Posted on 03/07/2014 5:00:13 PM PST by ckilmer
And we still have the north pole and the whole continent of Antarctica to poke holes in...
very good
>>More peak oil nonsense.<<
All the easy to get to stuff has been tapped in the free world. Over time we will have to rely on more and more on expensive sources of fuel like what we are doing in the Gulf of Mexico. But there will be a limit to how high oil prices will go imho. And that is because there is a ton of coal available, which can be turned into a liquid like gasoline. It takes a ton of money to set up a plant and investors are hesitant because if the price of oil were to return to levels from 10 years ago, the whole thing falls apart.
It would be nice if the feds would come in and offer a guaranteed minimum price from these plants so they could at least break even if the price of oil plummets. This way dozens of these plants could go up. The result of this is that OPEC makes less money, more supply pushes down the price of oil, ppl in our country have jobs. And if prices did collapse, it would be a boon to our economy to have cheap oil. So the Feds would more than make up for the lost revenue as the economy expands. The CEO of Jet Blue outlined this type of proposal around five years ago. I think he wanted around 100 large scale coal to liquid plants. IIRC the point isn’t to replace drilling with coal, but simply to add to the existing supply. He noted that because of tight supply vs. demand oil price is high. And further, you didn’t need all that much additional supply to significantly push down the price. I believe his plan was to use coal to add the equivalent of 5 million barrels of oil per day. And of course all this money stays in our country instead of going over seas.
Didn’t the Germans use coal gasification in World War II?
And where is the electricity going to come from? Coal is dead and nuclear is a no-no and cold fusion is a scam??
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imho thorium lftr reactors will do the job. likely there’s be a big public international competition break out in the next year or two to produce the first one.
Berman was spouting this nonsense four years ago and unfortunately some investment bankers listened to him.
He’s Mr. Negative and I guess someday he will be right. Just not in his lifetime.
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thanks. I’d never heard of the guy. so its helpful to have some back ground on him.
Especially I think he’s dead wrong about the permian basin
>>Didn’t the Germans use coal gasification in World War II?<<
Yes, the Germans did it in WW2 and I just read an article on it to satisfy my curiosity.
http://www.airpower.maxwell.af.mil/airchronicles/aureview/1981/jul-aug/becker.htm
It reached a peak in 1943 when half of all fuel needs were met from coal gasification.
If electric is going to “win out” it’s going to have to be running on something besides lithium...
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If you’re talking about lithium shortages, I think there are more lithium deposits outside china coming onstream in the next couple years.
If you’re talking about fire—I’m just not seeing enough worry about that to for example—kill the stock price of tesla or prevent Musk from moving forward with his 5 billion dollar battery plant.
Shortages. Chile has the most, and that’s enough under the most optimistic scenarios for maybe 5% of the current vehicle numbers in the world now.
IDK what ever happened to the Zinc-air batteries that were the rage a while back, that would be a good route, another for static applications is Nickel-Iron.
I found an Edison Battery Oil bottle a while back, took me a while to get around to noodling out what that was for, you poured it on top of the water in nickel-iron batteries to keep the evaporation down. They were used a lot in RR switch applications.
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