OUR ENERGY POLICY

We don't have one and never really have had one.

the rest of the world thinks us has a clear policy of nicking everyone else's energy

osama bin laden wants saudi light crude at 250 dollars per barrel.

the portion of the "energy plan" that has us extracting more petroleum from sources other than Saudi is kind of laughable. ANWR has some good data now and the overall estimates are still less than 10 billion barrels and could be less because of the porosity anomalies of the seismic data.
We should be transitioning into a natural gas economy with coal gas production. (in situ)
Then , there should be huge benefits and grants in aid for new solar, wind etc energy FUNDED by a gas tax that , now that the energy prices are temporarily dropping should be proportionately raised. The hgas tax for Pa is about 0.31 $ and it should be proportional to the pump price. Thatl divert money back into sustainable energy research. In the last week or so, since gas is dropping, Ive seen the number of cars increasing on weekends. (The 3$+ costs were having an effect)

Today I listened to the replay of the oil Co CEOs come up with the crap about how they are working and how we need to put more resources on drilling and environmnetal policies that allow for moreendergy production. Those guys are the Southern Pacific robber barons of the new millenium. I didnt hang around too long but did the Senators throw them any tough questions about
"Why the hell atre you guys raping the public?"
Why are your profits so obscene?
OSama bin Laden doesnt give a **** about 2504BBl oil, the oil companies do.

Our enery policy is an excellent example of "Intelligent Design"

We import more oil from ______ than from any other single nation.










Canada.

actually its Mexico, Canada and then Saudi keeps screwin around, sometimes Saudi is number 1 and sometimes its no 3.
For this last quarter it was Mexico, Canada, Saudi, Venezuela, Nigeria. thats acounting for about 65% of our daily oil then its Angola, Iraq, ALgeria,UK, Equador.
Notice that for 65% of our oil only Mexico and Canada are stable

I disagree. Not with putting $$ into research on alternative fuels but that the tax should be on gas. If you are going to advocate for a tax then tax the raw crude oil. Approx 45% of crude oil is refined into gasoline in the US market. Why should the people that consume the remaining 55% be let off the hook?

Let the people that heat their homes or buy products that are made from petroleum pay for it. If someone can afford a 4,000 sq ft home then they can afford an increase in their heating bill. Let the truckers pay the taxes, the electric utilities that use oil to run their turbines, and the businesses that use oil to run their plants and produce their products pay their share.

Ill partially agree. The heavy distillates are whats left over from gas cracking. So you have a good point. However, I wouldnt want the tax to be spread so much onto the petrochem and plastics and fertilizer industry, the cost of the crude is the largest expenditure in product transformation. Wed lose huge amts of fertilizers, plastics etc.
I could endorse your tax by taxing the light sweets and Brent and not the petrochem grades. I dont know how that would work but taxing the petrochem would just stifle the economy and he resaerch for new products Like recycled , or petrochem from coal tars and coal distillates. is already going on at a fever pitch (IMHO)

One of the neatest things is JP from coal. We tell everyone that weve got 1000 years of coal left but we dont tell people that we cant get at it because its under suburban developments and saddled with terrible setbacks. We can, instead, retort coal in the ground by steam distillation and not harm the areas by "mountaintop removals" and leave the coal country looking like Berlin after the war.
Theres a lot of self made money going into the development but with some extra incentives it could take off like crazy.

This sounds to me like you're playing favorites here. If it raises the cost of fertilizers and plastics so be it. Let the industry pass the cost along in the products and let the consumers that use them pay for it. A few less plastics around wouldn't bother me in the slightest.

Raising the tax on any portion of the market is going to stiffle the economy just as gas prices did over the last few months. That's the price we pay. If done responsibly and spread over a period of 15 or 20 years the increasing tax might just be an incentive for businesses to invest in R&D now instead of sitting on huge bank accounts or handing out bonuses left and right.

To bring back a phrase from earlier years - Gas, grass or ass. Nobody rides for free.

we disagree on the market sectors but , in your second paragraph you agree with me. I submit that their are still parts of the economy where we produce stuff and we wont curb anything by killing fertilizer mfg, Most of these crudes are the heavier sulfur bearing ones anyway. Mexico, Nigeria, North Sea Brent and Venezuela are the gas and diesel fuel stock with low sulfur.

I dont wanna kill the economy , Id like to shift it. However, even these pbb discussions have apparently not taken place in the Cheney "summit"
Did you hear those Petro CEOs testify? Bunch a hypocrites. They even want more money "to invest in alternative fuels and (Paraphrasins) "sop up the teeny last bit of oil from the remotest,deepest pockets on earth. When it costs 2 barrels of oil to make one total barrel of product, then the Hubbert curve is accelerated even further

I agree with you that we do not have a national energy policy, with the possible exception of "we'll run out on someone else's watch, so I don't care".

I disagree with you about "obscene profits".

If you do a "back of the envelope" type calculation, the $33 billion in profits in the last quarter they were whining about on the news yesterday spread across 91 days and an estimated 10 million barrels a day of prime fuels consumption works out to a whopping ONE CENT PER GALLON IN PROFIT.

If you want to be mad at someone, how about our dear friends in Riyadh getting $1.36 a gallon for their crude oil, or the combined tax of about 45 cents a gallon on gasoline?

I don't think that any of us - farmerman included - really know the inner thoughts and motives of the execs who run the oil industry. One should generally treat those who claim to know the unknowable with great suspicion.

Most businesses deal at least fairly well with basic changes in the markets they serve - if they don't others spring up to take their place. It seems to me to be a reasonably safe bet that oil company management would work hard to protect their current markets and the return on their sunk capital, and, at the same time, preserve their readiness to use their current market position as leverage so they can lead (as opposed to follow or react to ) any basic changes in their industry that might occur or be foreseen. How well they may do all that is another question.

Coal gassification did not take off in the early '80s, even after the heavy subsidies enacted for it during the Carter Administration, because it cost far more than alternative energy sources and yielded far greater environmental problems. (Coal tar is a fairly noxious substance containing a malevolent complex of chemicals.) There may well be new technologies that enable environmentally safer gas recovery and do so at a competitive price. However, given the unfilled demand for natural gas in this country, I cannot believe that, if such a process existed, it wouldn't be instantly deployed.

We have a serious lack of baseload electrical power generating capacity in this country and virtually all of the new capacity brought online during the last two decades is for gas turbine plants that can be started and shutdown quickly and easily to meet peak diurnal demand cycles. Even with modern compound heat recovery systems these gas turbine plants are slightly less efficient than the coal-fired boiler plants they replace. The gas is - per unit of energy released- a good deal more expensive than coal, but the Clean Air Act has virtually eliminated any new coal-fired plant capacity. Under these conditions, a new source of inexpensive natural gas, derived from coal, would be instantly exploited if it existed. It hasn't, and that leads me to the conclusion that the economic and environmental solutions for coal gassification do not yet exist - notwithstanding farmerman's claims.

My company does a very good business designing and constructing methane recovery systems for the waste products, both animal and vegetable, of the food processing industry, .The economic driver in these applications is the high (and variable) cost of natural gas - and it is a powerful one that leads these companies to willingly spend large sums on new waste gas recovery systems.

Letting government design our energy supply system through regulation and tax incentives is a good way to run out of energy. The U.S. Department of Energy is incompetent and corrupt enough as it is - more power would make it only worse. A relatively free market will achieve much more. California has already given the nation an apt example of the ineptitude of government bureaucracy in such matters.

The world's producers of petroleum need to sell their oil just as much as the consumers need to buy it. If the price gets too high, alternative sourrces will become economically advantageous, and they will quickly grow.

I believe we need greater use of nuclear power for electrical generation and serious reconsideration of our current environmental and licensing regulatory structure as they relate to energy production and distribution. to find a way to remove or reduce the very serious disincentives for capital investment in base capacity that have already affected the country. No one can even forecast how long the litigation surrounding a new nuclear plant license will take - as a result no new plants have been brought online for almost thirty years.

Government regulation is inflexable and generally maladapted to the real objective factors driving industry. Moreover such regulation usually becomes a pawn in various political and partisan struggles in which science and good engineering & economics are the usual first casualties. We need less of it, not more.

good post George

But you seem fixated that the market will solve energy requirments without need of govt. intervention.

A year or so ago you described my fears about peak oil as pseudo scientific fantasy, but it seems the concept is now making into the mainstream debate.

If conventional oil is near peak it will take a lot more than market forces to work it through. In fact that is what we are already seeing imo, with so much American foreign policy attention focused on the middle east. Market forces do not apply in resource wars.

excellent article on shale oil here for your interest

http://www.aspousa.org/assets/pdf/OilShale.pdf

georgeon
Thats true for the 80's. This is 2005 and we know that the Hubbert curve is correct and coal bed gas retorting and JP-90 production is already a "boutique" industry. Photovoltaic cells are becoming very efficient and cheap, methyl clathrate mining is looked on seriously as a commercially viable activity.
It is being exploited.
Its still far easier to exploit gas fields by the ancient art of drilling than retorting for coal gas or JP90 or coal diesel.That doesnt mean that these techs shouldnt be supported.In coal bed diesel production or JP-90 prep One can do the esterification by reacting directly in the coal bed by applying water jet technology(All you need is a way to increse permeability and a way to deliver a"wet methoxide". In the 80s the field of advanced oxidation wan "oxidation pyrolysis" were also not available, today, they are standard tools to clean up organics in ground.
There were a lot of things that were considered impossible in the 80's. I dont think that the present impediments are technological as you intimate. The oil companies have a vested interest in squeezing out the last drops of oil at significantly lesser rates of recovery and therefore significantly higher prices such that the costs of production, cracking, and delivery are exceeded by an increasing delta of profitThe arguments that the oil companies are using to justify these obscene profits are just an example of "the big lie".
We are beginning to become the "type section" definition of fascism rather than a Democratic Republic, and oil is one industry that,by its vertical ownership, and "overtly friendly governmental policies" has become the poster child of "we dont want no steenkin alternative energy". Just look at how uncreative the present attempt at an energy bill has been expressed. Its a joke .

This is an area where the science and engineering has far outstripped the market expression.
As far as multiple cycle gas turbine megawatt stations, your characterization is less than correct. Combined cycle gast turbines are being sited all up and down the EAst Coast in anticipation of an increased gas production based on exploration that never materialized. The new Trenton gasfield has more capacity than the biggest gas fields in the world and its in Pa, W Va, and NY Trenton limestones. Its a huge field and its capped in favor of siting temporary LNG facilities that, to me and my cycnical way of looking at things, are knowingly being pursued just to "fire up" the environmentalists while keeping gas high. I invested in gas stocks in the mid 90s when it looked like exploration was gonna be curtailed (1996) to be correct (Clinton was as much a part of the cabal as is the Cheney administration)
I read the oil and gas news and I suggest you do likewise. We are , at the post peak of the Hubbert curve, nobody disagrees with this. However, the "extension of the peak years" can be accomplished by a number of techy applications that, just because it would release more energy at a rate that would drop prices per cu ft, would not be welcome by the GAS BARONS.

I know, I sound like Im raving,but even the "insider" magazines like Geotimes are a bit embarrased at how the resource is being distributed . Im still a bit too close to oil production and energy exploration and the mere fact that we are stretching out the resource at exhorbitant and obscene returns is, to this old GAs field enumerator, a totally artificial thing, and it has NOTHING to do with the hurricane and cracking capacity.

Google up John Rich and Jp90, there george.You can see that in the last 25 years , weve made significant advance in hydrocarbon conversion. I remember 25 years ago, I had a computer with like a 20 meg harddrive and we used something called "film" in cameras. The big technology debate back then was whether VHS or "Beta" was gonna dominate the video market and "laptop" computers weighed a ton.

In that case things really are moving quickly. Are you saying that in the oil business peal oil is not only universally accepted, but that we are now in the post peak phase?

pretty much. The Hubbert curve was proposed by M King Hubbert wrt standard oil production, noy anyhting exotic, like coal retort diesel or JP.

energy policy
looking at various reports and listening to all kinds of experts, it's difficult to dertermine what the true state of energy supplies is. i read recently in "business week" magazine that coal gasifications "is now taking place in an environmentally clean" environment(probably posted under "what are you paying for gasoline).
. googling...COAL GASIFICATION...brings up many articles - no doubt many influenced by partisan sources on all sides.
short of being in a "war scenario" , i think it is difficult if not impossible to develop an energy policy to satisfy the majority of people.

as an aside : in germany and other parts of europe, wind power is being brought online at a faster rate now, but there are plenty of complaints - even from environmentalists ! wind turbines are not an enhancements to the natural beauty of the coastline. the mountain areas, the flatlands ... and so on. everyone thinks, wind power is great ... but surely not in my backyard !!!
we are right next to lake ontario and the local community college is in the process of developing a plan of erecting wind turbines to take advantage of this power ... plenty of loud opposition ... it will spoil the pristine shoreline. why not build it ten miles upstream/downstream ? oh, there are people living too ? well, they probably won't mind as much ... and so on and so on .

is not much different than garbage disposal; everyone wants to have garbage disposed of safely, cheaply, without odour ... but surely you are not planning to bury, burn , process - whatever - garbage in my neighbourhood , are you ?
NIMBY !!! hbg

I believe a fundamental fallacy in these arguments is the unspoken assumption that, if there is (or appears to be) a new good idea or opportunity out there, then the next needed step is for government to launch some new program to facilitate it. Nothing could be more wrongheaded in my view.

The truth is we already have an energy policy -- it consists of the confused tangle of environmental, tax, local land use, and direct market regulation actions of government at all levels. There is very little rationality in all of this with respect to the solutions posters here are arguing for. Moreover calling for more government action to enhance this or that favored alternative will very likely create yet another set of unforseen side effects and excite yet another set of bureaucratic and commercial special interests which, together will almost certainly make the whole set of government interventions, actions and "policies" even more confused, contradictory, inefficient, and inflexible.

"Obscene profits" is a term that maikes me smile. We all seek them in our investments, but some of us decry them when the other guy is making them. The truth is, absent a monopoly or managed market, high profits are simply a characteristic of growing markets in which demand is forcing supply. There certainly are some barriers to entry in the oil production and distribution industries, but they remain basically competitive. In the main, the chief anti competitive factors that do exist are a result of government action - the side effects of the accumulated debris of earlier "beneficial" government programs and regulation. These range from tax policy on the depreciation of assets or the costs of exploration to the complex environmental rules that affect refineries and distributin system (including the absurd requirements for season and region specific recipies for the gasoline market). It is common practice for politicians to blame the industry for whatever market inconveniences consumers may face, however they almost never acknowledge the bad side effects of government regulation. No surprise here - bureaucrats always put the interests of their agency above those of the people they pretend to serve.

Hang on a minute! We import oil to the US? Well, that's a new one on me. I thought we drilled it out for own use, thus helping to decrease petrol prices.

In fact, before this article, I had completely forgotten we had North Sea Oil Reserves.