michael_in_adelaide

Thanks for the link to Cheney’s 1999 speech. Velly intellesting.

I particularly note his concluding remarks;

“You don’t hear our times referred to as the Space Age anymore, instead it’s the Information Age. You will notice they call it the Information Age, not the Knowledge Age. Well, I would conclude today by saying that this industry must be at the forefront of moving into the Knowledge Age. Successful competitors will be those that best manage knowledge. This means technology, expertise, best practices, country, market and competitor intelligence and opportunity assessment. These will be the hallmarks of the energy industry in the new century.”

It all sounds good.

Wouldn’t it be nice if it matched reality, especially the ’best practices’ bit.

I didn’t notice anything in the speech to suggest that the Iraq war was a direct response to knowledge of the impending oil peak…..other than the fact that Cheney knows the oil industry inside out, including its grim future outlook… and obviously knew the value of shoring up oil reserves in the Middle East.

What part this might have played in the Iraq conflict I still can’t form a view on.

Thanks again for this.

This is the beginning of the end of oil. What will we use instead? HYDROGEN, of course. It's truly simple.

Nuclear power will eventually, (maybe in less than 10 years) make electricity cost a very small percentage of what it costs today. And because hydrogen is produced by electricity (electrolysis) that will make hydrogen so cheap that it will completely replace petroleum products. Using hydrogen then will be as if gas were 50 cents a gallon today. If it takes massive subsidies to get that going properly, it's worth it.....certainly cheaper than fighting a war in the Middle East (who will have to find SOME use for all the oil we WON'T NEED in 10 years (or less.)

Incidentally, I was recently invited to the BMW engineering plant in California to drive their brand new 7Hydrogen 12 cylinder sedan. What a rush ! ! It was like driving a rocket, and it was running on pure hydrogen ! ! ! No pollution at all ! ! That will speed up "The extinction of petroleum man," and good riddance!

Sorry Troublemaker, wrong on all counts.

Nuclear power is an incredibly expensive form of power and has never yet proved to be commercially viable. Government subsidies prop it up everywhere. Uranium mining is oil based, and diesel depletion could be problematic faster than many realize. Constructing nuclear power plants takes a long time, as does getting legal approval. No-one wants it.

And introducing a "hydrogen economy" would be far, far more expensive than using the electricity to generate transport energy in the first place.

Basically, Dr Bossel — who's great grandfather invented the Fuel Cell in 1830 — no longer thinks we should waste energy trying to set up a so called "hydrogen economy" because the very laws of physics dictate that the fuel will be 4 times more expensive. In summary, hydrogen is supposed to be replacing fossil fuels so it's insane to reform it from natural gas. The only alternative then is to split water, which requires enormous amounts of electricity and.... water. (Which is an issue in Australia and many other countries. The sheer quantities of fresh water required is another very topical and urgent limit to the "hydrogen economy" that I had not previously considered.)
http://www.podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3?http://media.libsyn.com/media/thewattpodcast/tWW67P2-2006-07-23.mp3

Each step of the hydrogen economy loses energy which could have been used to charge a battery in the first place! It's just nuts. I mean, you could do an angry rap song to this thing.

"You had to go and Split it! Compress it! Store it! and Burn it!
When you could have just Charged it you "Silly duffer"*!!"

(*I don't swear, but you can imagine the angry eco-rapper going off his head.)

Troublemaker, I think you need to go back and do your sums again so that you get a better grip on reality. All future power generation is going to come at a greater cost as resources get scarcer, that includes nuclear as well as solar or wind or whatever. Certainly, hydrogen will be part of the future, but it takes at least as much energy to produce hydrogen as you are going to get back from it. I can see hydrogen being used as a cheaper means to store energy than the present reliance on quite expensive batteries. The technology is out there, but needs to be developed a bit further to be used on a domestic scale. We need the price of oil based fuels to increase a bit further to provide the incentive for this to happen. This has actually started to happen, so that the next decade should hopefully see some advances in this area.

The Australian Senate on Hydrogen.

6.93 ...However, what is often overlooked is that hydrogen does not occur naturally and must be produced as part of a manufacturing process...

6.94 However, hydrogen is generally not regarded as a near-term transport fuel, as there are formidable technical issues to be overcome before it could be widely used. These include:

* the very large amounts of energy required to convert it to a liquid and maintain it in a liquid state, or compress it sufficiently to make it suitable for transport fuel use;
* storage problems arising from its propensity to leak through and embrittle the walls of metal pipes and tanks;
* in cars, large heavy tanks that limit luggage space and provide very limited range;
* in trucks, similar issues to LNG and CNG in relation to weight and volume of tanks and reduced cargo carrying capacity;
* the lack of a source of supply (although it could be produced in volume by reforming natural gas); and
* a complete lack of distribution infrastructure.

6.95 In the committee’s view, hydrogen is a fuel that might be considered in the distant future, but is not a useful option to consider in Australia’s current or medium term transport fuels mix. Mr Black of the NGVG summed up the argument in relation to hydrogen very well:

Everybody seems to pinning their hopes on hydrogen, which is still, frankly, pie in the sky. We do a lot of work with the CSIRO and we talk to them fairly frequently. I am on a hydrogen panel with the CSIRO. The greatest fear of hydrogen researchers in this country is that governments and the media will hype it up so much that people will have expectations that will never be met.[66]"

http://www.aph.gov.au/Senate/committee/rrat_ctte/oil_supply/report/c06.htm

Troublemaker

"Too cheap to meter electricity" was postulated over fifty years ago. I will believe it when I see it. As for hydrogen cars, you might lose your enthusiasm if you saw some of the cost estimates. Electric cars win hands down on comparison.

You might have missed the latest research in the cellulose to biofuel odyssey. Biofuel has the big advantage of utilising existing fuel infrastructure and transport. There is also a massive amount of potential feedstock which is presently unused.

I wouldn't write off the gas guzzler just yet.

http://www.rsc.org/chemistryworld/News/2007/June/20060701.asp