Re: Oil Economics, a (long) thought experiment

From: Robert J. Bradbury (bradbury@aeiveos.com)
Date: Mon Feb 03 2003 - 07:26:04 MST

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    On Sun, 2 Feb 2003, Kai Becker wrote:

    > So, the real problem is not the price of oil/gas, but the
    > missing alternatives to todays cars for transportation, which use a) a
    > large amount of b) oil/gas, which is c) neither unlimited nor d) produced
    > in an ideal free market.
    >
    > I'd set on (a) first, and on developing (b) and (c), which would probably
    > solve (d) as a result (iff the b/c-solution doesn't produce another
    > single factor dependency).

    Kai, a couple of comments. We are getting (a). The Honda Civic Hybrid
    recently released follows the path of development vehicles such as
    the Honda Insight and Toyota Prius. Some news items predict that
    Toyota will be selling all gas-electric hybrids by 2012.

    The trick will be getting people in the U.S. out of their SUV's and trucks.

    Oil (or esp. methane) *could* be both unlimited and sustainable *iff*
    it were produced in solar ponds instead of pumped out of the ground.
    That however requires a fair amount of bioengineering. But it is *not*
    unreasonable to expect that it could be accomplished within a decade
    if enough resources were devoted to the problem.

    One cannot produce enough energy to meet an average individual's
    transportation requirements from the surface area of ones home
    *but* I suspect for less than the cost of a few years gasoline
    consumption one could buy some significant fraction of an acre
    in a sunny location and produce sufficient energy resources
    (such as methane) that your effective energy costs are zero
    (i.e. you pipe your methane into one end of the pipeline
    system and take it out the other end). The Europeans should
    be buying land close to the ocean in North Africa.

    Robert



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