lance sjogren

America Needs a Natural Gas Transportation Infrastructure

realist2:

I find it plausible that PHEVs would reduce overall emissions, but I am skeptical about how strong a case there is for that.

Keep in mind that hybrids are complex machines that are considerably more expensive to build than either fossil fuel only or pure EVs.

Since battery technology is progressing rapidly, I am skeptical about the advisability of society spending massive amounts of capital on hybrids, which may very well be obsolete within a few years.

Bottom line, it probably doesn't matter, because just the inertia of switching over our transportation fleet means it will be many years before we have a substantial portion of our vehicles in hybrids, and so our ability to misallocate capital to hybrid vehicles which will be obsolete in 5-10 years is very limited. Plus, hybrids do exercise some of the technologies that pure EV's will use, such as driving the wheels by electric motors, so they do serve somewhat of a role as a technical stepping stone toward genuine electric vehicles.

America Needs a Natural Gas Transportation Infrastructure

Tosser & mac, you are dead on.

George Bush was an absolutely hideous President who solved imaginary problems and ignored real ones.

Obama has some clue what's going on, at least more so than most politicians.

However, Reid and Pelosi are buffoons who don't have a clue.


That's why I say regime change is not yet complete, until Reid and Pelosi are put out to pasture.

America Needs a Natural Gas Transportation Infrastructure

"And the answer is: leave the NG stored in the ground and use free, readily and forever available renewable alternatives like solar and wind, plus grow the biofuels."


Just one problem, Jaybird- the transition to renewables will take 50-100 years.

People that don't understand the technical challenges of renewable energy have pie in the sky notions. Alliance for Climate Change was doing those TV ads saying we should demand that our politicians switch us over to 100% renewables in 10 years.

Then that ad stopped appearing. I guess the scientists and engineers told the climate change guys that they were just making fools out of themselves for proposing a timetable for renewables that is ludicrous.

Don't get me wrong. We MUST transition to renewables. We must do it as rapidly as possible. If we don't it will be lights out for modern civilization for a number of decades between the time fossil fuels become too scarce to use as a mainstay of our energy needs and the time when renewables can take over as our primary energy sources.

But there is a need to get the general public fully cognizant of how long and hard a process it is going to be to switch to a primarily renewables-based energy system.

These are the big challenges:

1). Renewables primarily intermittent sources (the main exception is hydro whose potential is already close to fully utilized).

The ways to mitigate the intermittency are:

a). Come up with mass energy storage systems. Right now these do not exist, and there are no economically viable concepts out there so far for doing this.

b). The "supergrid". Build a massive global power transmission system. Challenges with this approach include the fact that the capital cost will be enormous, there are big electrical losses associated with transporting electric power over thousands of miles (unless we can develop affordable approaches that greatly reduce those losses), and geopolitical issues may be an obstacle even if the engineering issues are successfully addressed.

c). Switch to a variable pricing scheme in which you pay low prices for power when it is available in abundance (when the wind is blowing or the sun is shining) and you pay up the yin yang when it is not in abundance. No doubt this will be part of the solution but if we have to rely strictly on this rather than a) and/or b) then we will have a much less user-friendly energy system than we have now.

2). Problem 2 is that many key energy uses require liquid fuels rather than electric power. Prospects are good to power cars by electricity, but what about planes? And what about all the other products we make from fossil fuels- fertilizer, plastic, etc. My guess is that we will have to rely on biofuels for such uses, but it appears unlikely that biofuels will be able to be produced in large quantities so they will be expensive and only appropriate for critical uses where there is absolutely no other alternatie.