"Foreign Oil: Is It Time For Congress To Act?"
Started by T. Boone Pickens, and taken up by an array of people with real expertise, and a genuinely diverse set of views. National Journal is just there to coordinate the conversation, and get out of the way. It's a very intelligent conversation, and air time/ attention is dependent on what the participant's put into it, rather than a journalist's filter.
Journalism should do more of this.
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First, I am glad to notice the World is not going to collapse in an immense energy crunch, as stated one year ago when oil prices were rising.
Secondly, I don't know what it has to do Obama's proposals in renewable energy with oil dependence. Renewable is applied to a market, electricity, that is already independent from foreign countries if power is produced in coal fired and nuclear plants.
On the contrary, renewable energies (solar, wind) in European countries cause their increase dependence to Russian gas, since the only way to balance their irregular production is through gas fired turbines. Gas fired plants, moreover, are cheaper and faster to build, reducing the risks for the power companies, while, on the other hand higher variable costs are transfered to the consumer via prices of the energy produced.
Further, oil cannot be produced from Natural gas, thermodynamics doesn't allow that, at least now. In the end, my opinion is that lobbies are favouring another artificial energy scarcity: natural gas coupled to your grid seems to be the next point in the agenda, as well as more expensive cars.
Only if having an important title makes you an expert.
Greg, it's much more than titles. I recognized a few of the names, and they're people who have earned the title 'expert' by being involved in the field, and doing the research.
Pickens himself is a geology major with a long history in the oil business, before he got famous for hostile takeovers.
J Aguilar, one reason Americans are more interested in natural gas is the very large amounts of it under America's continental shelf, which could be hooked up via pipeline instead of using LNG bombs... er, ships. Gas is a much, much more continental market than oil (which is entirely global), because of the hazards of shipping by means other than pipeline.
That makes a problem in Europe (dependence on Russia and #2 Algeria) a potential solution in North America. Hence the level of interest and discussion. Natural Gas wouldn't be converted to oil, it would be used as itself.
Indeed, America has big reserves of natural gas, coal and uranium and thorium. Why favour then one above the others? Why does the framework have to be altered in order to give to some what is taken from the majority?
In America, the question regarding foreign dependence is oil, mainly used for transportation. IMHO, renewables are used to ram into the electricity market and impose a more expensive framework. I already have seen that process here in my country.
Logical fallacy. Your still making an appeal to authority. Carl Pope of the Sierra Club is not an expert on energy. He is an activist. Ultimately it is the merit of their arguments that count. Nuclear is not part of the conversation. Building an electric car is a engineering problem. The main problem with electric cars is the batteries don't exist. What kind of expert is someone if their solution requires something that doesn't exist?
I would commend an effort to debate alternatives to oil online but I would be careful about describing this particular online exchange as a debate. I didn't see any experts invited to provide dissenting views on natural gas, although perhaps it is early in the discussion.
My understanding is that natural gas can be turned into gasoline (using catalysts). The problem is that it is uneconomical at current prices to do so. Natural gas and oil are both currently used to produce part of the U.S. electricity supply. Foreign oil used to generate this electric power could be replaced by North American energy sources.
One of the participants in the National Journal discussion mentioned shale gas and methane hydrates. I would be interested to see further discussion of how these would compare in terms of engineering difficulty and costs with deep hot-rock geothermal energy, which an MIT study in 2006 proposed.
Why convert anything? Natural gas will run great in existing automobiles with pretty straightforward modifications. Everybody has a delivery system in their home already. I think Honda has a natural gas powered car out, and Vegas runs their buses on it. NG burns cleaner than just about anything else, its a natural choice for a gasoline alternative, but unfortunately the clever choices are always anathema to the greenies (see Power, Nuclear).
NG vehicles operate using an Otto cycle, which yields less performance than Diesel ones, thus much of the advantages are compensated by the extra costs.
BTW, France has a wide network of liquified petrol gas for vehicles, since they cannot sell that subproduct for domestic heating because that segment of the market is already occupied by nuclear generated electricity.
Of course, ideally, NG could be converted into liquid hydrocarbons. However, thermodynamics is playing against that, and that old lady is the most implacable of the branches of physics. In the end, coal hydrogenation (with hydrogen produced by nuclear reactors) might constitute a more straighforward approach.
And maybe, just maybe, that is the bottom of the issue.
I like the second part of this article. It well explains the difficulties in converting natural gas in an easy way:
Hitting the Natural-Gas Jackpot