Re: Oil Peaked !

On Thu, 19 Jun 2008 18:06:55 -0700, "Ernie Jurick"
<invalidexample@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:


"Dave Head" <rally2xs@xxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:cepl5454rqueu4k3jom1a4sg439kfo26hh@xxxxxxxxxx
You're way off on the Volt. I've been watching it closely, and the price
will
be about $35K.

Like all new models and badges, the first year or two will be sold below
cost to build a market for it. The online consensus seems to be around
$20,000.

I hope so. I'll buy it on the 1st day it's offered if that happens.

As production ramps up the costs will drop like a rock.

I think it'll take a battery breakthru for that to happen.

There will be future battery breakthroughs. We just can't wait around until
the perfect battery is developed, any more than people in 1910 could wait
around until the automobile was perfected. You take what's available and
build on it.

Yet you have to build something you can sell. Cars that are built and sit in
the dealer's showroom forever will _not_ cut fuel consumption.

I paid
$3,300 for my first IBM PC, a sizzling 4.5MHz with no hard drive. My
latest
cost $600 with a dual-core gigahertz chip and a 128GB hard drive.

Remember that the hottest market for electrics will be greens and the
under-35s, the people with the least money to spend. A $35,000 car would
be
priced out of their market, even with the gas savings figured in.

The car just might fail, too, if that's the only ones to buy it.

No, but it's the reason the selling price has to be kept reasonable. Older
people won't trust it,

Hey, I'm 61, and I _WANT_ one...

and will keep on driving their Buicks, even if gas is
$10 a gallon. Kids will think it's kewl and everybody will want one, just as
they wanted VW Beetles in the '60s, and will be snapping up Smart cars.

At least the smart is cheap, and gets good mileage.

What we really need is that air car by Tata. I want one of those too. I don't
give a F if it rolls up like tinfoil when it gets hit - I'm not going to let
mine get hit.

As for the electricity, have you missed all the news about the power
grid
being
in extremely sad shape and needing to be rebuilt? That was discussed at
length
after that sagging wire south of Cleveland plunged the entire
northeastern
USA
into darkness for an extended period of time.

Yes, the rash of acquisitions in the early years of this century produced
energy companies that were shareholder-driven, not public utilities, and
they cut costs on maintenance to boost profits.

What I've read is deregulation of the electric utilities caused them to
act
like profit-driven industries, which all cut costs any way they can. One
way
they can is to cut maintenance.

Yep, all parts of the same problem.

They should never have deregulated the power distrubution, or the airlines.

And, stringing power-carrying
copper is WAAAAAAAY more complicated than building out fiber. Fiber can
be
strung underground with a "ditch witch" sort of machine, but power wires
require towers and large diameter copper wires, and concrete, and
construction
crews, and snorkel trucks, and sometimes even helicopters.

Transmission lines use aluminum conductors as a rule, not copper.

Hmmmm...

And you're assuming that the old way is the only way. We're on the edge of
practical superconducting mains,

Well, when we get 'em, we can use 'em, but we ain't got 'em yet.

Nor can we wait for them.

Nope - we should rebuild the electric grid as soon as possible.

When cities were wired at the turn of the 20th
century immense overcapacity was designed into the conduits under the
streets, because everyone could clearly see the future.

all of which would be buried, probably
alongside roadways so they could later be adapted to recharge passing cars
on the fly.

$$$$$$$$$$$

Iraq = $2 billion/week
Rewiring America = ?

Rewiring America is going to have to be done by private industry, and it won't
happen unless there is a profit in it. Or, unless the government re-regulates
the power industry so they have the money to do it.

Even if conventional cables are used, they'd be lots more secure
buried than the pylon-borne setup we have now, a leftover from the 1950s.

Yep, but it is hideously expensive to do.

So was the railroad, the interstate highway system, rural electrification,
air transportation and all the other modern advances. We just need to make
it a priority.

Yeah, but its unnecessary. Just string the wires on the hi-tension towers like
our grandfathers used to do. People that don't like the looks can just kiss my
ass.


Nothing could be simpler. As you drive, you broadcast your location and
time
on the road to the nearest microwave tower, which charges (no pun
intended)
your credit card.

That's if everyone would cooperate, but you know that there will be
hoardes of
people stealing the power, and there'd be no metering possible in order
to
catch them.

How do you steal induced power?

Easy. The power wires are buried in the roadway, and creating a magnetic
field
that the car receives via a coil in the bottom of the car. Any car that
enters
the magnetic field can soak up the power. If the wire is as long as the
road,
there's no way to know which car on the road is not set up to send in a
payment
for the power he's soaking up out of the buried coils.

The car doesn't operate if it's not paying its way, any more than your cell
phone operates if you stop paying the bill.

Where do you get this stuff? I stick a coil in the bottom of my car, wire it
to an electric motor, and the coil picks up the power out of the air, from the
magnetic field. There's _NOTHING_ stopping my car from working - any more than
there would be something to stop a refrigerator magnet from clinging to a
refrigerator. No metering would be involved. It would be damn difficult to
know it was happening - my car would look like it was any other gasoline
powered car, but it would be running on electric from that wire under the road.

Nobody would have much chance of knowing.

If you tried to drive an unmetered car it
probably wouldn't start, and if it did you'd be broadcasting your position
to every police car in the vicinity.

????

Police would be monitoring for cheats the way they monitor for speeders and
electronic toll-jumpers today.

They wouldn't have an effective detection tool.

Yes, any change is resisted. Look how reluctant you are to give up
gasoline.
:-)

Am not. I'm only reluctant to give up gasoline-equivalent performance -
the
electric car I buy needs to perform as well or better than my gasoline
engined
car, that's all.

That may not be possible. You may have to make some sacrifices for the
greater good. Americans used to be able to do that. Witness the public
response to WWII. I wonder if we're still capable of it?

They did it during WW2 'cuz they knew that some TEMPORARY impact to their
lives
would result in the much greater good of defeating the enemy.

You're not likely to get people to PERMANENTLY make their lives less
pleasant,

No, I'm not projecting a permanent dystopia, just a transition period where
there will be some inconviniences, nowhere near like the home front in WWII.
Things on the other side will be just peachy. Oil dependence will be a thing
of the past.

That would take about 20 - 30 years to complete, which would most likely be the
rest of _my_ life, so yeah, it is essentially "forever", as far as I and anyone
else my age is concerned. Even if you're 30, you're looking at extremely hard
times 'til you're 50 or 60 - this would cut the best years out of your life and
condemn you to a relative austere existence, with deprivation of things that,
if you aren't lucky, may kill you. Go ahead, get cancer when you can't afford
insurance, which many more won't be able to that are not able to now.


especially when it is based on some PINHEAD's idea that we can't drill all
the
oil we have because of some fraud like global warming or spilled oil on
some
beaches or some damn caribou in Alaska or all the other excuses. They're
more
likely to lynch the pinheads, tho. That might happen.

Yes, they might. There is amazing power when enough stupid people form a
lynch mob.

Not stupid - just looking out for their own interests by dealing with people
who would harm them.

But global warming deniers are the lunatic fringe these days.

No, global warming proponents are looking more and more like the charlatans
that they are. This is all hype to bring people down to living the way the
environmental lunatic fringe wants them to - poor, unable to travel, so that
they _can't_ use any fuel...

No
one takes them seriously except talk radio hosts.

There _is_ _no_ consensus on this issue, only hype.

And why do you feel that
America has to despoil every square mile of its heritage so you can have
enough gas to drive your SUV to the mall?

Its more like avoiding an economic collapse that could kill millions, and there
is no "despoiling", there is only drilling. That is not despoiling. Do you
know that if ANWAR was the size of a newspaper page, that the portion to be
drilled would be no bigger than a single letter on the page? Worrying about
that is absolutely absurd.

Isn't that just a tad... selfish?

What? Saving millions from starvation resulting from an economic collapse? No,
I don't think so.

What about your grandkids?

_I_ don't have any, but if you have some, they may starve to death if the gas
goes to $8 / gallon and the economy goes tits up. Get into a collapse like the
last one in the 1930's, and you and they may spend the rest of your/their lives
getting out of it.

There's lots of ways to have virtually unlimited power, so we can live
wherever
we want, if we are just willing to go ahead and build it. Nuclear power
could
be made to last 1000's of years - there's that much Uranium and Thorium to
be
mined. Use breeder reactors, it goes way up. Get fusion working, it's
going to
be virtually limitless. Solar is virtually limitless. Geothermal is
virtually
limitless. We can solve the problem in maybe 30 - 100 years, but we have
to
survive the years in between those. We can't do any of this fun stuff
today -
not solar, geothermal, etc.

Don't forget wind, already paying its way in many places.

Wind is a minor player. There's not enough of the stuff in the country to make
a sufficient dent. T. Boone Pickens, the oil billionaire, is about to build
the largest windfarm in the world in N. Texas, and when he's done, it'll still
be a very small percentage of the total consumption of power in the country.

Now solar, that's something else - there's _enough_, easily, but we have to
make some solar cell efficiency improvements and be willing to put up
collectors, both PV and solar-thermal, in the desert southwest and ship the
power all over the country.

But if you think
we can just wait for it to happen you're going to wake up some day with
everything gone.

Exactly. We can't wait, and should be starting now. Start with solar-thermal
- we can do that now, build wind farms as fast as possible, AND DRILL EVERY
DAMN SQUARE INCH OF THE EARTH'S SURFACE WITH OIL UNDER IT AND AN AMERICAN FLAG
OVER IT!

We have to aggressively pursue EVERY approach.

Many countries used the 1970s oil shock as a warning and
took steps to prepare for the future. Brazil converted all its cars to
ethanol, France built its nuclear network, etc. Americans bought economy
cars in droves,

Everybody keeps beating this dead horse, but fails to notice that they did it
on sugar. WE CAN'T GROW THAT MUCH SUGAR. We have to do it on corn, at least
until some smart guy figures out the celluose to alcohol enzyme that will allow
us to use things like switchgrass. But as it is, we're using corn. Sugar
produces 7 times as much energy as it takes to make alcohol from it, but corn
produces something like 25% more energy than it takes to make it. That means
we don't have anywhere close to enough land to produce all the ethanol we need,
and we can't grow sugar can in more than a very small percentage of land in
this country.

but successive administrations ignored the need for a
national energy plan, which is why we're in the spot we're in now. Somebody
else was always going to do it, and nobody ever did.

Think of the space program. All we need is the will to accomplish it.
There
are many new battery designs in the works, including a
carbon-fiber/plastic
assembly that acts like a giant condenser, permitting near instantaneous
recharges. And selling electric car technology to the rest of the world
might make us a net creditor country again.

Yep, there's all kindza things out there, but they are experimental.
There's a
Lithium Ion battery invented at Stanford last December that is
supposedly
10X
the capacity of a regular Lithium Ion battery - if that works, then the
electric car is here. But... its development is being done in Saudi
Arabia now
- I look for the professors that are the inventors to be kidnapped and
beheaded
in an "unfortunate" security breach, and of course all the designs and
prototypes of this battery will, of course, be stolen.

Saudi Arabia has no research capacity to speak of.

Nevertheless:

"Yi Cui, an assistant professor of materials science and engineering at
Stanford who specializes in nanotechnology will get 2 million dollars a
year
for 5 years and is required to spend from 3 weeks to 3 months a year in
Saudi
Arabia doing research."

It shouldn't be necessary to point out that nanotech is only a small part of
battery research, and one assistant professor spending 3 weeks to 3 months a
year cooling his heels in Riyadh isn't going to be coming up with a
breakthrough anytime soon.

He's _already_ made the breakthru, but if there's any adaptation that is needed
to make it work in the real world, it'll be done in SA, and then this guy will
disappear, along with his work.

Saudi Arabia will continue to do what it's always
done-- invest where there the greatest chance of return.

They're going to bury this thing if they can, because it will make their oil
worth a lot less than it is now. Probably put oil back down at $6 a barrel.

The battery that could save the world from oil is likely to be lost, and
that
professor will be very lucky to survive his trips to the middle east. I
wouldn't stand near him while he's there on a bet. There's going to be a
bomb... or a bullet...

Or the space aliens will get them so humankind doesn't stumble onto the
secrets of interstellar travel! :-) Sorry, I'm not a conspiracy buff, and
the 400-mpg carburetor never existed, anyway. Research today is spread out
across the globe, not restricted to one small mountain retreat hidden away
in Transylvania. Look at the names and locations on papers presented each
week in Science and Nature-- they're cooperative efforts by people working
in 3-4-5 different countries.

You don't think they'd like him dead? They don't like _any_ of us as far as
that goes, and they are one of the world's most bloodthirsty bunches...



Yeah, burying them is not all bad, its just hideously expensive.

We're spending more than $2 billion a week in Iraq. More expensive than
that? And we'd be getting something back for it, too.

Yep, more expensive than that, and no, we'd not get jack back for it,
since
there's no great advantage to doing it the way we normally do. Those
"high"
lines generally have very little happen to them, 'cuz the power companies
are
smart enough to build them higher than most of the trees, and cut the
trees
that are higher back away from the wires. The wires will withstand
whatever
wind they encounter short of a tornado, and there's not much to worry
about
with wires strung between towers. They're easier / faster to repair, too,
if
something _does_ go wrong.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1998_Ice_Storm One single storm.

Yeah, well, stuff happens, but burying it is reallllyyyy expensive.

The interstate highway
system, rural electrification, satellite phones, FedEx, personal
computers--
all were impossibly expensive and far too complicated until somebody with
vision came along and did them. Now they cost next to nothing and we take
them for granted.
-- Ernie

Yep, but we didn't have a bunch of obstructionist liberals around to keep
us
from progressing when we built those things.

LOL! Ah, there's your bête noire, them wicked, wicked liberals! :-) Who do
you think is pushing for electric cars and an electric economy-- ***
Cheney?

Yet they'll oppose nuclear power, the power lines necessary to distribute the
power, clean coal, etc. etc.

Who wants to destroy every square mile of America to feed its oil
addiction-- the Sierra Club?

There is no destruction - that is another liberal lie... Liberals lie like a
rug...

Somebody has to have the cojones to put things
in perspective and say stop!

If we stop, we die.

there are more important things than cheap
gasoline to fuel our oversized cars so we can go shopping.

Yeah - stuff like diesel to get all our food to market, petrochemical
fertilizers to ensure the bumper crops our farmers produce, and if we don't get
cheap enough oil, the party is over. Famine, deprivation - its right around
the corner if we don't get ahold of these energy prices.

You can't replace
our natural heritage-- when it's gone it's gone forever.

Its not going anywhere - that is just another liberal lie. If we drill ANWR,
the f'n caribou will be lucky to stumble across it, and it won't harm them in
the least. In fact, the caribou right now cozy up to the Alaska pipeline, 'cuz
the oil in it is heated, and freezing is their main problem with surviving the
winters.

We can replace oil,
and the sooner the better.

Yep, but we have to keep it going long enough that we don't kill several
million people via starvation in an economic collapse.

Because oil is going to be gone someday too, and
it also will be gone forever. Then what? Time to start planning?

Neither of us would be alive when that happens if we drilled everything at our
disposal. Offshore is huge, and the Green River formation has 3X the amount of
reserves of Saudi Arabia. That would give us as much time as we'd need to make
that electric car work, y'know. Then all we have to do is kick the liberals in
the teeth and build some nuclear reactors to charge the batteries with, and
we'd be all set.

Time to run
around in circles saying Somebody Should Have Done Something!

We're doing it - the Chevy Volt will be out in 2 years. But these "breakthrus"
come slowly. We need to keep from going tits up, economically, until we can
get something better to work.

-- Ernie

.