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Strategies & Market Trends : 2026 TeoTwawKi ... 2032 Darkest Interregnum -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: TobagoJack who wrote (215379)	7/4/2025 5:17:04 AM
From: Maurice Winn	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 217764

I did contemplate electricity from photovoltaics as a possible alternative to oil as per my and sheik Yamani idea of going on half a century ago that the stone age didn't end for lack of stones and the oil age won't end because oil runs out. But I decided that while there's a trend, overall, oil remains foundational for earth moving and processing no matter what the finished product. In places like Australia where there's gold and terawatts of sun shining on zero value flat land, I have thought for 32 years that photovoltaics can go big for desalination, water pumping, bauxite mining and smelting, electric car propulsion and gigawatts to cities. My friend used to laugh at my ideas like that when I'd explain them to him. Nevertheless, oil remains a very big deal for making things happen. I don't believe that gold production has slipped the bounds of oil other than on the fringes. At fifty times the price of oil there's a lot of money to be made turning oil into gold, even if there are some tailings that can use electricity to get more gold. At $3000 an ounce, there's room for hordes of people to get into a gold rush. Cars are much more economic for photovoltaics and batteries to replace oil, but they've barely got started. Getting more gold with electric trucks and excavating equipment should make sense, but I guess it's still just getting started. If oil has to go down to 1/50th the price of gold to compete, then the profit from photovoltaics must be vast. It's probably better to mine photovoltaics and batteries than gold or oil if that's the price ratio. In fact I recently priced a 300 megawatt photovoltaic system in NZ just north of Auckland and it's much cheaper than oil (less than half price) and a small fraction of a nuclear reactor. Mqurice