Air travel set to feel fuel pinch

flyover said:
You can see why little countries like France and others felt the need to move to a universal system of measurements.
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Except the problem with that line of thinking is that all the big countries other than the United States use the metric system, including such large countries and future economic powerhouses like China and India. :p
 
Doug Taylor said:
We've squeezed the death of out the value of the dollar to jumpstart the economy that it's no longer the golden paper that capitalism is written on.
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That's what happens when a currency is no longer backed by real value (gold) and a government can just "create" money by printing it. I'm scared to think of what will happen when oil begins trading in euros vs. $$'s. Iran has just opened up it's own oil bourse in Iranian currency...

Gold hasn't gotten "more valuable" but like you said the dollar isn't worth crap anymore, so it takes more to buy an oz of gold. I have a buddy who does currency trading as a part time gig and he emailed me yesterday telling me he had a 500% gain yesterday shorting the dollar vs. the euro.

I believe peak oil arrived a few months ago, there just isn't any excess capacity left. Look at china's energy plans - they are signing deals with countries left and right for everything from oil to gas to uranium. They are building more nuke power plants (as is Japan). They are opening up ethanol plants. The US is sitting on our ass. It's a very scary thought...
 
The fact that gold is getting expensive is not scary because the dollar is becoming devalued its simply gold increasing not so much because the dollar is decreasing. But that means something completley diffrent. The reason gold is getting expensive is because people are pulling their money out of dollars maybe because of iran.

China is paying alot more for oil then we are. So yeah they are in a serious energy crisis. Its better we are using foreign oil because we still have alot of energy resources here. We have alot of coal that can be liquified into fuel and we have alot of oil shale that can be exracted for 30 dollars a barrel. Infact we have 1.2 out of the 1.6 trillion barrels of oil shale in the world estimated by the navy. We will be exporting oil and coal sooner or later and it will be cheap over here again.
 
Killtron2000 said:
we have alot of oil shale that can be exracted for 30 dollars a barrel. Infact we have 1.2 out of the 1.6 trillion barrels of oil shale in the world estimated by the navy.
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Article about Oil Shale, and how it's not very viable:
Experts doubt oil shale answer to energy crisis

Personally, I think the only 'true' answer is to stop using fossil fuels for things such as everyday travel - ie transportation. Some industries need it; aviation certainly is one, industrial is another (plastics, etc.), but using gas to drive around town isn't too smart when electric vehicles could fit that nitch.

I read that if every single pax car in the US could be run on electricity, the US would use less than 12 million bbl of oil per day, which is less than what we extract on our own. We'd be completely independent. Now, we'd have to charge those cars, but generating electricity can come from other sources instead of oil burning power plans - ie coal, nuclear, 'green energy', etc. A typical charge for an electric car costs anywhere from $0.25 to $0.40, and that'll get you (depending on the model) 40 miles or so. If these were being mass produced, according to a Popular Mechanics article cars could get 100-120 miles, so we're talking 50 miles each way - enough distance for most commuters. Even at $1.20 for 120 miles of travel - that's dirt cheap. Imagine the economy jump this would provide?!?

If I had any investment happy friends, I'd get together the captial and start making street legal electric cars. As gas prices head into the $4/gal range (and up), I'd bet we'd sell a ton!
 
wheelsup said:
If I had any investment happy friends, I'd get together the captial and start making street legal electric cars. As gas prices head into the $4/gal range (and up), I'd bet we'd sell a ton!
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This is an incredible idea and certainly should be explored. I can't believe no one else has thought of it.
 
flyover said:
This is an incredible idea and certainly should be explored. I can't believe no one else has thought of it.
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While I totally picked up the sarcasm on that, where can you buy electric cars that offer the same comforts as your everyday car (ie they are all incredibly small)? I don't believe there are any 'mainstream' (used on roads and highways) electric car dealers out there. That's what I was talking about...
 
wheelsup said:
While I totally picked up the sarcasm on that, where can you buy electric cars that offer the same comforts as your everyday car? I don't believe there are any 'mainstream' (used on roads and highways) electric car dealers out there. That's what I was talking about...
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If you have the technology to do that investors will not be a problem.

http://www.local6.com/news/8988315/detail.html
 
wheelsup said:
$35k is way out of reach of most people - this guy made his own for $8k

http://convert.jerryrig.com/step43.html

However he used an old car body to do it. I'm wondering how much mass-producing those hybrid technology cars can bring the cost down?
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Well that's the point. If they can start out selling these cars for $35,000, that's incredibly cheap. Remember how much a laptop used to cost? Or any other "new" technology that's been around a few years? And at $2 to $3 a gallon vs. the cost of recharge you can pay more for the car initially and still break even.

Entrepreneurs and technology will find what consumers want at the appropriate price and we'll have alternatives to fossil fuels.
 
I believe that the Big Three were investigating all electric cars as a way to meet California's clean air requirements. But then, instead of thinking long term, like you should if you want a business to be successful, the corporate mindset popped up once again and they killed the program.

At a time where they were making record profits.

Imagine what the demand would be for electric cars now with soaring fuel costs and the pressure to reduce greenhouse gases. I'm sure that ten to 15 years of research, which could have been funded through some of those record profits, would have allowed them to bring the price down.

Throw in some tax breaks like you have with hybrids, and there definitely would be a market for all electric cars.

Subsidized? Sure. So what else is new?
 
tonyw said:
I believe that the Big Three were investigating all electric cars as a way to meet California's clean air requirements. But then, instead of thinking long term, like you should if you want a business to be successful, the corporate mindset popped up once again and they killed the program.

At a time where they were making record profits.

Imagine what the demand would be for electric cars now with soaring fuel costs and the pressure to reduce greenhouse gases. I'm sure that ten to 15 years of research, which could have been funded through some of those record profits, would have allowed them to bring the price down.

Throw in some tax breaks like you have with hybrids, and there definitely would be a market for all electric cars.

Subsidized? Sure. So what else is new?
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The problem is that gas has been cheap. Even now it's not out of line once adjusted for inflation. The current hyper-ventilating and hysteria is really over the top.

Meanwhile the research has continued, and the cars they come out with will be ones consumers will buy. All in good time.
 
flyover said:
The problem is that gas has been cheap. Even now it's not out of line once adjusted for inflation...Meanwhile the research has continued, and the cars they come out with will be ones consumers will buy.
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I agree - however it depends on the consumer. I currently drive <200 miles per month. My car gets around 20 mpg, so that's 10 gallons of gas I'm buying a month. Still INCREDIBLY cheap to get around IMO when you factor in a well mx'd car (knocking on wood). In fact, insurance is more than double that. Even if gas were to go to $10/gal, I wouldn't be 'hurting' too much - however I most likely wouldn't have a job and everything else I buy (food, etc.) would skyrocket in price. That's what I'm worried about - if I flew for an oil company I'd be ecstatic, however. Combine overall rising prices with a devaluing dollar, and there's a recipe for disaster. Not only that, but 3 out of the last 4 recessions coincided with rising gas prices.
 
You can get almost any electric car certified these days. I don't know what the process for certifying an automobile is but I've seen some electric cars and they don't look very safe. Alot of companies did get together broke a bunch of anti-trust laws and tried to develop a battery when California made its pzev regulations but it didn't work out very good and you still have to replace it every few years and the range was not great either. They might be practical for some people but those kind of vehicles have been pushed by enviromentalists mostly. Enviromentalists are perfectly willing to compromise safety and the economy for their cause. Infact I would say that hurting business and maybe even reducing the population is seen as a good thing by many of the more radical ones. Keep that in mind if they start to move in on aviation.

The oil companies are making record profits but thats because the stuff we have over here that costs $10 a barrel to extract is getting sold for $70+, thats where there profits are coming from because they aren't making alot on the imported stuff. China has started to use oil shale and they don't even have alot of it. Only about 2/5s of our energy is used to generate electricity on the grid the other 3/5s is transportation so we would have to more then double our power plants and transmission capacity. Liquifying coal has been done on a large scale before the fuel is low grade but it works. Biodiesel might work for airplanes the fuel tanks would have to be heated but thats not a huge problem since I think airliners have fuel tank heaters anyways. In general though anything that would make airtravel cheaper and increase demand for pilots I'm for. So if people get electric or hydrogen or whatever cars and save the fuel for airplanes and can't drive across country and have to fly I'm ok with that.
 
Where is the electricity going to come from to power these "electric" cars? Jelly bean fields?
 
Swen said:
Where is the electricity going to come from to power these "electric" cars? Jelly bean fields?
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Nuclear, there is lots of uranium and the enrichment techniques are always getting better. Australia has 40% of the worlds uranium and they are a friendly country. We havn't even really tried to get it out of sea water yet. So pretty much the supply is practically unlimited. It is safe and puts out no green house gasses. Fourth generation reactors will be even safer more efficent and make more fuel then you put into them.
 
Swen said:
Where is the electricity going to come from to power these "electric" cars? Jelly bean fields?
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Re-read my posts and you'll see I touched on it...

It does take time and money to completely re-tool an entire country from one power source (gasoline) to another (whatever it may be). Others have done it, however (Brazil to ethanol). I just see going from oil to oil shale or coal to liqufied coal as a sort of stop gap in trying to get away from this fossil fuel stuff. To harvest oil shale, you've gotta heat the stuff underground to 500+ degrees...how efficient is that? Somehow I would think that energy would be better suited to generating power to power our cars & homes directly, rather than going into the ground to get something out of the ground, then refining it, then transporting it, etc.

Here's a Chart (PDF Format) showing the various energy costs to power a car from NY to CA.

I personally just think that electric cars would be more conveinent for the masses. Possibly a combo electric and ethanol/biodiesel infratructure (for those drivers that need larger cars or much greater range) is needed. I dunno.
 
Yeah estimates say that oil shale would only be 60% effcient to extract but its still a subtantial amount of energy just sitting colorado. I agree fossil fuels will run out eventually and we will eventually need something sustainable. We have at least 50 years of fossil fuel at current demand that can be economically extracted. At current demand we have over 250 years of coal but if we liquified it into fuel it would be less. People are talking about alternative fuels right now because fuel is getting expensive but we don't have to change yet. We just need some cheap gas that would help grow the economy and pay off the deficet and get us out of the middle east. We can get that from coal or oil shale I think but I'm not an expert maybe in the long term its better to use foreign energy supplies and pay extra now so that we still have ours.

The exciting thing about biodiesel is that they may have found an algae that could be grown that would drastically reduce the acreage and resources needed to get the oil. Its being researched but it look promising. Right now we would have to use about 27% of our land to grow fuel for biodiesel or ethonal. They burn pretty clean too. I like the biodiesel/ethanol/nuclear economy idea since it works for aviation.
 
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