of total power derived from renewables went from 6.26% to 6.70% - an increase of 7% over the course of 5 years. In terms of total energy, the only two renewable sources that showed big gains were biofuels (went from 4/10th of 1% to 1%) and wind (went from 1/10 of 1% to 3/10 of 1%). The biofuel component is mostly ethanol, which is highly controversial in terms of land use and energy return and unlikely to get significantly larger any time soon.

If you look beyond those 5 years, it's far more discouraging. Look at that hydroelectic chart again. In 1949, 30% of all the electricity used in the United States came from hydroelectric power. Today, it's 6%.

Your California numbers are just as bad. The vast bulk of renewables come from three sources - large scale hydro, small scale hydro and geothermal. All three are essentially either tapped out or have significant problems getting larger (you can't dam anything else and natural geothermal is largely tapped out - and injecting water into deep hot rocks has some significant geological dangers in a state full of fault lines).

I, too, want to move to a non-carbon economy. But even among the nerd-herd that is Slashdot, hardly anybody understands the sheer magnitude of power that is used to keep our 21st century civilization working. Wind has to grow 800% just to reach the current levels of hydroelectricity, and that's just 6% of electrical usage. And that hydropower is going to get smaller and smaller, as no one is creating new dams and existing dams are being shut down (for different environmental protection reasons). Land siting and usage issues, power transmission from places with good solar/wind potential to existing population centers, water problems - the list goes on and on.

"Significant" impact is decades away on a national scale. On a local scale, it can be transformative, but let's not kid ourselves into thinking we're 10 or 20 years away from being largely carbon-neutral. It simply can't happen - no matter how much we wish it were so. Best to just keep plugging away at it and being realistic and honest with the public - it's going to take a long time, but it can be done.

Renewables already constituted 7.4% of US energy consumption [doe.gov] by 2008

Well, following a link from the DoE source you cite, the picture is a bit less clear. Of the 6.813 quadrillion BTUs (sorry non US readers, for the non SI units, but it is from a US Gov't. website) attributed to "renewable" energy, 53% comes from biomass and 36% comes from hydroelectric dams. Of the remainder, wind energy accounts for 5% and solar for only 1%. America's hydroelectric capacity is pretty well tapped out -- not to mention the political pressure from environmental groups to prevent new dam building and to actually tear down functioning dams. The majority of the biomass consumption is the burning of wood for heat. Not a bad idea, where applicable, but wood is a poor source of heat for electricity generation and is useless for the transportation sector of our economy. Speaking of transportation, the second largest component of "biomass" energy consumption is biofuels -- largely corn-derived ethanol. Not too smart environmentally or economically speaking, but the farm states loves the subsidies...

When most people think of "renewable" energy, they're thinking solar panels and wind turbines. These energy sources accounted for (0.05 + 0.01)*0.074 = 0.0044 = 0.44% of the energy consumed in the US in 2007. Not so significant, really.

Yearly consumption is about 20 billion cubic feet

Reserves are measured in hundred of trillions of cubic feet

So...enough for tens of thousands of years even if we double or triple the consumption, plenty to keep going until somebody invents the ZPM.

(Assuming I haven't mixed up what Americans think of as "billion" and "trillion")

What is "significant impact"? Renewables already constituted 7.4% of US energy consumption by 2008, which was a year before Obama started dramatically increasing investment in renewables. Before the US entered the Great Recession, after a decade of Oil War in which energy prices were finally high enough to make reducing energy consumption a national consensus. Before BP killed the Gulf with the consequences of offshore oil/gas drilling. That fraction had already jumped by the beginning of 2009 (still before those propelling events), just as it had been swiftly rising - though for only a few years.

California (1/7th of all Americans) already generates 31% of its electricity from renewables, 12% from non-hydropower. Again, this is all before the recent catastrophes and stimuli produce a new wave of generation plants, which are under construction.

It doesn't have to take decades before renewables have significant impact. In fact, close to 10% is already significant impact. Renewable plants are faster to build than exhaustible power systems, and are much easier/cheaper to build distributed around the country than centralized exhaustible power plants. Contrary to your statement, onsite generation by solar and wind is an advantage over centralized petrofuels in terms of our existing distribution, which onsite can largely ignore but petrofuels cannot. If we spent a $TRILLION on renewables for a decade, the way we will have spent a $TRILLION+ in Iraq on Oil War for a decade, we'd probably have at least 25% of our power coming from renewables. The resulting boom in the US domestic economy, both stimulated by investment in new technology/labor and unshackled from shipping money and jobs to foreign oil suppliers, would even further accelerate renewable fuel switchover, making subsidies unnecessary. If we canceled all the subsidies to petrofuels like oil, coal, gas and nukes, we'd see even faster conversion as a freer market finally played on a leveled playing field.

We don't have fifty years to leave exhaustible fuels for renewables. Fortunately, we don't need more than 10-20 to do it.

I can by electricity generated by coal, oil and gas between $1-2 dollars per Kwh. If I replaced my electric with solar panels and batteries, my cost would be $4-5 dollars per Kwh.

Where did you get those numbers? I guess you made them up, but if that's really what you're paying, you're getting ripped off.

According to this, the average price for residential electricity in the U.S. is 10.86 cents per kWh.

I mean, come on, Canada? It's absurd. The only resource they really have a lot of that we might want to take is land,

You sound really, really sure of yourself.

I hate to burst your bubble, but we import more oil from Canada than any other country in the world.

Wind power will not be cost effective in the near future without massive subsidies.

Supporting cite?

Your views are about a decade out of date. In fact wind power is cost effective right now without any subsidies when measured by levelized cost comparisons, which evaluates the return on investment over the life of the plant. This method of comparison gives high capital cost, but low fuel cost power sources - like wind and nuclear - a fair comparison with the cheap-to-build but costly to run (and unpenalized for being carbon releasing, BTW) power plants like coal and gas. See: http://www.eia.doe.gov/oiaf/archive/ieo06/special_topics.html . Note that coal, gas, wind and nuclear are all in the same ballpark by this long-term metric, but that nuclear is significantly more expensive than the other three.

Observe that solar is not on the EIA list. Solar power is currently too expensive to be competitive without subsidies.

There are new power plants under construction right now and plants have been coming online and being built for the last ten years.

http://www.netl.doe.gov/coal/refshelf/ncp.pdf
http://www.nrc.gov/reactors/new-reactors/new-licensing-files/expected-new-rx-applications.pdf

The "vampire power" thing is a bit overrated, actually. It's worth having standards for new appliances limiting their offline current draw, but the amount of energy savings to be had doesn't come anywhere near 15% of our electricity use. Not even close. Home electronics themselves only use 7ish percent of our total electricity. See here

To the GP: yes that's the idea of the smart grid.

And in general it is pretty pathetic that Zigbee or X25 or even out-of-band ethernet or RS232 power strips and power meters continue to be products that are only sold at a premium to professional IT/ISP departments or home automation boutiques. The meters and the power switches themselves are all dirt cheap, and the network interfaces are also really cheap to add. I mean, look at the price of 5-port ethernet switches and tr to tell yourself adding a port or radio to a deivice like this is going to be "prohibitively expensive". It just does not make sense.

But these have always been products that cannot sell on the shelf at Home Depot. The best you can get is a dedicated lightswitch/lamp pair that uses a proprietary "protocol." As sad as that is, it's "progress" compared to several years ago when even that was not available.

Anyway, I suppose I'm going to have to watch a slow motion trainwreck of companies trying to proprietizesmart grid initiatives in the coming decades. Sigh.