How to drill our way out of the enrgy crisis

[Flectarn]

I agree with you totally about the the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, intact even to call it a TEMPORARY solution is being generous, it's essentially just a political trick that gets pulled out anytime people get uncomfortable with the price of gas, It does nothing to change anything about our supply and demand problems.

on to other things

There are some enourmous problems with coal, for starters


mountain top removal is just scary.
then of course it's the dirtiest form of power generation we have, in terms of both SMOG and green house gas emissions, as well as things like heat pollution in waterways used to cool the plants. clean coal tech may or may not address these issues, I havn't looked into it much.

Nuclear energy also has several problems associated with it, first, It is tremendously expensive. of course back in the early days they claimed they wouldn't even have to meter the electricity because you get so much energy from uranium, problem is the plant it's self is horrendously costly to build and maintain. Next, and more important to your typical hippy, is the fact that you have to deal with radioactive waste for centuries after it ceases to be useful as a fuel. Right now we keep it in giant pools on site at nuclear plants, before to long it will go to buried under a mountain in Nevada, neither is a really great solution. there are also huge problems with waste heat from nukes, and of course the collective memory of 3 mile island and Chernobyl- though I understand that nuclear safety tech has advanced considerably, so it's more a psychological than a real problem.
that said, we probably should be developing more nuclear power... it's just going to be expensive.

as for the food costs of growing more fuel, check out the articles I posted earlier about tower farms, And look into bio-diesel from algae. and if it comes to it, there is a lot of arable land in the world thats no longer being used for agriculture. and frankly, there should be alot of people in the third world who are ecstatic about the rising price of food because it makes their domestic agriculture competitive with subsidized agri-businesss in the US and europe.

as for ANWR. less than 5 billion http://www.sibelle.info/oped15.htm. over the course of 20 years (guesstimated life of the field)

I think I'll take the Carribou and unspoiled wilderness over the net effect that will have on the price of gas.

[Cocytus]

But I'm just sayin', you increase production, and you have a surefire way to hold down the price, even in world markets filled with idiots.

What exactly might this "surefire" way be? ANWR drilling won't have much of an effect on world prices. The USGS estimates recoverable resources at a mean 7.7 billion barrels of oil, and our comsumption rates average around 20 million barrels per day. Furthermore, the USGS also found the oil to be scattered over several fields, meaning we'd have to build quite a few platforms to get at it. I agree releasing oil from the Strategic Reserve is no solution, and neither is ANWR drilling. I'm not against it for ecological reasons, because frankly, the area that will be affected (barring any significant incident, of course) is pretty small compared to the whole of ANWR. I just don't see any significant help coming from it. Oil prices are slightly down now because Americans have curtailed their driving, thus reducing demand, more than anything Bush is doing. We cannot simply drill our way out of this problem, unless you happen to have a cheap means of processing oil shale...?

Renewable fuels sound neat, but there are limits to what you can do with that. I mean, you basically burn up your food supply each year

Which is exactly why we need cellulosic fuel. You can make it from the waste products of farming. We won't be burning our food supply, we'll be burning our agricultural trash.

As I said earlier, these technologies need time and money to develop. As it stands now, you can't simply plop a solar panel on your roof and call yourself "green." Solar panels have an enormous embodied energy cost, which takes into account what it took to manufacture and ship them. Solar panels make use of a lot of expensive silicon, and shipping them has a fuel cost all its own. Furthermore, solar cells produce direct current, and the majority of appliances run off of alternating current, which necessitates having an inverter along with your solar panels, which is itself an expensive piece of hardware, at least for one which can handle a few KW. As it stands, private residential solar panels don't remunerate themselves for years, but that will change in time.

Large-scale solar plants should be aggresively pursued. One design I find quite promising is the solar tower concept, which has already been tested in Spain. Such a facility would have a solar array with a large concrete chimney in the center. The inside of the chimney would be filled with turbines to take advantage of swirling air currents within it. Designs I've seen have ranged from 50 to 200MW. Look at the projects of Enviromission for an example. The idealists delude themselves by thinking that any of these technologies can supplant coal and oil right away. What they can do now, along with nuclear, is supplement them, and gradually reduce our dependence of fossil fuels.

[Flectarn]

Interesting energy debate on Economist.com

http://www.economist.com/debate/index.c ... /house/160