Working with english units of late. Love metric, much easier, but you have to remember to keep you M-G-T straight.

Looked up Natural Gas Plant capacity after the fact and realized my mistake.

Nukes are about 2.5 GW of elec. Big Natural Gas burners are in the 1 to 1.8 GW range. The majority are in the sub G (less than 1000 MW) range, and placed a lot closer to where the electricity is needed. Most (as in numers of plants) are in the 500 and below range.

We would need to Build 21 Nukes to get just 10% of the cars onto electricity.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_use_in_the_United_States

3.35TW (2004 total)

Transportation 28%

.9 TW Transportation usage

Gasoline as percent of transportion usage 61%

.54 TW in gasoline used

Assuming no loss from transmission of the electricity, which is hardly true- 10% of gas usage being replaced with electricity would mean .054TW (54 MW)more base load capacity. That is more than half of the electricity we get from Hydro electricity now, .09TW

Remember that is 10% of cars plugging in. Transportation of electricity is on average, less than 70% efficient. 10 goes in at the plant, 7 comes out of the wall.

We currently (and in 2004) have 104 reactors operating in the US producing .27 TW in 2004. That works out to, quick and dirty, 2.5 MW a piece, or .0025 TW a piece.

We would need to Build 21 Nukes to get just 10% of the cars onto electricity. As said above, really 7%.

You could build coal and Gas too, but nukes were used because of their scale.

This is an analysis which will be picked apart based on efficiency. I have been very conservative and given electrical vehicles equal energy usage efficiency. This is far from the truth. It would be much less in practice. The charger would usually only be about 80% efficient. This is if such a car can even be built.

Yes, gasoline engines are not that efficient, but, they do the conversion at the point of use, or very close. To be honest you should also count the distribution of the gasoline, mostly in electricity. No idea on that number.

http://wiki.xtronics.com/index.php/Energy_density

Lots of numbers. No Barrels.

All energy usage, Oil included, has an energy unit attached to it. It is not the Barrel. Oil has more than 120% of the energy of any of the other current replacements.

That’s how the figures get distorted. A barrel of ethanol has 80% of the energy that the same barrel of gasoline has. Methanol is even less.

That 15% ethanol gas that you put in your tank does not have the same energy as 100% gas would. You are paying the same for less energy.

PHEV’s- NO. First, show me one. Second, show me one that works. Third, what happens when everyone plugs in their cars to an electrical system that was built in the 50’s?

We could begin to move toward that goal, as stated above, if we start burning a whole lot more oil to build the infrastructure that plug in cars would require.

But it just comes out of the wall…..

The electrical system in the US is barely able to keep up as it is. Move the largest single energy sink in this country (cars) to electricity and watch it burst into flames. The energy conversion on this point is very clear. Do the math, figure how many more MW’s of base load we would need to change over just 10% of the cars to electricity.

California is a prefect example, they have grid problems already. They also have a lot of cars. What happens when electricity usage goes up even 10%? Where does that electricity come from, and how does it get to where it needs to be used? Oil will be building all of that.

Pie in the sky thinking does not get rid of the real engineering numbers that we are being faced with. Look at them.

The real reality is that there will be/should be rationing of oil based fuels. Oil should be used for the things that cannot use anything else, and things that will reduce oil usage/demand over the long term.

Frontline, at the beginning of October, did a climate change show. Part of it looked at alternatives. One was the Chevy volt.

This should be watched by everyone. The car, in is debut performance in front of the media, could not even make it up a slight incline. It ended up being towed away.

Did you see that story? Neither did I…

Frontline was the only place I saw any mention of this. An electric car is possible, but a lot more work has to be done.

Hybrids are the wrong path. How much more energy goes into producing the seperate engine, batteries, control systems, etc.
Been looking for those numbers for years. Still haven’t found any that I believe.

The Hybrid is an auto company wet dream. You want two engines in your car? Twice as much equipment and maintenance. What was it that Henry Ford said, I’d give the cars away if I were the only one selling the replacement parts. I bet those Hybrid parts are all very proprietary, and very high margin for the car companies making them. Again, the numbers on this stuff are all vaporous.

Two engines in a car- Detroit really seems to have underestimated the stupidity of the american public by not delivering more of them. This would be a first.

Oil is part of energy, not all of it. The change to natural gas cars and trucks will benefit oil. They own most any large production and distribution. Not that different to run a liquid or Gas through a pipe. Most of the higher tech Natural gas Pipelines could be considered liquids pipelines, they are operating at over 1000psi. One I saw in the Northeast was over 1300.

Oil is only one that can currently be transported easily outside of the existing infrastructure system.

Oil is, in my estimation, responsible for 80% of the cost of anything in this country. We move both oil and goods extremely well here, just not that efficiently, especially on the goods side.

Energy returned on energy invested will hopefully begin to be looked at in a real way. It is the only way.

All of these infrastructure heavy plans for ‘an independent energy future’ are all completely dependent on oil for construction. Without oil, what do you do? Run a NG pipeline to each job site?

NG, Coal, Nuculear at first, and electrictiy in every sense are completely dependant on oil for building and maintaining and infrastructure.

Working in Heavy Civil construction for years, you begin to realize that oil is responsible for everything they do.

How does coal get moved? How do the pipelines from the middle of nowhere get built, and maintained?

As I said before, ENERGY use in the US has never gone down, just been moved to other things.

On the NG as car/truck fuel, that will reach an equilibrium above where it is now, but does anyone really think that they can just shift demand like that without a considerable price change?

Using Oil, now while it is still cheap, to build nukes is the only answer, long and short term. Once electricity production is availiable, and distribution has been upgraded (all oil), the electric car would be good. This would be best case, if we decided tomorrow, 10-15 years off.

Trucks as with airplanes will never, never, never, be able to run on electricity.

This doesn’t even get at the more pressing problems with food distrubution being completely oil dependent.

Long oil.

reserves is not some singular and definitively know quantity but an unknown relating to both economics and changes in E&P tech.

“They might say that they will cut 1 million barrels but in reality the market knows maybe they’ll cut 500,000 to 600,000 barrels,” Stephen Schork, president of Schork Group Inc. in Villanova, Pennsylvania, said in a Bloomberg Television interview. “And that’s simply not enough to exorcise the surplus out of the market.”

This is not correct- what “peak oil” refers to is production as it relates to proven reserves – it is measure of how many years of oil reserves are left.

The US is more likely working with the Saudis to squeeze Iran and Russia.

Saudi Sunnis vs Iranian Shiites.

The US benefits by weakening foes.

Note that the Israelis are all of a sudden saying they have no issue with the US entering talks with Tehran.

Odd, no?

http://www.amazon.com/Myth-Oil-Crisis-Overcoming-Geopolitics/dp/0313354790/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1228139780&sr=1-1

I'm not even finished this one — still in Chapter 3 — and Mills has already destroyed the foundations of the "Peak Oil" position."

Robin Mills:

Petroleum Economics Manager at Emirates National Oil Company; author of 'The Myth of the Oil Crisis'

Past:

- Senior Evaluation Manager at Dubai Energy
- Economist at Norske Shell
- Economist at Shell International

http://www.linkedin.com/pub/4/579/856

Enough said for his credibility and agenda