svkoho

Is There Enough Natural Gas?

Thanks Mike for putting a lot of effort into buttressing your position of a switch to gas from oil. There are some strengths to your case and many weaknesses. Your underlying assumption if I am reading you correctly is that we can keep the American dream(nightmare?) alive my switching our transportation model to CNG. I don't see where the money would come from unless you taxed one of the fossil sources. Tax oil but not gas? Tax coal but not oil? I never see you addressing transportation as the issue and then deciding how to move people on that network. My other quibble are your quoted "reserves". Reserves from formations that are not economic are not reserves any more than the oft repeated statement that the US has more oil in oil shale than Saudi Arabia. It is pretty hard to build asphalt roads with gas, much less drill and transport especially boats and planes. I know, it is done and can be done but the scale of this switch and the dubious reserve numbers make this switch risky and not likely to pay off. I think a better strategy is to use electricity as your transport fuel. Use gas or oil or coal or wind or water to generate electricity and move people by rail instead of one by one in their 3000 psi suv bombs. Use less oil of course because we're running out. I would rather see you devote your good mind to waking up to the fact that a gas switch solution is no solution in an energy constrained future. We need to use less of all energy sources, conserve more and think about energy sources we can use not 20 or 50 years hence but 200 or 500 years hence. Your scheme would buy us a decade or two if we had the money to do it which we don't. Any switch to an energy source which is not renewable is a doomed strategy and I hope you will realize that soon.You are a little picture guy and I hope you grow up to become a big picture guy. The world could use more bright big picture guys.

The T. Boone Pickens Approach

Mike as usual has hit the nail on the head. His energy plan should form the basis of a discussion on a national energy policy. As for Pickens' plan, the wind turbine build out looks to be a no brainer but the idea of using NG in compressed form except in some applications is not affordable or feasible IMO. That would require 3000 psi tanks in every retrofitted vehicle and giant 3000 psi tanks in every filling station refueled by 3000 psi+ tankers sharing the highways and byways with we the happy motoring public. Are you listening and making notes Mr Bin Laden ? I suspect you are licking your bewhiskered chops. Mike is right as is Pickens saying that we must halt oil demand and in fact reduce demand. If we used the same oil per capita as most of the rest of the industrialized world, our consumption would be 10 million BPD not 20 million. That should be the minimal goal ASAP. Want energy independence? Reduce it to 6 or 7 million BPD and you are living off your own domestic production. How to do this is painfully obvious with an emphasis on painfully. You can tax it or ration it. Take your pick. It's one or the other. Taxing it is the least painful if you use the tax to build a transportation infrastructure which logically would be electrified rail and other forms of mass transit which is way cheaper and more durable to build than asphalt and the petroleum based binders for highways. Will this kill long distance commuting by private automobile? Of course. Will it be horrendously expensive to start laying track and building train stations,terminals and train cars? Of course. There are some real upsides like zillions of jobs for Americans but we have to pay for it somehow. The 2 or 3 trillion that will be spent on Iraq before that fiasco is over would have been a good start but that opportunity was pissed away by the incompetent neocons who happen to be from the soon to be defunct republican party. But the dems are showing real signs of carrying that incompetence forward as their party standard. Incompetence seems to be the national standard. I suspect absolutely nothing will be done until the next depression is well underway caused by by a credit and housing debacle with the bad guys going unpunished and the taxpayer bailing out everyone. That flushing sound you hear is the dollar going down the toilet.