19 thoughts on “Invincible Energy Ignorance”

  2. listing “electric” as an alternative to oil: -1 to pundit.
    misspelling “off”: -1 to blogger.

    They’re both idiots. Oh, and where’s “the math” I was promised?

  4. Comments there are brilliant, to wit:

    We need to let the oil go completely. Are we as Americans not smart enough to figure out an alternative? Really? No more troops dying for the black gold…reduce pollution. U r right about technology. We need to innovate and invest in renewable energy. Job issue solved, money issue solved, power issues solved. We don’t have tom change everything overnight but we can start with vehicles. That would make a huge difference. U telling me American brain power can’t figure this crap out?!

    Awestruck, really I am. Never has so much poignancy been expressed with such erudition.

  8. Ken: the energy required to produce isomeric hafnium would far exceed the energy you get back when it decays. It’s at best a way to store energy (and it’s doubtful it’s workable at all, given the failure of synchrotron radiation experiments to find the desired effect), not a source of primary energy.

  11. Why are we supposed to want to not burn Canadian and Mexican oil, anyway?

    (Canada and Mexico are, in most months, our two largest sources of imported oil.)

    Do we now hate our neighbors and their economies? Do we distrust them so much that we think they’re going to cut us off (and hurt themselves!) just to damage their biggest trading partners?

  12. I like our dependence on foreign oil. Just like I like our dependence on Chinese capital, cheap Indonesian labor, Indian customer support farms, Korean phone tech, and Canadian bacon.

    Because each of those dependencies implies a reverse dependency — each of the dealers that sell us our addiction is, willy-nilly, equally dependent on our dollars. A world of mutual interdependence driven by the relentless pursuit of profit is a world with its darker urges to dominate and destroy Others successfully sublimated into productive and peaceful economic competition. Moreover, it’s a world with little tolerance for the bloody and insane theories of Marx, Stalin, Mao and Goebbels, which are economically inefficient.

    Furthermore, oil is cheap, versatile and efficient. If yahoos in Arabia couldn’t pump the stuff out of the ground — if it had been synthesized after massive government R&D investment in some high-tech lab, trumpeted as the super-efficient energy-storage fluid of the future — its only waste products harmless water and carbon dioxide! Easily transportable! Energy density hundreds of times higher than any battery! So safe a 16-year-old can deal with it! Infinitely recyclable through green tech, i.e. plants! — it would be winning praise Left and Right and the Obama Administration would be proposing a $200 billion dollar Win The Future “investment” in it.

  13. Basic question:

    Simberg Oil – a USA company – gets a lease in Oklahoma, digs a well, strikes oil. Pumps a barrel of oil out of the ground.

    Where does that barrel of oil go? Is it placed on the global commodities market and sold at a common price?

    Or does that oil go to a US refinery and there’s one barrel less for us to import?

    In short, is there such a thing as “our oil”, in terms of the way it actually happens?

  14. Ipsissima verba, Carl. But, we have a class of education bubbleheads nowadays who don’t like getting their hands dirty, and oil is just icky.

  15. In short, is there such a thing as “our oil”, in terms of the way it actually happens?

    No, oil is fungible. Unfortunately, the economic ignorami don’t even understand what that word means. But that doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t be producing as much of it as we economically can.

  17. My problem with all these “we need 18,000 more nuclear reactors by 2100” people is that they’re extrapolating, and they’re not even extrapolating *well*. Most of them don’t even understand where the number comes from.. they just think it sounds impossible so they run with it.

  18. Pingback: Examining America’s Energy Dependencies And Safety « Tai-Chi Policy

  19. “No, oil is fungible. Unfortunately, the economic ignorami don’t even understand what that word means. But that doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t be producing as much of it as we economically can.”

    Given that oil is fungible, then any oil we pull up from US territory goes onto the general world market and is sold at world market prices.

    So “Drill, Baby, Drill!” confers only a couple of advantages to us:

    1) Increased supply, price per bbl goes down.

    2) Should a crude producer want to raise prices by lowering production, we can compensate.

    There is a distribution savings if you ship it from Oklahoma to Texas as opposed to Saudi Arabia to Texas but that’s not a major difference in the price of a gallon of gas, I am told.

    However, unless I’m mistaken (admittedly NOT an expert on this), you only accrue these advantages *if* the amount you add to the world market is really substantial. Adding 1% to the market supply gets you very little.

    So if we dug and pulled out all the easy oil in US owned lands, would we increase the world supply by enough to actually matter?

    If the answer is no, then I might say that it’s better to NOT drill in the US but sit on those reserves. THAT is our true strategic reserve. Not the 700+ million bbls in a cave somewhere. Certainly drill outside the 12 mile limit. Buy leases everywhere and drill like crazy. But sell no leases within the 12 mile limit to anyone.

    I am also under the impression that the price increases today are demand driven (China, India etc) and the supply is relatively stable. Is this the case?

    Always ready to hear counter arguments: as I say I’m no expert.

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