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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Road Walker who wrote (398177)	7/12/2008 9:35:21 AM
From: michael97123	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1574692

the problem is that we are off in a hundred different directions and saying let the market determine things. Not good enough. We need government planning--5 year plan, 10 year plan. Capitalism cant solve energy problem alone. If pickens is right, we need to build infrastructure so folks know where they can get fuel. If pickens is wrong lets drill and conserve and get rid of the brazil tarriff. Remember VHS or BetaMax? There need to be standards set by a body that represents the public. This is a 180 for me. Lets get the best minds from govt, business,scientific community etc and come up with a plan that involves short term and medium term as well as long term solutions and if that involves pumping alaska oil and going to 55mph at home for a couple of years, so be it. www.mike_the_socialist.com

To: Road Walker who wrote (398177)	7/12/2008 11:17:09 AM
From: TigerPaw	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 1574692

"I don't understand the advantage of a detour to natural gas. What is gained?" I think Pickens has access to a lot of natural gas. The advantage is to his pocketbook. According to an internal spreadsheet, BP Capital earned $146.8 million in 2001, $56 million in 2002, $432 million in 2003, and $340 million in 2004. Along the way, he started an energy equities fund, and he grew Pickens Fuel (later renamed Clean Energy) into the nation’s largest supplier of natural gas as an alternative vehicle fuel, with more than 150 stations from British Columbia to Southern California. portfolio.com TP

To: Road Walker who wrote (398177)	7/12/2008 10:27:41 PM
From: combjelly	Read Replies (5) \| Respond to of 1574692

"I don't know... I think the quickest route is to replace the 'fleet' with a more efficient fleet, regardless of using hybrids or even efficient internal combustion." But that requires replacing the fleet. Probably several times. Most any IC engine, save diesels, can be converted to LNG. It has the advantage of using existing technology. Now, I am not saying it is the best possible solution. It has some severe limitations that haven't been discussed. The most important being that LNG just doesn't have the energy density of gasoline. So, assuming you even have a trunk, you lose it. And you don't have the range. OTOH, you do have a reduced carbon footprint for those who care. And the infrastructure is relatively easy. Natural gas pipelines cover much of the country. So transportation costs could be less than gasoline. In many cases, a station could be set up using nothing more than municipal gas lines, a pump to liquefy it and dispensing nozzles with credit card swipes. Totally automated and self serve. If done right, for urban areas, they could handle both LNG and pressurized air. And that could greatly cut the pollution in major metro areas. Now, frankly, one advantage this plan has is in the political realm. Here is a grand strategy to get us off of foreign energy. Completely. It is easy to explain, you can put dollar figures to the costs and have a reasonably accurate time line with goals and gates. So, it can be packaged and marketed as a national goal. One we can get behind as a country and make a palpable difference. Some sacrifices required, but not many. Just enough to breed a spirit of unity. I dunno, JF. This alone, with the right kind of leadership, could be its single most valuable asset. From a technical point of view, it isn't the best possible solution. From a country that badly needs to come together over something constructive as opposed to huddling in the corner because of the terrorists, it has merit. And, other than the windmills, could spark a boom of small businesses doing conversions. The tooling required to convert a car used to not be a lot, couple of hundred bucks at most assuming you didn't even have a drill, and the expertise wasn't high. I dunno if that is still the case with modern cars. The infrastructure upgrade wouldn't be a huge problem. That is the sort of thing that government does well. Tax incentives and subsidized loans for putting in the equipment to handle LNG at stations, maybe the same for setting up businesses for doing the conversions. Restrict those to small businesses and independents, the national chains could handle that themselves with their franchisees. From a technical point of view, it isn't the best. But, again with the right leadership, this could be a big political winner. It actually does something to cut off the air supply to terrorists, it increases our security by decoupling us from foreign interests, and, in my mind more importantly, it gives something that we as a country can get behind and unite us instead of divide us. Two downsides. It isn't the best solution by any stretch of the imagination. And it puts a lot of dollars in Pickens pocket. Depending on the details, I would have to support it.