Mq., I realized after my 15 minutes of edit time was over that my post to you about The Prize was a bit snotty. Of course, you had a big picture view of the oil bidness from your previous life. So, please accept belated apologies for the tone.
The author of the book has a few articles in FA dealing with energy. One recent one that caught my eye a few months ago dealt the mother lode of natural gas we have stored up in the world. All we need are a few LNG ships, a bunch of pipelines in politically dicey places and, presto!, all the electricity we need is suddenly available.
foreignaffairs.org
And conversions from gasoline to NG are not too difficult. My father did them in the 60s in Mexico on pickup trucks he used in his business. It can be done easily, though I don't know what the heavy iron tanks will do to a vehicle's fuel economy. And though they were easy to place on the beds of trucks, doing so on autos is a different thing altogether.
I don't buy the LNG thing. Oil burns smoothly. Oil fires are not too difficult to put out. Oil is not that difficult to deal with from a safety standpoint. I'm sure you can imagine the conflagration potential for a damaged LNG ship or a major LNG pipeline. Sitting ducks for terrorists, in other words. Big, big booms, the kind the Wacos love.
The ultimate source of energy is hydrogen, it's cheap, plentiful and non-polluting. It is already in use as a fuel source for cars and trucks in Iceland. This, Mq, is the shape of the energy future, though of course Iceland is favored with cheap geothermal energy that makes hydrogen production via electrolysis feasible. Perhaps Iceland will become the Saudi Arabia of hydrogen:
h2cars.biz
worldpress.org
thecarconnection.com
I'm afraid we're stuck with oil for the near term. It is clearly going to get a lot more expensive in the next decade or so as India and China exert their demands for it, production declines and, God forbid, the IslamoWacos, possibly get their grubby and bloody paws on important ME sources.
All of which leads me to think there's big $ to be made in Texas Tea in the next few years.
Like you, well, not exactly like you, but somewhat like you, I'm a CDMA freak. I plan to have one foot in the future through QCOM and one in the past through ExxonMobil, profiting from the dying and from the cyberpacketswitchedCDMAphotonic revolution. |
