Apparently, in their infinite greed, Wall Street is open for business despite this being an important holiday. The big nonsense buoying (temporarily) the stock market this morning was the US Govt claim made that the USA would be energy independent by 2020 because they said so, and exporting natural gas by 2030, because they said so. Because, you know, that's totally rational.
The last time I checked you can't mandate scientific discovery. You can fund the attempt, but you can't mandate it or guarantee results. I recall reading articles in magazines published in 1920, saying we were only 35 years away from clean fusion power and we just needed to invest in it to make it happen. Then a similar article was published in 1948 saying the same thing. And again in 1975. And again in 1990. Just 35 years from fusion power. Because saying so makes it happen. Wanna buy a bridge?
Looked at through the lenses of history, its obvious that the Tokamak reactor is a con game, perhaps unintentional at first, but over time people got so invested in it that they won't allow a serious engineer to review their plans and determine that they can't actually work. Same with the Nova Laser in Livermore, which was supposed to get around the Tokamak's problems by doing fusion at the molecular level. Turns out there's just so much loss to heat in the battery system that you can't generate enough power to sustain fusion. Whoops! Yet another case of an engineer being needed. Too many of these scams are Receding Horizon Problems, a definition which someone keeps deleting from Wikipedia despite it being well known in Intro To Engineering. To wit: if the process doesn't work at the small scale, it won't work at the large one either. Idiots ignore this to their peril, and our tax rates.
If we do somehow find enough natural gas to export we'll just fall under the Export-Land Model, meaning we'll use that gas for more of our own needs, like running our cars on it. Don't laugh. Many countries already do that. They don't get much range with compressed natural gas, but its better than walking or pedaling, and it beats begging for gasoline when your nation can't afford a refinery for oil. This is not to say we aren't finding natural gas. Despite all odds being against it, Fracking for natural gas is getting some out. Perhaps a significant amount.
I would love for fracking to open up the Oil Shale in Western Colorado. That's a huge unit of rock and a truly significant amount of oil is trapped in there, Saudi Arabia big. Previously, the only way to get it out is mine it, boil it in a pressure cooker till the shale expands to release the oil, then separate the oil from the mud, and then dispose of the mud. Similar to the Alberta Tar Sands, only underground. That's a mining operation, not a drilling one. And the energy needed to boil the rock? Not a small amount. More than the oil is worth. We call that Negative EROEI. That's Fail, right there. So there it stays, waiting for the price to be right and another method for extracting the oil to come about. Maybe fracking will work.
Fracking is really a crapshoot though, since depending on porosity and permeability of the source rock, missing the oil or gas deposit could be the majority problem much of the time. There's also a great deal of chance involved too. You either split the rock through the pin-head worth of gas or oil or you miss it. Odds favor missing. This is why the biggest money in fracking isn't in fracking, but in buying and selling the leases for fracking. It is, in essence, a Real Estate game. Whether the actual fracking produces lots of energy or not, that's for others to answer. It is still Fossil Fuel, after all. It will run out. Reworking the tailings being fracked may extract more someday, but at some point growing it from algae is going to be cheaper.
And that's the other thing. Growing fuel from algae and plants is very expensive. If we'd gotten another president, we might have seen the end of the Corn-Ethanol subsidy and be allowed to import fuel ethanol from Brazil. That would give Brazil motivation to do business with the USA and they have a big population mostly in poverty that would like to do business with anyone else. Brazil grows sugar cane and turns that into fuel ethanol, cheaper than we can grow corn for the same purpose. Since those farmers in the USA are growing fuel corn instead of sweet corn, our food prices went up. Lots of products based on corn end up in our food. The Corn Lobby was happy to get the subsidy to grow corn for more than it was worth to not compete with Brazil who was... you guessed it, barred by trade tariff from selling sugar cane based ethanol to US drivers to lower the price of gasoline. Yep, that's how lobbyists make the rest of us poorer. Right now Brazil is dealing with China and India, who are fuel hungry but much farther away. Selling to the USA would be good for Brazil AND America, since our food prices would drop again and we could export our corn to hungry people again instead of wasting it on making whiskey for our cars. I will note that it was W who first approved this deal. Obama just kept it going. Both political parties are thus equally guilty of screwing us over.
I think, in the future, we'll see a lot of ethanol powered vehicles, particularly scooters and cars, since cars have been mandated to work with E85 (85% ethanol fuel) since 1997 or so. Mostly that's with stainless steel gas tank and fuel lines and with alcohol resistant synthetic rubber hoses. Cars are mostly ready to go. Its just the fuel isn't there yet. Someday, when we're really screwed for supply, we will buy fuel from a local moonshiner in exchange for fresh eggs, veggies, canned food, whatever we can barter with. That keeps him going and us able to go somewhere without pedaling. That's our future, not the claims of silly people on the TV screen babbling about govt mandates. That's just crazy talk.
I know that we could pretty easily convert many cars to run on Natural Gas. Replace the fuel lines, change the chip, replace the back seat and trunk space with a pressurized tank. Its like driving with a grenade. Filling stations would install the pumps to make that sale. We might do it at home, buying the compression pumps ourselves and absorbing the cost over years of use. If we're careful it will work till the Natural Gas runs out. And maybe by that time, we'll have something else, or just be ready to accept pedaling bicycles to work. Or take a golf cart for the grocery run.
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| 18 mph, here I come! |
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