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To: Kenny Bunk
My assessment of these sources:

(1) Conventional liquid petroleum production may have already come to a peak. Or maybe not for two or three decades. But that's not all that far away. Unconventional sources of petroleum are more abundant (tar sands and oil shales) but these are expensive and problematic to produce. So petroleum might be an ongoing problem.

(2) Done properly, nuclear could power our civilization for thousands of years. Big engineering challenges harnessing nuclear for transportation, however. Nuclear -> hydrogen? Battery-powered cars?

(3) Coal. Abundant. Very dirty. Can be converted to liquid fuel. (The details of how it's mined are rather ugly. I'm not sure I believe in human-caused global warming, but the climate science community seems to think it's a big problem.)

(4) Hydro is limited. Not a lot of suitable rivers are left undammed.

(5) Natural gas has reached peak production in North America, or so I've read. To keep domestic supplies high, it will need to be imported. Unfortunately, this requires use of liquified natural gas tankers, which are frightening targets for terrorists. Currently (if memory serves) there are only a couple of terminals in the US for this stuff.

May I add two more:

(6) Wind: Abundant, not very expensive to exploit. But intermittent, cannot be used beyond maybe 15% of electrical grid capacity because it becomes too difficult to control the power grid beyond that point.

(7) Solar: Abundant, but very expensive. Intermittent, so can only be used for peak electrical power generation. One good application is for people in remote locations. But not even the hippies at Sierra Club expect renewables to do more than maybe 20% of our power. They instead envision "efficiency" to solve our energy problem. I.e., we'll learn to do without energy.

71 posted on 02/08/2007 3:07:34 PM PST by megatherium
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To: megatherium
I think what the government really needs to do is clear the path for nuclear and renewables. That means streamlining the process for brining this stuff online. Licensing a nuclear plant or wind farm should not be a multi decade legal epic. That is the root of the "delays that drive up costs". All new cars should be flex-fuel capable, so that bio fuels can be used to the extent that they become available. And there are some things, like compact fluorescents, that make sense for conservation. The problem is that what the enviros really want is to ban the Industrial Revolution and return to our previous state of Harmony with Gaia.
83 posted on 02/08/2007 4:51:36 PM PST by beef (Who Killed Kennewick Man?)
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