The election is over and now is the time for the country to
work together. We need to add
well-paying jobs and we must use energy and other resources wisely. Yeah better jobs and smaller hybrid cars are
going to be in our future. These hybrids
will be micro-hybrids as well as standard hybrids. We will also have more people carpooling,
taking public transportation, or even riding bicycles to get around.
I feel really confident that energy consumption in the US
transportation sector will continue to drop by at 1% each year over the next
two decades. I am certain that in four
years President Obama will be able to claim real success in reducing the
quantity of gasoline used to move Americans around. In 2007 the US used 9.3 million barrels a
day of gasoline. Year to date in 2012 we
are averaging 8.6 million barrels of gasoline a day. I predict that by 2030 we will use approximately
7 million barrels a day of gasoline.
I also think that purely electric vehicles will remain a
small niche market and that the real savings in transportation fuel usage will
come from improved vehicles with internal combustion engines with or without
hybrid assist. I also think that
advanced bio fuels will fizzle out and that the quantity of ethanol and other fuels
made from biomass will remain pretty level with the peak reached in 2011 when
corn ethanol peaked.
There is going to be a period of several years of drought
with a warm Atlantic and a cold Pacific.
Corn based ethanol will be limited by the availability of sufficient
corn. Bio diesel might reach a production
limit of 100,000 barrels a day. It too
diminishes the availability of edible vegetable oils. Bio diesel and bio butanol from genetically
modified algae and bacteria will pretty much be dead end technologies with only
a very limited amount of these fuels ever produced. Cellulosic liquid fuels are simply dead on
arrival.
The real winner in the coming two decades will be domestic
production of shale oil and shale natural gas and the US must exploit the shale
bonanza for the good of us all. I pray
that President Obama will not kill this goose that is laying the golden
egg. The shale gas will also have
widespread usage in the supply chain for producing high value added chemicals
as well as steel.
Nucor the leading US steel company announced a massive deal to
buy working interests in shale gas reserves in the US in partnership with
Encana. Nucor uses natural gas to
convert iron ore to direct reduced iron (DRI) that is then converted into
steel. Between the investment in shale
gas and the DRI facilities Nucor is investing over $5 billion in the USA during
the next decade. President Obama should
take note of this project and should now come out in full support of projects
like this. Nucor’s carbon footprint in
steel making will be half that of the Chinese mills. Nucor you make me proud.
Over the next few weeks we will see if President Obama
sticks with Steven Chu for energy secretary.
I pray he does not and I hope that the President fills this post with
someone much more capable than Chu. Chu’s
predecessor Sam Bodman who was President Bush’s choice for Energy Secretary was
equally incompetent as Dr. Chu. The
President should let me interview the next Secretary of Energy so we do not get
a third thermodynamic stooge in a row filling that very important job.
"Now is the time to work together?" Really? What is it different today? Nothing... You're either "all-in, all the time" or you're not... As I told my son a few months ago as he prepared a diatribe against people who don't vote, "Voting is NEVER about getting your WAY, it's about getting your SAY"... Mitt Romney didn't lose and President Obama didn't win... Democracy simply got another chance to "create a more perfect union"...
ReplyDeleteBlair the pols in DC have not worked together and have not represented the best interests of the people. The House wanted to unseat Obama and Obama wanted to unseat the house. But now they realize it is a stalemate. The vote makes us feel we got our say but the representatives really have to represent us and they do not. It took $2 billion of mostly special interest money to retain the stalemate. My knowledge is not of how to exactly tax or spend but I am very capable of seeing through gangrene technology that Chu chose to choose. He needs to go real fast. No doubt there will be a compromise on taxing and spending else we will go over the cliff. Perhaps Chu will come up with a way to convert the kinetic energy of falling off of a cliff into some copper indium, gallium di selinide device that runs a plug in car that some ex vice president is promoting. You can tell your son that his idea that voting is important was correct but unless he and all of us get some real representation real soon he can prepare to live in a minor province of China and his vote will not even get recorded it will simply be assumed that the one party knows what is best for him.
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