Make no mistake about it, fuel or the increasing cost of it, will kill the economy, forcing the nation and potentially the world into a recession and the collapse of financial markets.

Oil should be reserved for the manufacture of plastics and industry, not used to power cars. Growing our own fuel via ethanol for transportation is well …madness, food is far too valuable. On the other hand, Aust has an abundance of cheap, clean, Natural Gas, piped to the home, yet we are paying over $1.70 Lt for petrol. What’s gone wrong?

Bring on the Natural Gas car as the norm.

"Oil should be reserved for the manufacture of plastics and industry, not used to power cars.

That would cause an even greater recession.

Yes, LNG seems like the way to go.

But what I’d like to know is just how feasible it is to quickly substitute gas for oil/petrol/diesel on a massive nationwide scale, and what the complicating factors might be.

Can anyone enlighten me?

Users of oil, in whatever form it is applied, are the ones most suited to deciding for themselves whether they should use it in cars of plastic packaging around their Oreos.

I remember the 1973 oil crisis. The sharp escalation caused a recession then and I agree I think we are entering one now.

The test is the restaurants. When those fellows start to feel the economic pinch, then worse s to come. Eating out is a marginal indulgence and one of the first things to be “cut back” upon when people are feeling less confident about their personal life-style security.

The next test are unemployment numbers, lead by unemployed waiters and chefs from all those fore-closing restaurants.

Then the hard one, mortgage walk-aways, where people simply leave the property they have been buying because they can no longer afford the repayments and of course, in that climate, house prices start to fall, suggesting that “housing affordability” will no longer be a problem.

Unfortunately with folks departing their properties and a prospective buyers looking at their own circumstances and deciding not to risk additional commitments until the economy is more buoyant, housing sales stall and building workers are no longer required, adding to the unemployed.

Of course, apart form oil, base food prices have soured in the past 6 months or so, flour, margarine, milk based products have all experienced heavy escalations in price.

So what to do?

Well government is having a hey-day, record surpluses.

Conventional wisdom is the pump prime the economy with a dearth of infrastructure spending.

Problem is if you reduce general economic activity, it tends to undermine the point and viability of a lot of that infrastructure. So this is a dumb strategy.

The best way for government “to come to the party” is to pull in its own spending and what it spends on itself leaving it in the hands of those who risk the most in creating real employment.

Cut civil servants incomes by 1/3 and also cut parliamentarians and senators and their state based cohorts the same.

Col has justed recommended the traditional remedy for solving a depression. This is the remedy that was applied in the 1930s prolonging the depression for everyone until Germany started spending on infrastructure. Pity the Germans were building an army but Britain and the United States were pulled out of recession by the desperate need to play catch up and rearm.

Yes we should spend more on infrastructure, installing train lines to the outer reaches of suburbia, and building freight hubs so that interstate freight goes by rail and trucks are only used at either end of the journey. What about building low cost housing located close to transport hubs. Might be the perfect opportunity to compulsorily acquire existing housing stock to redevelop whole blocks rather than adopting a piecemeal approach. Can't see the social benefit of an ad-hoc approach in the hands of small developers.

Quite happy to see politicians pay cut but does Col really want to see teachers, nurses, tramdrivers and policemen's salary cut by a third. Well all the students can say goodbye to their part time jobs at Chadstone.

Billie ,they either take a pay cuts or look for jobs in private enterprise.Michael Coster in NSW said 2yrs ago that we have 30,000 too many public servants.Either they go or the PS generally suffer pay cuts.It is the private system that makes the real economy work and pays the taxes to support you.

The Truckies are losing money.They cannot even make the most basic wage.Why should they carry the can for lazy public servants and pay taxes to support them?

Labor has done what it is best at,ie killing incentive for people to be both autonomous and prosperous.
"I want to buy myself some time'
In the Shade of your weakness"

yes indeed get out the razor gang on public servants/tyrants

I live in a caravan park in FNQ and there has been doom & gloom by management [Harvey Bains if you will] that their lifeline, the retired Victorians in their huge rigs would not come this year because of fuel prices

well last nite we had 112% capacity with Winebagos hanging off the rafters

the answer? these are mainly retired public servants on their unfunded super [is taxpayer funded]. There is so much slack in the system we saw Costello simply take $60 Billion of OUR money to put into his Future Fund

so first cut? The Child Support Scheme was simply set up as a scheme WITH FULL REDUNENCY if it failed

It failed, so there are 2,000 "jobs" right there

Billie “Yes we should spend more on infrastructure,”

The socialist response to everything.

So billie some Questions –

Is there an economic benefit from that infrastructure?
Or is it the usual grandstands for the political elites?

Who will operate that infrastructure?
The ‘state’ or private businesses?

“Col really want to see teachers, nurses, tramdrivers and policemen's salary cut by a third.”

We hear whining by the public sector for “parity” with the private sector.
In a recession incomes in the private sector dwindle, job opportunities dwindle.

“Parity” is a two way street.

I see neither benefit nor “Parity” in protecting the hangers-on of the national economy (those employed by government) whilst those in the wealth creating “private sector” wither.

Public confidence has taken a nose dive in the past six months. People are pulling up th draw bridge and adoption a siege mentality. The only way of returning to the buoyancy of the Howard government years is to remove the impending constraints which Rudd has planned Carbon Emissions trading tax, Nanny-State taxes (eg Alcho-pops),

Forget fiddling with complicated paid maternity leave, that only increases the costs of business, with no productive benefits.

Remember the Australian economy is a competitor of the Chinese and Indian economies and some of the pointless draconian interference through government regulation for wannabe planning ideals which are pure socialist theory are turning away investors (this applies particularly to the differentials of the Kyoto accords which Mr Howard refused to sign but which Krudd took his own jar of Vaseline along to).

So kick at me all you want billie but whilst you are looking at me through rose tinted distortion glasses of socialism you will always miss your target, just as the fantasy theories of socialism have always missed their target (socialism, the politics of the well intentioned, sentimental failures).

Bull is close to right on most of his suggestions.
I remember a quote from Kenneth Deffreyes a question from his grandson;
"You mean you burnt all that stuff ?"

That is surely the crux of the matter and you should include natural
gas with it. Plastics can be made from natural gas as well as from oil.
Also natural gas is used to make fertillisers.

So eventually oil & gas has to be kept for manufacturing of the large
range of products.

How we get from here to there is the main question.
I had always thought we had about five years before peak oil would hit
us, but I am afraid its effects are preceding it by only a year or so.

Yes Billie traditional solutions are gone I am afraid, but watch how
many economists are still talking of economic growth. They are mostly
still running with the business as usual crowd and governments are
still employing them.

All thransport will have to go electric and eventually even local
truck transport will have to be electric. There will be no choice and
the sooner the better.

The last 20 years have seen technology advance more than it has in any other period in History.

Remember the first mobile phones? They were huge and the batteries didn't last long. Due to advances in mobile phone techology we now have very small phones and the batteries last some time.

Why haven't we developed this technology for the electric car? What about light weight batteries that give up to 500 km of range at 110 km/h. What about developing a high current fast charge so that the batteries could be recharged in a short time when on a journey? Existing petrol stations could be converted to recharging centres or battery exchange centres. At home the car could be charged by a normal power supply.

Maybe one day all roofing material will also incorporate solar cells and we shall obtain free clean power. Where I live there's a lot of wind and I would like to have a wind generator when these are more efficient.

There is no doubt that we are heading for a recession. Indeed, it will be stagflation. The cost of a major input into everything we buy is rising and this will continue. Demand is greater than productive capacity in the long term. So a recession will occur eventually.

If central banks increase interest rates it will have no effect. It could make a recession even worse. Fuel will be set at a very high level. There is nothing consumers or business can do to bring the price of oil down again.

We must face the fact that the good days are gone. Wealthy countries will have to pay a much higher price for imports made in developing countries. Labour in "advanced" countries will be priced out of the labour market.

Steel Mann,
There is a lot of work going on with batteries and some
progress, even if it is slow, is being made.
One of the problems is the low cell voltage mostly in the 1 volt to 1.5 volt range.
This means for a practical electric car up to 100 cells must be connected in series.
The quite high currents that are needed requires large capacity cells
unless you have to start paralleling up cells as well.
This all reduces the reliability and cost and right now no cheap
solutions are available with Lith Ion being the most efficient but
the most costly.

Back on stream: I listened to Prof Garnaut on Meet the Press on ABC.
He said all that was expected but there were two remarks that he
made that told me that he doesn't have a clue.
He said that unless we implement co2 control we will lose our Nth
Queensland tourist market because we will lose the Barrier Reef.
He also said we will lose other parts of our in bound tourism.

Clearly he does not understand that with peak oil the airlines are
not going to be operating in the tourist industry anyway.
He believes that with CO2 reduction we can save the tourist industry.
It would seem that oil depletion and consumption has not figured in
his calculations otherwise he would not be talking about tourism.

That is a real worry !
It means that the governments expert does not understand what is going on.

Interesting article, high fuel costs may be man made as well, gst on petrol could be easily scrapped, yet the government won't do it, and it sounds like Australia, like the rest of the countries of the world, are at the mercy of the oil cartels, who don't care less if petrol were to rise even to 5 dollards a litre, all they care about is making money, even if it means hardship for normal people.I couldn't care less about personal tax cuts, it should all being put in cutting the tax on petrol, yet the 'artificial' tax on petrol, which is government regulated, is an 'untouchable' tax, too hard to do anything about it, even if everyone is suffering about it.What is an extra 8 dollars a week going to do for me, even I'm spending many times over that amount on fuel, and everything is costing too much because fuel is what puts food on our shelves, moves the goods in our stores and it's the very backbone of our economy.It's a very selfish government.

Now, climate change is more important than emptying your wallet on fuel costs, most of it to the government and the greedy oil companies.Read the interesting report below on climate change for an open minded view

http://209.85.175.104/search?q=cache:PT5Ne23HQrgJ:www.lavoisier.com.au/papers/articles/EvansQuadrantMarch2008.pdf+fraud+Garnaut&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=21&gl=au

Climate_Change: "Read the interesting report below on climate change for an open minded view."

It didn't look open minded to me. Quite the reverse - the author, Ray Evans, seems have a very firm opinion on AGW. His thesis in that piece seems to be "even if AGW means the end of the world, any efforts we make are irrelevant in the scheme of things so lets just party on". Its not an argument I can sympathise with. I didn't find his supporting "facts" very convincing either. One of the planks it stood on was "China will never change". On the contrary, I'd say if China does end up viewing AGW as a threat they will be far more bloody minded in dealing with it than we could ever be. Just look at their one child policy, which was their solution to over population.

However, the picture he paints in correct in one respect. If we view both Peak Oil and AGW as dire threats, then we are between a rock and a hard place.

I’m going to repeat an earlier post on this thread, in the hope that somebody will address my question:

Yes, LNG seems like the way to go.

But what I’d like to know is just how feasible it is to quickly substitute gas for oil/petrol/diesel on a massive nationwide scale, and what the complicating factors might be.

Can anyone enlighten me?

We have now got this discussion…which is SUPPOSED to be about the schism between our massive gas reserves and our abject lack of use of it for transport in place of oil/petrol/diesel. And we’ve got two current articles, on all-electric and hybrid cars http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?article=7588 http://forum.onlineopinion.com.au/thread.asp?article=7586.

But no one is comparing them and giving us any sort of a rundown on why any one of them or combination is the best option.

OK Ludwig, I'll bite. Firstly, rather than reading any of the rubbish I am about to say, I suggest you read this:

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

You say "gas", but not all gas is equal. Liquid Petroleum Gas (LPG) is mainly butane. As gases go, its rather nice. It compresses to a liquid at modest pressures and the liquid handles much like petrol. And indeed we use it now as a replacement. But - we don't have much of it.

Natural Gas is methane. It is not as nice. It is stored as a highly compressed gas which creates engineering headaches - it costs energy to compress, is hard to transfer, it containers are heavy and are given to spectacular failure modes, and after all that the energy density is not high because it still a gas. It is in fact so hard to handle that they talk about offshore natural gas fields turning it into LPG before it leaves the platform. The Fischer-Tropsch process does that - it is about 50% efficient. The upside is we have lots of it.

But if butane is good, even longer carbon chains molecules are better. Thus petrol is better than butane and diesel has a higher energy density than petrol. Diesel is the limit as longer chains are wax at room temperature. Aviation fuel is just the longest carbon chains that don't freeze 10km above the earth. So why stop at butane? Just produce petrol instead and use our existing infrastructure.

Coal can be used as a feed stock to the F-T process, and is cheaper than Natural Gas. Actually, just about any source of carbon can be used as a feed stock - including plant material. There are several pilot plants out there doing just that.

After saying all that, when it comes to land based transport there look to be lots of options. At $2/litre even pure electric vehicles look good. There are bigger challenges - like we cover our roads with petroleum. I wonder what we will be driving on?

Read this far, did you? Lazy bugger. Now go read the link.

yes I agree [as an engineer and pushing energy conservation 40 years ago] there is energy all around us

eg mice farts could power all of Canberra BUT it needs engineers to make it happen

Oz is ruled by Bean Counters with short term bean counting in mind

so Kevin '07 departs from that and postulates long term

the Toorak Taxi mob come back to castrate Kevin '07 so as to be able to run their 4WD to pick up kids from school and attend the Gym to tone up their Abs [whatever they might be]

so Kevin '07 must LISTEN to you freaks and adjust to short term, as did Howard

the problem is YOU J Doe - are you listening?

How about when the fringe benefit tax came in all public servants , federal to local , became tax evaders by returning their sedans and received utes ( which are exempt ).They only need to drive past their job site or work place to get a free car and fuel .
They can use it as family transport with no accountability .
It is very easy when you get to make the rules for your own department.
Saw it with my own eyes with ten years with BCC.
Add a call out to your own time sheet (filled out by the employee) and on paper it's all good.
Paid for the call out and then the fuel and car are free as when the paperwork comes in you just write that it was checking up on the suspect employee or ee's .
Public servants are (from first hand evidence )Legal theives.
Any employee that does not use a light truck for daily work is a tax avoider.
As for to many chiefs and not enough Indians , blind fredy already knows this , this is what we get when yesmen ,and women, are put in charge.
Let any public servant from CEO to Hole digger pay their way with fuel and then maybe , no chance ,they may get it.

“Read this far, did you? Lazy bugger. Now go read the link.”

( :> o

He called me a lazy bugger. Pfff!! [If only he knew how true it was….. lying around on beautiful Pallarenda beach in the wonderful north Queensland winter sun, in me skimpy speedos with the topless babes!! ( : >) ]

Um, yes, thankyou very much rstuart. Very interesting stuff. I’ll have to spend all day tomorrow [on the beach on wonderful Magnetic Island] reading ‘Australia’s future oil supply and alternative transport fuels final report’!

Meanwhile, just one question…

“So why stop at butane? Just produce petrol instead and use our existing infrastructure.”

Well, yes, why stop at butane? If we can produce petrol from LNG or coal, that is competitive with current or near-future fuel prices, then why don’t we put a massive effort into doing this??

Ludwig: "If we can produce petrol from LNG or coal, that is competitive with current or near-future fuel prices, then why don’t we put a massive effort into doing this??"

Well, as you will discover when you read the link, "price competitive" doesn't quite capture it. The projected cost of producing the equivalent of a barrel of oil from coal is around $60 per barrel. You can probably think of a better adjective for it than I could. I failed English in high school.

Your question isn't directly answered in the link. There are hints in there though. I could not resist speculating about it. It'll be interesting to see if you come to the same conclusions as I did.

Col Rouge, for me is not the carbon taxes that make me nervous. When its all said and done, you can undo them at the stroke of a pen.

What makes me shake my head in disbelief are the current ads for the new tunnel system through Brisbane. The biggest and most expensive road development project Australian has ever seen, they proclaim proudly. If I were certain the roads would still be jammed in 10 years time I would might be proud of them too.

As it is, it they look to me to be a bit of a gamble. A gamble with my money.

Rstuart “Col Rouge, for me is not the carbon taxes that make me nervous. When its all said and done, you can undo them at the stroke of a pen.

What makes me shake my head in disbelief are the current ads for the new tunnel system through Brisbane. “

When have you seen a government ever abolish a tax?

The ones the states were supposed to retire in exchange for the GST linger on and on and on and on . . . .

As for Brisbane . you have me at a disadvantage, I do not live there so do not follow the antics of local Queensland politics (I have enough of the tears on the local state level here).

However, that apart and taking on board your point about the wisdom of certain infrastructure, I refer you to my earlier post on this thread in response to billie, re

“Is there an economic benefit from that infrastructure?
Or is it the usual grandstands for the political elites?”

I think we would see eye-to-eye on objectively and responsibly assessing the benefits.

“As it is, it they look to me to be a bit of a gamble. A gamble with my money.”

No disagreement there, governments are rapacious consumers of other peoples money and other peoples rights.

Better to keep governments short of power and limited on their taxing options. Otherwise we will end up paying for the Vaseline when the violate us some more