Official "Extremely Unctuous Antics" Thread

[nibble4bits]

I see everyone concentrating on oil as a fuel but what about oil as a source of cheap polymers? What is the economics in a system where burning (!) oil as a primary fuel for cars is considered insane because the relative price of plastics (and other materials made from oil) compared to energy becomes majorly unbalanced? Imagine if a barrel of oil was it's current price but energy costs were one quarter and polymers doubled. That's not just a speculation, but inevitable! Eventually the price of oil must reach parity with all new energy sources. The price may very well surpass energy prices. Once energy becomes cheaper than oil... There's going to be some major pain in countries that didn't invest their petrolium profits wisely - although they could use the fuel themselves to help delay the blow. A soft fall would be less painful but would spread their economic disadvantage over many years.

I think the concept of burning oil will eventually be seen the same way as farming before irrigation, crop rotations, soil management, etc. Or like pumping untreated sewage into a lake. A great idea at the time, but obviously it had to end sometime.

[only_human]

Originally Posted by nibble4bits

I see everyone concentrating on oil as a fuel but what about oil as a source of cheap polymers? What is the economics in a system where burning (!) oil as a primary fuel for cars is considered insane because the relative price of plastics (and other materials made from oil) compared to energy becomes majorly unbalanced? Imagine if a barrel of oil was it's current price but energy costs were one quarter and polymers doubled. That's not just a speculation, but inevitable! Eventually the price of oil must reach parity with all new energy sources. The price may very well surpass energy prices. Once energy becomes cheaper than oil... There's going to be some major pain in countries that didn't invest their petrolium profits wisely - although they could use the fuel themselves to help delay the blow. A soft fall would be less painful but would spread their economic disadvantage over many years.

I think the concept of burning oil will eventually be seen the same way as farming before irrigation, crop rotations, soil management, etc. Or like pumping untreated sewage into a lake. A great idea at the time, but obviously it had to end sometime.

We talk about it, but it just gets lost in the noise of administrations that are busy refusing to open official emails at the times they are not busy losing them en masse. They see every hardship as an opportunity to seize new powers and avenues of exploitation, even sometimes writing new powers hundreds of pages into bulk legislation. When they do all this and treat us with contempt and continuously lie and deceive, it is hard to get people to notice that we are eating our seed corn or burning our houses to stay warm in the winter.

Originally Posted by cheesehead

Me, too.

I want untapped oil reserves to be more widely recognized as worthy long-term investments than as unexploited resources begging to be consumed as soon as possible.

That reminds me ...

Back in the early 1970s, when I was working at the Amoco Production Company's research center in Tulsa, the company held, perhaps once a year, seminars to which employees from all departments were invited for an afternoon. The topics would be current technical developments in the fields of oil exploration and production, and new technology about to pass from research to productive use within our company. We were always advised that it was confidential, not to be disclosed outside the company, but I think the following can be ethically revealed 35 years later :)

During a discussion of the then-newly-being-developed North Slope oil field in Alaska, one of my computing department co-workers proposed from the audience that instead of working to ramp up production as soon as the Trans-Alaska Pipeline was completed, the company and nation should instead consider conserving it for the future when its hydrocarbons might be more valuable as, for example, basic ingredients for food production than as fuel to be burned. Why not use Middle East oil as fuel, while conserving US oil for a future where it would be much more valuable for other uses than as fuel now? As soon as he finished his last sentence, there was spontaneous applause throughout the audience!

... as an example of how we oil company research workers thought U.S. oil policy should run ... and this from within a decidedly conservative region whose Republican representatives in Congress were staunchly in favor of increasing U.S. domestic oil production.

[cheesehead]

Originally Posted by ewmayer

Forgot to mention one more key argument in favor of reducing consumption as being the option of First Resort: there is no environmental downside to reducing consumption., if done prudently^*.

I disagree, but only because your statement doesn't go far enough. Not only is there no significant downside, but also it has an enormous upside absent from the proposals for increasing oil production: curbing global warming.

Oh wait, at this point the U.S. auto industry shills will counter with something like, "but think of the environmental cost of taking all those millions of SUVs out of the auto fleet prematurely, and having to replace them with newly manufactured 'green' vehicles" - conveniently ignoring that those gas guzzlers should never have been manufactured in the first place.

Even better (this is the sort of idea that conservatives could easily think of, _if_ they sincerely tried to think favorably about conservation): someone should figure out how much energy it takes to manufacture a new car, including energy to extract the raw materials and so forth, and how much less energy it takes to maintain a used car for, say, an extra three-four years instead of buying a new one. Then compare that to the amount of gas saved, according to the relative MPGs or LPKs.

(But, surely someone's already done that. Maybe I just need to Google more.)

Used-car dealers could use that as a selling point (or do they already? -- I haven't used-car-shopped since I bought my current car, used, three years ago after my previous thirteen-year-old one, also purchased used, exhibited mucho many disablements). I suppose that new-car dealers with some inventory of used cars for sale might not want to include that in their sales pitches, though.

I say, institute a nationwide "SUV recycling" program, and kick-start it with a couple billion $ of government money and tax incentives. [Maybe use a few % of that money that was slated to go to the pork-barrel housing-bailout bill, one of the few Bush vetos I agree with, though our motives surely differ].

In a way, that's already being done through private enterprise, no government money needed -- dealers are cutting thousands of dollars off the prices they're asking for used SUVs they have for sale!

Adam Smith handles the rest.

America's untapped oil: Lawmakers lay into big oil for leaving million of acres untouched while at the same time asking to drill in Alaska and off the coasts.

Sounds to me like Big Oil is using the current crisis atmosphere in an attempt to lock up long-term leases on huge amounts of previously-off-limits land and offshore areas.

I agree.

The motive is obvious: after all, it`s not in Big Oil`s interest - just like it`s not in OPEC`s interest - to boost production in order to lower prices.

Well, it is in American Big Oil's interest (short-term; few shareholders look long-term) to boost U.S. production -- the small amounts of conceivable U.S. increase wouldn't have much effect on prices.

Also, note that high oil prices don't boost oil industry profits all by themselves -- it's the sudden increase in value of all the oil that's on its way from well to consumer that boosts profits, temporarily. When oil prices fall, so do oil company profits, but mainly because the value of their unsold inventory suddenly drops. It's basically an accounting matter that will be the subject of the final installment of my explanation for only_human's personal peeve (shared by millions of other folks!) in post #39 of this thread.

The political cover for this? - notice how the Saudis made heavy use of this over the weekend - is too simply blame "oil market speculators." To be sure, speculation plays a significant role in the oil-price runup of the past 5 years

You presented evidence, earlier (starting at post #49 of this thread), that the price-insensitive Commodity Index Speculators have had the most effect. (Testimony before a U.S. Senate committee on May 20, 2008 -- http://hsgac.senate.gov/public/_files/052008Masters.pdf -- especially note the right-hand side of Chart One on page 3)

- but that begs the question [unless your name is George Bush or Ben Bernanke], why has there been such a huge increase in speculative investment in oil and other commodities?

Wasn't it the Commodities Index Speculators? They are operating on a fundamentally different theory than classical commodities speculators have.

Could it be that unlike the "new Lira" U.S. dollar, they actually have some intrinsic value which makes them attractive during periods when U.S. government policy is to try to inflate their way out of an economic mess by debasing the currency?

Well, yes, Index Speculators couldn't have done it by themselves. However, don't forget that oil prices have been rising in all currencies, not only the USD, so it can't all be the fault of the dollar's fall (despite my original, not-very-correct contention in post #1, long ago when circumstances were different -- Egad, was I ahead of my time then?).

[Uncwilly]

The real "REAL" reasons:

Too many people on this globe.
Not enough governmental control of people's lives.
Not enough group and communal living.
Too many people living in "the countyside".


Think them through.

[cheesehead]

Originally Posted by Uncwilly

Not enough governmental control of people's lives.

?

[Uncwilly]

Originally Posted by cheesehead

?

Communal, group intrests vs. selfishness.

[cheesehead]

Originally Posted by Uncwilly

Not enough governmental control of people's lives.

Originally Posted by Uncwilly

Communal, group intrests vs. selfishness.

?? Specific examples?

[Uncwilly]

Originally Posted by me

Think them through.

Originally Posted by cheesehead

?? Specific examples?

First, remember that my statements are designed to provoke others to think.
Second, my statements are coming at the problem from a complete oblique angle. I am not talking about the end reasons, rather the root reasons and the reasons for the next and previous rise.

You can add to the list:
Lack of true spine by politicians. (Pandering for votes and lack of willingness to lead.)

[cheesehead]

Okey-dokey.

[cheesehead]

From the but-I-could-be-wrong department:

Originally Posted by cheesehead

< snip >

For instance, while extreme concentration of solar heat may be used in electricity generation stations, that isn't practical in a home system

Here's something that might be practical for a home system:

"Inventors: Solar Dish Could Revolutionize Energy Production"

http://www.livescience.com/environme...lar-power.html

Originally Posted by LiveScience Staff

A new type of solar energy collector concentrates the sun into a beam that could melt steel.

...

The prototype is a 12-footwide mirrored dish was made from a lightweight frame of thin, inexpensive aluminum tubing and strips of mirror. It concentrates sunlight by a factor of 1,000 to produce steam.

...

At the end of a 12-foot aluminum tube rising from the center of the dish is a black-painted coil of tubing that has water running through it. When the dish is pointing directly at the sun, the water in the coil flashes immediately into steam.

...

They could be set up in huge arrays to provide steam for industrial processing, or for heating or cooling buildings, as well as to hook up to steam turbines and generate electricity

While a "huge array" could produce both hot water and electricity, I doubt there's a home-system-priced steam turbine electricity generator that could run effectively on the amount of steam produced by one 12-foot dish.

Of course, I could be wrong, again.

Maybe this could power a home-system-priced steel foundry.

Perhaps a photovoltaic cell that reflects most of the sunlight it doesn't convert into electricity might, if used for the mirror material, be good enough for solar heat concentration by a factor of, say, 100 instead of 1000 on the water tube, and thus produce both hot water and electricity in an integrated home system. How'd that grab you, Fusion_power?

[Uncwilly]

Originally Posted by cheesehead

"Inventors: Solar Dish Could Revolutionize Energy Production"

This is over 100 years behind the times (or previously was 100 years ahead)
http://books.google.com/books?id=OEh...um=7&ct=result Start at the bottom of page 208
http://www.montanagreenpower.com/sol.../timeline.html Look at 1861 to 1941
and
http://www.solarenergy.com/info_history.html

My understanding about the Google solar project is, that they will be using Sterling engines.

added: IIRC France had a huge solar furnace that would burn through steel beams, not melt, burn with flames like a torch.