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How can we combat gas prices?

The GOP assholes in Congress are blocking all attempts to tax the oil companies more for every barrell of oil sold over $50.00 a barrell. Link here. What their saying in public and what they are doing behind closed doors are two different things.

Remember this come mid-terms.
 
You can always tell when some issue has entered the domain of the irrational - it becomes politicized. To blame Bush for the price of gas is like blaming him for the orbit of Pluto. The cost of gas is ever-upward: when you pay $10 for it in the future, some will say "Duh, remember when we complained about $3? Hee Hee Duh!"
 
ngdawg said:
I think it's really a shame that these oil companies are losing money like they are.

Now, far be it from me to deny anyone the right to make a profit-hell, it's the American way and I wish I could do so....BUT, stating a NET profit of $5.6 billion and then saying you LOST money is insane.

Nowhere in your cite does it say that BP LOST money. It says that profits were LOWER than the same period one year ago.

Another wonder aloud: Corn, the base for ethanol, is a renewable resource. It is conceivable it would never run out. The technology to make ethanol has been around for decades. Why then, is it used as another reason for the escalating cost at the gas pump?

The May '06 issue of Popular Mechanics has a very good article on alternative fuels. Here is what PM says about ethanol:

Outlook: Hopeful--to a point. According to the Renewable Fuels Association, 95 ethanol refineries produced more than 4.3 billion gal. of ethanol in 2005. An additional 40 new or expanded refineries slated to come on line in the next 18 months will increase that to 6.3 billion gal. That sounds like a lot--and it is--but it represents just over 3 percent of our annual consumption of more than 200 billion gal. of gasoline and diesel.

One acre of corn can produce 300 gal. of ethanol per growing season. So, in order to replace that 200 billion gal. of petroleum products, American farmers would need to dedicate 675 million acres, or 71 percent of the nation's 938 million acres of farmland, to growing feedstock. Clearly, ethanol alone won't kick our fossil fuel dependence--unless we want to replace our oil imports with food imports.

Bottom line: ethanol can help, but it won't cure.
 
Billo_Really said:
The GOP assholes in Congress are blocking all attempts to tax the oil companies more for every barrell of oil sold over $50.00 a barrell. Link here. What their saying in public and what they are doing behind closed doors are two different things.

Remember this come mid-terms.

We should indeed remember this come mid-terms. Whether Dems or GOP, we should remember those would respond to the public hue and cry over higher gas prices that are still incredibly cheap in real terms and would only reach 1970 levels at about $3.25 - $3.50. We should remember those that would opt for a currently politically popular but short-term solution to a much greater fundamental problem. We should remember those who have forgotten the short-term appeal but long-term negative effect on exploration of the 'windfall profits tax' of the '70s. Gasoline prices are higher, but they are still cheap.

Except for a few independents closing their pumps because they don't have the storage capacity or the purchasing power of the majors, gasoline is readily available. At some price, gasoline does indeed become prohibitively expensive. Clearly, we are not there yet. In order for us to never get there, we simply must not only continue but to accelerate our investment in R&D on exploration and alternative fuels.

Increasing gasoline prices are indeed a form of wealth-transfer, from the consumers that are paying the higher prices to the oil companies. The oil companies are enjoying huge profits just now largely due to the very advantageous operating leverage afforded them courtesy of no new refineries having been constructed since the '70s - paradoxically due in part to govt/EPA/OSHA regs - meaning that operating margins are improving markedly.

Appropriate public policy should, IMO, address the longer-term issues, instead of trying to apply band-aids for short-run relief from a sense of discomfort among consumers. For example, instead of some form of new tax and instead of taking away R&D and exploration incentives, wouldn't a better approach be a requirement to re-invest significant portions of these big bucks in exploration or R&D into alternative fuels? Isn't it in our best interest, both long-run and short-run to further encourage efforts to achieve energy independence, both from foreign sources and from fossil fuels? Do politicians really want to cut off our noses to spite our faces?

Increasing taxes on oil/gasoline producers would work to our long-term advantage if and only if those same funds were re-directed back into exploration and research. Does anyone have any confidence that any Congress, whether Dems or GOP are the majority, would do that, instead of spreading the new found wealth across various pet projects of their own?
 
Sorry, my bad. I had intended that to be 'ad reductio hitlerum', which was coined by Leo Strauss quite a while back and is an association fallacy suggesting that (to use the Wikipedia example), "Adolf Hitler or the Nazi party supported X; therefore X must be evil." Although you haven't used Hitler specifically, the technique is quite similar.

There was actually another name for that fallacy but I don't recall off the top of my head what it is--it's one that usually is covered by other fallacies, either red herring or some version of ad hominem.

Anyway, I don't think I've committed any fallacies. I was responding to the notion that, in principle, government should not tell anyone what to do with their money. My reply was that we can think of a number of examples where we would acknowledge that government interference in how someone uses their money is a good thing. So the assertion of that principle as a means of arguing against salary caps for CEOs is not valid.

This doesn't mean that there couldn't be other valid means of argument against mandated salary caps. Just that this method--i.e. assertion of a specific principle about government not interfering with how people use their money--isn't valid.

You feel that certain laws should have been changed because of unintended consequences. To examine that claim requires more specificity: your claim as stated above is based on your particular indivudual values and beliefs, which may or may not be consistent with the values and beliefs of society at large.

Implicit in this paragraph seems to be the notion that there is either no objective standard of judgement when it comes to these sorts of matters, or that the only objective means of judgement is by comparison to the values and beliefs of society at large. That idea is clearly flawed.

If I can defend my assumptions by reference to known facts and the rules of logic, then it oughtn't matter whether they're solely my assumptions or not, or whether others might share them.

Yes, there are many instances in which your description "interfering in what people do with their money" applies. But tell me, are you advocating that the laws, rules and regulations concerning money transactions that are designed and instituted for the public good are not in the public interest? We shouldn't have money laundering laws, 3-day cancellation of certain major consumer purchases, lemon laws, margin requirements for commodity markets (which are exchange regulations, btw, not laws), and a host of others?

No, I'm not advocating any of those things, specifically. I am saying that certain ideas implicit in law as it currently existed have had, and will to greater extent have, some very unintended and untoward consequences in the future.

We are entering into a time when it is no longer possible for one person to own, say, a car without another person necessarily starving to death. The ethical implications, then, of what we do with our money have to be considered in light of this.

Keep in mind that many of the laws concerning commericial transactions were derived from common law practices dating back many, many years before their was a US, and grew from centuries old practice and custom before being codified.

This goes to my overall point. The laws we have are based on principles formulated in times that were very different than those we now live in. It was once possible for a man to own a hundred head of cattle (in ancient Sumeria, such a man would have been fabulously wealthy) without other people being deprived of the necessities of life. So the idea that once a person owns something, they are free to use it as they wish was not confusing or murky in those conditions.

Part of my argument, though, is that such principles became ideals assumed to be correct under any circumstance. Thus, such ideals were elevated to the status of morals. This is what allows us to look at fellow human beings who are going hungry and rationalize letting them stay in that state because we assume it's right for us to use our money for our own personal gain.

However, I believe it is becoming more apparent that it is no longer possible (indeed, has been less and less possible for centuries) for one person to attain fabulous wealth without others being impoverished. Now, it's not that someone who is fabulously wealthy intends necessarily to impoverish others. It's just a necessary but ignored consequences thereof.

If you are not an XON stockholder, it is simply not any of your business. You certainly are entitled to your opinion as to whether or not he "earned" that much money, but other than that, nope.

If you mean that in present circumstance, I have no (legal) practical recourse, then of course you're correct. I do not.

But if you mean that I should not, or that anyone not a stockholder should not, have a say, it's that principle with which I take issue.

In this case, remember that Lee Raymond worked for XON for 43 years. (43 years! How often do you hear of that longevity of service to one company today?) I haven't read the terms of his package, but typically, a large part of a pension award is based on length of service. Moreover, for most of his career, Raymond was a relatively well-paid executive, which also likely contributed to his pension amounts.

Also don't forget that pension packages for long-time employees such as this are typically funded over many years, coincident with the employees length of service. In other words, the headlines may read "a $400 million package", but that doesn't mean that XON is coming up with $400 million in cash. The majority of a pension package like this will have been funded over many years.

Assuming that he was a decent and good man and did nothing that would offend the principles of honor, then he ought to have a nice retirement. I'm not against the notion of someone working hard and getting some reward for it. Nor am I against the notion that those who work only a little deserve less. But when faced with such an intimately connected world economy as we have, and when faced with the staggering inequalities in wealth that we observe in the world, I think this principle has to be tempered by something.
 
Outlook: Hopeful--to a point. According to the Renewable Fuels Association, 95 ethanol refineries produced more than 4.3 billion gal. of ethanol in 2005. An additional 40 new or expanded refineries slated to come on line in the next 18 months will increase that to 6.3 billion gal. That sounds like a lot--and it is--but it represents just over 3 percent of our annual consumption of more than 200 billion gal. of gasoline and diesel.

One acre of corn can produce 300 gal. of ethanol per growing season. So, in order to replace that 200 billion gal. of petroleum products, American farmers would need to dedicate 675 million acres, or 71 percent of the nation's 938 million acres of farmland, to growing feedstock. Clearly, ethanol alone won't kick our fossil fuel dependence--unless we want to replace our oil imports with food imports.

There are several things wrong with this sort of analysis; it's really much worse than that. A couple points:

1) I'm only aware of three analyses done on ethanol production from corn and how much energy the process itself uses. But they go anywhere from a net loss of energy to a return of 3:1. By contrast, conventional oil has a return of 40:1. That means that 25% of the ethanol produced has to be used to produce more ethanol. That means that, by the figures above, one acre of corn will net only 225 galons of ethanol. So, again, by the figures above, we'd actually need to appropriate 95% of the farmland in America.

2) Ethanol has about 50% of the energy density that gasoline does. This means that about twice as much is required to do the same work. If your car goes 500 miles on a full tank of gasoline, it will go 250 miles on a full tank of ethanol (assuming it will run on ethanol). So to stay at our same level of energy usage, we'd need to produce about 400 billion gallons annually. To do that, we'd need to appropriate 1.9 times the farmland in America--say by taking over the farmland in Canada and Mexico as well.

3) But then, those yields per acre are predicated on widely available sources of nitrogen fertilizer, which are made from natural gas. As it enters decline, yields will probably also decline. There's a lot of talk about organic methods, but I happen to work in that industry and I can tell you that it's not as simple as it sounds. Once chemical fertilizers are no longer produced, we will see yields decline. By how much is anyone's guess, but that could only mean that, to support our current usage of energy, we'd have to appropriate still more farmland.

We can conclude then, that we can keep our way of life so long as no body in the Western Hemisphere eats. At least, that is, if we assume ethanol will be what saves us.
 
ashurbanipal said:
We can conclude then, that we can keep our way of life so long as no body in the Western Hemisphere eats. At least, that is, if we assume ethanol will be what saves us.

Like I said above, ethanol can help, but it won't cure.

ashurbanipal said:
My reply was that we can think of a number of examples where we would acknowledge that government interference in how someone uses their money is a good thing.

Color me :confused: I will have to re-read your earlier post again! I could have sworn that you were arguing just the opposite: any government interference in how someone uses their money is a bad thing.

Out of time for the moment; more later.
 
While the government is pretending to run the Senate hearings that are supposed to determine if the oil companies should be broken up or regulated further, gas prices are projected to rise to the $5.00-$7.00 range within 3-5 years...
 
oldreliable67 said:
Like I said above, ethanol can help, but it won't cure.



Color me :confused: I will have to re-read your earlier post again! I could have sworn that you were arguing just the opposite: any government interference in how someone uses their money is a bad thing.

Out of time for the moment; more later.

Doesn't the government already say so by taking income tax, SS tax, etc?
Our phone bills have surcharges implemented half a century ago that, going by government's original reasoning for them, are obsolete and have been for several decades. Yet they continue to take the charges.
 
oldreliable>>Increasing gasoline prices are indeed a form of wealth-transfer, from the consumers that are paying the higher prices to the oil companies.

So buy the stock or make sure your 401k plan has a fund that buys the stock.
 
ashurbanipal said:
2) Ethanol has about 50% of the energy density that gasoline does. This means that about twice as much is required to do the same work. If your car goes 500 miles on a full tank of gasoline, it will go 250 miles on a full tank of ethanol (assuming it will run on ethanol). So to stay at our same level of energy usage, we'd need to produce about 400 billion gallons annually. To do that, we'd need to appropriate 1.9 times the farmland in America--say by taking over the farmland in Canada and Mexico as well.

Of course the ethanol proponents will tell you that we will solve the problem of where do you get the resouce to produce ethanol by claiming cellouse ethanol (produced from the corn stalks, and weed clippings and grass clippings we produce) we solve that problem. Of course that material must be collected, sorted, compressed, bagged and transported to an ethanol factory and I wonder what the energy content of a bale of weeds is compared to a barrel of oil.

It has it's place but it is not a sole answer. Nuclear, until we get nuclear on the table we do not solve the problem. With that we get hydrogen and cheaper ethanol. With hydrogen we can begin to look at supplying vechicles that are at least practical for city and suburban living at first and later heavier usage.
 
Actually, I am fairly sure that we will do none of that. That's what we might like to do, of course. But we can't scale quickly enough.
 
Ran across an article by Robert Zubrin at the The American Enterprise site that was pretty interesting. Here are the highlights:

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.

Our responses to these provocations have been muted and hapless. Why? We can't stand up to our enemies because we rely on them for the fuel that is our own lifeblood.

At the rate China and India are industrializing, if the world remains on the oil standard, the income streams of many noxious oil exporters will soar. We will be impoverished to the same degree that they are enriched.

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.

Todays favorite energy panacea is hydrogen. But hydrogen is not a source of energy, it is a carrier of energy. The process of obtaining hydrogen necessarily consumes more energy than the hydrogen it produces. Thus, hydrogen is one of the least practical carriers of energy that we know of.

The Alcohol Solution: We can liberate ourselves from the threat of foreign economic domination, undercut the financiers of terror, and give ourselves the free hand necessary to deal with ME extremists by devaluing
their resources and increasing the value of our own. We can do this by taking the world off the petroleum standard and putting it on an alcohol standard.

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.

Lots of good things happen to the environment when on an alcohol standard.

The Politics: The only real sticking point is the non-availability of high alcohol fuel mixes at the pump. Filling stations don't want to dedicate space to a fuel mix used by only 1 percent of all cars. And consumers are not interested in buying vehicles for which the preferred mix is unavailable.

This chicken-and-egg problem has to be solved by legislation. The Brazilian experience suggests that it can be done if there is a will to do so: after legislation was passed in 2003 mandating a transition to FFVs, by 2007, 80 percent of all new vehicles sold in Brazil will be FFVs.

Ethanol or Methanol? 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.

The Mega Fix For What Ails Us:

> Even with maximum conservation efforts, today's petroluem monopolists will have us over a barrel (pun intended).
>The ballyhooed hydrogen economy is a hoax.
> The only way to win this battle is to take ourselves off the petroleum standard.

Therefore, Congress should immediately mandate that all future vehicles sold in the USA be flexible-fueled.

Source.

What do people think of this analysis? Particularly the assertion that the "hydrogen economy is a hoax"?
 
oldreliable67 said:
Todays favorite energy panacea is hydrogen. But hydrogen is not a source of energy, it is a carrier of energy. The process of obtaining hydrogen necessarily consumes more energy than the hydrogen it produces. Thus, hydrogen is one of the least practical carriers of energy that we know of.
.
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What do people think of this analysis? Particularly the assertion that the "hydrogen economy is a hoax"?

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...
 
goligoth said:
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...
Plunged into a depression? Have you seen how some of those oil-rich countries' 'sultans', kings and princes live?? Granted, the riches most times don't trickle down to the citizens, which happens everywhere anyway. The most oil-rich countries are in turmoil anyway. Saudi Arabia-265.3 billion barrels of reserve, Iraq-115, Kuwait-98.8, Iran-96.4. Source: http://www.aneki.com/oil.html
Maybe NOT buying from them would get them to be a bit more 'creative' in developing economies outside oil dependency and dependencies on us to bail them out. Hell, if they're going to blame the US for their own troubles, might as well make those complaints legit.
 
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.
 
To answer the question the thread poses, I think 1 answer is obvious:

After Exxon posted a 1st Qrtr Profit of $8.4 BILLION dollars, then complained about the crtiticism they were receiving for it since it was DOWN from $11 BILLION the prvious Qrtr, if you buy gas from EXXON at all, you are a MORON! :roll:
 
galenrox said:
Why in God's name would we subsidize to get people to drill for our oil? I'm not gonna patronize you with the whole supply and demand implications in the cases of subsidies, but if we're capitalists than we need to stand by the concept of comparative advantage, because if we continue producing oil at rates higher than international comparative advantage sets, then we're wasting our man power on things that we are not productive at.

In our energy situation, comparative advantage no longer holds. Comparative advantage was relevant some decades ago; no longer. Energy independence is now a national security issue. Repeating a portion of Robert Zubrin's article cited earlier:

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.

It is true that we get only about 25% of our oil from the ME, but when you add the oil that the other western nations import, nations that are our principal trading partners, the importance of ME oil goes up significantly.

If the political situation were the same as it was in say, the '50s or '60s, comparative advantage would certainly hold. Throughout the '70s, '80s and '90s, a principal western foreign policy goal in the ME was to maintain 'stability' (hence our support of autocrats and despots), so that comparative advantage could 'do its thing'. Only in a stable environment, free of polticial controls and influences can comparative advantage work to its fullest. Thats what we tried to foster.

Unfortunately, the political situation has changed the whole dynamics and has pretty much set comparative advantage aside.
 
Benyahmin said:
It amazes me how passive we are about the gas prices. $3.00 a gallon is outrageous considering the gas companies were already turning profits at $.95 per gallon 6 years ago. Oil & Gas companies are giggling about record profits and stock prices while Americans and Canadians are being bled dry at the pump. Isn't it ironic that one of Dubya's 1st campaign slogan's was "Don't get Gored at tthe Pump".
Big Bro. makes @ 18 cents per gallon, where as the oil company makes only @ 8-9 cents.

Remember the first step in propagandizing an issue: Change the name --
It's not "tax gouging", it's "price gouging".

ExxonMobil's profit was $8.4 billion in the first quarter, and there's nine cents per gallon of profit in the sale of a gallon of gasoline. So it's easy to figure. The federal taxes are 18 cents, so the feds get twice what the oil companies get in their profits. So the $8.4 billion profit for ExxonMobil translates to $16.8 billion that the feds get. But ExxonMobil then pays taxes on their profits. ExxonMobil pays taxes, so that $16.8 billion is actually larger by the time Exxon pays its taxes; same thing with ConocoPhillips -- and, of course, the drive-by media is playing right along with this because the profit is one thing. But it's the profit margin that you actually need to look at, and that's where you can find gouging.

Now, the first quarter 2004 profit margin for most of big oil is about 8%. This first quarter, it was 9.4%. The first quarter 2004 was about 8% and the first quarter this year, 2006, is 9.4%, and that's an increase of about 14% in the profit margin with an increase in revenue of 24%. They're taking in a lot more money, but their expenses eat up almost half the gain. So if you wanted to suggest that they're gouging, you would have to find evidence that their profit margin is skyrocketing, and the profit margin is not. Just looking at the number of dollars in the raw profit, you know, that's the simpleton way, and that's the way everybody is all ticked off and everything.

Source

All this hubbub about the price of gas is just election-year political mumbojumbo anyway.

If you really want to lower gas prices, either show us the hybrid Bowing 747 and Mac or Peter Peter Built trucks, or lower taxes.

Also, do you have a source on "Oil & Gas companies are giggling about record profits....". That just sounds sophistic to me.
 
ashurbanipal said:
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.



Depends on how far you take it. If we crash the global economy, I guarantee we'll save more than 3% annually.



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.



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.



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.



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.



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.


Doom gloom and leftism is all you know huh?


with that said, I'll give this one to you. We're on a resource scare here pretty soon. Weither its next year of 2015. Its really close. (my money is on 2013 or 2012)
 
Doom gloom and leftism is all you know huh?


with that said, I'll give this one to you. We're on a resource scare here pretty soon. Weither its next year of 2015. Its really close. (my money is on 2013 or 2012)

Tell me what knowledge is and I'll tell you what I know.

But, just out of curiosity, what was so leftist about my post? The vast majority of it was factual analysis and had nothing to do with politics. The first actual political statement seems pretty verifiable to me, the last bit about gardening and connecting with your neighbors seems like a good survival tip, especially if you agree that we're going to go through a period of resource scarcity.

As for doom and gloom--until about 2 years ago I was a wild optimist about just about everything. But I can't deny the logic of what I've learned about oil production since then. I don't expect everyone to believe me, or to agree. But I wouldn't be any sort of decent man if I didn't at least try to get people to listen. The practical advice I give benefits no one in particular, and is probably a good idea in any case.
 
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ashurbanipal said:
Tell me what knowledge is and I'll tell you what I know.


ahaha. you called me on this one. Touche.


I'm still wondering what you meant by the perrils the new rich have to through (People like the Gates, Google brothers, etc) that makes them throw away "morality"
 
galenrox said:
I'd have much less of a problem if that $2 billion went to subsidies for companies to try to develop alternative fuels that we could possibly make as productively or more productively than the ME makes oil.

It should be that $2 billion plus a lot more. In the short run, we need to maximize the resources that are at hand, including the crude supplies, coal, wind, nuclear, etc. In the long run, we simply have to much bigger investments in the technology of alternative energy sources.

One thing this country has been just terrific at, has been developing and applying new technologies. We need to double and then double again our efforts in applying technology to alternative energy sources.

But like I said on another post, I'm really concerned about whether or not the taxation of oil company profits or the reduction of depreciation/depletion allowances (increased taxation by another name) will accomplish what we need to accomplish. I guess I'm just cynical, but their track record since the '70s oil embargo certainly doesn't give one any confidence that Congress will do the right thing with the tax dough once get their hands on it.

I have to think I'd rather leave it(the dough) in the hands of the oil companies and mandate a level of investment that if not met, will result in loss of depletion/depreciation allowances, etc. Let the profit motive keep working - these guys in the oil and gas industry seem to respond to it.

galenrox said:
One thing I was raised to believe is you can never ignore comparative advantage, or other well known economic concepts, but instead if ****'s not working within comparative advantage, than you need to be creative and find a way to make it work.

There is a true statement. When institutional or political considerations block the movement of resources, and comparative advantage is hindered, something has to eventually give way. And if you are on the short end of the stick, as we are in this case, you gotta 'find a way to make it work'.

Personally, more and more I find myself agreeing with Robert Zubrin (see the paper cited in an earlier post): we should mandate a switch to an alcohol standard and simply remove ourselves from a petroleum standard. I know, its easy to say, hard to do. But right here, right now, as of this moment in time, it looks like the bullet that we should choose to bite.
 
ashurbanipal said:
We're in for a global economic collapse...Theoretically, we could still avoid such a fate, but I consider it very unlikely.

You had some very cogent observations to Zurbin's paper. The one thing that I noticed lacking in your comments was recognition of the potential for development of new technologies that will enhance/make more economical the provision of a existing energy sources or known alternative energy sources. Your 'default' position seems to be that there really isn't much that we can do about it. Do I have that right?

I mentioned in another post that in the long run, we simply have to make much bigger investments in the technology of both existing (but especially) alternative energy sources. One thing this country has been just terrific at, has been developing and applying new technologies. We need to double and then double again our efforts in applying technology to alternative energy sources. Can we do it? Don't know, but I do know we have to try.

I would suggest only one modification to your statement quoted above, "If we don't make much, much more than the half-hearted effort that we are making right now in developing non-petroleum sources of energy, we are in for a global economic collapse."
 
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