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Obama Green double down question

Is it time to double down on green energy that has never been more promising?


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the use of oil for other things doesn't make it's use as fuel wasteful or dangerous - again, oil remains cheaper than the alternatives. and the answer is that nobody is even working on answers to those questions, so the notion of the US 'weaning itself off of fossil fuels" is ridiculous.
Yes, oil is cheap - we all understand that. Also, as you've pointed out, it's China's demand for oil that is now controlling global prices and our price at the pump. So we have two choices:
- We can continue to increase production in a race to keep up with China's growing demand, which we're eventually going to lose because there are 1200M people over there and counting, and/or
- We can decrease our demand at a pace to balance China's growing demand, which we could eventually win because as our demand keeps dropping we become less dependent on others and eventually we'll have no dependence at all.
But the latter never works if we continue wasting the oil we have by moving cars and trucks with it. Over 60% of our oil usage each year, which is more than we import, is going out the tailpipe. If tomorrow we stopped using oil to make gasoline and diesel (not going to happen soon, see below) we wouldn't need any oil imports.

There are other "fuels" that can also move vehicles, NG and EV. Yes, both need investment to be viable on a large-scale basis - what do you think this thread is about?? We've got as much or more NG as we do oil but if the distribution system isn't built to handle it, it's for naught. NG pipelines will have to be added or upgraded. Local storage will need to be addressed. EVs will have to be phased in slowly. They're our long-term investment to get us free of foreign oil and the global oil market for good. But even if we started switching to EV tomorrow it would still take decades to get everything transferred over. The average age of cars on the road is ~10 years, which means if we stopped selling anything but EVs tomorrow, half the cars on the road in a decade would still need gasoline. Switching "fuel" sources is going to t-a-k-e t-i-m-e, we can't just flick a switch to do it, so we'd better be looking at least 30 maybe 40 years ahead.



It's also interesting to note that one possible way of storing electricity is to convert it into NG. It's one of the things being tried in Europe and it looks very promising. Just one more good reason to switch to NG instead of oil for transportation.

The Process of Storing Wind and Solar Power as Synthetic Natural Gas
 
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For decades now, the green movement has been swearing to us that with some support to start, green energy can take off on its' own.

Well, now with skyrocketed deficits and a looming fiscal crisis, the time has come;

time to fly, little bird.
So you have come to the conclusion that we will only have coal and hydrocarbons for the rest of our time on this planet.
Then you are wanting us to invest in the ships that will take us to Earth II?
 
Here's some red propaganda for you to watch. :lol:

 
So you have come to the conclusion that we will only have coal and hydrocarbons for the rest of our time on this planet.
Then you are wanting us to invest in the ships that will take us to Earth II?

:) the only thing better than your obvious strawman fallacy is the hysterical nature of it.

Thank you - had I attempted to caricature your position to demonstrate the foolishness of those who buy into the Religion of Green, I could not have done a better job than this.
 
Ok, if 10% ethanol lowers your mileage by 10%, then 100% ethanol would lower your gas mileage to "0." Meaning if you fill your tank with 100% ethanol you go nowhere. I never knew that. Further meaning putting ethanol in your tank is no different than putting water in your tank, it's useless. I swear I never knew that.

You are erroneously assuming a linear extrapolation. It doesn't work that way.
 
Good point but I am not for that. Rather I am for some back up from the government to do research and experiment and may be some subsidies (why is it the oil industry can be subsidised and the green energy not?)

The oil industry is not subsidized. It gets only the same depreciation allowances as all other companies. In fact a few years ago (2007 maybe?) I read that ExxonMobil paid half of all corporate income taxes collected by the IRS that year. Green energy companies, on the other hand, are simply sinkholes for taxpayer money that is used to pay executive bonuses and build fancy headquarters buildings.

Obama's stimulus put $150k into solar panels for a state fish hatchery at Ennis, Montana. The panels are expected to save $3,000 per year, and will thus pay for themselves in 50 years if you don't count the interest on the loan for the money we borrowed from China. The solar panels have a life expectancy of only 25 years. Does that sound like a worthwhile effort to you?

On the commercial level, solar panels are useful in heating home swimming pools and that's where they are used. I don't have a home swimming pool, and see no reason to subsidize my wealthier neighbors who may have them.
 
we haven't built a new refinery for 30 years - I agree we'd have to expand that, fortunately, the new oil industry in the Dakota's is sitting next to giant tracts of land that nobody is using.

I have to take issue with "giant tracts of land that nobody is using." Back in the nineties we had some Ivy League Idiots, a husband and wife team of PhD's from Princeton (where PhD = Piled Higher and Deeper) advocated an idea they called the Buffalo Commons - since people were leaving anyway, why not turn the land back to the bison? The underlying facts are that in 1974 eastern Montana had 11,000 farms working 47 million acres of wheat; in 2002 there were 5500 farms working 49 million acres of wheat. In any other industry this would be evidence of increased productivity, but to the Ivy League Idiots who leap to conclusions it "proved" that the land was being abandoned.

Moreover, oil and gas development doesn't destroy the land surface; once the wells are drilled and the pipelines are laid, life returns to normal and the land is once again open to the plow and livestock. Back in my days as a surveyor, I visited with a farmer in northwestern North Dakota who had recently built a new house with a picture window that looked out over an oil well in his front yard. That well provided him with $3,000 a month, which was good money back in 1970.

Agreed that we could use some new refineries, especially since EPA is waging war on the ones we have and requiring uneconomical changes that would force them to shut down. The seemingly arbitrary requirement for boutique fuels is another issue that deserves review - I have heard (but haven't confirmed) that there is exactly one refinery in the entire world which is licensed to produce the blend of gasoline required in the city of Chicago.
 
So you have come to the conclusion that we will only have coal and hydrocarbons for the rest of our time on this planet.
Then you are wanting us to invest in the ships that will take us to Earth II?

There was a delightful cartoon in the Wall Street Journal a few months ago that showed two cavemen looking at a little fire in the cave. One was saying to the other "Of course it's sustainable! Do you think we're going to run out of sticks?!?"
 
There was a delightful cartoon in the Wall Street Journal a few months ago that showed two cavemen looking at a little fire in the cave. One was saying to the other "Of course it's sustainable! Do you think we're going to run out of sticks?!?"
Thanks. Yup, funny w/ a message; and, sticks are sustainable. All they had to do was control their population or move on to oil and coal. And oil and coal are sustainable too, but I'm not sure what the creation rate is today. Actually I expect us to move on again. Its just the grace with which it will be done that is in question. Sorry, I'm a retired design engineer married to a retired design engineer and every development project we were ever involved in took way longer than expected, e.g. 777. ( No religion involved, just experience.)
 
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On the commercial level, solar panels are useful in heating home swimming pools and that's where they are used. I don't have a home swimming pool, and see no reason to subsidize my wealthier neighbors who may have them.

There is thermal solar panels and photovoltaic panels. The fist ones are not so expensive and pay off in about 3 years. Photovoltaics are a joke, I agree. Yet. If they can increase the efficiency they may be viable.
I like CHP technologies. :)
 
No Idea what happened to this Idea...(probably bought up by Exxon or something)...but this would be amazing if upscaled.

"Anything into Oil Technological savvy could turn 600 million tons of turkey guts and other waste into 4 billion barrels of light Texas crude each year By Brad Lemley Photography by Tony Law

Gory refuse, from a Butterball Turkey plant in Carthage, Missouri, will no longer go to waste. Each day 200 tons of turkey offal will be carted to the first industrial-scale thermal depolymerization plant, recently completed in an adjacent lot, and be transformed into various useful products, including 600 barrels of light oil.

In an industrial park in Philadelphia sits a new machine that can change almost anything into oil. Really. "This is a solution to three of the biggest problems facing mankind," says Brian Appel, chairman and CEO of Changing World Technologies, the company that built this pilot plant and has just completed its first industrial-size installation in Missouri. "This process can deal with the world's waste. It can supplement our dwindling supplies of oil. And it can slow down global warming." Pardon me, says a reporter, shivering in the frigid dawn, but that sounds too good to be true. "Everybody says that," says Appel. He is a tall, affable entrepreneur who has assembled a team of scientists, former government leaders, and deep-pocketed investors to develop and sell what he calls the thermal depolymerization process, or TDP. The process is designed to handle almost any waste product imaginable, including turkey offal, tires, plastic bottles, harbor-dredged muck, old computers, municipal garbage, cornstalks, paper-pulp effluent, infectious medical waste, oil-refinery residues, even biological weapons such as anthrax spores. According to Appel, waste goes in one end and comes out the other as three products, all valuable and environmentally benign: high-quality oil, clean-burning gas, and purified minerals that can be used as fuels, fertilizers, or specialty chemicals for manufacturing. Unlike other solid-to-liquid-fuel processes such as cornstarch into ethanol, this one will accept almost any carbon-based feedstock. If a 175-pound man fell into one end, he would come out the other end as 38 pounds of oil, 7 pounds of gas, and 7 pounds of minerals, as well as 123 pounds of sterilized water. While no one plans to put people into a thermal depolymerization machine, an intimate human creation could become a prime feedstock. "There is no reason why we can't turn sewage, including human excrement, into a glorious oil," says engineer Terry Adams, a project consultant. So the city of Philadelphia is in discussion with Changing World Technologies to begin doing exactly that. "The potential is unbelievable," says Michael Roberts, a senior chemical engineer for the Gas Technology Institute, an energy research group. "You're not only cleaning up waste; you're talking about distributed generation of oil all over the world." "This is not an incremental change. This is a big, new step," agrees Alf Andreassen, a venture capitalist with the Paladin Capital Group and a former Bell Laboratories director. The offal-derived oil, is chemically almost identical to a number two fuel oil used to heat homes. "


Anything into Oil (Change trash & sewage to oil for $15@barrel)
 
Thanks. Yup, funny w/ a message; and, sticks are sustainable. All they had to do was control their population or move on to oil and coal. And oil and coal are sustainable too, but I'm not sure what the creation rate is today. Actually I expect us to move on again. Its just the grace with which it will be done that is in question. Sorry, I'm a retired design engineer married to a retired design engineer and every development project we were ever involved in took way longer than expected, e.g. 777. ( No religion involved, just experience.)

We agree on quite a bit. When we started running low on whales for whale oil lamps, there was an attempt to move to kerosene. It didn't take long to run short of surface seeps for crude oil, and so the first well was drilled around 1856 in western Pennsylvania. The effort was so successful that in 1866, the newly created Department of the Interior issued its first warning that we would exhaust our known reserves of oil within ten years if we didn't scale back. The visionary John D. Rockefeller, though he may have been a greedy offspring of a canid, did organize the industry so that kerosene lamps became a standard available to almost everyone. Then came Henry Ford who gave us masses the freedom to move where and when we choose.

Agreed that we will eventually move on to something else, but I would argue that the only role of government is to get out of the way. Natural gas is a promising avenue, but you and I are both old enough to remember Jimmy Carter and the disaster he created by insisting that we were almost out of natural gas. His government sponsored Synfuels Corp that was created to turn lignite into gas left a billion dollars of taxpayer money rusting alongside the Missouri River in North Dakota after Reagan turned off the subsidy spigot. Obama's "green energy" is just a rerun of that disaster.

Agreed also that no development project ever comes in on time or within budget. In some circles, this is known as Cheops' Law.
 
There was a delightful cartoon in the Wall Street Journal a few months ago that showed two cavemen looking at a little fire in the cave. One was saying to the other "Of course it's sustainable! Do you think we're going to run out of sticks?!?"
Actually, sticks are a renewable energy source. ;)
 
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Actually, sticks are a renewable energy source. ;)

True. And like other green technologies (along with Obama's solution of inflating your tires properly), they are insufficient to power today's economy and can't be scaled up to do so. Where does that leave us?
 
True. And like other green technologies (along with Obama's solution of inflating your tires properly), they are insufficient to power today's economy and can't be scaled up to do so. Where does that leave us?


In the same boat we were in 120 yrs. ago...we need to figure this out just like we did in the late 1800's...we call it progress.

"Jump to: navigation, search

The Age of Oil, also known as the Oil Age or the Petroleum Age, refers to the era in human history characterised by an increased use of petroleum in products and as fuel. Though unrefined petroleum has been used for various purposes since ancient times, it was during the 19th century that refinement techniques were developed and gasoline engines were created. The oil age is commonly thought of as beginning, however, in 1901 with the strike at Spindletop, near Beaumont, Texas in the United States which launched large scale oil production and soon made the petroleum products widely available.[1] Other earlier dates which are sometimes used as start dates include 1846 (Abraham Gesner invents kerosene making coal and petroleum practical raw materials for lighting fuel), 1859 (Edwin Drake invents the first modern drilling process for deep oil wells), and 1879 (Karl Benz produces the first practical gasoline-powered automobile).

Since the 1960s and 1970s, when petroleum production peaked in many industrialized nations, a frequent topic of speculation among scholars has been when worldwide production will peak, as well as when and how the oil age will ultimately end. According to some definitions the age is defined as ending at the point where consumption outstrips the decreasing production making its use unprofitable or impossible. With the dawning of the so-called Atomic Age many observers in the mid 20th century had believed that the Oil Age was rapidly coming to an end.[2] However, the rapid change to atomic power envisioned during this period never materialized. Assuming current consumption rates, current oil reserves will be completely depleted by the year 2050. [3]"


Remember that concept?

Age of Oil - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
 
No Idea what happened to this Idea...(probably bought up by Exxon or something)...but this would be amazing if upscaled.

"Anything into Oil Technological savvy could turn 600 million tons of turkey guts and other waste into 4 billion barrels of light Texas crude each year By Brad Lemley Photography by Tony Law

Gory refuse, from a Butterball Turkey plant in Carthage, Missouri, will no longer go to waste. Each day 200 tons of turkey offal will be carted to the first industrial-scale thermal depolymerization plant, recently completed in an adjacent lot, and be transformed into various useful products, including 600 barrels of light oil.

In an industrial park in Philadelphia sits a new machine that can change almost anything into oil. Really. "This is a solution to three of the biggest problems facing mankind," says Brian Appel, chairman and CEO of Changing World Technologies, the company that built this pilot plant and has just completed its first industrial-size installation in Missouri. "This process can deal with the world's waste. It can supplement our dwindling supplies of oil. And it can slow down global warming." Pardon me, says a reporter, shivering in the frigid dawn, but that sounds too good to be true. "Everybody says that," says Appel. He is a tall, affable entrepreneur who has assembled a team of scientists, former government leaders, and deep-pocketed investors to develop and sell what he calls the thermal depolymerization process, or TDP. The process is designed to handle almost any waste product imaginable, including turkey offal, tires, plastic bottles, harbor-dredged muck, old computers, municipal garbage, cornstalks, paper-pulp effluent, infectious medical waste, oil-refinery residues, even biological weapons such as anthrax spores. According to Appel, waste goes in one end and comes out the other as three products, all valuable and environmentally benign: high-quality oil, clean-burning gas, and purified minerals that can be used as fuels, fertilizers, or specialty chemicals for manufacturing. Unlike other solid-to-liquid-fuel processes such as cornstarch into ethanol, this one will accept almost any carbon-based feedstock. If a 175-pound man fell into one end, he would come out the other end as 38 pounds of oil, 7 pounds of gas, and 7 pounds of minerals, as well as 123 pounds of sterilized water. While no one plans to put people into a thermal depolymerization machine, an intimate human creation could become a prime feedstock. "There is no reason why we can't turn sewage, including human excrement, into a glorious oil," says engineer Terry Adams, a project consultant. So the city of Philadelphia is in discussion with Changing World Technologies to begin doing exactly that. "The potential is unbelievable," says Michael Roberts, a senior chemical engineer for the Gas Technology Institute, an energy research group. "You're not only cleaning up waste; you're talking about distributed generation of oil all over the world." "This is not an incremental change. This is a big, new step," agrees Alf Andreassen, a venture capitalist with the Paladin Capital Group and a former Bell Laboratories director. The offal-derived oil, is chemically almost identical to a number two fuel oil used to heat homes. "


Anything into Oil (Change trash & sewage to oil for $15@barrel)


I find it rather peculiar...that I place before you all, something revolutionary and capable of eliminating the very issues we all debate.


And it is ignored...strange.

Might we be focused on preset agendas?
 
I find it rather peculiar...that I place before you all, something revolutionary and capable of eliminating the very issues we all debate.


And it is ignored...strange.

Might we be focused on preset agendas?
Earlier I saved it for later reading - and research. I'll get to it ... :)
 
Yes, oil is cheap - we all understand that. Also, as you've pointed out, it's China's demand for oil that is now controlling global prices and our price at the pump.

that is not accurate - and it is not what I have claimed. China's demand is part of current oil prices. China's demand was not appreciably higher 6 months ago:

Screen+shot+2012-02-27+at+7.32.46+AM.png


The price of gasoline at the pump swings much more wildly than mere Chinese demand - because it is not a product of simply Chinese Demand. As democrats are constantly pointing out (though misdiagnosing), the futures and commodities market plays a massive role in price variations. Perceived future supply vice demand increases or decreases off an assumed baseline, prices swing higher and lower at a greater variation than that produced by shifts in relative demand. Prices are swinging high right now because investors see that future supply will be artificially constrained, and disproportionately vulnerable to political instability. Change that perception, and they will swing low.

- We can continue to increase production in a race to keep up with China's growing demand, which we're eventually going to lose because there are 1200M people over there and counting, and/or

You're going to have to forgive, me. How, exactly, is creating massive numbers of new jobs which traditionally pay above-average-wages in America and taking advantage of our natural abundance in supply of a resource whose value (you say) is only going to increase losing? It sort of seems like the massive boost to GNI / GDP would be a good thing.

But basically this is the "use oil until it's no longer the cheapest source of energy, at which point we switch to the new cheapest form of energy" plan.

We can decrease our demand at a pace to balance China's growing demand, which we could eventually win because as our demand keeps dropping we become less dependent on others and eventually we'll have no dependence at all. But the latter never works if we continue wasting the oil we have by moving cars and trucks with it. Over 60% of our oil usage each year, which is more than we import, is going out the tailpipe. If tomorrow we stopped using oil to make gasoline and diesel (not going to happen soon, see below) we wouldn't need any oil imports.

:doh except that as you point out, magical green unicorn vehicles, even if someone found the magic make-them-work button, is nowhere near our oil consumption.

There are other "fuels" that can also move vehicles, NG and EV.
.
Yup. If oil actually becomes a worse bet than alternatives in the near future, my bet is on NG. after a certain time horizon, however, I'm betting hydrogen. Electric is just another way of saying "Coal".

Yes, both need investment to be viable on a large-scale basis - what do you think this thread is about?

It is about the fact that, despite decades of massive taxpayer subsides, neither of these options seem to be viable. You know what the definition of insanity is? It's continuing to do the exact same thing, but expecting different results. We are facing a fiscal crises of a proportion that we have not yet faced in our history. When it comes down to cutting spending on weapons systems we know work, medicare that we know provides healthcare for seniors, or on giveaways to politically connected friends of key politicians because they have invested in the green-unicorn-religion which we have every indication won't work.... well, that's a pretty easy choice.


We've got as much or more NG as we do oil but if the distribution system isn't built to handle it, it's for naught.

Bi-Fuel Vehicles. :) As gasoline approaches the price of NG, expect manufacturers to increasingly offer this option.

NG pipelines will have to be added or upgraded. Local storage will need to be addressed

And, if there is ever any significant demand for it, it will be. But we've already seen attempts to "jump start" the EV market by installing infrastructure and hoping for demand to appear fail, and fail expensively.

EVs will have to be phased in slowly. They're our long-term investment to get us free of foreign oil and the global oil market for good.

why would we want to be?

But even if we started switching to EV tomorrow it would still take decades to get everything transferred over.

why would you want to?


Do you see what I mean about this stuff being a religion? You take your means as an a priori assumption.
 
In the same boat we were in 120 yrs. ago...we need to figure this out just like we did in the late 1800's...we call it progress.

:lol: it's pretty funny you should mention 120 years ago. That was about just before the first time people like you started warning that the end of oil was just around the corner :mrgreen:
 
Biodeisel is a better bet than NG. Bioedeisel is renewable and easy tomake. NG like Hydrogen has a storage problem. Neither of them are particlarily safe in a collision. I don't see EV going anywhere anytime soon, The technology isn't there yet. They keep looking for better capacity batteries with longer life with less weight/size. This leads to more and more exotic minerals being used increasing cost and facing the same problems what peolel are whinning about with oil. .bad for the environment, limited supply etc. Untill someone comes up with a real revolution in battery technology instead of small increases in existing technology I don't see it going very far.
 
:lol: it's pretty funny you should mention 120 years ago. That was about just before the first time people like you started warning that the end of oil was just around the corner :mrgreen:

Fortunately...I have not lived quite that long, nor:peace has the environmental cause...it is intereseting to note however,( that if you are accurate) which could happen, that people knew something was amiss that long ago.

To bad we waited until now to pay attention.
 
Assuming current consumption rates, current oil reserves will be completely depleted by the year 2050. [3]"[/I]
That sounds like it was written before fracking and the Bakken. It's been two centuries since Malthus worried about the world running out of food as the global population approached one billion. Now we've got seven billion people and we are nowhere near running out of food. I see no reason to take doomsday forecasts seriously, given their track record.

Besides, you've already pointed to the link for turning almost anything into oil and that should reassure us all that oil is ultimately a renewable resource.
 
Fortunately...I have not lived quite that long, nor:peace has the environmental cause...it is intereseting to note however,( that if you are accurate) which could happen, that people knew something was amiss that long ago.

:doh

no. they were wrong. just like they were 20 years after that, and 20 years after that, and 20 years after that... and today.
 
I find it rather peculiar...that I place before you all, something revolutionary and capable of eliminating the very issues we all debate.

And it is ignored...strange.

This didn't fall on deaf ears. I already knew about it. This is the best alternative fuel system yet. It's a "twofer." You get rid of trash in an environmentally safe manner, and get energy out of the bargain. Companies working on this are already making bank.
 
Despite Negative Press Renewable Energy Revenues Rapidly Expand in 2011

"Solar, wind and biofuels saw global revenue expand by 31% in 2011. With all the negative hype put out by Big Oil and its acolytes, you’d have thought the green energy market had crashed rather than growing by a third.

But investment in green energy rose only 5% over the year, which tells me that somebody is making a lot of money and others are losing out. Green Tech Media reports,

“…costs of solar panels fell by more than 40 percent last year, while installations grew by 69 percent, yielding a 29-percent increase in solar market revenues last year, Clean Edge reported.”

In the US, solar installations more than doubled, with 1.8 gigawatts in capacity added. That is roughly like two small nuclear plants."

"Wind power turbines were also put in at record rates throughout the world in 2011, with China leading the way. By 2020, China will have large numbers of mega-wind installations, generating 148 gigawatts of power.

The US is falling behind on wind installations. It only installed 6,800 megawatts worth in 2011. Altogether, wind now generates enough power to meet electricity demand in 10 million US homes. If there are roughly 60 million US households, that would mean we only have 50 million to go!

There are lots of growing pains in this industry. Many start-ups will fail or be absorbed. An old electricity grid is often an obstacle. Battery power and life is still too limited. But we should be suspicious of the negative tone of a lot of press and political comment on renewable energy, since any business that expands revenue by a third in one year is anything but a basket case."

Despite Negative Press Renewable Energy Revenues Rapidly Expand in 2011
 
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