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.

High Gas Prices: Look No Further Than The Person In The Mirror

Guys, look at the big picture:World oil consumption is increasing and reserves aren't. Refineries are expensive,have a long time horizon, liability risk etc and require OIL! If you have less oil at ever higher cost which eventually will curtail demand, you don't need more refineries. The majors can afford refineries, but they're not stupid. Oil as an energy source is on the way out and at some point will be too valuable to waste as a refinery input product anyway. What we need is ENERGY. It is time to turn the discussion to how and where we will get our energy and how best to use it. Oil will be p[art of the mix for the next 100+ years but it's time to move the discussion forward to obtaining and managing our energy needs. I'm just back from Italy with $7.50 gas. People drive smaller cars, bikes and mopeds and WALK! Almost no obesity. The trains are cheap,comfortable and fast. The only way to get more cheap oil is to steal it, but that isn't working out so well for cheneybush and it's a doomed option.