[muawiyah]

‘Peak cheap light oil’ ~ there’s still plentiful expensive heavy oil somewhere ~ but the big story at the moment is natural gas. We can convert our surface transportation industry to it in short order.

[aruanan]

The number of cars in the United States (300,000,000 minus 792,787 non-gasoline cars= 299,207,213) times the number of dollars per car to retrofit it to natural gas ($6500 for a basic system to $12,000 for a top-of-the-line installation with a high-capacity, composite fuel tank) = $1,944,846,884,500 to $3,590,486,555,992.52 to retrofit cars alone, not counting the cost for the rest of the vehicular fleet, the costs of retooling the auto industry to produce all natural gas autos, the cost of lost pre-natural gas automotive industries, the costs of increased exploration, production, storage, and delivery of natural gas, the costs of lost gasoline fueling enterprises, and about a thousand etcs.

A. Are there other uses for natural gas than transportation? Yes.
B. Are there other uses for gasoline than transportation? No.

C. Is it worthwhile spending many multiple trillions of dollars "in short order" and destroying multiple trillions of dollars of existing industries to switch from one type of fuel to another to do exactly the same thing? No.