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Practical Method for Getting Oil from Oil Shale?
ConfigurationManager writes "An article in the Rocky Mountain News describes how Shell has demonstrated a practical way to extract oil from the shale deposits in Colorado. Since it describes those deposits as "the largest fossil fuel deposits in the world," that could be a very good thing for those of us who are currently paying anywhere from $3 on up for a gallon of regular unleaded."
3 Dollar a gallon -- how about 3 euro a Litre !
Dw
Many people here in Europe pay over $5.60 per gallon nowadays. We wish we had $3.00 per gallon prices.
The Official Steve Ballmer Webpage
My solution was to get rid of my car, and get a bike!
Instead of finding a more difficult technique to the problem, I simplified the problem of purchasing gasoline for a motor vehicle almost out of existence.
Won't work for everyone, but it worked for me. Some people may need to change the way they live much more than I have had to, but then again, it's been an ongoing process that's been worked on by myself for years, not overnight.
Dada Mail - Program, Art Project or Absurdity?
The US needs to learn to use energy more efficiently. Experts suggest that current prices are driven by growth and demand, rather than a supply shortage causing a spike as has happened in the past. This means that prices are not likely to drop quickly. Interestingly The Economist (not generally in favor of big government, taxes, or other impediments to business) says:
From:
http://www.economist.com/printedition/displaystor
(You have to pay for access...sorry).
http://www.welton.it/davidw/
The reason they're talking about getting oil from shale at all is because the gas price is $3/gallon. If it was less, they wouldn't bother, so you aren't going to see the price go down when they start on the sand and shale deposits.
Deleted
I am not sure we need more fossil fuels for our climate and our lungs.
Shell bosses feel chilly, find new way to warm Earth.
I live in the UK and I pay £0.90 (1.32/1.65) a litre. My family, living in Denmark, pay 12 DKR (1.60/2.00).
... $3 for a gallon is nothing.
In Europe, the prices are twice as high.
(Here is the Google conversion between units and currencies.)
I have a really elegant proof for Fermat's last theorem. If this sig was only a bit longer...
I was thinking this the other day... I read a story on CNN that said people in New Orleans were paying "as much as" $5/gallon. As if that was a major disaster. Now people are whinging about paying $3 / gallon?
/gallon = $6.96.
Everyday UK price = Very near GBP 1 / litre = GBP 3.78
When is the US going to wake up to just how much oil COSTS, and top subsidising their country's SUV's?
Every country in the EU pays prices near the UK ones (maybe not quite as much). Nobody really moans (except a little if they go up even further), because that's what it always has cost. What does the EU know that America doesn't? Or, more likely, what is America choosing to ignore in case whoever changes prices gets lynched?
Hurrah! I was worried I'd have to get rid of the Hummer H2 I use to drive to the office every day!
Anyone who likes economic disincentives towards buying peniscars is Un-American!
"Goodness me, how unlike the FBI to abuse the trust of the American public." -- The Onion
Type in "1.30 aud per litre in usd per gallon" and get "1.30 (Australian dollars per litre) = 3.76065521 U.S. dollars per US gallon".
no doubt. The timing of this article fits the current situation a little too well.
To make re-useable energy sources more and more attractive, we find a way to just heat this planet just a bit more.
Just place solar energy/wind energy systems on these shale places instead. It will yield more than oil in the long run (Break even point wind power: 6 years at current US energy prices).
My wife's sketchblog Blob[p]: Gastrono-me
which are mean to reduce use of cars. They also make it seem much less of a shock when the price of oil goes up.
but afaict most of the high fuel prices at the moment are due to catrina knocking out refining capacity not oil prices.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
The problem with oil shale is the same problem that the tar sands (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tar_sands) have, they require enormous amounts of energy to extract effectivly.
Where a conventional extraction of oil through drilling into the ground yeilds about a 1:80 energy ratio (1 barrel of oil worth of energy expended gets you 80 barrels of oil out of the ground) on average, the average energy ratio for tar sands is about 1:5 (or 16x less return). I do not imagine that the energy ratio for the extraction of oil from oil shale will be much better.
This poses the same fundamental problem that alternative energy supplies pose, the energy extracted vs the energy spent is MUCH lower then conventional oil drilledout of the ground, and even if such a system where today instantly implemented, where most of americas oil was from tar sands/oil shale, there would still be a MASSIVE jump in price, due to the expense of production.
and how much energy does it take to freeze and then heat the ground to 750F for half a year?
doesn't sound all that effecient to me
Protecting the ground water by pumping refrigerants around the site to great an ice wall. What's safe to pump into ground water? hydrocarbon? This is the part the sounds unreal to me.
*DrugCheese rants*
If i'm understanding the process correctly, it involves drilling a lot (A LOT) of holes from the surface. Kind of makes oil wells sound like environmentally friendly devices.
(Are you listening Captain Planet?? We need your help!)
Know what I like about atheists? I've yet to meet one that believes God is on their side.
In North America, people need personal vehicles due to the design of the infastructure, and the placement of essential services. This is particularly true for rural areas, and small cities to a lesser extent.
Gas prices have a greater direct effect on the average American or Canadian consumer than their counterparts in Europe.
I figure that we're getting what we deserve. After all, anyone stupid enough to bring back 70's colors and fashions deserves to get it's fuel supply woes as well. Seriously. I was in Target the other day (unfortunately enough) and almost lost my lunch because of the crap they're selling.
What brought this to mind though was a drive past Costco the other day when fuel prices began to rise. I'd just passed a Chevron advertising $2.95/gal for regular unleaded and $3/gal at Sinclair when I see a huge line of cars (we're talking about 150-200) waiting to use the pumps Costco's gas station. The price there was $2.50/gal. At the time I figured it would be a convenient time to get rid of all the nut jobs in the city (how much gas are they wasting sitting there idling?) but I also recalled all those pictures I've seen of gas stations in the 70's.
"What do you despise? By this are you truly known." --Princess Irulan, Manual of Muad'Dib
/)
... and realise that the other 95% of the world is paying _way_ more than that.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
$3 per gallon is still nothing compared to european fuel prices. On teh otehr hand it appears the rising prices speed up invention a bit more in the US than in Europe? (yes, where shall we put that experimental fusion reactor? takes ages...)
Suppose the high prices were not only caused by stock speculators, but mostly by a factual shortage of fossil fuels, peak oil. It would be the best chance to (globally!) switch to alternative fuels and modernizing our way of thinking about energy and its consumption. Everybody is - or should be - aware that oil reserves are neither infinite nor inexhaustible.
If we want to sustain our living standards, we have to look at oil as a starting budget, a one-time loan (pollution being the interest) from pre-historic times, to help us developing a sustainable way of living. Some higher being knows that has been taking us pretty long already.
The grass is always greener on the other side of the light cone.
Americans I know cry bloody murder as gas prices inch up to 4 USD a gallon.
Here in Europe, we're between 5 and 7 USD a gallon, and we've never had gas prices so low as they are in the US. And averages wages in most EU countries are less than they are in the USA, so how in the hell can Americans find 3 or 4 USD a gallon as impossibly high prices?
Even the difference in Fuel economy of US and European cars can't be that much of a factor! So what gives?
Lot of folks want to throw out the "gas in Europe costs more than gas in the USA, so don't cry about your 'high gas prices'" line. What you need to look at, though, is where this cost comes from. The answer is taxes. From http://www.csmonitor.com/2005/0826/p01s03-woeu.htm l:
In Britain, the government takes 75 percent, and raises taxes by 5 percent above inflation every year (though it has forgone this year's rise in view of rocketing oil prices, and the French government has promised tax rebates this year to taxi drivers, truckers, fishermen, and others who depend heavily on gasoline.) On August 8, for example, the price of gas in the US, without taxes, would be $2.17, instead of $2.56; in Britain, it would be $1.97, instead of $6.06.
Given that, I'm not sure it's a fair comparison to make: Europe has decided to tax the hell out of gasoline, a decision the government can undo should there be a need, while the USA is paying higher prices to the oil companies, which can't be controlled as easily.
Not really sure what my point is, really,
robert
Don't complain about 3 Dollars. In order to have some decent effect agains global warming it should be IMHO closer to 20 Dollars!
Why don't the big networks talk about that in the long term it could be cheaper do seriously do something about global warming than give up a third of the northamerican continent due to increasingly hostile climat?
The article says this would be profitable even if oil cost $30 a barral. It is near $70 now.
"It is not how things are in the world that is mystical, but that it exists." -Ludwig Wittgenstein
that oil source, availability, and extraction have NOTHING to do with CURRENT gas prices. Do you actually think gas MUST cost $3.00+ per gallon based on these factors? $2.50? $2.00? The answer is NO. Sure, you can use terms like "supply" and "demand", but let's face it; realistically, you can replace "demand" with "requirement". The oil companies replaced "demand" long ago and started making billions instead of millions. WAKE UP.
Since it describes those deposits as "the largest fossil fuel deposits in the world," that could be a very good thing (..)
My thoughts on that statement are, at the very least, mixed. I'm one of those few people who aren't bothered much by rising energy prices. Why? Higher energy prices are a strong drive for development of alternative energy sources. Many of which are sustainable, exhaust-free and suitable for small-scale application (read: useful for remote, under-developed areas).
When energy prices go up, it forces people and businesses to think about whether they really need to consume that much. It gives a competitive edge to businesses that do care about their energy consumption. And when high oil prices slow down economy, it makes people re-use things more, buy second-hand, or choose long-lasting quality over cheap crap when they buy things. All good for the environment we all have to share.
So an 'easy', huge new source of fossil fuel = good? Not really, just more CO2 waiting to be thrown in the atmosphere, and solving the real problems may get put on hold.
High oil prices aren't all bad, you know. They tell you that oil is a precious substance that you shouldn't be too careless with.and they're all about how ignorant this American is to complain 'bout the gas prices in the US. And the next logical step? Critique America's dependency on oil.
Yawn!!! Move on. Broken record.
The article itself is exceptionally light on details on the process of getting oil from oil shale. Perhaps we can stay on target and discuss *that* rather than another bloody comment like "$3 a gallon?? Try $3 a litre!!" Or "boo hoo!! The Economist, the end all and be all of all things, believes that the US needs to be like Europe! Oiloholism! Down with Bush!"
If this is true, this pretty much gauruntees America's primacy into the 22nd century. As for all the people comparing Europes gas prices with the US, well, complain to your politicians. The gas prices are pretty much the same before taxes.
Considering that I pay $2 per litre, $3 per gallon seems dirt cheap.
Stop whining, you've still got dirt cheap fuel.
"Rune Kristian Viken" - http://www.nwo.no - arca
Bye Planet Earth, it was nice knowing you. The last thing we need is another hundred years of oil. Even normal oil will last another 50-100 years, as technology enables us to retrieve it more efficiently and new supplies are found.
Your paying $1.26 a liter, which is 1.06 a liter. The current price of petrol here is 1.16 a liter and is set to keep rising. So ye actually fare quite well.
But tbh, driving cars with 7liter engines around doesn't help the costs. Maybe ye should try hybrid cars? As seen as they can do 60-70 miles to the gallon now.
http://www.iter.org/site.htm/ They have finally chosen France over Japan, and hopefully this technology will prive to be useful comercially.
Last week's tragic events should have demonstrated to America the foolishness of such excessive consumption of fossil fuels. That said, I doubt Pres. Bush's recent failure to enforce reasonable standards of fuel economy on all vehicles will be overturned..
I have been a user for about 10 years. This ends Feb 2014. The site's been ruined. I'm off. Dice, FU
*is reminded, somehow, of Atlas Shrugged*
Since we will be buying Colorado-extracted oil from the Chinese, will this shale extraction technique benefit us? Are the Chinese going to sell this oil to us cheaper than the Arabs? I guess they will be able to since the oil is coming from the U.S. and won't have to be shipped.
See this Rocky Mountain News article from 8/23/05. http://www.insidedenver.com/drmn/business/article/ 0,1299,DRMN_4_4022438,00.html
It would be nice to ride the bike but probably not in winter and not in -40 Celsius! This solution is defeniately *NOT* for everyone.
Also not everyone will ride the bike for 50 miles per day or get all those groceries....
US fuel tax is much lower, but does the US fuel tax cover the highway / road repair / construction / administration? Don't have the numbers but my guess is no.
So the EU subsidizes health care and the US subsidizes automobile culture. Europe has been around longer than the automobile, American suburbia was designed around the automobile. Without cheap transportation, much of America doesn't work as layed out.
I want rolling roads. (excuse me, flying cars)
Physics is like sex: sure, it may give some practical results, but that's not why we do it.
I'm happy to pay a bit more to keep SUVs off the roads. I just moved from Canada (where petrol guzzlers are on the rise) to Australia (where there are very few SUVs). If paying an extra dollar or so at the pumps every couple weeks keeps them off the road, I'm more than willing. I honestly can't believe people still choose to drive those things.
They're estimating the energy cost alone to be 28% of the total energy extracted. Given all the other overhead involved, that's not going to turn into a gigantic profit margin. The most significant thing about this discovery is the potential to tap as much as a trillion barrels of oil from within the United States.
What scares me about this idea is the environmental impact. Anything growing in the ground in (or near) the affected region will die. How much "gunk" does the steam-cleaning process generate, and what will we do with it? How much is the targeted plot of land permanently altered by the process, and in what ways? There are all kinds of ways this could go wrong.
Still, I very much like the idea of the U.S. not depending on foreign sources of oil. Economic entanglement turns into political entanglement, and political entanglement has a nasty habit of turning into military entanglement. Maybe someday we'll have enough troops rested, trained, equipped, and ready to stop genocides and maintain order during natural disasters, like we used to.
There's no failure quite as dissatisfying as a complete and total solution to the wrong problem.
mean should have been meant
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
...we should actually do something about our near exclusive dependance on oil for our energy needs. So what if we are heavily dependant on one of the more [politically, chemically, economically, etc.] volatile resources in the world. So what if we have spent 100's of billions of dollars in Iraq to help save a region that happend to produce oil?
Oh, and a little thought experiment:
You are an oil company. Demand for your product is near constant with respect to price. You collect about 30% profit per gallon. Would you rather be charging $2 a gallon, or $4?
The reasons American complain about their extremely low gas prices is because they are much more dependant on fossil fuel than Europeians.
1. The average American city has a much lower population density than a Europeian one meaning you'll have to travel much farther on average.
2. They have crappy mass transits. This is because the car industry has lobbied heavily against building public transportations because it would be bad for business.
3. Cars are cheaper so they buy more and bigger cars that consumes more fuel. Also, in USA cars are status. While a Europeian might be content with an exclusive wrist-watch to cover his penis-complex an American just NEEDS to have a SUV.
Sucks for them. Their overdependancy on oil means that increasing gas prices cause a slowdown in the economy that doesn't happen in Europe and other places. Expect a major recess in the global economy over the next few years and for the US to have a very hard time defending their position as the #1 global superpower.
The article referenced in this Slashdot story is a complete lie, in my opinion. It is certainly possible to do what the article says. However, the cost in energy is greater than the amount of the energy returned.
The situation was the same 50 years ago. There is a huge amount of oil in the shale, but no way has been found to extract the huge amounts of oil efficiently.
The article refers to the "Synfuels debacle". Here's an article about Synfuels called The Great Energy Scam that discusses how scammers take advantage of the lack of technical knowledge of the public. Here's another article: Harsh glare on synfuels hitting home.
In my opinion, this is just another attempt to start a new scam. I think the word farce is too weak. Here's a little about how it works: THE 2005 ENERGY BILL, Helping Corporations, Hurting Western Colorado.
--
Bush lied, many died.
Personally I wish gas was more expensive, so people would be forced to take mass transit.
Problem is that at least in Fort Wayne, Indiana, mass transit does not run after 9 PM on weekdays, after 6 PM on Saturdays, or at all on Sundays or holidays.
Yeah, me riding a bike 27 miles, one way to work, in single digit temps isn't entirely my cup of tea. Especially since most of that way doesn't have bike paths, so I'd be contending with traffic on 55mph country roads.
Sounds less like a viable plan and more a like a recipe for roadkill.
Can't live much closer to work, housing prices get ridiculous. Rent is insane as well.
Don't get me wrong though, I wish I could - an easy daily non-impact aerobic workout is just what my ticker could use.
Since it describes those deposits as "the largest fossil fuel deposits in the world," that could be a very good thing for those of us who are currently paying anywhere from $3 on up for a gallon of regular unleaded.
Since, you could also describe the deposits as "the largest carbon deposits in the world", this could be a very bad thing for those of use who live near the coast.
"... could be a very good thing for those of us who are currently paying anywhere from $3 on up for a gallon of regular unleaded."
Err. That's tending the symptoms, not the cause once more. Step on the fusion research and don't try to pollute more please.
I did the same thing foir about a year till I came across a biker laying on the sidewalk bleeding as cars sped past. I stopped and helped him up. He said he had been laying there for a couple of minutes but noone stopped. A passing car clipped the end of his handlebar. Don't know how many stitches the guy needed. Point being: till the government starts building MANY more roads with bike lanes, it will be extremely dangerous to ride a bike. At least is isn't as bad as some other countries. In many countries only third-class citizens ride bikes so anyone riding a bike is fair game. I talked to one guy who had been fined the equivalent of $12000 for running down a cyclist and he was pissed over the amount and that the judge made him late for his trip to NY. This was in a Mideastern country.
"God fights on the side with the best artillery." - Napoleon, Marshal of France - speaking truth to power
Oil is a finite resource. Finding more shouldn't make you complacent enough to think that you can carry on using what we have at the same rate - certainly not think so selfishly as to help push prices down. Do you know why teh prices are high? Because there's less of it now than there was yesterday. And yes you could blame OPEC, but they have to marshall the reserves - oil for tomorrow. And it's not like this stuff is being created a the same rate is it. We can plant trees and see them come to fruition in a matter of decades. Oil takes a lot longer (and no, I'm not advocating wood-burning cars!).
If we are to make oil last a lot longer - and yes with China and India both capable of using more oil than the states does now - then we need to change how we use it. Currently, with our blinkered thinking, we only panic when a crisis seems imminent; thinking for today, not for tomorrow.
I'm glad everyone is worried at the moment because action is being taken. If we do wait until the last drop of oil before we panic, well we can wave fuel and plastics goodbye. Less oil among more people = higher prices. Deal with it.
Pardon me, but when did the definition of "subsidize" change to "fail to rapaciously tax." If you're paying 5 or 6$ per gallon equivalent for gas in Europe, then vote for someone who's not quite as enamored of taxing as much.
Here in Canada, every time the base price of fuel goes up, the government gets a huge boost in tax revenue because of the fuel tax. It's obscene really - if any other organization realized that sort of benefit, you'd call it racketeering. We're coming close to paying 5$ per gallon ourselves, and the tax on fuel actually represents the majority of the price.
What's with that?
Fischer-Tropsch is the future of energy in the U.S. It produces oil from coal and generated $20/barrel oil in plants in South Africa that they used during their period of economic isolation. It is a simple process that converts coal to H2+CO and then into any kind of oil you want. It can also be used to produce fertilizer and plastics. It scales, it's simple and the U.S has the largest coal reserves in the world. This is really our ace in the hole in the upcoming global energy crisis. Expect their to be a coal to oil gold rush in the next 5 years. Apparently some people are catching on. Unfortunately for the environmentalists this is not what you wanted to happen when we started running out of oil but this is by far the most practical realistic solution that will work to give us time to find alternatives.
The bottom line is that Americans drive longs distances because many of us have to drive long distances. I myself live in a rural area, and have to drive 30-40 miles for what many would consider basic things (e.g. to go to a movie theater.) So, while I have little sympathy for the whining of effete suburbanites driving their SUV's, I think it needs to be recognized that a large part of America's economy is neither suburban nor effete, and high gas prices hurt us badly.
That's really the core reason that we choose to be taxed in other ways, and it's also why America is so much more successful than Europe. If you look at the per capita GDP of most European countries, they would rate 48th in the nation. Sorry we don't imitate you.
"He who would learn astronomy, and other recondite arts, let him go elsewhere. " -- John Calvin, commenting on Genesis 1
Around $7.15 per gallon.
You don't think enough... therefore you better not be!
Thank you slashdot!
1. Find shale oil deposit
2. Use Slashdotted method
3. Profit!
This is my sig. There are thousands more, but this one is mine.
And the reason mass transit doesn't run much in this country is because nobody rides it! If more people rode mass transit, it would run until after midnight like Japan or San Francisco, or 24 hours/day like New York!
More fossil fuels doesn't mean "Honey, order a new Hummer"
When will you Yanks see the light?
First some geeky trivia. . . In the movie "Alien", the Nostromo was bringing a load of crude oil to Earth. Earth's oil had all been refined into gasoline and burned up. Industry had long since switched to other energy sources, but they still needed oil to make: plastics, solvents, pesticides, synthetic rubber, and all the myriad other products that are produced from petrochemicals.
Let's not have it come to that in real life, okay?
The good news is, we've got huge amounts of tar sands, huge amounts of oil shale, and other low grade deposits like that. We shouldn't be thinking too hard about squeezing those low grade deposits for every drop of gasoline we can get out of them. We should be thinking about alternative energy, and saving those deposits for the petrochemicals we can produce from them.
I see the problem being more a factor of the "relative" increase in a short period. If the economy has a built in tolerance for fuel prices (used to ship all those twinkies to your wal-mart), it does not just mean people pay more to fill up their car. It means they pay more to buy everything. Add that to the extra you have to pay to get to the store, and it starts to add up. Even though I drive an F-250 that gets 14mpg, I don't complain about filling up the tank. I do, however, worry that the economy can only handle so much sticker shock before it starts to have a much greater effect. The logical result of the higher fuel cost is a better chance for alternative fuels, which is what I am really hoping happens. As the fuel prices rise for traditional fuels, alternatives become "relatively" more affordable.
Shale oil requires hideous amounts of energy to extract and when it is used emitts all kinds of gross pollution. It's the worst of the worst fossil fuels. There have been massive protests in Australia over plans to extract it from North Queensland. It's a step in the wrong direction, not only because it means fuel prices will go down again but also because the fuel itself is dirty and contributes more to the greenhouse effect than normal oil. Oil prices in the US are artificially low and your government is unnecissarily plunging deeper into debt by subsidising petrol. Tax petrol, spend the tax money on developing alternatives. It's win win win win win win win win win - who cares if some rednecks complain. The worst thing a government can do is ignore common sense and strategic thinking for the future for the sake of appealing to the lowest common denominator.
In Europe.
We've already organised much of our society round high gas prices. As you said, the effect of the increasing demand and reducing supply can be mitigated somewhat by reducing taxes as oil gets really expensive.
In America, the shit is just about to hit the fan and there's bugger all the government can do about it.
Deleted
"Let the market sort things out"? I see you are either an anarchist or someone who drank their way through Econ 101. First of all, when there are externalities, as there is here, a tax is required to minimize deadweight losses. Second, in a situation where there is a finite resource, especially one that places a key role in so many parts of the economy, it is prudent not to pump it out of the ground and squander it as fast as possible. There's a reason every major country has a strategic petroleum reserve but doesn't have a strategic gummy bear reserve. For the same reason, it is prudent to impose fuel standards. Although any person's individual actions won't make a difference, we'd all like to drive Hummers or Corvettes. Without a centralized policy decision there won't be cheap oil a few decades out and our economy (and/or the environment, if we have to switch to coal-powered hydrogen for example) will be in deep trouble.
I was just mastering my bow & arrow skills so that I could hunt dear out from underneath the decayed gremains of the freeways of civilization past!
Nooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo!! My life is in ruins!
Die, civilization, die Die DIE!
Stop inventing technology shit!
Another problem with SUVs is that they are higher, so you need to be taller to be seen. So accidents happen more often, and the result is that more parents bring their kids to school because it's not safe anymore. The more this happens, the busier it gets, the more agitated people get, the more accidents happen.
Then I read that if an SUV has an accident with another car, the people in the other car are 6x more likely to die than in an accident with a normal car.
One of the primary uses of the oil tax is to build public transport systems, but most rural taxpayers see very little of that benefit, making it more sensible to live closer to town.
One thing you're forgetting here, that 1% of the people who are now in rural areas REGECT proposals for new roads because it 'disrupts the lovely view'. That then screws everyone over. Only when the accident with the school bus happens do these rural purists then allow it.
warning - offtopic rant
Actually, im pretty pissed off with a lot of those people, as most of them are > 60 - especially with wind farms. Recently i'm sure one was regected in scotland that was 5 miles out in the ocean. They regected it because it would disrupt the view. It just so happens they will not be around when we all turn around and wished 'if only we had that wind farm'.
The best use of $3 and even $4 per gallon fuel would have been ot fund 50% into R&D to work out sustainable fuel sources -- Read my lips George -- the solution to the problem is not pumping more oil out of the ground. But for the Bushes "read my lips" seems to mean something different than they typical interpretation.
Now we have $3/gallon and where's the money go: into Arab pockets, or petroleum refiner pockets, or into people who's only job is speculation in the markets, living on the world's fear of the future.
The US being the worlds biggest consumer needed leadership. What did we get -- a war to keep the status quo, squabbling about stem cells, a call to keep a vegetative woman alive against the wishes of her guardian, the biggest pork-barrel budget in history. We used to have two parties that differed on many issues including spending and government size. Now we have two parties racing to spend as fast as possible and only differening in religious zealotry. (For the information of the zealots whom I have just offended -- I am a Christian. If I offended you -- then I dare you to read the whole Bible cover to cover ; find your 10 LEAST favorite passages and try to live by those for a few days. If you really believe the book to be divinely inspired and perfect this should cause you no problems.)
This has been talked about for some time now. The break even point is estimated at between $30 and $40 per barrel. The technology itself is really old too. There were huge investments in it during the supply shocks of the 70s, but the companies took a beating when the prices dropped back down.
This time around, the problem is on the demand side, so the current price levels are very likely to represent the new norm. The energy companies are obviously hesitant to invest the 10s of billions of dollars necessary to make this a reality, but it's probably just a matter of time.
As a side note, there's also been talk about turning coal into diesel.
Energy consumption-wise, this looks like a method that would scale to covering larger areas very well (heating costs would be less than linear, refrigerated wall should go up as the square root of the area). Given a few successful trials I can see them scaling it to cover a very large area, and producing huge amounts.
Given that they report a cost/benefit breakeven at $30, I would expect this to be a significant damper on future price rises of oil.
Hm, re-reading TFA I see that the test plot was only 20 x 35 feet. I wonder how much of the 1500 barrels they collected leaked in from nearby. Maybe the yield won't scale as well as they say it will.
I'm guessing that wasn't on their radar screen...
It sounds like this is a terribly inefficient process. One poster offered the 80/1 statistic for traditional oil pumping (1 barrel of oil in -> 80 barrels out). By comparison, this process requires that you burn about a third of your production. I could be thinking about this wrong, but it seems that (from a global warming perspective) it's as though we would take every car in America and reduce its fuel efficiency by a third.
From the article, it's not clear whether the "wall of ice" is taken into account when doing the energy calculations. If it's not, then it may be even less efficient, closer to a 2:1 yield perhaps.
From an environmental standpoint, it doesn't sounds downright scary. Drilling a shaft every ten feet around the perimeter of the site, freezing it, then heating the bedrock to 700 degrees? That's going to take a lot of equipment and manpower, and produce a lot of waste. Nor am I as confident in this "wall of ice" as the author. So they may have to scrub the groundwater once they're done, if there is any chance of contaminating drinking water. Finally, I do believe that most bedrock contains extremophiles, and while I don't want to be an alarmist or a eukaryote-rights activist, we can't be sure of the environmental impact of burning them away.
Can't we just agree to not do this? Our country has an energy addiction, and this article just goes to show how far we are willing to go to avoid facing the problem (Exhibit B being the way our lustful eyes keep falling on the ANWR). If we start the transition away from fossil fuels now, we could quickly become the leaders in alternative fuels and energy efficient technology. If, on the other hand, we use this process as a crutch to keep us strung out on oil for a few more decades, then it ends with us having the same energy-inefficient infrastructure we have now, a much more serious global warming problem, and no expertise in alternatives. We'll have to buy all our fuel efficient vehicles from the French.
C'mon, Republicans. You hate the French. Hop on board with this.
Rather than eliminating this option entirely, I think it would make more sense to put a tax on it, so that the break-even point is around to $7/gallon, not $3.50. The revenue generated would go to subsidize alternative fuels research and to mitigate the environmental damage from this process.
Also, if we're going to do this come hell or high water, it seems sensible to pursue the idea of using geothermal to provide the heat for this process, rather than heaters powered from the surface. Hydrocarbons are good heat carriers; that's one reason we use oil to cool and lubricate our engines. The oil is down there, the energy is down there. It seems like all you would need to do is heat it long enough to distill out a small amount of oil, then use that oil to circulate heat up from the hot bedrock below. Of course, that means deeper holes. Like I said, maybe this idea should just be scratched altogether.
You want the truthiness? You can't handle the truthiness!
Why high Oil and Gas prices have a good side too
or
The best way to force people to change is making them wanting to change
First of all - I live in Europa, Germany.
Today Fuel prices have reached 1.43 Euro / liter, this is about 7.9$ / gallon. Yes, driving is EXPENSIVE here.
In the last few years, cars with a high efficiency have become very high in demand - of course, when fuel is expensive, people want cars that use little fuel.
And the same thing is going to happen to the USA.
People will look at the prices, look into their purses and the next car they buy won't be a 15 miles per gallon SUV, but perhaps a 30 / 35 miles per gallon car. Or they might grab one of the ultra fuel-efficient cars (many of them are from Germany - guess why...) like the VW Lupo - 78 miles per gallon (Diesel) - well, truth to be told, it ain't a beauty, you've got no real storage space, and acceleration isn't, but if you want fuel economy, there you go.
And this is the positive side of the high prices - there will be a demand for fuel-efficient cars, thus the industry will build them, and people will buy and drive them. And overall, less Oil will be used, causing less pollution and conserving it for more important uses
+++ MELON MELON MELON +++ Out of Cheese Error +++ redo from start +++
Taken as a whole, Europe is pretty big too. What is very different is that not everyone thinks they have a god-given right to a spread-out, one story home with a big garden. People have learned to build up, rather than out, and out, and out some more so that it takes 1+ hours to cross some major areas by freeway (Phoenix, AZ, Los Angeles from personal experience).
Sure, it's a compromise, like most things are. It's nice to have a big back yard, at times. But that compromise begins to look less favorable when you have to drive 5 kilometers to even get food or go to otherwise basically available services. At some point, maybe it's good enough to have an appartment of your own, and a common green area that you can share with others...
Your point about who gets hit first is a good one, however, at some point, you've got to start changing, even though that means some pain. Perhaps the next time you are in the housing market, you will give some consideration to whether you could use the car a little bit less. Perhaps you will start appreciating politicians who do something about implementing changes making it easier to do more with less car use. Perhaps you will pay attention to vehicle fuel efficiency when you buy one...
As the article states, fuel efficiency in the US has been *declining*, which is absurd, considering that technology continues to improve energy usage in vehicles.
http://www.welton.it/davidw/
I think if the Oil companies built more refineries the price would probably drop rather than finding more methods of extracting oil. But why would they do that as it costs them money to build and potentially drops their profit.
17% of the US imported oil is provided by Canada and from what I can tell Canada is not as greedy about it as the OPEC countries. Mind you extracting from the Tar Sands is more expensive and difficult than from the oil fields of the ME.
Disclaimer: IANAR (I am not a Roughneck)
Where I live in the UK it costs 99.9p per litre of unleaded. The prices seem to have stabilized as all the petrol stations here only have room for 3 digits on their forecourt signs...
Sure, you often hear this from eco people. "Just use public transportation!". But how much would that cost, if it weren't subsidized / cross-financed through those insanely high mineral oil and eco taxes?
So it's easy to say "thank god I'm using public transportation", cause others pay parts of your ticket's price.
Btw: 1.49 EUR/liter (price we now pay in Germany) = 7.06 USD/gallon ... Heck, and they complain about a mere $3/gl.
but afaict most of the high fuel prices at the moment are due to Katrina knocking out refining capacity not oil prices.
Well, you've got to consider that during world wide demand surges (America and China being the biggest buyers) the supply wasn't going down. What happened? OPEC changed the floor price for oil to $40 a barrel. When you consider cheap gas was at a time when oil was between $30-$35 per barrel you soon realize that you won't being seeing that again.
To get cheap gas we'd have to lower our demand or blow the lid off of the supply numbers. This is a good time to bring up that since 2001 Bush has put more oil away in the "reserves" than ever before. That lowered the supply available to the United States *only*, and made prices higher there/here, *only*.
Then you've got a few natural disasters, the growth in China, a war in an oil rich land and general un-ease over prices. Oh, and no one is buying less gas (until these past few weeks).
It will explode. I say the oil market is seeing a bubble, worldwide.
Get your Unix fortune now!
oil is inherently a finite resource. the US government is always reluctant to fund alternate sources of automobile fuel until an absolute oil crisis is on the horizon. sure, the hybrid thing is a stop-gap solution, but at least it pushes a little against the suppliers and can temporarily delay price increases while we work towards a more permanent solution (maybe fuel cell, but it's just too damn expensive now to be viable for private consumers).
for those of you who tell me this gas problem is only temporary and that we need to innovate to improve oil extraction productivity, bear in mind that this is not the oil shock of the 70s: we now have a strong China and India on the scene, who do not help OPEC's wheeling and dealing of supply/demand. those countries' demand will not go away, and for the short term, neither will the political unrest in the Middle East which threatens our supply of crude. c'mon thinking we can stabilize the Middle East is like Englishmen talking about actively Westernizing China: people have been trying unsuccessfully for so many years; what makes you think you can do it?
having worked for an R&D consulting firm, i often spoke with the big gas extracting and refining firms. they are so hesitant to move into a new technology because they keep getting paid for gas. i can see where they're coming from. still, the smartest companies practice technology roadmapping to allocate resources towards the development of a disruptive technology (read Xerox copy machines, VOIP) which will leave their competitors in the dust. so yes, it does make business sense to diversify and innovate, but large public companies are reluctant to allocate too many resources towards these activities because they are busy meeting quarterly earnings requirements and satisfying their stakeholders.
with the big companies unable to wholly fund alternate fuel R&D efforts, the onus lies on the US government to help fund these programs. yet, non-defense/DARPA funding towards science programs has been cut. i wonder where that money is going?
OHHH:
tie fighters it's a bit of a catch-22; i only wish it was as funny as the book.
woot
Martini Glasses
Stuff like this might only be viable with oil prices as high as they are now.
Don't look forward to lower gas prices again, those days are probably over.
US gasoline taxes average around 0.05 Euro per liter. If I'm not mistaken, the Netherlands imposes a tax of around 0.70 per liter.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
Oh, my poor foolish Slashie. It's not that they've been unable to extract oil from shale all these years. It's that it wasn't economically rewarding to do so, with gasoline at only two dollars something per gallon (more precisely, with the crude pirces that led to that). I'm not sure that they aren't getting a bit ahead of themselves, but I suppose Shell knows more than you or I about how soon and how far prices are likely to rise as the long-term effects of the Katrina disaster take hold. Free clue: if you're only paying $3, you ain't done squealing yet.
Time to sell the SUV that you drive in splendid isolation to and from work... if you can find someone so out of touch with reality as to buy the gas-guzzling waste.
Yes the fuel is cheaper in the US, this is for two reasons.
1. The tax is much higher in europe for a variety of reasons.
2. Your regular unleaded has a higher octance rating then the USA's premium. Seriously, you'd have a lot of trouble finding a vehicle in Europe that could run on the low quality fuel sold in the US.
Cheap gas enables speed and distance for both goods and people. This has many beneficial effects, including:
- Consumers can afford a wider variety of goods at a lower levels of cost. This means that a person in NY in winter can get Florida orange juice for a modest price.
- Consumers can afford to drive a little farther to find the best goods at the best prices. Rather than be forced to buy from an expensive, small store nearby (as much as I like Mon'n'Pop stores, they are more expensive and offer worse selection), consumers can shop around and buy the best items at the lowest cost.
- Workers can find a better job by traveling a longer distance at higher effective speed -- a fixed commute time, but greater commute distance. Mass transit, in most regions of the country, is much slower than a personal automobile. Our area has a decent mass-transit system, but the effective speed is half that of an automobile due to frequent stops, schedule intervals, and the walk to/from the bus stop. Speed has a quadratic effect: a 2X increase the average speed means 4X the number of possible employers within given maximum commuting time.
- Workers probably can probably get higher pay by finding an employer in their expanded commuting range. With more employers to chose from, a job seeker can probably find an employer who will pay a little more to get that employee's unique combination of skills and experience.
- Employers get better workers. Imagine a company that can only hire people living within a mile of the company versus a company that can tap into a much larger pool of applicants. When employees are mobile, companies get better workers. This translates into more success for the company, shareholders, workers, and greater tax revenues for government projects.
- Companies can tap into suppliers that are further from them. It means that a manufacturer in Arizona can find and buy the best components, even if they are made 2000 miles way in Georgia.
- Likewise, each company can sell goods to a greater part of the U.S. giving them better economies of scale.
The result is both higher standards of living and better economic growth than we would see if we had high gas prices. I'm not saying that gas taxes explain all of the disparity between the U.S. and Europe in terms of economic growth and unemployment rates, but I'd bet its a factor. My point is that low gas prices have under-appreciated, hidden benefits that are good for consumers, good for workers, good for employers, good for companies, and good for the country.I have no idea if these hidden benefits override the hidden costs, but I feel that both sides of the indirect effects must be tallied before declaring that gas/oil should be taxed to inhibit consumption.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
Sure - we could take it out now, but later we will be trying to figure out a way to re-sequester the carbon back into the ground (to solve global warming). High gas prices are a good thing - they encourage conservation and alternative energy research.
SUV sales are way down this year...
The rise in gas prices has nothing to do with lack of supplies of oil. The reason is the lack of refineries at the moment because some key ones were shut down.
What, you're upset that our governments don't assrape us for energy costs like your government does?
No, I'm upset that your governments don't assrape you for the environmental costs like our does. But I suppose it's impossible to get you to understand that concept.
I have a really elegant proof for Fermat's last theorem. If this sig was only a bit longer...
First off,
/end rant
I live in Korea. Gas here is ~1400 Won a Litre. That equates to ~$5.30/gal.
When I was in Cambodia on vacation this summer, with oil around $60 a barrel. Gas was 2000 Riel per litre. 4200 Riel = $1. That equates to ~$1.80/gal.
Thailand had similar pricing: 25 Baht/Litre. That's ~$2.25 a gallon.
Answer this simple question for me: If gas at these prices is subsidized, how the hell do the Thai or Cambodian government subsidize it?
Hell, the annual revenues for the company I work for are 4x Cambodia's GNP!
If you don't like the gas prices in GO OUT AND VOTE OR LOBBY YOUR GOVERNMENT AND DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT.
I'm sick and tired of the world constantly blaming America for all of their problems.
> could be a very good thing for those of us who
> are currently paying anywhere from $3 on up for
> a gallon of regular unleaded.
- while it will be a very bad thing for the other 3.75 billion people on the planet, and the billions of as-yet-unborn future generations, who will have to put up with the consequences.
I'm wondering how much worse it will have to get before some sort of action is taken. I'd certainly start with blockading US ports, so they can't import oil. Then I'd bomb their oil refineries and car plants.
That may sound extreme, but think about it this way, in 80 years time:
Great-grandson: Great-grandfather, you were alive back in the 2000's weren't you?
You: Yes, sonny, I was.
GGson: So did you know that the Americans were burning all that oil that would make the earth melt?
You: Yes, sonny, we all knew.
GGson: What did you do about it?
You: Nothing, sonny. There was nothing we could do. They were the Superpower.
GGson: But Britain and France and China and Russia had nuclear bombs didn't they?
You: Yes, they did.
GGson: So why didn't you just kill them all?
You: We couldn't have done that, sonny. That's millions of people.
GGson: Yes, but look at all the innocent people who've died because of what they did. There are whole countries that have sunk under the seas with millions of innocent deaths. Killing a few million Americans would have been much less bad.
You: Well, maybe you're right, looking back. But it didn't seem that way at the time.
..Ellis Wyatt already did this. Where? That John Galt book.
[Slashdot Comments We Liked]
Out here in California, prices surged as people bet the price would sky rocket and bought gas no matter what the price. The local 7/11 had people topping off their tanks because their price, usually the highest around, was 10 cents lower than in town. Most of the people buying gas didn't need it but figured the price was going higher so they bought while it was "low" at $2.90.
If the price stays high for the next few years, people will get out of their SUVs and move into more efficient vehicles. The oil markets will respond, just as it did in the 80's, and prices will drop in real terms. Eventually, people will forget and they'll buy gas hogs again. People do that - they forget.
Those of you who are certain that we're running out of oil forget as well. In 1970, it was common knowledge that we'd be out of oil by 1985. Paul Erlich at Stanford made a fortune pitching his dystopian view of the future and we bought it. The futurists who got it right were the economist who argued that the real price of commodities fall over time as producers and consumers become more efficient.
It's worth noting that the shift to SUVs wasn't due to just the cheap price of gas. Congress played a major role as well. Business used to be able to depreciate the price of cars it purchased at an accelerated rate. Small business owners used that to their advantage by buying nicer cars which angered folks who didn't own businesses and hence, couldn't get the same tax write off. Congress responded by eliminating the write off for business-owned cars. The accelerated depreciation schedule remained for trucks which GM and Ford exploited by gussing up what used to be utility trucks for hauling workers around into SUVs. I saw a lot of new SUVs in my neighborhood after my accountant sent out a flyer advising his clients of the tax advantage which was considerable. A very smart friend of mine grumbled that the "I want my children to be safe and so I have to have the biggest car available" crowd just got a tax boost and the only way to retaliate was to drive a Peterbilt to work.
What does the EU know that America doesn't? Or, more likely, what is America choosing to ignore in case whoever changes prices gets lynched?
Why is your assumption that when Europe and the US disagree, it must be that Europe knows something the US doesn't? Knock that chip off your shoulder, asshat. You're exactly what gives Europeans the "elitist" tag: you think you're smarter than us, but you're really just ignorant.
I'm a geologist working in the Rocky Mnt region, and I have a few comments...
Environmental impact will be essentially the same whether you have one hole in the ground, or if you have 12 holes in the ground. You can drill them radiating out from a single surface location, so what does matter is what you do on your single surface location.
So the actual facilities won't be that much different from going out and drilling a "normal" oil and gas well. What raises questions in my mind is the heating.
When you drill a "normal" oil or gas well, you drill a hole several thousand feet deep into your reservoir and run pipe (called casing) down it. you then pump certain amount of cement down the pipe and follow that with water or mud so that the cement flows out of the pipe at the bottom of your hole, and up - between the casing and the rock. Once your pipe is cemented in place, you drop a giant gun on a string down the hole and perforate the pipe. The idea is you want hydrocarbon to flow out of the rock through your perforation holes and then up the casing (better flow dynamics). The cement also acts as a barrier - it keeps oil inside the casing and prevents it from leaking out at the surface, contaminating surface water, etc etc.
This assumes your hydrocarbon already exists and is at a steady state (not flowing to the surface, in other words) several thousand feet underground. Geologically, an oil shale has to sink (over millions of years) to a certain depth before things get hot enough for hydrocarbons to start being cooked off. When hydrocarbons DO start being cooked off, they migrate up through the rock until they reach an impermeable layer where they can accumulate, called a trap. The easiest one of these to visualize would be where rocks are folded into a kind of upside down bowl. Think about filling a dome shaped stadium roof with helium balloons.
In shell's scenario, they are heating the oil shales and artifically cooking off the hydrocarbons. This might cause most of the hydrocarbons to flow up the wellbore, but some of the hydrocarbons will just migrate up through the rock. And ice wall or no, once you've created oil and gas, they will migrate up until they are trapped or until they reach the surface.
To me, it sounds like a good way to create a few oil & gas surface seeps. Plenty of these seeps exist naturally... but I bet if they were created by Shell, it would be kinda unpopular.
Maybe they plan on using their ice wall AS their trap. But they still would need to turn off the heaters first, maintain the ice wall a while longer to catch the last of the oil, and then pump from under the ice wall.
Regardless, it sounds expensive and problematic.
Wow, this must be a few days old...When I passed the gas stations yesterday, the previously-cheapest place in town was selling it for $3.63. Will probably be up to $4 by tuesday.
Just how do you know how much gas (petrol) costs in England?
Back in June of 2004, the average USA price/gallon was $2.04, in England it was $5.44.
I just saw a BBC article from JUNE (BEFORE the recent hikes!) and the price was 90pence/litre!
so 90x3.76(liters/gallon)= 338 pence/gallon or 3.38 pounds. 3.38x1.84(current exchange rate)=$6.22/GALLON!!!!! OWWWWW! MIND you - that was before all the recent price increases too. My brother, who lives in London also confirms that petrol prices are generally about$2.50 above american prices.
..........FULL STOP.
Let's assume that since it's coming from a SHell PR department, they're putting the best possible spin on this. That means for each unit of energy delivered down the hole, they get back 3.5 units of equivalent heat back up, in the form of oil and gas.
But if the heat comes from electrical heaters, the electricity came from coal and oil-fired generators, said plants are only about 30 percent efficent.
So you're burning about 3 units of good oil and coal and gas to get, maybe, if the stuff really is down there, 3.5 units back up. Doesnt sound like a good deal.
I suppose they could do something a bit more efficient, like burn coal down in the hole, or put down a small cleanish nuke down the holes, but those ideas have some non-negligble drawbacks too.. :)
It's not the absolute price that hurts people, it's the rapid change that's doing all the harm.
In the long term, the cost of energy gets rolled in to the cost of doing business, and is budgeted for. But if the price more than doubles in a very short amount of time, it HURTS economically, since there's often no quick way to reduce your energy usage overnight.
INsigNIFICANT
" "This? It's nothing, compared to what I've got coming." He pointed west. "The Buena Esperanza Pass. Five miles from here. Everybody's wondering what I'm doing with it. Oil shale. How many years ago was it that they gave up trying to get oil from shale, because it was too expensive? Well, wait till you see the process I've developed. It will be the cheapest oil ever to splash in their faces, and an unlimited supply of it, an untapped supply that will make the biggest oil pool look like a mud puddle. "
( ATLAS SHRUGGED )
---
Ayn Rand was right all along! She even got the state right! What's next... a motor that will draw static electricity from the atmosphere?
Circumcision is child abuse.
Today Fuel prices have reached 1.43 Euro / liter, this is about 7.9$ / gallon. Yes, driving is EXPENSIVE here.
According to Google, 1.43 (Euros per liter) = 6.77941513 U.S. dollars per US gallon, but the rest of your post was right on the mark.
While having more supplies of oil may help lower the overall price of crude, it's going to take a lot more to lower the price of gasoline in the US. True, OPEC has tight control of the world's oil supply, but these days, the US (and other nations) also face a lack of refining capacity. There simply aren't enough plants to make gasoline, and it doesn't look like there's a rush to build new ones.
Now before you start blaming the tree huggers, bear this in mind: Nobody wants an oil refinery near their house. These days any good location will be located near somebody's house.
There are a few retired plants that may be restarted but this plan faces other issues. Back in the late 1990s when gas was like $1/ gallon, many of the oil companies closed older, less efficient plants in order to save money. Unfortunately, when a plant has been closed for a certain amount of time, it may lose its environmental permits. Because of grandfathering, these older plants may have tons of equipment that will not pass inspection by today's standards. Restarting a plant would cost some capital to bring the equipment to efficiency and code.
Also the oil companies simply aren't really interested in opening new/restoring old plants. By the time everything has been done, the oil situation may have changed. In addition they are making huge profits. Exxon-Mobil made $7 billion in profit last quarter alone. Any increase in the supply of gasoline would affect profits.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
Here's an article about Synfuels called The Great Energy Scam...
Oh no, it can't be! A reputable online publication like the Free Republic, noble bastion of 'Rights for Corporations, not Individuals', reprinting Time Inc.'s copyrighted material without permission? I have already alerted Time to this unconscionable infringement of their rights.
Nice try replacing 'freerepublic.com' with their IP address so people wouldn't see what the link was to, btw. Evidently you have some sense of shame about linking to them, at least.
Read the best of all of Slash: seenonslash.com
Uh, we must not have been reading the same article. This article is about a new technique that does make it energy efficient to extract oil from shale. Or are you reading the article through shit-tinted glasses because you don't want to believe?
Marxism is the opiate of dumbasses
Oil prices rising to $3 a gallon? The US economy shouldn't be held to ransom by unstable elements like oil prices! It's understandable the US is getting a little uneasy, I mean, wasn't that the whole point of the fabulousy conceived Operation Iraqi Liberation?
Why the heck did we go to war in the FIRST place if not for cheaper oil to pour into our SUVs?
You can fill your tanks with my emapthy.
Read about this topic on the The OilDrum a few days back. Seriously, oil shale is not really a solution at all. Why? The cost of extracting this stuff is phenomenal. You use up 1 barrel for every 3 that you extract(30 %).
First misconception " Oil Shale Will Save Us"
I worked with a major oil company for 2 years trying to develop a way to commercialize oil shale. Trust me on this, it ain't going to happen. Most oil companies know this. The few (one??) that don't are totally deluded.
Oil shale is not oil. Oil shale is rock that has a relatively high concentration of organic carbon compounds in it. Geologists call this a source rock. If you heat this shale to 700 degrees F you will turn this organic carbon (kerogen) into the nastiest, stinkiest, gooiest, pile of oil-like crap that you can imagine. Then if you send it through the gnarliest oil refinery on the planet you can make this shit into transportation fuel. In the mean time you have created all kinds of nasty by products, have polluted the air and groundwater of where ever you have extracted it. You have also created an enormous pile of superheated rock that will take hundreds to thousands of years to cool off.
The biggest deposits of oil shale in the world are in northwestern Colorado. No other deposit anywhere else in the world (China, Jordan, Australia, etc.) even comes close in terms of size and richness. There are approximately 1.3 trillion barrels of POTENTIAL oil in this deposit of oil shale. However, even those in their wildest hallucinations have never proposed that more than about 300 billion of these barrels were POSSIBLY extractable.
Of course 300 billion barrels is a very large number. Assuming $50/bbl, these $300 billion would be worth $15 trillion. Quite an enticement to go after. HOWEVER, - I still haven't seen a good analysis that shows you end up with more energy at the end of the cycle than what you put in. Moreover, it takes about 3-5 barrels of water for about every barrel of oil you get. Last time anyone seriously looked at where all this water would come from was Exxon back in the late 70's and early '80's. Their solution was to RE-ROUTE THE MISSOURI RIVER to bring water to this very arid area. I am not shitting you.
Lastly, you will be leaving the biggest superfund site you could ever imagine.
Will we eventually extract oil from oil shale - maybe, but it has always been a last resort, and for good reason. In the meantime, DON'T EVEN THINK about investing in this, even if the offer seems really good. You can't imagine how much money has been poured into trying to commercialize this resource without any success.
There was a experimental oil shale extraction project running in Australia but it shut down a while ago(don't have exact links atm). If it were me, I would be thinking about conserving oil than messing with oil shale.
do you pull a boat?
Sure you could keep it in dry dock and own a sedan but how do you rapidly pull all those boats out of there if a hurricane is coming your way?
http://www.livejournal.com/users/cixel
"So it's easy to say "thank god I'm using public transportation", cause others pay parts of your ticket's price."
This applies to driving automobiles as well. The roads aren't free.
with the spotty contract employment you see quite a bit of in the US these days, the people driving SUVs are trapped. They're trapped because the SUV owners cant buy a new car since theyre living paycheck to paycheck and car dealerships won't accept them in trade-ins because they know they'll just sit on their lots for months because noone else wants them either. Catch-22
http://www.livejournal.com/users/cixel
Note the $20/barrel figure depends on the cost of energy to produce the steam. It's not a fixed, universal figure.
Yes, we could also use public transportation -- for the sake of extending a 15-25min travel by car to about 1-1.5h, because we don't live and work right next to the main radials of the PT network and therefore need to take and change buses.
Besides: also public transportation doesn't run with plain air. With energy prices raising also ticket prices will raise. They on average already doubled during the last 10 years -- just like fuel. So while the ticket prices *at the moment* suggest that it's cheaper than using the car, one must not forget that those ticket prices are raised on a yearly base and (at least in Germany) also heavily subsidized.
There is another benefit, too. Besides buying more fuel efficient cars, more people will be interested in building and using meaningful public transportation systems. Public transportation in the U.S. is abominable. A lot of that comes from the fact that much of the country was developed in a time when driving anywhere you wanted to go was a possibility, so things here tend to be very spread out, which makes efficient public transportation difficult to implement. Up until now, the major complaint most people have about driving has been traffic congestion. So rather than focus on meaningful public transportation, most people would rather see more/wider roads and highways, even though it's been pretty much proven that such increases do little to help congestion. Now that gas prices are reaching the point where they might be a real economic concern for some people, as opposed to a minor annoyance, maybe we'll see more people start to look for alternatives...
Personally, I do grumble a little bit now that it costs over $30 to fill up the gas tank even in my fairly fuel efficient car, but it doesn't bother me too much because neither my wife or I drive on a regular basis. It means that we'll have to budget a little bit more when we go on long driving trips, but that's about it. Over all, i think high gas prices that we are seeing right now are a) inevitable, and b) good for us.
And lastly, as an aside, I always find it amusing how much more Americans complain about gas prices compared to other people in the world, considering that our gas is still among the cheapest in the world. I guess that's what happens when you are brought up in a society where it is assumed that the only way to get from point a to point b is to drive.
If I don't put anything here, will anyone recognize me anymore?
I am glad to see a slashdot story regarding energy as it will be the single most important topic that effects the vast majority of users here, their families, their neighbors, people they know, their jobs, etc.
Indeed, $3 per gallon or even $4 per gallon as it will likely be soon is not a big problem. We complain about $3 per gallon. At the same time we enjoy some of the lowest prices in the world. Our energy bill, which is a free for all 1700 pages, does little to curb mileage. They have designed diesels that can exceed 100mpg. We give tax breaks for large vehicles over 8.5k lbs based on weight alone. The breaks are specifically targeted at these large vehicles so that their extremely privelaged drivers can be compensated for their higher gas consumption. This class of vehicles was in a list in this bill that mandates small improvements in mileage for these vehicles in the future but it was removed by the administration. If you think we are making progress then just look around. Look at what people are driving, where they are driving to, what they are driving for, how they are driving, etc. You might see a few Priuses or some Mercedes Benz diesels running on SVO. Maybe one hydrogen powered honda in your life if you are lucky. Do it in Europe, Russia or Japan and compare that with the US.
To think that this new oil shale techniqe will drop your price of gas is probably delusional. First off, by Shells own words, they won't know if it is profitable or feasible until 2010. If the going price for oil is $69 per barrel and there is a demand for it then that is what Shell is going to sell it for. If demand goes down then all oil will go down. The only thing that would likely cause this is major economic collaps or "demand destruction". Shell isn't out for your best interest, they don't make money off charity. To the contrary, eventhough big business is firmly entrenched in the goverment, pushing bills that rule the citizens with it's vast powerful lobbying power, it is illegal by corporate law to make any business decision that will create a loss. This rules out charity for consumers.
The administration has just admitted that global supply hasn't been able to keep up with demand for three months before Katrina hit. We currently are living mostly on old mega-field oil discoveries. We use 4-5 times as much oil as we discover. Discoveries are going down at a rapid pace, they are smaller and smaller and Saudi Arabia has finally admitted that it cannot currently increase supply anytime soon. The anti-peak oilers will argue that this is all hype when the new wells come online and drop the prices this year and perhaps a little next year. But look at the facts with the mega discoveries and the capacity that we are using - this will be a shortlived peak. There is a lead time for these wells to come online; we know about these and we know about the years where there will be no wells comming online. Once they are used up there are few others to take their place. The world uses well over 75 million barrels a day. How long would a "mega-field" of 500,000 barrels last?
As people are so accustomed seeing important, high payed people on tv talking positively about economic growth they tend to lose sight of the real problem with regards to energy: growth. Business depends on it. Anything less than 3% growth in Japan is considered a recession. Domestic or global sustainability is not a topic for discussion, as there is there is more money in consumption and growth. And money is what rules business strategy and business is what rules governments, at least to a large effect.
We don't have just growth, we have exponential growth. A number that has exponential growth of 7% will double itself every 10 years. Carter said once that every new decade consumes more oil than all the previous years combined - going back to the first drop that was ever consumed. If you need another example think of the one from Professor Bartlett that explains the exponential function. There is a mostly empty jar. You drop in a few organi
North America still has a wild card to play, but with radical consequences for the world. But people resist change. Besides, in an open market situation it will compensate quite quickly as oil goes up the alternative sources will be developed. Capital investment is also relatively inexpensive.
The best alternatives would be wind for electric power and instead of giving away grain, add water and yeast and make a 100% renewable fuel source called hydroxyls (alcohols). The best part about this is it is usually just water that comes out the tail pipe, good bye smog. It is also renwable -- works as long as the sun glows hot.
Here is the issue, if we turn grain into alcohol it will raise the cost of food prices. This creates wars.
But yet another good point exists, instead of having multi-billion dollar refineries you can make it locally in Alaska or Texas or everywhere inbetween. Keep the dollars in the local economy. But that is what Exxon and the government does want and that is why it isn't fostered. Imagine famer Joe making his own hootch tax free!
When the price is high enough, say $120-150 per barrel the consumer will demand and get the alternative.
Batteries are a gimmic. We can't even keep a PC going for more than 2 hours and this is generally unsuitable in the transportation industry. Besides most batteries contain hazardous materials and are expensive to produce and maintain. Besides, you would still have to charge them with power made from fossel fuels unless you were near a hydro dam.
For some like Iceland with thermal energy source abundant, they may use Hydrogen as they could convert the thermal energy to produce hydrogen. But to get hydrogen in liquid quantity takes energy to make. Thus not a general replacement for alcohol.
And once we convert to alcohol, let the Arabs eat oil.
Besides, also public transportation uses that very infrastructure. Last time I checked buses weren't using antigravity.
Let's see. Shell cooks the shale to 650-700 deg F for 9 months and builds an ice wall around the site and gets 1500 barrels of oil. The entire process probably took more than a year. And this only costs $30 per barrel. I don't believe it.
Chill, already.
The world was painstakingly set up so that people depend deeply, emotionally on the flow of oil and money; to connect those things to well-being and the ability to obtain food and shelter.
That's silly.
The world is capable of making just as much food today as it did yesterday, and it has just as many houses and places for people to shelter comfortably in. So why should a few numbers stop people from eating and living?
Are people really going to starve and feel fear just because a few numbers start to change? For goodness sake! There's food and shelter aplenty. All we need to do is work to maintain and share it and everybody will be fine. (We could start by perhaps firing the CEOs and Government officials who throw chairs across board rooms and try to hang on to old family money by way of keeping the people stupid and subjugated.)
The whole confabulation of banks and economic crises, yadda, yadda, was designed in such a way that it was very easy to upset it and thus extract a fine flow of fear and anxiety. Like tapping trees for maple syrup.
News Flash: The economy is ENTIRELY a fabrication of people's belief systems; It is just as healthy as the world believes it to be. Be a part of the solution. Love is the answer.
Perhaps this contrived oil scarcity will give the much-needed kick in the pants to get alternative power sources a boost in acceptance levels. It doesn't actually take that long to implement massive infrastructure changes so long as the people in the driver's seats want them to come about.
-FL
We'd be better to try and reduce our consumption of oil somewhat with lower displacement engines, lighter vehicles, more biofuels, mild hybrids, cycles, public transport, or cheap electric vehicles for city users. Putting some of that massive agricultural overcapacity that both Europe and America suffer from would be a good idea. Biofuels can become more cost effective, particularly with present oil prices.
Many vehicles sold in the US are just abysmal.
I have driven several US pickups (F-150, Dodge Ram), and although they have engines of ridiculously large capacity, they are the worst vehicles I have ever driven. They have poor brakes, dismal handling and poor ride quality. They drink fuel, they are unrefined with poor quality cabin finish, often lack four wheel drive, and basic safety features, many can't even go off road properly. Unbelievably, some of the vehicles in this weight range (in excess of 2500kg) are actually fitted with petrol engines! The sheer disregard for the overconsuption of such vehicles is frightening. If you need to shift huge loads, buy a van. If you have a family large enough to require more seats than are available in a car, buy a mini bus. They use much less fuel, and are considerably more refined.
As most people probably know these vehicles are not really justifiable.
People often quote towing capacity as a reason to buy such vehicles, but this is just total nonsense. Towing weight for a vehicle is generally stated based on vehicle weight. With these vehicles, when towing a heavy load, I would be seriously frightened to drive at all, given the poor braking technology and dreadful handling. Towing capacity is not the maximum capacity it is safe to tow if your load is balanced properly. The vehicles cooling system capacity and engine torque ultimately determine what load you may actually safely tow. There is little that most people would want to tow that could not be moved by an ordinary family car.
It is hardly surprising that large US style vehicles are unmarketable in more civilised parts of the world.
Fuel in the UK costs ~$6.50 / US Gallon now, and such vehicles, particularly with ridiculous petrol engines are just grossly overconsuming, wasteful, anti-social jokes here. Most of the world now looks in disgust at US overconsumption, greed, empire building, and the arrogant, insular attitude that has further hardened under the Bush regime.
Not that geeks need to sell hydrogin fuel cells and something that will use the existing infrastructure. GM had a lowkey proof of concept where by they used a dead oil tank that was apparently the exact same one kind to store gas to pumpout what ever it is they use for fuel celss. As someone who has finally gotten to where it's compulsory for me to drive, because then I can support my family and do right by my girl- it's interesting to experience this stuff first hand. I drove a 4x4 once, it was nerve racking! I coudn't controll the beest, it was a pain to park, the thing was not nimble enough to be considerred safe, and I had precous cargo (IE my kid) in the back-no way in HELL will I do that shit again.
No one seems to have mentioned the fact that the oil shales are in some of the most beautiful pristine regions of North America. Mining these resources will require tearing up huge amounts of Colorado and Wyoming.
At least that is what one of my geology professors in college taught me.
We pay 8$ per gallon here and you are complaining about 3$?!?! wtf is wrong with you, stop whining!
As if it were a God-given-right.
European Union population: 456,953,258 European Union area: 3,976,372 sq. km European Union population density: 114.9 persons per sq. km
United States population: 295,734,134 United States area: 9,631,418 United States population density:
.... and start rethinking their whole energy solution....
burn the stuff and soon its gone forever.... medicine and so much more depends on it too. and you cant just wait some hundred million years to recreate the oil reserves in the ground again....
besides, its all polluting your atmosphere and the consequences are already devastating. the carbondioxide and monoxide parts in the atmosphere are on the rise constantly, and many scientists say it will have devastating effects on climate, the currents in the oceans, ecosystems, plants and so forth....
we need new and clean energy resources for the sake of this planet, our children or if its not too late for our own sake too....
it hurts to see mankind act like savages in a great many ways.....
We have been warned for over 30 years, since the first fuel debacle - how much more time did we/do we need?
No, or very few, efficient major city-to-city links, yet? Alternative fuels? Significant transport efficiency?
No, tinfoil hat people have always knew it would come, and as Katrina, we really did not prepare.
The only reason I see is that we needed to "use up" cheap energy, or someone else, likely a global competitor, would.
Instead of looking for more sources of petrol, why not find alternative fuels which are both cleaner and less expensive?
-illumina+us "I put on my robe and wizard hat..."
Steam engines were left by the wayside of development; if the past 60+ years of gasoline engine delopment had went for steam engine advances, who knows.
Also, a bit of Sodium in a water tank will make lots of steam......
or a Magnesium fire can break water down into Hydrogen and Oxygen.
Just my 2 cents worth.
I am the unwilling control for my Origin.
How do we farm the grain? Tractors and combines need fuel. It turns out they need more fuel than is produced by fermenting the grain. So, even if you could run the tractors and combines on alcohol, you wouldn't have any left over to use elsewhere. And, you would still need other fuel just for the farm equipment.
As if it were a God-given-right.
European Union population: 456,953,258 (2005 est.)
European Union area: 3,976,372 sq. km
European Union population density: 114.9 persons per sq. km
United States population: 295,734,134 (2005 est.)
United States area: 9,631,418
United States population density: 30.7 persons per sq. km
Ratio of the two population densities: 3.7:1
Stuff here is just further apart. The entire economic relationship between fuel costs, transport costs, and retail costs is different here than from Europe. Fuel taxes similar to what Europe charges would have a much larger impact on the retail prices for other goods than in Europe, simply because people here are nearly 4x further apart.
Actually, point number two isn't true. A different measure of octane is used in the United States than in Europe (US 87 = EU 91, for example).
This is interesting, this in-situ processing. I have to admit that the idea of superheated shale and ice walls does sound quite energy intensive. I wonder if there's a good way to get rid of the ice walls...I mean, from what I understand, in the area of colorado they're talking about, there's no water underground to pollute anyhow.
Petroleum products are not only useful as a source of energy, but also for its storage. It would be a waste to use those valuable petro products generating heat, when it can be done more efficiently by nuclear fission. I imagine steam pipes going over colorado and into the ground from a large power plant (that's near a river as a source of water).
Someone mentioned that the rocks would stay hot for hundreds or thousands of years...uh...how do you figure that? Given that it is an enormous thermal mass, but there's a heck of a lot of heat being removed by the extraction of the hydrocarbon products and water. I think the problem woul dbe the opposite, in trying to keep the rock hot enough, especially if those ice walls are used.
Now, onto smug europeans: I am damned sick of the number of you people trating us americans like we're stupid, spoiled brats. Too many europeans make broad generalizations about Americans that just don't hold up to rigorous evaluation. Yes, too many of us drive cars/trucks that are overly large and inefficient in a quick comparison to what many europeans drive. It has been pointed out that Americans often have to drive greater distances than Europeans for work. But there's also the issue of having to drive further for groceries and supplies. This often means driving over worse roads (hence the trucks with big suspensions and increased cargo capacity). There's still a great portion of the US that is rural and agricultural. That's a good thing for you Europeans, because we export a large amount of food...feeding Europe! There's all sorts of fighting about hormones in milk and genetically engineered crops, but most US crops are still legal in Europe, and do help feed Europe.
Second fallacy of self-appointed European energy experts is this idea that "you have to put more money into public transportation". Well, it's not that simple. Where would you put it? Intercity trains? Well, who owns the tracks? Not amtrak. They run the trains. The trains are slow, so people are hesitant to use them. Why are they slow? Most often because they are old, and not in great shape. Most of these tracks are owned by railroad corporations, who use them for transporting freight, which is less about sending things quickly than it is about sending thing cheaply. Track wears out based upon number of transits, load, speed and speed change. Curved and graded portions wear out more quickly. Guess what? A large portion of the US metropolitan population lives in areas where curves and grades are necessary because they are somewhat mountainous, and have rivers and swamps as well. Speed limits are reduced to keep from wearing the track out, and also for safety reasons on worn track with a lot of curves. This only makes sense. But there's also the question of the rail bed. Rail beds are the piles of rocks and earth that supprt the rail and ties. Rail beds don't really wear out, but are built to transport a certain load. Freight tends to be heavier and slower. This requires really strong beds. Because of freight's need for such strong beds, it's very expensive to raise or lower the bed very much above or below the terrain, i.e. to build up or to cut through mounds of rock. And bridges are very expensive, when built to take such loads. These issues make it more economically efficient for freight trains to twist and climb, ascend and descend, at a crawling pace, than it would be to try to punch a straight track through mountains and over marshes. But this is the opposite of what passenger service needs, which is quick travel without so much load. Damn!
So why not be brilliant and build two rail networks, one for passenger service and one for freight? Well, that has some advant
oil shales and oil sands have been used in production of oil in Canada for sometime in Alberta.
They even use a similar method to get oil out using steam instead of heaters: http://www.petro-canada.ca/eng/about/11551.htm
Are compaining or boasting about how cheap gas is? Just wanted to know, so I adjust my posts accordingly. :-|
"Consistency is contrary to nature, contrary to life. The only completely consistent people are the dead." A. Huxley
I'm an oiloholic! I just can't live without oilohol!
Mod me down with all of your hatred, and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
http://energy.senate.gov/public/index.cfm?FuseActi on=Hearings.Testimony&Hearing_ID=1445&Witness_ID=4 139
http://www.postindependent.com/article/20050407/VA LLEYNEWS/104070011&SearchID=73218713158746
If you're in the city, something on the order of 50-125cc will only set you back about $1-2k, less if you buy used. They're easy to ride, alot more fun than driving a car, you'll get some fresh air, and you'll get 50-100 mpg.
If you're outside of the city, and\or have some extra cash and want something a bit more fun or powerful, try something like a Honda Silverwing. I've been riding one for a few years now, rain or shine, from 20 degrees to 100 degrees. 55mpg, 0-60 in about 4.5 seconds, and last time I was out in the desert and able to test it, a top speed of 111 mph. It'll cruise comfortably on the interstate at 80 mph with plenty of passing power. It's also still really easy to ride, though much more like a motorcycle than a scooter.
from $2.49 to $3.19 per gallon in less then 20 hours is what I personally saw happen here in Atlanta, and reports of even 50% increase in same time period, in the atlanta area.
This is not a refinery knock out issue. For part of the reason for reserves is to have a buffer in the event of even worse happening. A buffer that is to be replaced as soon as reasonably possible.
The oil industry runs off of speculation. The US frees up a country rich in oil and our oil prices go up..... What? What are they speculating?
A storm hits the US and some refineries go down, but there are plenty more refineries in the US.
Remember the oil shortage in the US in the 70's, where tankers were stuck in teh Gulf of Mexico with no place to dump their load because all other storage was topped out....
Bush probably only visited New Orleans to see how bad the refineries were and upon realizing its people that run them.... uh decided to get relief efforts going...
Hmmm, someone said we are buying oil from those who want to harm us with terrorism. That they are getting the money they need for such harming, from us.....
So really, all things considered.... oil prices going up can be for political and commercial gain, not public well being.
Currently I will be getting at retirement less then 75% of social security benefits due me (this directly from the social security office), and Bush wanted me and those in my income class to give up some of this to the low class... in essence removing the middle class by converting them to low class.. (those there are those you can take out of the getto, there are also those you cannot take the getto out of --- habitual drain on anything they can get their hands on..)
That Social Security additional screw job was shot down.... So Bush and company found another way and Kantrina.... a timely happenstance useful for an excuse.
But thats not enough....or is it? As all product prices have to account for distribution transportation costs..
I've heard China is being used for an excuse too.
Imagine that, a country as big as China apparently has no natural oil resources of its own... So as its growing it taking the increase in world oil production...
I understand In Iraq, a gallon of gas is 5 cents....
With a profit ratio that can be had from that with neighboring countries (no boat needed) any terrorist should be able to fund their needs... and with a vehicle small then the Bush claimed mobile WMD production trailers found in iraq (funny how I remember getting spam on this very vehicle -- someone wanting to sell mobil production trailers (chemical products) made and sold in the US....)
This is not about oil shortage or even refinery problems.
Its about political and semi-commercial manipulation of economies.
The movie file of his presentaton. And the indexed transcription
Seems to me that the whole damn thing is more a supply problem. Lack of capacity at old outdated refineries and corrupt companies sticking it to us and blaming everything from OPEC to hurricanes.
A great example to the fucked up thinking in California were diesel prices have rocketed up over $3.50 a gallon. Before the hurricane they were jacked up to $3.20 with the excuse of a fire at the Chevron refinery in SoCal ( Calif. has laws that only really allow diesel to be made here in Calif. ) Then because they had a "GLUT" of diesel they sold all the California. diesel to Chile!!! We the fuck are they allowed to do that??
We need a unified Natin wide formula for fuels, with winter/summer blends, and we need modern, smaller, disperced regional refineries. The more excuses we take away from the oil industry the harder it will be for them to lie to us about cost/supply!
Now heres the kicker, there really is only one source for diesel in California and thats from our local refineries, so when the they get shut down by a hurricane ???cause right after Katrina the price of CALIFORNIA DIESEL WENT THROUGH THE ROOF!!!!
On top of this the chumps in Sacramento (both Democrats and republicans) are making alternative fuels like BioDiesel too expensive or out right unlawful to produce as a commercial fuel!!!!
BioDiesel burns much cleaner then DinoDiesel yet they say we must mix it as 20% Bio with 80% Dino!
Si vis pacem, para bellum! For evil to succeed good men need only do nothing!
The real trouble with extracting usable petroleum from oil shale is that given the processes now employed, you actually wind up putting more raw energy into the process than you get out. The current process requires huge inputs of natural gas--these processes were invented at a time when North American natural gas was cheap. If you intend for oil shale to be a replacement for crude oil, you have to have a way of getting it out of the ground that uses less energy than is embodied in the oil shale to begin with; otherwise you're ignoring the second law of thermodynamics. At this point we're better off just burning the natural gas on its own rather than waste it on cracking oil shale.
Secondly, you have to examine the environmental impact of oil shale production. The process that is currently employed leaves behind absolutely massive quantities of polluted water and slag that must be disposed of. You're talking several barrels of toxic waste water for every barrel of oil equivalent produced. Ugh.
Conservation is the only viable alternative that we have right now. If we Americans could just take the simple steps of driving fuel-efficient cars, insulating our houses properly, investing in public transportation, and converting our shipping systems from inefficient trucks back to a rail system, we could vastly increase the energy-efficiency of our economy with very little pain. At what price will my countrymen wake up and begin to take these simple steps? Only when prices have become unbearable, and not likely before.
Don't Panic!
... Stuff like this doesn't get funded, because the last time there was this level of oil pricing, lots of alternative sources got funded, and then oil got cheap again and destroyed all that invested capital.
How about this: have the fedgov put a floor on the price of oil, say $45/bbl. It would make no difference now, obviously, but it would serve to protect investments into alternate energy sources. If the price of oil goes below that level, use the tax money generated to offset stuff like highways, income taxes, etc.
(NT)
A lot of that comes from the fact that much of the country was developed in a time when driving anywhere you wanted to go was a possibility, so things here tend to be very spread out, which makes efficient public transportation difficult to implement.
Lest we forget the monopolistic practices, for example by GM, of buying public transit pointedly to destroy it. (For which they were ultimately fined around $1000, if I recall correctly)
Serious waste from what I see. There's an elementary school roughly 5 miles from me, the closest school. I drive by it to get to town. I'd say a significant percentage of the kids get driven to and from school by their parents, covering the same area that the busses cover. I have no idea why they do this either, this is not a huge crime area with kids getting snatched or anything like that. I mean the line of cars picking up kids at 3 o clock in the afternoon is HUGE. A lot of redundant driving there.
The current price spike is due to the cost of refining the crude.
Granted having that oil reserve tapped could make us oil independent for a while. In my opinion that would be great.
I'm not going to bitch about gas prices. I'm not going to bitch about taxes. I'm not going to bitch about SUVs, Hybrids, or bicycles.
I'm going to, instead, smile to myself and tip my hat to Ellis Wyatt -- a fictional character in Rand's Atlas Shrugged, who figured out a method to extract crude from the same Colorado oil shale. And to the real-world Men of the Mind that have made it possible today.
Ed R.Zahurak
You know, oblivion keeps looking better every day.
Oiloholism is by far the worst use of the suffix "-oholism" I've ever seen.
Unfortunately for the environmentalists this is not what you wanted to happen when we started running out of oil but this is by far the most practical realistic solution that will work to give us time to find alternatives.
I get the feeling that while it would give us time to find alternatives, if it provides enough supply we'll just wind up in the same boat we're in now. That is to say, we'll put off looking for alternatives until it's too late again. It's happened before, it's happening now, and should this provide enough supply, it will happen again.
This poo is cold.
At least in my own country, Norway, all of the fuel tax is diverted into the general budget - motorists hardly see any of the funds collected [put into roads]. However the whole point is to keep it expensive and encourage people to find alternatives! Norway is the world's third largest exporter of oil. We actually have a very good public transport system - and the country is quite large not to mention mountainous.
BTW: We don't spend our oil income, we put it into a huge fund for future generations. Approx. USD 190 billion and rapidly expanding.
12.50 NOK (1.6) per liter. 'nuff said.
I'm a dreamer, the world is my playpen. But hey, I'm a serious person, I can't dream all the time.
It has much cleaner emissions, it keeps your fuel system cleaner, and it supports local economies! It requirs no changes to diesel-powered vehicles made after 1995 (generally). My VW Golf TDI gets 45mpg! It's starting to get big in Portland, OR.
http://www.gobiodiesel.org/
http://www.biodiesel.org/
http://www.biodieselnow.com/
http://www.sqbiofuels.com/
What is the minimum wage for you?? Not being a jerk or sarcastic just ignorant ;)...
Shale oil is definitely a potentially good investment opportunity if you believe that conventional oil is going to be harder to find. I don't know much about shale oil stuff but I'm bullish on coal-bed methane (natural gas from coal). CBM could be the future of natural gas (although there are some environmental concerns)... I'm medium-term bearish on the oil&gas sector but in the long-run, if you are bullish on the sector, then shale oil, CBM, oil sands, and stuff like that are where the future production is going to come from IMO...
Sivaram Velauthapillai
Seeking the meaning of life... @slashdot of all places
Some of the message posters from other countries seem to be taking an attitude of "Ha! Glad the U.S. is finally forced to pay a lot more for their gas! They're the cause of the whole shortage to begin with, because they use up so much of it!" In all fairness, I think that's a short-sighted, myopic attitude - largely for the reasons you're bringing up here.
I've been chatting with a lady friend living in Russia, and the impression I've quickly gotten is that Russians are often poor and struggling because their country is so vast, and population is spread relatively thin over all the open space. A job may be available (or the opportunity to start one's own profitable business may be available), but it may not work out for a family living too far out in the countryside.
This speaks, therefore, to a great need for more readily available transportation. The "suppliers" need better access to the "customers". The "employees" need better access to the "employers".
One reason the U.S. thrives is because we do have the whole transportation thing down pretty well. Practically everyone I know owns a car, and often 2 or 3 of them. Roads interconnect everything, and we've got mass transit in most big cities on top of that. But this comes at a cost.... vastly increased use of gasoline.
As other nations rise to greatness, they'll all have to tackle these same transportation issues. That's going to be where you see most of this "exponential growth" in fuel consumption. China, Russia, etc.... All well-populated nations that haven't quite gotten to the point where personal transportation is an integral part of everyone's daily life yet. But it's coming..... and in some cases, they've got a LOT more land to cover than the United States has!
Please tell me how I can get some 'gas' that cheap, you insensitive clod.
Maybe you should just accept higher prices, maybe the gov. should tax it up to $5.60 in the US and let people figure it out.
#hostfile 0.0.0.0 primidi.com 0.0.0.0 www.primidi.com 0.0.0.0 radio.weblogs.com
I think the best solution is to essentially start imposing excise taxes on automobiles based on physical size and engine displacement like they do in Europe and Japan.
As such, this will quickly encourage people to buy far more economical cars. Fortunately, thanks to modern automotive technology today's B-segment (as it's known in Europe) small cars are no longer death traps with no power, thanks to better engine technology and the European New Car Assessment Programme (EuroNCAP) crash test certifications. Take for example the Honda Fit/Jazz five door hatchback, a model sold in most of the world (and coming to the USA and Canada Spring 2006); the Fit/Jazz sports an amazing amount of interior space for such a physically small car, yet has very good passenger safety protection, decent protection for pedestrians in case of frontal impact, excellent fuel economy with the i-DSI 1.4-liter engine and good performance with very good fuel economy with the VTEC 1.5-liter engine. This explains why the Fit became Japan's #1 selling car recently and why the Jazz (Fit's name in Europe) became very popular with European drivers. When the Fit arrives in the USA next spring, I expect very strong sales, especially when the four-door sedan version arrives (probably in early calendar year 2007).
1.20 (Canadian dollars per litre) = 3.83171193 U.S. dollars per US gallon
A wee bit higher, but I expect that's because the local stations currently have a $0.40/litre markup over what the fuel taxes are.
I'm waiting for biodiesel to become popular..
--
Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
There is NO new technique. That's the point.
The article says, "Drill shafts into the oil-bearing rock. Drop heaters down the shaft. Cook the rock until the hydrocarbons boil off, the lightest and most desirable first."
That's NOT a new technique. They were saying EXACTLY the same thing 50 years ago. (Back then, my father sold Motorola communications equipment to the oil and mining companies in Western Colorado.)
My guess is that Shell's P.R. people found a technologically ignorant media writer.
Think about it. How much energy would it take to heat a cubic mile of rock enough that the oil would boil out? Where would you get the energy?
Slashdot has become an angry place. If someone doesn't understand, or there is disagreement, there is immediate hostility.
--
Trying to make one book explain all of life makes some taxpayers crazy enough to pay for killing.
From your own link:
"The carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide is generated by partial oxidation of coal and wood-based fuels"
I've seen from other sources that synthetic fuel production from coal produces about twice as much waste carbon dioxide then if you just simply burned the coal alone. Also natural gas reserves are becoming increasingly depleted so methane isn't going to be easy to come, unless you want to go through this coal oxidation process which is just going to increase global warming. I actually think coal mining is one of the worse ways fuel sources, the mines destroy the landscape, the fuel creates acid rain, it generates more (albeit diffuse) radioactivity than nuclear power plants, it creates plenty of carbon dioxide and it centralizes power generation.
A cleaner, cheaper approach would be to rely more on wind power (which despite high upfront capital costs is quite cheap over the lifetime of the plant, unlike solar) and to increase the effiency of existing technologies. Hopefully by the 22nd centry we won't be doing coal mining anymore.
Read up at:
- The Institute for Local Self-Reliance
- Taxpayers for Common Sense
- The Union of Concerned Scientists
The US government funds the building of pipelines, exploration for new oil reserves, leases federal land at below market rates, etc., etc. And all that before the latest energy bill just signed into law which massively increases the amount of subsidies going to oil firms.You're still probably gonna drop dead from cancer, though. Imagine all the filth you've been inhaling on your walks to and fro? All that stuff that comes out of the tailpipes of vehicles has to go somewhere...
I'm not sure where you are from, but living in the suburbs is definitely a lot safer than living in the city in America. It is also a lot nicer looking, with much better public schooling. Now, they are not usually sleeper towns, because not all people actually work in the city, I'm not sure if even most people make that commute. Take St. Louis, MO for example. It is a very spread out city, with lots of different municipalities. Nobody wants to go to school in St. Louis City, as they are very bad schools. Everyone obviously has to drive to work and waste much gas, be it to another municipality or the city. There is no real public transportation. Note, St. Louis is very odd, because the city and county are different governmental units.
http://www.uh.edu/engines/epi984.htm
For a single machine, improved fuel efficiency lowers the cost of fuel consumption. Historically the number of fuel-consuming devices in a particular industry usually increases as the costs decline. Each individual machine is more efficient then earlier technology, but overall fuel consumption rises when their increased numbers outstrip the individual fuel savings.
The article also mentions the failures of government enterprise (an oxymoron, IMHO) to solve these problems in the 1980's. Energy is the single most important factor for standard-of-living, so I question the agenda of anyone that wants to strangle the energy economy with taxes, regulation, etc.
Ultimately, the possible ways to structure the energy economy has two extremes: rely on centralized decision making from "government intelligence" or rely on the unregulated and distributed decision making of "market intelligence." (The many options along this spectrum include nationalization, public corporations, regulation, tax structuring, etc.) The expectation that "market forces" are preferable to "government control" has been ascendant for the last few decades, and I expect it will continue to be so for a good part of the 21st Century. For more on this point, I redirect you to a well-known public corporation:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/commandingheights/
If economics is the science of what is financialy possible/probable, then actions should reasonble follow. As you point out, the costs are supposed to make this feasable. Then why hasn't it happened? Grinding up large patches of land to extract oil isn't popular. This is strip mining at its very worst. Grind the earth down and boil the oil out, then refine it several times.
If there is so much oil about to come online, why isn't the oil industry building new refineries? While I certainly know nothing about the oil industry's geological understanding, one would think that new refineries would be economically beneficial if more refinement is necessary. Unless it isn't.
Something I haven't seen mentioned much is what affect the higher price of gas will have on truckers, both owner-ops and the larger companies. A bumper sticker I've seen many times on semis says "Without Trucks, America Stops", and that is rather true. An amazing amount of shipping takes place on America's highways, something that in a lot of other countries is done by rail or what-have-you.
"The past is but the beginning of a beginning, and all that is and has been is but the twilight of the dawn."
bike fags...
The article talks about HEATING the shale in situ to cook the source rock at 750F. It talks about FREEZING the surrounding ground mass. This appears sort of like Nixon setting the A/A in the White House to 69F, in summer, because he wanted the fire place roaring.
Could a nuclear power station provide both electric power and is the turbine outflow sufficient to cook the shale? Or at least make better use of the waste heat than sending it into the atmosphere?
Slashdot comments are not fully edited editorials. I just googled for what I knew was there, and picked one of the first links. Don't like it? Pick one of the others, or Google for your own.
--
If your gov't chooses killing as policy (CIA trained Arabs in 1980), expect others to choose the same.
And they say US schools are bad at teaching geography. What's YOUR excuse? The miles-to-kilometers conversion is too tough? What's your excuse for such a fundamental lack of economics knowledge? Here's my point.
I'm not at all worried about paying $4 per gallon, personally. What I am concerned about is the fact that something like 90% of our economy does business by diesel truck. The US does not have rail infrastructure capacity to replace those trucks. If I can't afford gas, I'll carpool. Hey Mr. $2 per litre, what's your next brilliant bit of genius? Suggest truck drivers start to car pool? And they say US schools suck?
So if this 200% increase in our gasoline prices create a significant dent in our GDP, that will create a significant dent in our federal tax revenue at a crucial point in history where we NEED to invest huge sums into rail and mass transit infrastructure. We have wastelands bigger than France, Germany, or Spain. We're not talking about some quaint little train system for Delaware.
Here's a list of densely populated cities. Notice anything? Very few American cities there. I've never heard of the sub-1m population European cities, but I bet I could name a dozen US cities you've heard of that aren't on that list at all.
Yeah really, what are we whining about? It's just that our entire nation is ill-equipped for mass transportation, our entire economy depends on cheap gasoline, and our gas prices have doubled in the last year. Fuck all, why don't you just burn down your schools? If you're any indication of average, you're clearly not doing you any good.
The alcoholic murderer is just another example of the Gulfstream Liberal hypocrites, sneering down at flyover country from 35,000 feet, clucking their tongues at all those selfish SUV drivers below.
Teddy, his nephew RFK Jr., Michael Moore, Al Gore, Laurie David, Ariana Huffington, Barbara Streisand, and the list goes on and on and on. They live lives dripping with decadence and luxury. They live in 10,000 sq. ft. Malibu mansions with six or eight air conditioning subsystems. They go hither and yon in their Gulfstreams and Learjets. They drive around town in their limousines and Maybachs and S600 Mercs. I have two kids, but Al Gore has four, and the Kennedys breed useless mouths like rats. Their footprint on Mother Earth's limited resources is ten or twenty times my own. Yet these pampered hypocrites have the gall to criticize me for driving a Jeep? Fuck them. Fuck them hard.
-ccm
Too much Law; not enough Order.
Why are pump prices so volatile?
I've read that it might take a barrel of oil some 60 to 90 days, from the time it's extracted, to end up in your fuel tank.
There's clearly a difference between historic cost (i.e., the cost of all the oil already being processed) and replacement (cost of a new barrel of oil).
I wouldn't expect retail prices to fluctuate so rapidly.
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Improving his fitness saved him from a back problem which would otherwise have left him bedridden.
On the other hand, one of the drunk drivers who ran him over (forget if it was the second or the third) broke his hip. I think that was the driver who was so drunk that he couldn't get out of the car on his own.
Support bike lanes if your home town ever considers them.
It is time, even for you, to accept the inevitable. We are raning out of fossile fuels sooner or later. Also we increase the amount of CO_2, CO_1 etc. in the atmmosphere which is definitly affecting the temperature and plant life (oceans and land). Which results in various different changes to the global and local climate. Beside these ecological effects, which may cause hunger, wars etc., we have to switch to another energy technology. This technology must have at least the following features: 1. It must not pollute any limited natural resource (air, water, land) 2. It must be save 3. If an accident happens, it must not devastate large areas. 4. It shall be affordable 5. It shall be decentralized, so single problems won't affect large areas. 6. It must be implementable To meet these goals, it is important to change a) certain human behaviour. Like driving around in cars instead of using more energy efficient methods. b) certain production methods c) the way we produce goods. to c). today we produce a certain good, lets say a computer. It works normally for 4 years before it starts to break down. (Yes I know sometimes they work for maore than 4 yaers) Also most companies throw them out after 2 yaers. Because most electornic equipment needs 10 times the energy to be produced than they ever consume during their use (even with standby). It is important to stretch their lifetime and/or reduce the energy consumed by producing them. Also most tools cannot be repaired these days because their are not designed for it. And because nobody can repair them for a reasonable price. When we change these things, we have a problem with the current economic system. It is based upon the idea, that the market should grow and to do so, more and more energy and other resources are needed. This change would have two effects 1. we will have more services than production 2. we will have less to do in general, as we produce less and that stuff runs longer. this leads to the point, that humans will have to work less in production. So we have to find other things to do. ;-)
yes, seas collect most of the sun energy, and growing efficient algaes is of several ways to collect this energy (Danemark uses sea windmills, and several countries use tidal and wave power)
Enjoy your free health care, commie.
I can't be bothered to repeat, yet again, the numerous reasons why my own personal private transportation beats public transportation, so I won't.
When I travel to a remote city for a week, I do not like to rent a car. I find that if I can walk to and from the motel for the week that I am there it makes for a much better trip. (usually when I travel it is for classes and such so I spend most of the 40 hours sitting down)
I frequently find some hotel that is very close to where I am going to be. Some times I have been staying within 1/2 mile of where I need to be during the day and I get told that I can get there from here on foot.
One place was very close but I wound up getting bus passes because you needed to walk over five railroad tracks and down beneath some bridges (very dangerous looking) because the bridge that cars drove on had no foot or bike access. Rode the bus 4 blocks a day for three days until I figured out a way to get there with a two mile walk.
Next time you go on a one week trip, try this though. You will learn so much more about a strange city.
Did you ever stop to think that the 300+ billion dollar/year United States military budget is the best hidden "gas tax" that ever existed? Who do you think is paying to keep the Middle East pot stirred into a third world country so that standards are low and prices are cheap there? What country, do you think, has squandered all of it's reputation and "political capital" trying to dominate the resource? Not to mention the National Guard troops and tax dollars that could've better been spent domestically on some, oh I dunno natural disaster.
If you think were (you're) paying $3.29/gallon you might want to look a little further. In addition, if you want to feel sorry for someone, try feeling sorry for the minority in the US (and anywhere else for that matter) who are trying to keep a rabid government in check despite an apathetic and complacent majority.
Can anyone else see that flame flickering in the not too distant future?
Didn't Ayn Rand write about this in "Atlas Shrugged"? Wasn't her Oil Baron hero-figure, "Wyatt", the guy that figured out how to efficiently extract oil out of shale. And in Colorado no less? How interesting.
Have Keyboard, Will Travel
For those of us who lived in Colorado in the
Seventies, this has a strangely familiar ring
to it.
Last time, however, the oil shale harvesting
soultion involved microwaving the rock to heat
it up. Interested to know what the "heaters"
referred to in the article would be. In addition
to heating the rock, it would have killed everything
living in the soil.
Oil shale sucked up a lot of venture capital and
delivered very little last time there was an oil
shortage. But it promised millions of barrels of
oil. So what is the difference this time?
The US was investing heavily in public transportation systems prior to WW1. Investment stopped after WW1 because most state and municipal regulators were holding fares to pre-WW1 levels even though operting costs had doubled. This was also the same time that cars were becoming rapidly more affordable.
Right you are. But the U.S. also shows fewer property crimes when victim surveys are used instead of official police-recorded statistics.
It tuns out that many crimes that are reported to the authorities in England are not officially recorded . The ineffectual British police are cooking the books to make themselves look better, and provide talking points to sneering, ill-informed, anti-American Eurotrash assholes.
I prefer something like number of fatalities due to violent crime.
WTF? Apples and oranges, dude. We were talking about property crimes, not murders.
By the way, if current trends continue, England's murder rate will surpass the USA sometime around 2012.
It polutes, its offshoot products (plastic bags etc), PCBs are harmful and all that. If they could invest in alternatives such as solar the air would be cleaner and the oil wars unecessary. Am I being naive here?
O'WONDERWe're working on it.
Oh right, because the oil prices have nothing to do with peak oil and lack of refining capacity.
That said, the dems still are happy to spend billions on roads to subsidize car use, one of the biggest uses of energy in the country. They spend more on public transit than republicans, but that isn't enough. Make road users pay for road use, then less people will drive, less energy will be used and oil prices might fall.
Sure, it's a compromise, like most things are. It's nice to have a big back yard, at times. But that compromise begins to look less favorable when you have to drive 5 kilometers to even get food or go to otherwise basically available services. At some point, maybe it's good enough to have an appartment of your own, and a common green area that you can share with others...
If you believe the reason to have land is to live like you do in the city but with more room then your philosophy makes sense.
I have a well, a septic system, solar panels, chickens for meat, eggs and fertilizer, a garden for fruit and vegetables, cultivated bass for meat and fertilizer and a wood stove and axe.
That covers a good chunk of the basics. I have to make up reason to go out sometimes. Hell, I only go shopping every 3-4 weeks and I am very disorganized. Basic self sufficiency is not really difficult when you have some land and a little knowledge.
But for me, none of this would be possible without the internet.
I would still be packing myself into that one bedroom apartment sharing that common green area just to have newspapers, books, music and commerce. No more.
Cities are dead, cars are dead, centralization is dead.
The internet changed the world.
Long live information/technology based, distributed self sufficiency.
yes.... by over throwing iran's only deomcratic leader in favour of an installed autocrocy... turning the most liberal repulic in the middle east into the islamic revolution..... leading to the current frosty relation between US and the middle east.
a great foriegn policy.
But it's coming..... and in some cases, they've got a LOT more land to cover than the United States has!
That's right - and they'll be fucked, because the developed countries, with all their personal SUV use and their 95 million km of paved roads will have pushed the supply of oil to unaffordable heights.
So, they'll be the ones with the 45 year old 2 cylinder micro-car from the eatern bloc with worse economy than your average californian SUV, because they can't afford the tech that would let them use the remaining oil efficiently.... because they're poor to start out with and it takes a weeks wages to fuel that car to go to work for a week.
You are in a twisty maze of processor lines, all alike.
There is a lot of hype here.
TANSTAAFL. Even with streetcars.
That's simply not possible. Even if the trolleycars were run on solar power (which didn't really exist back then), just maintaining them creates pollution.
I would also question why the link thinks that these companies would have been profitable when bus and light rail systems are not. It's a more competitive market now, if these systems still existed, they would certainly require subsidies to compete with cars. I mean, I and 3 friends are going up to San Francisco next week. If we were all to take Caltrain (which is subsidized) it would cost about $36 for us to go. We can take a car for under $10, even adding in the actual purchase cost of the car, I would imagine its under $20. And my car isn't the cheapest or more efficient.
So, GM's practices or no, there's no guarantee these systems would be profitable today.
It's kind of cool though, I recognize that bridge in the picture. I'm gonna go over and check it out, see if I can see the old wire supports like it says.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
Does the government just assume that everyone is interested in funding that? Do they take taxes from cyclists and pedestrians to pay for the steady supply of oil? Everyone should be interested in funding that, since the prices of everything are based on it. As diesel and gas go up in price, so does everything that needs to be shipped. Bicyclists are consumers too, so they have an interest in the prices of fuel being low so that all of their goods will have low prices. Bicyclists use the roads too, so they're interested in traffic control police and good roads (albeit not highways, which are necessary for the transportation of their goods). According to our leadership the stabilisation of oil-producing middle-eastern countries wasn't the goal, it was the stabilisation of totalitarionistic nuclear weapon wielding maniacs, but that's another story..
which makes the high fuel tax, just a tiny bit harder to swallow...
-- For evil to triumph it is enough that good men do nothing.
My only major obejection is that a lot of rural Americans making those routine 30 mile drives you refer to, choose to do them in absolutely enormous pickups, or other massively overpowered cars.
Take a minute to ask yourself if those rural Americans have a non-leisure requirement for those "absolutely enormous pickups." How about coal miners in Appalachia, or framing carpenters in Tennessee, or HVAC technicians in Kentucky? Do you really think that a population where nearly 80% of the mobile workforce is employed in an agribusiness or mechanical industry should haul around their equipment in a Honda Civic?
For most rural Americans, owning a vehicle with a decent payload capacity is not a luxury--it's a necessary way of life. And you need a clue.
umm.. my pickup is will only hold a half ton. I don't know of any SUVs that hold 2 or 3 tons, unless you count surplus Unimogs or duece and a halfs as SUVs. But an excellent reason to have a SUV is to escape flooded, debris strewn areas. Higher clearence, more power, and greater carrying capability make it much better to flee a hurricane, or it's aftermath, in than, say, a Chevy Caprice or Honda Accord.
The EROEI of conventional oil is around 30:1, while the process is around 3:1 - a significant difference.
Nothing will replace oil, and all indications are that we are fast approaching peak production, if we haven't already reached it. What technologies like this may do is ease the transition to a post-carbon society.. but they aren't going to prevent it.
I've lived in Colorado since '79 and every 10 years or so, somebody brings up oil shale as the next savior for high energy prices
Fact is, producing anything significant from oil shale is a mirage shimmering in the distance - impossible to reach. Like the fabled "hydrogen economy" it's just never gonna happen.
This may be the biggest technological breakthrough in oil shale production since the mid '80's but it's still far cheaper to import from the Persian Gulf. Hell, you can stick a fork in the sand over there and start pumping.
The price of oil today is nothing more than the result of futures speculators spreading fear and paranoia. Big oil was pissed as hell when the price fell to $10/barrel back in '97-'98 that they're using every excuse they can find to drive it up now. Oil executives drop to their knees daily and praise the Lord that their buddy Bush is in the White House now.
You think it's a coincedence that ExxonMobile just reported a whopping 44% increase in quarterly profits - just about the same percentage of gas price increases in the same period?
My 1996 dodge dakota is definitely not the most fuel efficient, coming in at around 20 mpg tops. The market can definitely bear higher gas prices as can be seen from the rising consumption even in light of "skyrocketing" fuel prices. I just put myself in the mindset that gas prices right now are a bargain (cause they are.) I do believe gas prices should be better regulated so that they don't increase 50 cents overnight. Living in california I expect to pay a premium for gas with additional city and state taxes, but fuel fluctuations must be leveled out. This practice has worked wonderfully for electric bills through the summer months. People need to stop driving out of their way to save a few cents per gallon on gas. I have even seen cars lining up for miles with news crews covering the insanity when some promotion is going on at a gas station for cheap gas or a free 10 gallons. We are able to move tons of metal hundreds of miles for less than a hundred bucks, but yet we crave cheaper prices. Admittedly, air quality is much better than before smog laws, but it is a continuing process not a simple fix. Where the hell is my mr. fusion...and flux capacitor...and hoverboard?
http://www.sledgehammercomputers.com
Not wanting to sound like too much of a hippie, but current shale oil technics are rather destructive.
n als/shaleoil/overview.html
http://www.greenpeace.org.au/climate/causes/crimi
Our reliance on fossil fuels is quite astonding (spelling??) in this current day. I mean we've been using such fuels for over 100 years (almost 150?). I'm sure there has always been a pretense that this stuff (coal, oil, uranium) was going to run out, you'd think we would have cut our depedency from these fuel sources years ago. I guess too few people are making too much money from exploiting such resources and the resources are plenty enough to last out their generation.
Yah, 'cause the House of Saud had nothing to do with the fact that Saudi Arabia is a 3rd-world country. You know, they just own all the oil, 'cause it's their kingdom. Who's going to fight them?
Tell you what, why don't you go over there and start a revolution against the Saudi Royal Family, and let all those poor people have access to what should be theirs. That way, they could screw the rest of the world if they saw fit. At least it'd be their choice, and not the choice of the tiny oligarchy (oiligarchy? heh) that runs things.
If we were all to take Caltrain (which is subsidized) it would cost about $36 for us to go. We can take a car for under $10, even adding in the actual purchase cost of the car, I would imagine its under $20. And my car isn't the cheapest or more efficient.
There are a lot of hidden costs with cars. The cost of building, maintaining, and policing the roads. Unless you are on a private highway, those are subsidies. As well, cars are much less economical than centralized energy production for mass transit. Trains and the like can all run on the same power grid, from the same industrial power plant with better environmental scrubbers than ever be viably put into cars.
There is also the cost of lost space and real estate. Most American cities are 60% road. Reducing the amount of roads required for day-to-day transit would dramatically decrease the cost of real estate.
Also, there are serious health considerations to such prolific driving. It is one of the most dangerous activities. I believe more people die in car accidents in a week than have ever in public transit accidents. As well, driving can be conducive to a sedentary lifestyle. New York is said to have the least obese Americans because of the high use of public transit. Houston is said to be the fattest for precisely the opposite reason: no viable public transit. While I am not sure I buy the causation, there is a definite correlation. Obesity causes an enormous burden on health care, particularly public health care. Let us not even mention the cost to health care from air pollution.
Finally, the permanent destruction of non-renewable oil resources is not truly reflected in the market price of oil. So, looking way down the road, when oil becomes truly scarce, the transition costs to alternate fuels will be staggering for defunct cars and useless roads. Public transit on an electrical grid can switch transparently to more readily available sources.
So while you can say that it costs 3 times as much to take transit to to San Francisco, it is only so because the government has done a splendid job of hiding the real costs of facilitating that cheap driving. But these externalized costs are real, and their aggregate is only now becoming readily apparent.
(See also the post Ayn Rand was right! by Stormwatch (Score:2) Sunday September 04, @09:39AM)
h rugged.htm
Yup; the name of the character was Ellis Wyatt.
Detailed table of contents to "Atlas Shrugged":
http://www.geocities.com/forpropertyrights/AtlasS
(thoroughly gives away the story)
... well sort of.
My 65mpg 250cc bike runs off E85, only 15% fossil fuel. Meaning my direct consumption of gas per year with my 4 mile roundtrip daily commute comes to approximately: 2.4 gallons per year.
Of course, occasionally I'll take a trip up to Santa Fe on a nice day so it's probably more like an egregious 12 gallons per year...
Maybe this technology will push out Hubbert;s peak by a couple of decades, giving us time to produce better technology to take advantage of renewable sources of energy
Vote for Pedro
if you look at Carter's energy policy, Reagan, Bush, and Clinton all used it with only a little tweaking. Don't blame Carter for Nixon's screw-up. .
Katrina did cause a lovely $0.30-$0.40 spike, but prior to this unleaded (at least in my area) was still rising at a very brisk pace. We went from just over $2/gallon to $2.55 in the span of just a month or two, and before that there was another (slower) climb from $1.50 to $2. And it's not like $1.50 is a really low number to start with. Nine years ago, I remember the price in my area (east central Florida) was as low as $0.85/gallon.
My point is, gas prices were stable in the early 90s, but they've been rising steadily for years and have hit a major spike in recent months. +$0.50 in two or three months is pretty huge. Katrina is not the primary cause; she just exacerbated the situation.
By the time the refineries reach full capacity again, I bet it'll be too late to reel the prices back under $3/gallon.
Yeah, yeah, that's the spirit! If they're going to be souless ass-fuckers then why can't we!?
Gee, I wonder how long the SRF would've held up if not propped up by foreigners?
As far as revoloutins are concerned you might pluck the splinter out of their eye right after you pull the log out of your own.
"I worked with a major oil company for 2 years trying to develop a way to commercialize oil shale. Trust me on this, it ain't going to happen. Most oil companies know this. The few (one??) that don't are totally deluded.
Oil shale is not oil. Oil shale is rock that has a relatively high concentration of organic carbon compounds in it. Geologists call this a source rock. If you heat this shale to 700 degrees F you will turn this organic carbon (kerogen) into the nastiest, stinkiest, gooiest, pile of oil-like crap that you can imagine. Then if you send it through the gnarliest oil refinery on the planet you can make this shit into transportation fuel. In the mean time you have created all kinds of nasty by products, have polluted the air and groundwater of where ever you have extracted it. You have also created an enormous pile of superheated rock that will take hundreds to thousands of years to cool off."
I don't undertand why this opsession with getting fuel out of the ground when instead of gasoline one can use ethanol http://runningonalcohol.tripod.com/ Which requers no vehicle modification. Most gasoline now is 15% Ethanol. You probablythink that its hard to make it. Guess what--NO! it cost about $1.50 per gallon. One can make it at home,this is basicly alcohol. Similarly, with Biodiesel one canmake fuel very cheaply around from corn oil and the like. Not only can you use plants like corn, to produce the fuels which far,ers know how to grow,and we are not dependant on Saudi Arabia to get it. Bio-Fuels have much less of the pollution then fosil fuels. And what-ever pollution they do have,it is not really a "pollution" since it came from plants around us, and is part of bio-system (Unlike Oil which is NOT). So why we still using this expensive poison in our vehicles? The problem is not that people drive tanks on the street the pproblem is --fuel. Why should I care if people fuel up their $50K Hummer with biodisel?
Sir,I belive we already screwed them up pretty badly. Oops,I think it did it again. As for Colorado,we don't have enough troops to invade, we still have to find WMD's in Iraq, unless you Sir know where they are. (Do you?, 'Cause we are REALLY lost).
This is not the first time that an oil company has tried this. I am from Western Colorado, and the Exxon company already tried to come up with a way to extract oil from oilshale back in the 1980's.
They set up huge operations and employed a ton of people in Western CO. Very quickly it was figured out that there was no profitable way to get oil out of the shale.
They suddenly pulled up operations, giving most of their employees less than a week to know they were out of jobs. Needless to say, this really screwed some people over.Now with oil prices skyrocketing again, they are going back to their old tricks. They may find a way to extract oil from shale cheaply, but I seriously doubt it. Alternative energy sources will most likely be cheaper much sooner than they figure out how to get oil from those damn rocks.
What we really need is something like these:
http://www.cheniere.org/misc/oulist.htm
Infinite electrical power if it actually works...
make gas or diesel from chemicals in the air. Basically we need to get to a closed-loop system. I am guessing that we could either crank-up some kind of monstrous air seperator and chemical reactor/refiner or maybe do something like fill Utah (or maybe have the Saudi's do this when their oil starts running out) with 1" deep water troughs and let some oily slime grow in it, then process that into a diesel substitute.
The reason we use gas/diesel in the first place is because they are a very handy way to distribute and store energy. Even if it takes more energy than it produces, its still a benefit (due to alternative/nuclear methods we can create to make the surplus energy) because we can make something to keep our infrastructure (esp farm tractors and fertilizer!!!) running. If our farmers can't produce, the world will starve and our civilation will end. If you want to get really spooked, that probably means some bolide we might have been able to stop will smack us and the only intelligent life found so far will cease forever.
Not possible; if you start with N moles of carbon, you can only end with N moles CO2 at the end (barring seriously exotic not-in-your-grandkids-lifetimes nuclear power schemes). Coal cumbustion is pretty complete these days. Pending a cited journal source, I call bullshit.
Also natural gas reserves are becoming increasingly depleted so methane isn't going to be easy to come, unless you want to go through this coal oxidation process which is just going to increase global warming.
Natural gas depletion can be expected, yes. Anticipate exploration of continental shelf methyl clathrates. And yes, expect nasty global warming consequences, such as more Cat5 hurricanes making landfall, and killer bees making it all the way to Canada. (Eat honey, maple-boys!)
I actually think coal mining is one of the worse ways fuel sources, the mines destroy the landscape, the fuel creates acid rain, it generates more (albeit diffuse) radioactivity than nuclear power plants, it creates plenty of carbon dioxide and it centralizes power generation.
Yes, coal sucks as a fuel source. Coal mining is messy, and there's no avoiding the way coal fuel will continue to increase CO2 levels. Using it for synthetic petroleum (SP) production, however, allows stripping most of the sulfur (one acid rain source) and thorium (main radioisotope IIR) from the SP. Furthermore, even with the wretched environmental impacts, it's about the only fuel source the US can get on line to replace gasoline FAST if, say, the Saudi Oil fields peak in the next year.
Wind power can not run your car, can not transport food from the farm to your grocery store, and can not provide feedstocks for either plastics or fertilizers. Organically grown biodiesel is the probable longer term answer if we're going to maintain a technloglical civilization; but I'm betting SP from coal — a proven technology — will be the stopgap used in the next decade. The bad news is, the US has at most only a century's worth of coal. So, yes, this will be a very short term answer.
//Information does not want to be free; it wants to breed.
I got one, the Passat, which I like. I think it
gets over 20 miles per gallon, probably because
of the smallish 2.8 L engine using premium fuel.
Then I had my 5 kids. That means I need 7 seats.
The Passat has only 5 seats. Whoops!
I could get a minivan, but that would be silly.
My family will outgrow it in a year or two.
I think a 15-seat van will do the job. Some of
my friends (very Catholic) need two vans to get
the whole family to church.
Grrr... what's with all the puny cars these days?
How is a man supposed to transport his family?
and find the whole idea to be a preposterous example of the excesses of modern living. decadence defined.
I'll bet you a million dollars you have no kids. Otherwise, I'd be surprised if you can afford a mortage or rent on a large enough place close to to work, and not needed a car.
Look - commuting is the last resort for the middle class families in many cases. I think you guys need to lighten the fuck up. It's hardly decadence.
Your hybrid is not saving the environment. Its purpose is to make you feel good about buying something.
So I wonder, putting aside for one moment all the useful things that are made with oil derivities, if we will be able to utilise (burn) all this extra carbon based energy before the consequences of using it take effect? Or, put another way, how much of these gasses can the atmosphere actually absorb before our weather becomes so violent that we can't use these energy sources anymore?
Then there is the question of heat dissapation from our cites, surely it's in the gigawatt/terrawatt range by now? Maybe not much compared to the sun, but certainly extra, it must have some sort of effect on the weather, look at the fury of the hurricanes and tornados that always appear to be in the news in the U.S. All that energy has to go somewhere and if the gases we are pumping into the atmosphere delay/halt it going into space, then how do we expect this energy to disappate?
The irony is that oil IS a really useful product, but our current day consumption of this resource is simply unrealistic and by now, obviously unsustainable, certainly selfish wrt our decendants.
Unfortunatley both our countries are sadly lacking in any political will in this department and until the reality smacks us in the face like the ground embraces a skydiver whose parachute has failed, I can't really see it changing.
I, for one, would prefer a more controlled decent!
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
Also, with inflation taken in account, gas prices are only up %8 from 1950. It was 2.33 a gallon then. That's why people still have the purchasing power to run their vehicles. It's a pretty simple matter, really.
What we don't need are price caps, as suggested by the Communist News Network (CNN). Price caps will cause the same Carter-regime supply-runout gas lines.
In other words, if people want to push an alternative fuel agenda, let the free market drive it by causing oil-based resources to sky rocket in value. Why is the shale in Colorado and Utah becoming cost feasible to develop? Because the oil prices are dictating it. Based on the same principal, hybrid and alternative fuel vehicles will eventually become cost competitive. YMMV.
Cheap gas made in the USA. I can't think of anything else that could make America a happy place again!
By by middle east!
See ya! Home that islam thing works out for you! See you in a 100 years.
Maybe even a thousand.
This is great news, if it works!
This is my sig.
what about a car-full of circus clowns? Until I see that, I remain skeptical to your claims, mister...
Here's an idea, why not scrap your fucking SUVs and Hummers and buy efficient vehicles instead? Or at least just quit whining? You have it fucking good.
No you stop whining! Isn't your country a democracy? Why don't you vote to abolish the gasoline tax next election if you don't like it? Here in the US we never voted for high gas taxes, which is why our gas is so much cheaper than yours.
There isn't too much to be said for European ingenuity either. If American gas prices were as high as yours, we'd have developed alternative fuels long ago. Even at the current prices, ethanol is starting to be competitive, and many cars can already run on it (E85). Last time i was over there, the only thing for sale was unleaded. At astronomical prices.
Too many Europeans have a defeatist mentality. Why doesn't France have a hydrogen economy already in place? They have had dirty cheap nuclear energy for decades, but nobody bothered to use it to produce hydrogen. They just roll over and pay OPEC plus a 200% tax bonus to the government like there was no alternative.
Instead of taking advantage of the high prices to start alternative fuel businesses and getting rich, people over there force themselves to conserve, pay taxes though the nose, drive around in ridiculous looking mini cars which probably cost more than Lincoln Navigators (after tax of course), and generally accept their declining standard of living while blaming everybody else for their problems.
And to add insult to injury, unlike France, the rest of Europe is busily decommissioning their nuclear plants and replacing them with natural gas, coal and oil, while complaining all day long about those vulgar and selfish Americans.
Gas price here in Finland just bumped to new heights, 1.5 euros per litre. That's like $7.13 per gallon. How does that look like?
we americans may pay $3 at the pump,
but we make up for it through taxes.
the us goverment subsidizes oil tremendously.
thats why they use vinyl in car - short shelf life
We are only a few months away from Hubbert's Peak when half the conventional oil that the human race will ever pump will be used up. This is a watershed event comparable in scope to the industrial revolution.
The only logical response for technical people is to rebuild the entire world energy infrastructure. From top to bottom and from rich to poor.
Every type of alternative energy is now open for consideration as a piece of this puzzle. Wind to solar, clean coal to nuclear, hydrogen to wet steam, and certainly oil shale and tar sands. As the price of gas goes up, the alternatives will become economically viable in turn.
There is no silver bullet. Oil shale has a strength in its volume. It has weaknesses in greenhouse gas production and environmental contamination. It is however irrelevant that it is neither oil nor shale.
There will be winners. There will be looser. The open question is which are we going to be? It is going to be one whale of a rollercoaster ride. We have now all bought our tickets and we top the first hill this fall. In the words of Wile E. Coyote, "Yhaa whooo whooo whooo."
The best references are:
Kenneth Deffeyes, Hubbert's Peak, (Princeton University Press, 2001)
Kenneth Deffeyes, Beyond Oil, The View from Hubbert's Peak, (Princeton University Press, 2005)
Thanks,
--And that is, when too much power agregates, it is possible for the players with all the power to dictate the rules of the game, as well as the moves available to the rest of the players. To stack the deck, so to speak, so that even a superior business model, (for instance), is unable to survive.
This is why the ultra rich families tend to stay ultra rich. They did it by designing and controling the world currency systems, the legal systems and the choices which are made in how infrastructures are established. The Rothschildes, Rockefellers and their ilk may have gotten rich through competition and cleverness hundreds of years ago, but they maintain their wealth today through inbreeding and through manipulating the systems in which the illusion of 'competition' functions. Truly competing systems which might upset this balance tend to be rubbed out. Scientists who think too much do get murdered and not infrequently.
In natural livings systems which do not have the added component of self-awareness and the ability to plan and solve problems through rational thinking, the model of competition is the only one available, and thus it works as is seen in the animal and plant kingdoms. It appears to be the superior system because there are no alternatives. Those kingdoms, however, are difficult and uncomfortable to live in.
There is nothing wrong with using our intelligence to transcend such barbaric systems with a little balanced planning. For instance. . .
I choose to share my time and resources with my neighbors rather than compete and fight with them and live behind bars and locks, (that's what competition means; 'fighting'.). The result is that I am a trusted and honored member of my town. My life is very comfortable and stress-free. Indeed, the people I know who also behave in a non-competetive way also tend to be trusted, honored and comfortable in their lives. Those who are lazy and do not contribute to our town, in turn are not contributed to, and so they cannot drain the system. They either learn to contribute or they live in isolation with no support structure. It works very well.
Now, is this communist thinking? I don't know and I honestly don't care, because it has led to a happy, healthy community. This does not mean that competition is necessarily a bad thing; healthy competition keeps people sharp. But if the level of competition slips out of balance, it reduces people to stressed-out savages willing to lose their human traits in trying to replicate behaviors seen in the animal kingdom.
Why embrace that which we know works in a harsh and brutal way, (all-out competition), when we have the tools to make something far more effective and comfortable? In a very real sense, those who do not stretch to take advantage of their higher human qualities are the ones who are being lazy and afraid.
In other words. . . Why let the 'free' market, (which is anything but 'free' as it is tightly controled by elitist money), determine gas prices, and indeed, the nature of our energy systems, when we could have planned something far superior in the first place?
-FL
Interesting ideas, but some of the observations are from the 60s. Today's reality, created by American government policy of creating "cheaper" gas supply since WW II (and subsidizing highways):
1) Consumers can be offered a wider variety of goods and services, but rather than getting FL orange juice, you're getting foreign fruit juice, that comes from globalized policies that choose cheap fruit that is easy to transport rather than tastes good, and rape the land and the workers who produce it, creating widespread problems with poverty. Not just juice, but all your food, clothing and raw materials can be shipped in from third world megafarms, sweatshops, or cut from the rain forests.
But hey, its cheaper in the store, just like gas! Cheaper is good, right?
2) Customers not only can drive further to get goods, they have to. Because Walmart and big box retail have destroyed the malls, which destroyed downtown businesses. Survival of the fittest? Actually in this case, we've destroyed sustainable local economies and replaced them with highly efficient megacorps that offer really low prices. And really low paychecks, no benefits and little job security. Since they wipe out other business' ability to compete, we've lost economic strength at the price of cheapness, and are discovering the benefits of a huge, needy poverty class replacing our middle class.
3) Workers not only can commute, they have to. Transit is slower than highways because transit is starved of funds and generally only built for the purpose of political aggrandizing and favors, rather than actually moving people around. The neighborhoods that people desire living in were built around transit. Desirable neighborhoods in LA, San Francisco, NY and most other American cities (as well as most European cities), sprang from transit lines, creating dense town centers. Our charming small towns were built along rail lines.
Today's development builds sweeping parking lots and expressways around everything, using more land and forcing longer drives to get anywhere. And once you're there, there's nothing interesting or special to see. Just homogenous sprawl and and big box retail chain stores. But everything is cheap.
4) Workers might get paid more, but if jobs that use their skills are replaced by megacorps who can afford to build temples of cheapness, its more likely they will be stuck working at Walmart making minimum wage and getting their benefits from the state welfare system. But its cheap for the rest of us.
5) Mobile, efficient companies can just outsource their work overseas. And replace technical positions by sending work to India, where people speak such good English and have American names.
6) Globalization means suppliers are not in Georgia, but in South America and China. America has already ceded its manufacturing to China, so at this point, we can just ship finished goods into the country and enjoy CHEAP stuff.
7) Why would Americans buy products from other states when they have easy access to cheaper stuff from China? It's Cheap!
And of course, there is the trade deficit, but who cares when we have cheap Chinese stuff at Walmart? After all it's all we can afford since being laid off and sent to work at megacorp.
Higher standards of living and better economic growth are happening overseas.
Cheap gas produced a contorted marketplace that marked up the price of transit to the point of making it inefficient by comparison. After all, its easier to get there in a car if the government bulldozes land for your freeway, builds the "FREE" freeway for you, secures unrealistically low prices for your fuel, and then makes laws demanding that all developments must pay for you to park next to their establishment by building huge parking lots. Some of the greatest costs involved with transit projects are the building of mega parking lots to entice drivers to park their cars prior to taking transit.
Not even mentioned is the reliance on foreign production of oil, or how government subs
Humans get their power two ways: from spinning magnets and expanding gasses.
There are others: solar, piezoelectric... they are trivial in the scheme of things.
We need to figure out two things:
1) how to spin the magnet without using fossil fuels
2) how to store the energy produced
This is our assignment. Extra points for doing so in an environmentally friendly way.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
and to the rest of the world: HELLO!!!! Fusion is the ONLY way to generate the power needed. Superconducting power grid (at least major lines) would also help A LOT.
We need to do this or die. Yes, die. We already have a few wars over energy. Iraq is a clear example.
No way. Let's play the satellite map game. There's no way the average city is 60% road. I know there's a lot of roads, it's really distressingly high actually, but not 60%. Even if you count driveways and parking lots (essentially then counting all paved surfaces) I can't imagine it makes 60%.
As to your other stuff, you do make a lot of good points. However, we make all our electricy from petroleum. Nuclear power is dead, and green sources just don't make enough to make a dent (but it's rising at least).
As to it costing 3x as much, I could easily say it costs 5x as much. I do own a 5 person car. And although the government is hiding some of the costs of running a car, it also does so for trains too. And the train I would possibly take, it runs on Diesel fuel. Although they are trying to electrify it right now, mostly for speed, partially for efficiency.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
Change the law so that the big gas guzzling SUVs and such are classed as "cars" and not "trucks" for things like emission and fuel efficiency regulations.
If SUVs had the same "fuel inefficency" levies and taxes as things like some station wagons and people movers have, that would help.
[...]that could be a very good thing for those of us who are currently paying anywhere from $3 on up for a gallon of regular unleaded.
Anything that extends our dependency on oil is by definition not a good thing.
The NSA: The only part of the US government that actually listens.
If gas prices get much higher, they won't have to use legislation to force the auto makers to design and build more fuel efficient cars - economics will do it. I'm already seeing a lot of Toyoto Prius'es in my area, and I've read that Ford's SUV sales are starting to decline. If electric prices and home heating oil goes up another couple of dollars, solar power will look a lot more reasonable too.
I just want to address some of the comments I've seen on this article.
First one, "ditch the gas guzzler". Much easier said than done! First of all, some people actually need a big vehicle like that. (Just one example is that rural america doesn't have a company that picks up your trash. Either you or the neighbor dumps it. No one I know takes their trash the 30 miles to the dump in their car.) The fact that they also drive it to get groceries or to work is that buying a second vehicle just for more economical gas would cost them more than the second vehicle's gas mileage would save. For those who could get by with a smaller vehicle, they may not be able to afford it. I know both my best friend and I can't. Our vehicles are paid for and we just can't afford payments on a new vehicle right now. Don't forget you don't just have car payments but the insurance can be higher on a car you're paying off because you have to have more than just liability.
Second is people frowning on *anyone* who has made the decision to purchase an SUV. Now granted, I was at the store one day and I saw a high maintenance-looking woman having to hitch up her skirt to crawl up into her brand new Suburban and thought that had to be a case of buying the thing because it was cool. Pretty much at the prices of these things anyone who buys one brand new as an individual probably doesn't really need it. Having said that, there are places where it is a daily requirement to have something like that. For these people, it is a Utility Vehicle and sport has nothing to do with it. Some people face the possibility that they're going to have to use the 4 wheel drive on the way home or to some aspect of their job. (Probably not most city dwellers, though. Although given the choice between and SUV and a minivan to transport the family, I know which I would pick.) *I* happened to get everywhere I needed to even in the middle of nowhere in the mountains in a 1973 Chevy Nova, but I also was willing to make it do things it wasn't meant to do.
Next... Picking on people who drive big vehicles for the safety value. I'm with you that some of these people should just be shot because the way they drive the SUV, they are the only one who is safe. However, part of the reason I drive an old steel truck is for the safety factor. The above mentioned Chevy Nova was run over by 2 oil tankers in a case of black ice on a mountain pass, but I was still able to drive it home. (Tow trucks were all tied up in other accidents, it was a messy day.) I spent an hour sitting on the side of the pass waiting for the cops to show up and mentally evaluating the vehicles that passed to determine if they'd have done as well in the accident as my Nova. I had a tire print in my trunk and the front bumper was crumpled. The odds weren't good folks. So before you riducule someone about their choice, be aware there might be something you don't know about influencing that choice. (I also don't like airbags because had the nova had airbags I wouldn't have been able to recover from the slide and I'd have gone off the pass. I don't know if an airbag can protect you when you fall off a mountain.)
As long as we're talking about the Nova... it got 20+ miles to the gallon in town and almost 30 on the highway. So I'd like to know why new cars coming out with that same kind of mileage are acting like it's such an advance when it's obviously something that is at least 32 years old.
Coincidentally, I got this link in my email this morning. If that car sat higher up off the ground, maybe one person in the car would have survived: http://www.sandstorming.com/index.php/2005/08/250- kmh-crash-pictures
I had more to say, but the cold medicine kicked in so I'll just leave this where it stands.
http://glacierdragon.smugmug.com - Check out my photos. No need to buy, even though I do need the money!
That might work better then how the DOE wanted to compress the oil out of the shale in 1973
"Three 30 kiloton detonations took place simultaneously at depths of 1,758, 1,875, and 2,015 meters. It was the third nuclear explosion experiment intended to stimulate the flow of natural gas from "tight" formation gas fields"
Yes boys and girls, underground nuclear explosions were meant to compress the rocks and make it profitable to retrieve the oil. Unfortunately the oil was radioactive and was never put into the commercial supply.
You just build you country wrong.
And I suppose you're some god of planning who knows the right and wrong way to build a country? The "right" way to build a country is a moving target. The US practices a fairly free form of capitalism. If the country is built wrong, someone who builds their house and business right will be at an economic advantage and drive out those who built it wrong (unless of course those people also adapt). If energy prices remain high for long, you'll see shifts in home and store locations and trade patterns to compensate. Just as I expect if global warming turns out to be true, Canadians will sprawl to the North as it becomes more habitable.
While all of the Europeans complain about Americans and their love of cars, isn't it true that the Germans are building low gas mileage high performance cars for export to the USA?
A BMW M3 gets the same gas mileage as a truck, as does nearly anything Mercedes AMG.
BMW is widely regarded as having started the horsepower wars by releasing a BMW 3 series in the mid 90s that had more horsepower and thus gas consumption than other car manufacturers. It was BMW's "Ultimate driving machine" campaign that put a renewed emphasis on 0-60 times.
All of which, I think is very cool. But Europeans should not be complaining about cars in America when their own economy is driven by our insatiable lust for automotive performance and power.
This is my sig.