Originally posted by: Engineer
Originally posted by: charrison
Originally posted by: Engineer
Originally posted by: charrison
I agree it is not going to get us off opec, but it will give us more power to bargain with them. As long as we say we are not going to go after anwr or offshore it means what we have decided to be on opec tit for sure.
My vote is to agressively do what Brasil did and that is to develope something alternative and run with it. I'm sure that the brainpower is here....and if we're going to be paying outrageous prices for fuel, I would just rather pay it to man made alternatives made right here in the USA. Oil isn't going to last forever (in any usable quantities) so why not say fuck em now?
You do know that we make more ethanol that brazil does?
While I agree it is time to get off oil. it is not a trivial problem we are going to solve in a short amount of time. If we mandated everyone had a drive a scooter to work, it would still take a long time to produce them for everyone. So if we want to get away from opec, we need to decrease demand, increase supply or both.
Increasing supply will give us a short term price drop (maybe???) but will do nothing except that. It will turn off developments of alternatives as cheaper fuel always does.
Well if it were not for surging world demand, I might agree with you.
Doesn't matter that we produce more ethanol than Brasil does. They do it with a more efficient process and make enough to serve their country's needs.
They dont have a more efficient process, they just have more land suitable for growing sugarcane. This is something we cannot fix. The best we can do in this department is drop the tariff on sugar. Until we can make cellulistic ethanol work, we are basically stuck with corn and 1.3x return on energy investment.
There would also need to be significant upgrade to distribution of ethanol as there currently is a condensation problem when it is transported in the current pipelines.
We could have done the same by now. Every year we wait is one year closer to the real peak oil and once on a decline, the scramble begins. Sure, if we can keep the price high and produce more oil domestically, it will help lower our dependence on OPEC and imported oil but it will do nothing for the long term energy needs of this country.
We are not anywhere near a peak oil. There are plenty of the stuff left in the ground, we do appear to running out of the easy to get stuff.
Why not start now....the price is currently high enough to do just that, IMO.
The price is high enough to make alot of things happen and OPEC should keep this in mind as well.