[Rhodes22-list] Opinion on the Pickens Plan - non sailing, non political, educational

[Mike Cheung]

Let us not make the same mistake(s) again ....

The last "oil crisis" kicked off a huge surge of effort to conserve energy,
find "alternative" energy sources, and recover more oil from the ground. 
Naturally it also spurred a huge effort to find more oil.  The latter won
out and the former were starved for funding.  

While the situation is not identical, the rise of the Asian economies is one
huge difference, it is similar enough to cause concern.  As a engineering
graduate student in a field related to oil recovery at that time, I met many
of the researchers working on enhanced oil recovery; most of them are long
gone.  The funding dried up and either they moved on or no one took up their
work as they passed.  In fact only one of the "old gang" of EOR researchers
is still plugging away and he's now approaching or into his eighties.  

So, what do we do?  If we say, let the market decide ... well, if a couple
of decent oil reservoirs are found oil will drop to "reasonable" levels, say
$100/barrel, and we'll be "happy".  If we say, let the government solve
this, then there will be enormous sums spend on bad ideas in politically
correct districts.  

So what do we do?  From the political standpoint, damned if I know; from the
technical standpoint my gut says: design a nuclear power plant that can
operate on top of the San Andreas fault and built thousands of them ... this
is a variation on the French approach, push hard on "darn near anything" to
liquid transportation fuels (probably via Fischer-Tropsch chemistry) since
we're pretty much addicted to "pumpable" transportation fuels, find some way
to reward efforts in wind and solar.  But remember gang, we're fighting a
tough battle between fossil fuels and "renewable" fuels.  The fossil fuels
have a huge advantage, they're the result of the solar energy the earth
received stored up over millions of years, beating them with just this years
solar energy is not easy, maybe not even possible.

Mike C. s/v Muireann and a Professor of Chemical and Biomolecular
Engineering, The University of Akron, Akron, OH
-- 
View this message in context: http://www.nabble.com/Opinion-on-the-Pickens-Plan---non-sailing%2C-non-political%2C-educational-tp18964601p18975299.html
Sent from the Rhodes 22 mailing list archive at Nabble.com.