Reply #67: time and price

[mulethree]

They couldn't get 15 years of oil out of ANWR at 1.5 MBL per day unless oil prices go way up. They figure 5-11 Billion barrels but only the first 2 billion pump out cheaply, figure 5 Billion at $70 per barrel and 9 billion at $200. At those prices (even current prices) there are other oilfields that become economical like a huge Saudi oilfield thats thick slop with high sulfur but could be dealt with at a profit as long as prices are high enough.

New nuclear will take more than 10 years to bring online, by then the older nuke plants will be shutting down - or at least be past their design service lives.

Unfortunately the plan seems to be America's 250 year supply of coal. http://www.csmonitor.com/2004/0226/p01s04-sten.html But many planned plants put profits over pollution controls. Hmm I wonder if the stocks of coal mining companies have gone up yet, or the companies that make the mining equipment?

Renewable energy development is unfortunately also shortsighted concentrating on getting large power plants to a price level that competes with current KWH prices. So you get solar research that only applies to large plants in the southwest desert or wind plants in 'prime wind' locations instead of smaller systems that could work in sub-prime locations. Smaller systems that could compete with a realistic future projected wholesale electric price or even with current retail prices. Similarly biodiesel research is turning toward "established" food crops like soybeans and canola which use tons of fertilizers per acre from fossil fuels. Turning away from more energy efficient non-food crops like algae or hemp which could be fed sewage and convert more sunlight to fuel.

Then theres the whole suburban and urban sprawl situation where jobs are far from houses and lowish population densities mean your public transit busses would be spaced so far apart and travelling such long circuitous routes that nobody wants to use them.