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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: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.
- 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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