phillips49

An Alternative to America’s Gasoline Crisis

The basic problem of alternatives to gasoline is infrastructure. The mobil fleet is based on liquid fuel and the entire infrastructure system supports liquid fuel.

CNG is a high pressure gas. Infrastructure does not exist to make it a practicle alternative even in the medium term. There are not stations on every block. It is also dangerous. Aside from being highly flammable, it is stored under high pressure and is subject to catastrophic failure and leakage.

The same problem exists with hydrogen. Cleaner but more flammable.

Electrical is also an infrastructure problem. Imagine what would happen to the grid when everybody got home at 5:30 and plugged in their car. A big fuse is going to blow someplace. And then there is the matter of battery disposal. They are hazardous. There would be alot of them. They don't last the life of a car. And there not convenient receptacles along the way for recharge. Not that you would want to wait 4 hours to get back home again.

Bio fuel, as we are finding out, is subject to weather. You cannot depend on its availability.

Our best shot is to use what we have, oil, natural gas, coal, nuclear, wind, solar and conserve. That and a national effort to develop an economically available 100 mpg car.

Oil Manipulations Exposed

correction -it was Abe Lincoln that said "you can fool......." not Mark Twain

Oil Manipulations Exposed

Good article! I sure wish it was as easy as the author presents. We could just send in the oil Gustapo and fix it! Arrest them all, sue them all. Gas would drop back to $2.50/gallon and everyone would go back to sleep!

I rather suspect that it is a little more complex than that though. It is hard to hide a fraud of this magnitude from the entire world. Was it Mark Twain that said "you can fool some of the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all of the people all of the time"

I'm sure there is some churning and manipulation. However the fundamental truth is that if supply exceeded demand, prices could not be manipulated. A supply/demand issue is the root cause. Our dependance on foreign oil will be the ruin of us. I'm not an oil apologist, I'm a realist. We need to reduce our presence in the global energy market competition. We need to pump our own oil, use our own coal, use our own natural gas, put up wind farms, put up nuclear power plants, and transition our mobile fleet over to the most energy efficient possible.