Thesis: The world economy is currently running on a resource that is controlled by our enemies. Using portions of the billions of petrodollars, middle easterners have:
> established training centers for terrorists,
>paid bounties to the families of suicide bombers,
>funded the purchase of weapons and explosives,
>underwritten new media outlets that propagandize hatefully against the US and the West,
>pay for more than 10,000 madrassahs around the world to indoctrinate young boys that the way to paradise is to murder Christians, Jews, and Hindus,
>Iran and other states are using petroleum lucre to underwrite the development of nuclear weapons and insulate themselves from the economic sanctions that could result.
Well, it's a little more complicated than that. We've given them ample reason to dislike us. Not that they were necessarily all nice guys to begin with.
Conservation and Alternative Fuel Daydreams: Conservation offers no prospect of being anywhere nearly effective enough to make more than a 3% annual reduction in global gasoline use.
Depends on how far you take it. If we crash the global economy, I guarantee we'll save more than 3% annually.
Todays favorite energy panacea is hydrogen. But hydrogen is not a source of energy, it is a carrier of energy.
Yep. The hydrogen economy is not currently feasible. I read an interview with someone from Toyota who was responsible for heading up their hydrogen research department. He was extolling the virtues of hydrogen fuel cells, when the journalist asked him what the average expected life of a fuel cell was. His answer was that they stop functioning after 600 kilometers (about 272 miles). Given that each cell costs roughly $2000, this doesn't seem like a very sound alternative.
In general, there's a lot that engineers haven't been able to make work with hydrogen.
Congress could make an enormous step toward American energy independence within a decade or so by passing a law that all new cars sold in the US must be flexible-fuel vehicles capable of burning any combination of gasoline and alcohol. The alcohols so employed could be either methanol or ethanol. Ethanol is made from agricultural products. Methanol can also be made from biomass, as well as natural gas or coal. American coal reserves alone are enough to power every car in the country on methanol for more than 500 years.
I've never done that particular check as usually people talk about producing diesel from coal via the Fischer-Tropsch process, but there are also problems with coal production. One thing that surprises everyone when talking about coal is that we never really got off the coal standard. We're producing more coal now than we ever have in all of history. We didn't turn away from it as an energy source, we added oil and natural gas along with a small bag of mixed alternatives to our energy consumption.
Part of the problem with coal is that it can't be produced, BTU for BTU, at the rate oil can. Oil can be extracted by drilling lots of relatively small holes and letting it come to the surface (well, initially, anyway) under its own pressure. For coal, you either have to strip mine or excavate. The holes you have to dig are large and that requires energy. You have to send people down into the holes to pull it out. And so on. Coal doesn't produce the return on energy invested in its recovery that oil does, not by a long shot. Moreover, we're probably producing coal at about half the absolute maximum rate; even if we double production, we will have a very hard time keeping our electric grid going as natural gas declines. How we're going to worry about liquid fuel manufacture on top of that is a little mystifying.
However, I don't know where the 500 year figure comes from. At current rates of consumption, we will run out of coal in 200 years in North America. If we turn to coal as a means of replacing our fertilizer and liquid fuel usage, we run out much more quickly (I've seen numbers as low as 8 years and as optimistic as 20 years, but that was the outside limit). It may be that the author of the article makes the same mistake people often do when looking at reserves-in-place. Theoretically, there is enough oil still in place to keep us rolling in the stuff for another 3 centuries. The problem is, most of that oil will cost far more energy to extract than is provided by burning it, so we will never extract that oil. It's the same with coal. There's a lot there, but most of it loses energy to get.
The Brazilian experience suggests that it can be done if there is a will to do so.
This fails to mention three things:
1) The Brazillian effort on ethanol actually started in 1969. By 1989, they were able to get 70% (IIRC) of their fleet on a dual-fuel standard. But read that again--in spite of massive government subsidies and devastating disregard for the environment, it took them 20 years to get 70% as good as they needed to be.
2) Most of those cars still are actually run by their owners on gasoline, not ethanol. A mile for mile per unit volume comparison shows that ethanol is only about half as good as gasoline. And it creates other problems as well--in colder climates, ethanol will not start an engine.
3) Brazil was able, at the height of its ethanol production in the 1980's, to make enough by a slash and burn technique in the Amazon rain forrest. Rain forrest soil is not a good growing medium for any sort of domesticated crop in the long term; farmers have therefore had to burn ten acres, plant it for one season, and then burn another ten acres. This is clearly not a sustainable practice. Additionally, Brazil turned to exporting minerals in order to import enough food to feed its people. It runs into the same problem with farmland that we do.
Since an ethanol-only standard would require a larger production base than the US can deliver, ethanol alone is not the answer. But expanding the production base to include methanol, especially methanol produced from coal, we can increase supplies, reduce prices, and maximize environmental benefits. Thus, it is critical to insist that all future vehicles have the capability to burn both ethanol and methanol.
Whenever you see broad generalizations like this, my advice is to always look at the numbers. Not that the numbers are always clear; they can be used to conceal the truth as well. But phrases like "we can increase supplies," "{we can} reduce prices," "{we can} maximize environmental benefits," and so on are vague. We may be able to increase supplies, but whether by a few gallons or a few hundred million gallons is left open. We may be able to reduce price, but is there any practical difference between liquid fuels costing $19.90 a gallon and $20.00 a gallon?
I've been researching this issue long enough to have seen
lots of articles like this. When I go back to the stats from the DOE, from OPEC, and to the conversions in my sophomore physics textbook, so far I've found that they're all highly misleading and couched in unduly optimistic language.
he is right that hydrogen is just a carrier of energy, but essentially it is a 'battery' that can hold a lot more energy than any other source...I think that hydrogen is a better source of fuel than oil...but the one and only reason that we haven't changed is simply because our government is attempting to help the oil companies in the mid-east....if we quit buyin then their economy dies and they are left with lots of flamable liquids and sand...their governments are already blaming us for their problems now but whenever they get plunged into a depression imagine their reaction...
If we (i.e. the United States) quits buying Middle Eastern Oil, the entire Middle East will scarcely notice because we currently purchase less than 15% of OPEC output to begin with, and BRIC is begging to take up the slack anyway. Our major exporters are Mexico and Canada, which, along with domestic production, provides about 65% of our oil. OPEC provides about 30%, and the other 5% comes from Norway and England, as well as a mixed bag of African nations. The Middle East sells most of their oil to Europe, Asia, and Oceania.
In future, with Cantarell in decline and no new mega projects due to come online in Mexico or Canada, we will have to increasingly turn to the Middle East, who are telling us that for less than $500 billion in infrastructure investment, they won't be able to open the taps wider (incidentally, that half-a trillion dollars buys us,
at most a 2mbpd increase in ten years).
Refining hydrogen uses more energy than is recovered from burning it. The technologies that utilize hyrdrogen as a fuel don't work nearly as well as we're used to gasoline/ diesel technologies working. Those two critical facts make all the difference.
So what can we do? Well, at ths point, not bloody much. We're in for a global economic collapse. What I mean by that is that if you have a dollar in your pocket and the guy next to you has a billion dollars in his pocket (or roubles, or Euros, or Yuan), you're both equally wealthy, and neither of you will be able to purchase toilet paper. Theoretically, we could still avoid such a fate, but I consider it very unlikely.
My advice is to start as big a garden as you can manage, build a large water catchment system, and network as much as possible with your neighbors. The most optimistic scenarios I've seen put this happening no later than 2015. Recent figures (i.e. production and news from Q4 2005 and Q1 2006) don't look good at all. We may have no more than a few years.