Chester, as one of your loyal readers from the beginnings of your blog, albeit one who has not commented before, I observe that Davis, Kielland, Cardee and Papa Ray have shown themselves to be informed on this issue from their responses to part one. Take their input seriously.

Thank you addanz.

Yes, thank you addanz.

Chester I have found a tidbit that seems to be one of those "too good to be true" things.

There is a company that claims they have developed a technology that produces free, clean and constant energy, the key word there is of course "free".

As you can see, they have offered up a challenge, which I think is a plus on their side as far as them actually having something to evaluate. Their claim about the free part may not be true as they think it is. But that is what they are wanting, is testing to determine if their claims are correct.

I've added my name to the email list, you might be interested in doing the same.

The only thing that I read on their website that bothers me, is the statement about how some had evaluated it, but would not make public statements about their findings. That seems odd to me, or at least I would like to know why not. The statement about how many would not evaluate or at least come look at it is not surprising to me. It seems that the majority of the egg heads in this world refuse to believe that something that they think is impossible may really be possible. A common failing among the higher learning crowd and even people like me.

An example of that is the conversion of cooking oil to enable a car's engine to run on the stuff. The method to do this has been around for quite a while. But it took little guys with borrowed money to develop a small "plant" that is affordable and can be operated by almost anyone.
This process took years, and it still is not being done by many. I guess McD's started charging for their old grease.

Anyway, for you information.

Papa Ray

This Steorn outfit brings to mind the UK hairdresser (Maurice Ward) in the early '90s who claimed to have invented a plastic - called Starlite - concocted from various household materials that could withstand temperatures in excess of 10K degrees C. I remember several mainstream publications carried this story; the one I remember was in Business Week. It was all quite convincing, but I never heard anymore until recently when I did a google search and turned up several references including this cheezy looking site (http://www.starlitetechnologies.com/index.html) that purports to be a company with the intent of bringing Starlite to market. I suspect Steorn's perpetual motion machines will be about as sucessful as Starlite has been up to this point, but at least Steorn has a professional looking web site.

When it comes to electricity, we are already energy independant. Our electricity comes from coal, natural gas, nuclear and hydro. The amount produced by all the various wind, geothermal, solar cells etc combined does not get out of single digits as a percentage of our total usage.

Where we import enormous quantities of energy is for transportation fuel. The problem with petroleum is that it is only located in a few places and that in a lot of those places, hostile or psychotic people live on the ground above the oil deposits. In the past, we went where the oil was, drilled and pumped the oil and paid whatever thug was in charge for the privilege. With China and India joining the First World (or the Integrated Core if you are a Thomas Barnett fan) there is a lot more competition for that oil and the price has gone up a lot as these new economies rapidly catch up with the rest of the industrial world. There are other nonmonetary costs as the money flowing into the Arab world allows them to force the rest of the world to participate in their psychodramas.

The current situation is dangerous and unstable, but what can we do about it?

In densely populated cities, we might be able to convert some of our mass transit from internal combustion to electricity, but what tiny fraction of our population rides the bus to work?

Eventually developments in fuel cells or battery technology might make them competetive technologies without the high price premium that you pay today for a hybrid car. The hibrids are also pushing the state of the art for electric motors and batteries but anybody who buys one today is an early adopter which means that in addition to the satesfaction of being on the leading edge of a technology, you pay higher prices and often get lower performance.

There are several very good features about biofuels like ethanol and biodiesel. First they require minor changes to our existing infrastructure. The QWERTY keyboard and the 4 foot 8.5 inch railroad gauge may not be the optimum but there is so much infrastructure out there that they are not going to be replaced. Internal combustion engines, the stations to fuel them, the people to service them are an enormous part of the American infrastructure. Probably trillions of dollars have been spent to install this infrastructure.

Ethanol can replace up to 10% of the volume of gasoline in an unmodified car engine without any effect except to increase the octane to ~95, boost horsepower, lower the combustion temperature and to make the exhaust cleaner. When you increase the mix above ~20% ethanol, you are going to have problems unless you modify the engine to raise the air/fuel mixture (9:1 for pure ethanol vs. 14.7:1 for gasoline) and advance the spark. Flex fuel engines do this automatically. It requires an additional sensor and a software change to the engine computer.

Right now, new ethanol plants are being built as fast as they can be. We doubled our ethanol production last year and we will probably double our production again this year.

When it comes to chemical feed stocks, the original source of those in the 19th Century was the complex mix of chemicals called coal tar. Coal tar is what you had left after you heated up coal to produce "town gas", "coal gas", "producer gas" which is what people used to heat and light their housed and cook with before natural gas became more economical in the 1940s.

Coal gas can be used as a substitute for natural gas in many applications (like fueling gas turbine electric power generation) or it can be used in the Fischer-Tropf process to produce artificial gasoline or diesel. SASOL in South Africa did a lot of development on this process and I think that it makes economic sense at the current prices.

The reason that you don't see the oil companies jumping on this is that after the sub $10 per barrel oil prices of the 1990s, the only people left in the oil industry are very, very conservative and terrified about the price of oil dropping to those levels again. Nobody in the oil industry is going to invest in any process that would only make economic sense at $70 a barrel. They are reluctant to look at anything that would require $30 a barrel to make money.

Chester:

You silly Schizoid. Just make a decision.

Are you a Marxist Lenninist Keysenian, despite all empirical evidence that it's a predictor of Economic disaster to let Governments get involved in Big Spending Economic Projects ?

Or are you a Monetarist letting the Market Decide ?

When People Can't afford the gas, and they can't, they'll switch.

Japan Corporations spent a decade not on whizbang solutions like Hydrogen (say rearender KABOOM) or ALL Elctric All the time, (except to protect their California Marketshare from Politicos) the went for the Hybrids.

Meanwhile U.S. politicos spent Billions and so did the U.S. Auto Makers who followed their spending on Hydrogern (will not happen even in your children's lifetimes says top oil guy I know in Charge of the program) and unfortuneately High Efficiency Diesel - Thank you Clinton administration Geniuses.

Therefore we are a DECADE behind the japanese in hybrid car technology. Thems the facts.

It's the cars,

Euro Farmers used to high "Petrol" price have switched to growing rapeseed and fueling their Diesels with simple conversions, at $.25-.50 /gal fuel costs if you can grow it.

the thriving Amish From Pennsylvania to Ohio to Indiana have proven that Farming with Horses is economically Equivalent to farming with expensive to purchase expensive to maintain, expensive to fuel expensive to replace, IS ECONOMICALLY EQUIVALENT. And the horses being gentler on the land and giving back fertilizer, the Amish have the Most productive farmland per acre any where on this earth, and that is an economic FACT.

So ... it's the City Dwellers and all their cars that are burning 80% of the Petroleum. let them walk, ride a bike, make their kid ride the Bus to School rather than IDLE IN THE SUV in a long line picking up little johnny little janey.

I choose Hayek Freedman and the Monetarists, let them Drill Santa Barbara, let them Drill Anwar, let them Drill All of Texas Oklahoma Louisianna and the San Juans in New Mexico ---

--- And let's have a mixed, highly diversified energy source, Grow some, buy some (foreign oil and Nat Gas), walk some, ride a bike some, Drill Some more, and finally develop some mutual aid development deals with the countries who have oil and are culturally friendly, like Mexico, Columbia, Ecuador, I'll bet with directional drilling they can get some of that Venezualan oil&Gas on the Ecuadorian side.

CNG Compressed Natural Gas is about to go mainstream and make most of your above wishes happen right now WITHOUT further government assistance.

Carbon fiber composites have reached such a performance cost point that CGN is now a viable way to power the family auto.

The Honda 2006 Civic GX is in production and can be filled over night at your house from your own utility connection. This is NOT a dual fuel automobile.

A companion compressor running on wall current is available. In a world of $3.00 gasoline this Honda burns $2.00 methane.

The conversion of our automotive fleets over to CNG will take years.

Locally, our buses and UPS trucks have been running on it for years.

Currently vast amounts of natural gas are being used to fire up steam boilers and combined cycle power plants.

Over time this gas must be redirected towards motor fuel. Its loss can be covered by combined cycle systems using coal, hydropower, and nuclear power.

It is high time to link to the vast Alaskan natural gas deposits discovered decades ago.

Forget about mainstreaming the other energy schemes: they’re too uncompetitive with CNG.

CNG can power: trains, trucks, buses, autos … as they are already built … with trivial modifications to the fuel delivery system. The diesel engine takes the gas at full pressure right through the injector system with no modification past the fuel injection pump. Autos need a pressure step down valve.

Pollution emissions drop 90% from current levels with natural gas.

National Crisis Solved…. Next Gordian Knot Please!

Everyone knows about Prudhoe Bay and ANWR, but I was completely unaware, until the other day when I picked up and started browsing a new road atlas, of the National Petroleum Reserve in Alaska. Established in the 1920's as a navy reserve and now under the juristiction of the BLM, it consists of 23 million acres (roughly the size of Indiana) and is west of the current development in Prudhoe Bay. The mean estimate of recoverable oil is on the order of 9.3 billion barrels. Does anyone in the oil business know what's being done there?

Speaking of ANWR, the recent MSM fauxtography scandals reminded me of how for many years, the networks and newspapers have misrepresented ANWR's image whenever they had pictures or videos accompanying any ANWR story. We were always shown eagles soaring against a backdrop of snow-capped mountains, or elk grazing in meadows surrounded by pine forests; whereas in reality, ANWR more closely resembles a sleet-covered parking lot extending from horizon to horizon.

ANWR is interesting, and while never having been there it wouldn't surprise me to hear that the ecological value of it is over-hyped.

Still, I find myself inclined to resist opening it to oil exploration in the near-term. As I've pointed out previously, even with other highly welcome energy strategies, there will always be a strong value for oil. It's incredibly useful, not merely as an energy source but as a basic ingredient in synthetic materials.

If the Peak Oil theories are correct, if the energy demands of India and China continue to rise, the value of oil should be expected to rise. It may be wise for us to recognize ANWR as a massive strategic reserve.

I wouldn't want to argue this position as, quite honestly, I've not really looked at the various numbers closely enough. Would cracking into the piggy bank now be the best thing? Perhaps it is. I'd merely suggest that we wish to consider the value of maintaining ANWR as a critical reserve which could serve us well in a global crisis in the coming decades.

Yes my greatest wish is that all the tree hugger bunny humping opposum kissing....well you get the idea, enviros would be forced to spend a whole summer vacations in the delicate arctic paradise of ANWR. It's a stinking arctic wasteland. Yes there's some scenic areas, about a hundred miles south along the Brooks range. As far as the wildlife, The entire region is simply proof that life will move into any nich such as a volcanic cone or even ANWR if given an opportunity. I especially get a chuckle when they use the caribou ploy. How the poor animals will be confused and wary of a steel pipe. An ANG friend mentioned he used to fly one of those noisy, boxcar looking Canadian made twin engine turbo props up there. The caribou are so "sensitive" that they had to use the follow me truck to bump them out of the way else they'd walk into the plane's props :)

There is really no accurate assesment of what's in the NPR area west of Prudhoe Bay. Could be great, could be mediocre. Vast amounts of heavy cold crude that is a pain to pump and process (a rail line would be more practical than trying to inject it into the oil pipeline and has been proposed if they ever build the trans Canada rail linkup). Also great potential for oil and gas in the interior areas such as the Nenana Valley and the Yukon River Valley.

Excellent amounts of generally low sulphur coal. The best grades near Point Hope. Rail would be needed to exploit it properly. Think gasification. Methane hydrates, huge though uncertain amounts. Some progress made on capture methods. Speaking of gas used as CNG for vehicles. Consider convertion to stable liquids (I forget the process name). Supposedly makes an excellent deisel replacement.

http://www.dog.dnr.state.ak.us/oil/index.htm will link you to the State government site which has some information if anyone is curiouse.

The following are an updated version of some thoughts I aired on this topic earlier this year in the Colorado Daily, a Boulder newspaper for which I write a column. I put them in the context of electoral politics, but they still speak to the topic at hand. Briefly, the issue is not energy independence; it is the price of oil, which is different.

-0-

The greatest Republican vulnerability in the 2006 election is not Iraq but the failure to create a coherent energy policy. The greatest Democratic vulnerability is the failure to exploit the issue.

It’s hard to contemplate this state of affairs in any way except slack-jawed amazement.

The United States has been involved in the war on terror for almost five years -- longer than its involvement in World War II. Its Islamofascist enemies in that war are funded and sustained by largely petrodollars.

Moreover, since 9/11 the average price of a barrel of oil has more than tripled, rising to about $70 a barrel from about $20. This means that a county like Iran, which is beavering away at acquiring nuclear weapons while chanting “death to America” five times a day, has seen its oil income go from around $50 million a day to $175 million a day.

Given what’s at stake in the war on terror – the survival of the republic and of what’s wryly called western civilization, that sort of stuff – the failure to produce a wartime energy policy, let alone implement it, is an omission of breathtaking proportions on the part of the Bush Administration.

You’d think the Democrats would seize the moment and propose a serious energy policy of their own. In your dreams.

If the Bush Administration’s energy policy consists largely of trying to open the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge for drilling, the Democratic policy consists largely of blocking oil drilling in ANWR while at the same time demanding energy independence and genuflecting in the general direction of alternative energy.

When it comes to energy, the Republicans have been listening to their inner oilman and the Democrats to their inner environmentalist. Unfortunately, neither of these inner worthies seems aware of an inconvenient truth: we’re engaged in an existential war.

In the context of the War on Terror – the War with Islamic Fascism – energy policy boils down to one issue, and it’s not about air pollution, global warming, or the relative virtues of nuclear, coal, wind, and solar generated electricity. The core issue, the only issue really, is the price of crude oil.

Break the price of crude oil and Islamic fascism and the godfather societies that nurture and sustain it will likely crumble like the former Soviet Union, and their war on western civilization will be de-funded.

To the extent energy is a war on terror problem, the solution lies driving down oil prices and keeping them down -- by finding new sources of crude or, more important, substitutes for it, and by reducing demand for it by using oil more efficiently. This does not mean replacing every barrel of oil consumed by the West with a barrel of domestic crude or a crude substitute. It does mean producing a permanent glut of crude or crude substitute on the world petroleum market. This is still a formidable job, but it’s a lot easier than achieving energy independence or creating a hydrogen economy.

What’s to be done?

Since about two-thirds of the petroleum consumed in the United States is in the form of gasoline or diesel fuel, that’s where the focus should be. For example:

Adopt new Corporate Average Fuel Economy Standards that would increase average gas mileage 50 percent (from 26 to 40 mpg) in ten years. Bring light trucks and SUVs under CAFÉ standards. Outlaw production of the worst gas guzzlers outright.

Give a generous investment tax credit for any project that produces synthetic petroleum, diesel, or alcohol from domestic coal, natural gas or bio-mass. Set a national goal of increasing the amount of ethanol produced and distributed in the United States by an order of magnitude – from current production of about 4 billion gallons a year to 42 billion gallons or the equivalent of about 1 billion barrels of oil – in a decade. (The U.S. currently uses about three billion barrels of gasoline a year.)

At the same time, require automakers to give all cars they make a flexible fuel capability, meaning they can run on gasoline or a gasoline-ethanol blend containing up to 85 percent ethanol (E85) or anything in between, within 5 years. (Such systems are already in production.)

Make a similar national commitment to bio-diesel production and use.

Require hybrid cars – those that are powered by a combination of gasoline and electric motors – to have the capability to recharge their batteries from an electric outlet and run 20 miles on batteries only. Since most trips are under twenty miles and most electricity is produced from something other than oil, the practical effect of this is a car that gets about 100 miles to the gallon.

None of these proposals require new technology and all can produce substantial results within a few years of being implemented.

There are dozens of similar steps that could be taken. If the Democrats had any sense, they would package about a half dozen of them as a new contract with America and run on it this fall. If the congressional Republicans – who are looking at impending death this November – had any sense, they would quit looking to the Bush Administration for leadership in this area and do the same thing.

Breaking the price of oil doesn’t require replacing every barrel of crude we consume with a barrel of domestic crude or a domestically produced substitute like ethanol. It only requires producing a permanent glut on the market that guarantees permanently low market prices. Subsidies are particularly useful for producing surpluses – as 70-plus years of farm subsidies have shown.

And the cost? Let’s assume the total cost of measures such as the foregoing came to $200 billion a year. That’s not a trivial sum, but it is still only about 40 percent of the defense budget, and would hardly strain a $12 trillion a year economy, which would at the same time benefit from lower energy costs. And for that sum, we would de-fund Islamic fascism and give a good hard knock to Hugo Chavez and Vladimir Putin in the bargain. Not a bad deal, really.

pauldanish, one slight problem with your theory and the basic reason why the Demonrats won't bring the isssue up.
The current administration DID produce an 'Energy Policy'. It was stone walled out of existance. IIRC, it died in committe and has been left there to rot for the last 4 years. I think it was in early '02. IIRC, it had provisions for drilling ANWR, money for cenversion of fuel types and reasearch on AltEngy.
I still think that those who see energy independance as a means of avoiding war are living in cookoo cloud land. It shows a basic misunderstanding on their part of the 'why's and wherefores' of the ongoing war between Islam and the West. NO ammount of energy independance will stop the Islamic attack on the West.
I saw Wallid Whatshisname on CNN this weekend and his estimate of Muslims that support Jihad was 75% So those that think it's just some small, warped, subset of Islam that is waging war on the west is just as delusional as those that think it's about the OIL. I would love to see what the intersection of those two sets looked like.

Moreover, since 9/11 the average price of a barrel of oil has more than tripled, rising to about $70 a barrel from about $20. This means that a county like Iran, which is beavering away at acquiring nuclear weapons while chanting “death to America” five times a day, has seen its oil income go from around $50 million a day to $175 million a day.

Yep. And Ahminejad has used that money to launch all kinds of welfare programs, basically buying off the electorate. This was not possible when oil was at $20-$30 a barrel.

Sounds like it's great to be him, doesn't it? But now that it's at $70, there is all kinds of really, really intense interest in getting off of petrofuels now, and a large number of very smart people are all coming up with ideas. That wasn't happening back when the Saudis were keeping oil in the $20-$30 range- those guys have a lot of respect for American inenuity (guess who built their oilfields?), and they don't want to get innovated into irrelevance.

Someone will come up with something- or, even better, a lot of someones will come up with a lot of somethings- and the US will diversify away from oil with great rapidity.

But I do not look to the government to be the driver of all of this innovation, invention, and diversification. The driver will be (and should be) private individuals making their own decisions about what solution best fits their circumstances.

As far as the 'existential threat' thing is concerned... no, it's not. Now. Maybe it'll be one some years from now, but comparatively speaking, the current time period (give or take a few days) would be analogous to 1935.

Specifically, March 16, 1935.

We still have a few years to resolve this without resorting to what is done to existential threats.

Iran et al. are getting rich off the futures market, who are doing quite well, in their own turn, off of any good rumor on the vine. Alternative fuels are great, but anything that requires a stable supply will undergo the same economic process as oil.

CNG vehicles are great. They work great, the green folk love them, usually more power per cylinder stroke (who doesn't like that)and....and... well, over regulated.

It used to be in Texas, any ol' cowboy could throw on a propane tank, hook up a few do-dads under the hood and be in business. This all started you know around here because of the ranchers and farmers. They always were looking for a way to save a buck. Then things started to go wrong, to cause big problems for all us that were driving our pickups with the big tank right behind our heads.

I'm guessing, you can guess what. Yes, too many coors or whatever, accidents with tanks blowing up and causing widespread panic among the drivers of your "safe" gasoline vehicles. I think this might have happened about the number of fingers on one hand...well, maybe both hands, I don't recall I was counting. Anyway, the State got involved about the time the Feds got involved and well, you know what that means. That means it got screwed up real quick.

Now if you want to run your vehicle with compressed anything, you can't do it yourself and you have to have "specified, certified" gear and someone "qualified and licensed" to put it all together and it has to naturally be "inspected".

The "kits" and labor available to do your ol' beat up truck or your new high dollar truck run from $8,000 to around $12,000 the last time I checked. They may be cheaper now. The biggest part of the money is in the tanks, the more tanks you want, the more of course it's gona cost. I have a bud that runs three tanks because he never goes anywhere, anyway. So I'm guessing you would need a lot more than that for any long trips, unless you was going to California, where they got lots of CPS filling stations. We have one here in my midsized town. I don't know how many total there are statewide.

I'm all for it, but in my case, my ol' truck ain't worth the investment and my car is too little, unless I took out the backseat for the tanks, and my Sweet Sarah (my one and only, most precious favorite GrandDaughter) wouldn't like that one bit. So, I'm guess I'm stuck with gas.

In more ways than one.

Papa Ray

A few years ago, Arizona offered a $3000 tax credit to anybosy who had a CNG setup installed in their car as well as a natural gas compressor system for their garage so that they could fuel up every night. This program was originally aimed at cleaning up the air in Phoenix so that the air quality would comply with EPA standards.

The program was wildly successful. It cost about $1500 to get you car converted and get the compressor installed in your house. WIth natural gas prices at the time, it worked out to the equivalent of using 85 cent per gallon gasoline.

Arizona had to cancel the program because so many people were doing it that state income taxes dropped down to where the state was facing the prospect of borrowing money to meet budget. When they cancelled the program, they claimed that people were doing the conversion, taking the tax credit but continuing to drive their cars mainly on gasoline. Explain to me why anyone would burn (at the time) $1.50 gasoline instead of 85 cent natural gas except if they were going on a trip beyond the range of their natural gas tanks.

Blert pointed out the problem that converting our entire national fleet over to CNG would require a massive investment. He also pointed out that most of the natural gas in this country is already spoken for. In large part this is because the Clinton Administration would not approve any other method of electrical generation than gas turbines. That is when we changed from having a surplus of natural gas to a shortage. How is importing LNG from the Mideast an improvement over importing oil and gasoline from the Mideast?

CNG is a nice idea, but it's too late to try to implement it now except in some special application fleets.

We can displace 10% of the gasoline we consume with ethanol and we would not have to modify our installed infrastructure at all. By requiring all new gasoline engines to be FlexFuel capable, we could eliminate all gasoline imports as fast as the ethanol plants could be built.

When (not if) the oil terminal at Ras Tanura is knocked out, it is going to be a serious blow to the world economy. The more able we are to shift to alternatives, the more resilient we will prove to be.

The more we shift away from using oil, the less ability the jihadis have to use oil as a weapon against us either by threatening to cut off the flow of oil or by using the money we give them for oil to purchase weapons that they are incapable of building themselves.

grumbler,

I'm not arguing for energy independence. I am arguing for breaking the price of oil as a means of waging war on Islamofascists.

I don't doubt for a moment that they will continue to wage war even if the price of oil is driven down to single digits. However they will have a much harder time of conducting jihad if they have been driven into poverty by having their black gold transformed into black gunk.

Consider a small concrete example: Hezbollah has bought the loyalty of Lebanese Shiites with Iranian petro-dollars. Pauperize Iran and it won't be able to do that anymore. It won't be able to go out and hand out $12,000 in American dollars to everyone who lost a home to Israeli airstrikes. It won't be able to continue to arm them with ballistic missiles, state of the art anti-tank weapons, and ballistic missiles. Indeed, it won't be able to continue paying Hezbollah's operating expenses, which it currently does to the tune of about half a billion a year.

Or consider another example: Iran is building a the industrial base for the production of nuclear weapons. That costs billions of dollars. It isn't being paid for with money that the tooth fairy or the 12th Imam left under President Ahmadinejad's pillow.

I agree with your point that Islam won't stop fighting even if the price of oil is broken. But whether Islam's godfather societies will be able to contine the fight in any meaningful way or will collapse like the former Soviet Union is another matter.

grumbler,

I'm not arguing for energy independence. I am arguing for breaking the price of oil as a means of waging war on Islamofascists.

I don't doubt for a moment that they will continue to wage war even if the price of oil is driven down to single digits. However they will have a much harder time of conducting jihad if they have been driven into poverty by having their black gold transformed into black gunk.

Consider a small concrete example: Hezbollah has bought the loyalty of Lebanese Shiites with Iranian petro-dollars. Pauperize Iran and it won't be able to do that anymore. It won't be able to go out and hand out $12,000 in American dollars to everyone who lost a home to Israeli airstrikes. It won't be able to continue to arm them with ballistic missiles, state of the art anti-tank weapons, and ballistic missiles. Indeed, it won't be able to continue paying Hezbollah's operating expenses, which it currently does to the tune of about half a billion a year.

Or consider another example: Iran is building a the industrial base for the production of nuclear weapons. That costs billions of dollars. It isn't being paid for with money that the tooth fairy or the 12th Imam left under President Ahmadinejad's pillow.

I agree with your point that Islam won't stop fighting even if the price of oil is broken. But whether Islam's godfather societies will be able to contine the fight in any meaningful way or will collapse like the former Soviet Union is another matter.

Pauldanish,

No matter what course the US takes, oil will remain a valuable commodity for the next twenty years. Even if we decide, right now, to phase out gasoline and move over to bio-diesel or some other energy source, the demand for oil from China, India, and other developing countries will offset the decrease in US oil consumption.

If your goal is to deprive these nations of currency, there are really only two courses of action:
1) Take the oil supply from islamofascist nations.
2) Destroy the oil supply in islamofascist nations.

My feeling is that we should be using both tools. If Iraq becomes an Islamic terrorist haven, we should move into the oil producing regions and cut off their income (declaring a free fire zone to discourage mischief). If Iran continues to work on an atomic program, we should bomb their oil infrastructure and remove their source of income.

The time for playing nice is over. I’m perfectly happy to buy oil in an open market from people who aren’t trying to use my money to kill me. However, I think it’s abundantly clear that isn’t the case anymore. It’s stupid for a strong powerful nation to mess around with a bunch of piss-ant countries filled with hateful people who care more for killing our citizens than they do for raising their own families. Screw them – take their oil, pump them dry, and then leave them to wallow in their hatred. If we are lucky, in 50 years the Middle East will resemble current sub-Saharan Africa.

Pauldanish,

No matter what course the US takes, oil will remain a valuable commodity for the next twenty years. Even if we decide, right now, to phase out gasoline and move over to bio-diesel or some other energy source, the demand for oil from China, India, and other developing countries will offset the decrease in US oil consumption.

If your goal is to deprive these nations of currency, there are really only two courses of action:
1) Take the oil supply from islamofascist nations.
2) Destroy the oil supply in islamofascist nations.

My feeling is that we should be using both tools. If Iraq becomes an Islamic terrorist haven, we should move into the oil producing regions and cut off their income (declaring a free fire zone to discourage mischief). If Iran continues to work on an atomic program, we should bomb their oil infrastructure and remove their source of income.

The time for playing nice is over. I’m perfectly happy to buy oil in an open market from people who aren’t trying to use my money to kill me. However, I think it’s abundantly clear that isn’t the case anymore. It’s stupid for a strong powerful nation to mess around with a bunch of piss-ant countries filled with hateful people who care more for killing our citizens than they do for raising their own families. Screw them – take their oil, pump them dry, and then leave them to wallow in their hatred. If we are lucky, in 50 years the Middle East will resemble current sub-Saharan Africa.

I think the consensus here is that we could achieve energy independance, or at least as much as we deemed politically necessary. It would take time though. Few people stop to think on that. Even if someone walked into the patent office today with a working, handheld "Mr. Fusion" it would be a decade before a noticeably amount of power and transportation used it.

Oil itself is not scarce, it's simply harder to get it cheapley. I allways think of the analogy of oil as water power. The easy alpine sites for penstocks have been used. Still plenty of potential with the large and small river valleys but it requires a whole lot more work for proportionally less return. This makes it logical to start switching to other methods such as ethanol supplementation, Fischer-Tropsch conversion of coal and gas, learning to love nuclear again and even wind and solar (if they ever become practical).

Some reading these ramblings will cry "What of the Future!" Only wind and solar are renewable. Well those two could be good supplements, maybe, someday. They're still not practical(and maybe never will be) as baseload for obviouse reasons.

We have enough resources to cover humanity, even with projected growth, for at least a century plus. That provides time for more tech developement. Some of you had parents who grew up using woodstoves and coaloil lanterns (some of us grew up using them :). Now some kooks insist we should retrench and live a bucolic, village lifestyle, be energy nuetral. I've lived that lifestyle, it sucks and I would shoot anyone that tried to force me back into it. If we can't develope better over the next fifty to one hundred years then we've failed as a species and evolution will return the verdict.

The experience of the second oil crisis 1979-1985 suggests breaking the price of oil might be less difficult than is now supposed.

Following the Iranian revolution of 1979 the price of oil spiked at about $40 a barrel (about $85 a barrel in today's $s if memory serves.) Within six years it collapsed to single digit levels due to a combination of market forces and government policy.

Government policy included CAFE standards that increased MPG of the American auto fleet to 27 mpg (from a low of about 12 or 13 mpg in 1973 if memory serves). Market forces and legislation switched oil burning power plants and a range of industrial users to other fuels -- mostly natural gas and coal. The last included industrial uses like process heat and feedstocks for the petro-chemical industry. (During this time a natural gas glut was created by the Reagan administration's decision to deregulate the price of natural gas, which was long overdue. While this left natural gas more costly than before regulation, it also left it cheaper than OPEC price fixed oil.) Market forces also drove energy efficiency throughout the economy.

Similar trends occurred in the economies of other nations as well. Japan, for example, switched its steel industry to coal and, I believe, its electrical production as well (and there was probably a good deal of nuclear in the electrical mix too).

All of these factors produced a surplus of about 1 million barrels a day in global energy markets. OPEC initially combatted this by cutting back production, but eventually conservation, substitution, and new production from non-OPEC sources -- primarily the North Sea and Mexico -- forced OPEC production quotas so low that members began to cheat and the price of oil collapsed. And all of this occurred at a time when Iran and Iraq were fighting a war that took several million barrels a day of production off line. (Iraq financed its part of the war with massive borrowing from Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, which helped sow the seeds of the 1991 Gulf War.)

The biggest difference between today and 1979-85 is that the two most populous countries in the world are industrializing quickly and global demand for oil is surging. However, technologies like ethanol production, coal liquifaction, and production from oil sands are also more mature now than they were in 1979-85. So more robust demand can be matched by more robust means of increasing supply, increasing substitution, and, of course, increasing efficiency.

The first lesson here is that the world does not need to quit using oil to break its price; it is sufficient to find a way to create a relatively small but persistent surplus on global markets.

The second lesson is that this can be done in a relatively short period of time (five or six years) with existing or very near term technologies.

The third lesson -- and this is critical if breaking the price of oil is to be used as a weapon against Islamic fascism -- is that a way must be found to keep the price down after it has been initially broken and market forces quit working to keep it down. This can be done with subsidies, taxes, or by creating stand-by alternative fuel production capacity.

Agreed, I don't think there can be any justification for subsidizing or punatively taxing oil or oil substitutes as a way of life. But I think such steps could be justified as a wartime measures. Granted, once put in place subsidies and taxes are damnedly hard to get rid of. But then again, once put in place fascists are also damnedably hard to get rid of, and fascists constitute the present, and existential, danger.

pauldanish

Here's my modest proposal. The NAFTA nations impose a $1 per barrel import tax on oil imported from outside of NAFTA. The revenue from the tax will be distributed to offset the costs associated with citizens from other NAFTA countries in each other's country. Since most of the oil that the US imports is from Canada and Mexico, it is not going to have that much effect on oil prices within the NAFTA area. However there will be some effect and it will make oil sand more valuable and more likely to be exploited. It will lower the risk of developing any oil technology within the NAFTA countries because external forces are less able to drop the price of oil. As an added bonus, it will also make Hugo Chaves' Venezualan oil somewhat less valuable.

You will also have a political constituancy of school districts, hospital and health care workers and insurance companies that will push to raise the oil import tax every time the world oil price drops.

Consider a small concrete example: Hezbollah has bought the loyalty of Lebanese Shiites with Iranian petro-dollars. Pauperize Iran and it won't be able to do that anymore. It won't be able to go out and hand out $12,000 in American dollars to everyone who lost a home to Israeli airstrikes.

Did you know that money was counterfeit?

One of the more interesting pictures to come out of Beirut was one of some uncut sheets of Ben Franklins... Hizbullah has counterfeited dollars in the past, and it looks like they're still at it.

rosignol

Two thoughts:

If the money was indeed counterfeit, the United States government should be howling its head off about it. It should also be sanctioning transactions with Lebanese banks. The fact that neither it nor Israel has made a big deal about this is reason for doubting the report, but something may still emerge. Obviously, if the payoffs should be shown to be in counterfeit currency, the effect on Hezbollah's legitimacy among its Shiite supporters would be devestating.

This should be interesting.