New Update

Three stories to share with today.

1. Florida needs energy (as does everyone else), but doesn't want to have oil rigs off its coast. Its ok for other States or countries to have them but Florida should be spared the sight of them.

Actually, replace Florida with California and the story could just as true here. But with $5 a gallon gasoline, maybe that view will change.

2. Oregon has depended upon the Federal Government for timber payments for much of its budget. Now those payments are ending and the local governments are crying. Here is a solution, allow more economic activities on your land and the budget problem can be solved.

3. A female Christian reporter wrote an article critical of some of the cultural practices of her community. The Christian community has denounced her saying she as a Christian woman has a duty to defend the faith and not say or write anything that may bring the Christian community into a bad light.

Of course if the above was true, the ACLU or the Canadian equivalent would be up in arms along with many secularists to protect this woman and the paper that dared to print the story.

However, replace Christian with Muslim and the above paragraph is true. However, I don't hear anyone coming to the defense of the reporter or the paper. Do you?

Bugs and Oil Barrels

A silicon valley firm claims to have genetically engineered a strain of bacteria to produce a petroleum by-product near to distilled gasoline--somehow the company, LS9, has convinced a few E. coli to poop gas, which is the highly technical term. The article goes on to present their claims as well as explain to us their discovery is "carbon-negative".

Can this be true?

Frankly, I'm skeptical. Remember a few years ago in 2003 when turkey offal would be converted into light crude via thermal depolymerization? "It's the silver bullet!" we (or at least I) thought. Five years later, they're still relying on subsidies for a profit and fighting the local government to even stay open (apparently nobody likes the smell of turkey offal).

This current fad for green technology and the resulting gold rush for alternative fuels feels like a haven for snake oil salesmen and hucksters looking for easy money from soft-headed capitalists. This firm's claims sound too much like a penny stock spam email than real scientific results:

Mr Pal holds up a small beaker of bug excretion that could, theoretically, be poured into the tank of the giant Lexus SUV next to us. Not that Mr Pal is willing to risk it just yet. He gives it a month before the first vehicle is filled up on what he calls “renewable petroleum”. After that, he grins, "it’s a brave new world".

or (emphasis mine)

Bob Walsh, 50, who now serves as the firm’s president after a 26-year career at Shell, most recently running European supply operations in London. "How many times in your life do you get the opportunity to grow a multi-billion-dollar company?" he asks. It is a bold statement from a man who works in a glorified cubicle in a San Francisco industrial estate for a company that describes itself as being "prerevenue".

As much as I want to believe we can simply grow gas and lesson our dependence on imported oil (and I do hope we get there one day), the truth of the matter is our foreseeable future lies in oil pipelines and not in pipe dreams.

About time

South Dakota county of Union approved a rezoning ballot measure to allow a new refinery to be built in the county. The measure won 58% to 42%. This will be the first new refinery built in the US in 30 years. Of course those who opposed the measure have vowed legal action to void the election, and failing that to fight the permitting process to delay and hopefully cancel the project.

Can the oil companies play hard ball with those people and refuse to sell them gasoline since they don't like refineries or anything to do with the oil industry?

Cost of Oil and Ethanol

The use of ethanol made from corn has helped increased the cost of food to consumers. The corn used for ethanol is feed corn, not sweet corn humans eat, and by corn being diverted to ethanol, its not available to feed chickens, cattle or other animals. Even when the plant waste from ethanol plants are used as feed stock (which it is), the cost of feed has been increasing for the last few years.

But before you run off and invest in farming, it is still a risky investment, one bad storm or harvest could ruin the crop and the farmer is out of business.

But if you really want to reduce the cost of oil, reduce the cost of gasoline, reduce our dependence on imported oil, then we need to start drilling. Its as simple as that. Decisions made 10 years ago are coming back to haunt us now. Will we continue to compound the problem or will we fix it by allowing more drilling now so prices will be lower in the future.

Make Ethanol and the cost of food increases

If you use food crops for fuel and a farmer can make more money turning food into fuel, guess where he will sell his crops to make fuel and not food.

Well now with the increase in wealth around the world meaning more meat is being eaten, it means more grain is needed to feed the animals and with more crop land going to ethanol and with bad harvests in Australia for the last two years, it means there is now a food shortage.

Suddenly, global warming isn't as important as feeding people.

Even here in the US, people can't get as much of the type of rice they want. Which causes hording which makes things worse. There isn't a food shortage in the US (unlike other countries) but there isn't as much of the type of food some people want so people will panic. Each cheaper rice instead of the premium rice and you will be fine.

Ethanol

The promise of ethanol is fading as the laws of supply and demand are starting to be felt.

Also the law of unintended consequences such as the rise in all food costs because farmers grow more corn which means less wheat, rye, soybean etc. are grown. This causes all grains to increase in price which increases the cost of animal food (chickens, turkeys, cattle, etc all eat corn).

The extra corn being grown is turned into fuel so it also isn't available for food stuff so the food available is shrinking and the cost of food through out the economy is increasing.

So ethanol is contributing to the inflation we are seeing. Is it worth it? That is a question we as a society need to answer.

Oil price bubble ready to pop?

Well this blogger thinks so. I hope they are correct.

Hat tip Instapundit.

Ethanol

There are a lot of reasons to doubt the wisdom of using ethanol as a fuel to replace gasoline. Eric Peters makes another one saying fires from ethanol has to be fought differently then gasoline fires and forcing the fire departments to get the training and equipment will be too expensive.

That is a straw man argument.

Anytime there is a change in the way transportation is powered (from horse drawn wagon to the
steam engine railroad to the diesel powered truck) there are costs for society bear.

There was a cost when passenger airplanes switched from propeller planes (burning aviation gasoline) to jets (burning kerosene) but we as a society made the switch because the reward for making the switch was worth it.

If burning alcohol as a motor fuel is worth it, the cost of equipping and training the fire departments to fight those fires will be worth it too. Saying we can't use alcohol because of the fire risk is a foolish argument that tries to win by fear not facts and gives the impression the author has other motives (maybe he owns an oil well) to fear ethanol.

And this is a surprise?

In Texas, where they now have a lot of wind generators, had an emergency when the wind died down and the power fell. So the wonderful wind power has problems and we still have to have gas, coal or oil generators online standing by to replace power when the wind dies.

How is this supposed to help prevent global warming??? Or rather climate change?

End of the world

New seed vault opens in Norway. While not a bad idea, I'm just glad the US taxpayers didn't have to pay for it.

They have calculated when the earth will end. And they have even come up with a way to save it by moving the orbit of the earth to keep it far enough away from the sun.

These folks have too much time on their hands. How about doing something useful, like finding a way to get 50 to 80% efficiency from solar power instead of the current 6 to 20%.

Oil Companies and Bio-Fuels

South America is trying to demonized non government owned oil companies. Yet at the same time, the same countries that demonize foreign companies wonder why no one will invest in their countries. As one Spanish banker says:

``It makes no sense doing business outside the First World. What you earn in a decade, you lose in a week when an unscrupulous president changes the rules of the game.''

Bio-Diesel is good, but like all fuels is not a perfect replacement. Apparently it doesn't work well in the cold and passengers on bus lines stop caring about how green the company is if the buses don't work at -15 degrees.

Flex Fuel Cars

Two sides to an argument.

If Congress would only pass a law mandating all new cars be flex fuel (able to burn alcohol, gasoline or some mix), then gas stations would carry ethanol and we would be free from OPEC, after all, Brazil did it.

Ethanol isn't cost effective as gasoline and government mandate isn't the answer.

I tend to agree with the second, but read both sides. And both authors wrote this at NRO, so its conservative verses conservative which makes it more interesting in my opinion.

Energy and Automobiles

Do we believe in free markets or not? Can government mandates requiring cars to be flex fuel and gas stations to sell ethanol solve our oil problems or do we allow the free market to decide? The debate continues.

Chrysler is showing some of the problems with outsourcing everything. When suppliers get into trouble, the production lines stop.

Flex Fuel Cars

If only the government would mandate all cars be flex fuel, so they can burn gasoline, ethanol or methanol we could free ourselves from imported oil. It will only cost about $100 per car and no government subsidy required. That is the promise of these conservative writers.

While I would like the US to be energy independent, I am skeptical of government mandates. If it is the right thing to do, the market will make it happen.

Greenpeace Co-Founder: "My bad. I likes the nuclear power."

Patrick Moore, co-founder of Greenpeace now co-chairs the "Clean and Safe Energy Coalition"--a nuke industry association. Money quote:

As a co-founder of Greenpeace, even though I was a scientist, I made the same mistake in those days as all the rest of my colleagues did. We kind of lumped nuclear energy in with nuclear weapons as if all things nuclear were evil. It was an honest mistake.

An honest mistake? Doh. "My bad."

An interesting interview, although I am suspicious of his motives, since he is currently serving as a nuclear industry spokesman of sorts. His interesting take on solar:

Solar photovoltaic simply has no place on the grid. All the money that's going into subsiding solar is a waste of money because it could be being used on more effective technologies that we already have that are not unreliable and intermittent.

His statement rings true concerning the reliability of solar, but I have to, again, question his motives in stating that solar has absolutely no role in supplying our energy needs. Still, it would seem there is hope reasonable people will come around.

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Ethanol

Cellulose ethanol is the goal for wide spread ethanol use.

Forbes has an article saying it will also be the destruction of plants and nature if it really works as advertised.

I don't think cellulose ethanol will ever be that effective or cost efficient but I also don't think ethanol is a cure all for our energy needs. However, some of the arguments against ethanol are just wrong. One is that ethanol can only be transported by tanker and not by pipelines. That is NOT correct. We can send ethanol through pipelines that are dedicated for ethanol, just like we have pipelines dedicated for oil and others dedicated for natural gas. We can't send ethanol through oil pipelines so we will have to build new ones, but if the product will replace gasoline then it will be economical to build the new pipelines.

Damned If You Do...Damned If You Don't

...biofuels were held up as a panacea for countries struggling to cope with the rising cost of oil or those looking to reduce greenhouse gas emissions...But in recent months, scientists, private agencies and even the British government have said biofuels could do more harm than good. Rather than protecting the environment, they say energy crops destroy natural forests that actually store carbon and thus are a key tool in the fight to reduce global warming.

Not to mention the destruction wrought on clearcutting jungles and forests for land to grow biofuel crops. As they say, there is no free lunch, especially if it's corn.

(hat tip Instapundit)

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Gas mileage

One of the contributors here wrote on his Xanga site about replacing his 01 Honda Accord with an 07 Honda Civic and in the end it wasn't worth it due to the fuel savings.

On his 01 Accord, he averages 19 MPG in city driving, this is real world and not EPA. If he is driving 12,000 miles a year, he will used about 632 gallons of gasoline and at $3.00 a gallon spent $1,863 in fuel last year.

The Honda Civic Hybrid will get about 40 MPG in the city under real driving conditions.

The Toyota Prius will get about 48 MPG in the city real world (I know because that is what I get with my 2004 Prius).

The savings would break down as follows:



Both cars can be purchased for about $25,000.00 out the door including tax and license for a base model in California. So the gas savings won't pay for the car, but they will help.



If gasoline goes to $4.00 a gallon, the savings would be as follows:



With gasoline prices at $4 a gallon, the savings from a hybrid can start paying for a significant fraction of the car payment. And the more miles driven, the bigger the savings. Hmm, maybe the hybrid makes more sense then before, unless you believe oil prices will decline back to $50 a barrel anytime soon.

News roundup

Lot of news to share today and so without further ado . . .

In Austria, a gorilla still isn't considered a person. The lawsuit has now been thrown out of three courts but the group says they will appeal. I'm glad Austria is still showing common sense, a gorilla isn't a person, but its scary that they only need one judge to change the basic definition of what a person is.

British Airways is buying a lot of airplanes and decided to split the order between the Boeing 787 and Airbus 380. Personally I think BA will quietly cancel or sideline the 380s when their true operating costs are known.

Now we can see if yanks care where things are made. Toy stores are starting to set up areas in their stores where all toys are made in the US or Europe so shoppers can avoid toys made in China. Be interesting to see how long that will last.

Israel, Syria, the US and the rest of the Middle East are still not talking about the Israeli air attack on Syria last week. Here are some suggestions on why that may be.

John McCain is a smart man, but in a serious article on energy independence he makes a stupid premise. We need to become oil independent so lets increase the use of nuclear power for generating electricity. Ok, first, increasing the use of nuclear power is not a bad idea. But we DO NOT use much oil to make electricity. We use natural gas and coal for the majority of our electrical generation. Oil accounts for less then 5% of our electricity generation needs. We use oil for TRANSPORTATION. So building a lot of nuclear plants won't solve our oil use unless you think we will all drive electric cars.

And speaking of cars, here is an interesting article on the future transportation modes.

The new Iraqi Army and why it has taken so much time to get them up to speed.

The sub-prime bailout and costs to landlords and the tax nightmare being envisioned.

Have a good day.

Oil and Unions

Turning Oil into Salt: R. James Woolsey & Anne Korin write we need to not just become imported oil dependent but make oil like salt. An important commodity, but not something countries go to war over. The authors solution is plug in hybrid and ethanol from bio mass. Basically a pipe dream. Unless there is a major breakthrough in battery storage technology and or ethanol manufacturing we won't be replacing oil or making oil as common as salt.

More on the UAW, GM and the effects on the State of Michigan.

George Soros a threat to democracy? Don't know I would go that far. . . .

Steve Laffey and his new book and his future plans.

New Jersey, most people think Democrats corrupt in State but will vote for them anyway. Why?