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Gold/Mining/Energy : PEAK OIL - The New Y2K or The Beginning of the Real End?

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To: Raymond Duray who wrote (536)5/16/2005 8:09:27 AM
From: Mahatmabenfoo  Read Replies (1) of 1183
 
> wastefullness of his staff schlepping up to the RMI in their
> gas guzzling SUVs every workday and wasting barrels and
> barrels of OPEC oil to evangelize about a brighter future.
> The irony is not lost on the bike riding townies

Funny.

He is a compelling speaker, and may even have many practical ideas about inducing business to take the right road by showing how it can be profitable. His ideas about making oil last longer by using composites or other light material makes sense (assuming that, physicist that he his, he's considered the degeree to which making composites means using petroleum).

I haven't given him a fair shake yet, but where he seems to go goofy is on hydrogen. No one seems to have passed on Matt Simmons' revelation that we may have a much worse natural gas crisis than petroleum crisis, because gas peaks 10 years after oil and not long (5 years?) after that fundamentally disappears: being a vapor there's not a lot sticking around the sides of the well. Accordingly, we'd be much better off just burning natural gas in an internal combustion engine than going through all the steps:

- gas to hydrogen
- hydrogen to electricity via fuel cell
- electrity to motion via motor

needed for the fuel cell cars Lovins likes so much. Yes, solar to electricity cracking water would be very nice and even more inefficient; no one has shown yet it can remotely come close to scaling up.

But if Lovin's can't cheer me up, there's this:

freeenergynews.com

it's a lot less crackers than the URL implies -- mostly mainstream stuff reported, all the things that sound fab until you realize they're 20 years and millions away from making them work, or finding out they won't.

- Charles
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