The Pickens Plan

From T. Boone Pickens:

America is in a hole and it’s getting deeper every day. We import 70% of our oil at a cost of $700 billion a year – four times the annual cost of the Iraq war.

I’ve been an oil man all my life, but this is one emergency we can’t drill our way out of. But if we create a new renewable energy network, we can break our addiction to foreign oil.

On January 20, 2009, a new President gets sworn in. If we’re organized, we can convince Congress to make major changes towards cleaner, cheaper and domestic energy resources.

To get this done, I need your help. Check out the plan. If you think it’s worth fighting for, please join our effort.

Source: Pickens Plan

Commentary

This is something I can get behind. Check it out, and help spread the word.

Crunching The Numbers On Algal Gasoline

According to the US Energy Information Administration, US gasoline consumption is currently averaging (4-week rolling) 9.027 million barrels of gasoline per day, or about 379 million gallons (42 gallons per barrel). Thus, to completely replace US gasoline consumption, Sapphire Energy would need to “scrub”, at 100% efficiency, just over 83000 cubic kilometers of air per day. Certainly there is plenty of air available – this volume represents less than 0.02% of the volume of air in the first 1 km of atmosphere. Nevertheless, it is an enormous amount to process each day.

Of course, Sapphire Energy’s near-term goals are much more modest. As CEO Jason Pyle told Biomass Magazine, “the company is currently deploying a three-year pilot process with the goal of opening a 153 MMgy (10,000 barrel per day) production facility by 2011 at a site yet to be determined.” Using my fuzzy math above, that equates to a minimum of 92 cubic kilometers of air a day. Still seems like a lot.

So where will all of the CO2 come from?

Source: Watts Up With That? (Be sure and read the whole post over there).

Commentary

This is the one thing enviro-weenies seem to forget when they try to force alternative energy on us…it is usually not scalable the way oil is scalable. They make good supplemental sources of energy, but cannot replace oil completely.

I am very interested to see more research in this direction for producing fuels from biological sources that are not also food sources. Al Fin has a post on a similar effort that boasts 100,000 gallons of oil an acre production, which leaves me to ponder the possibility of lefties and enviro-weenies (often the same creature) will begin to oppose that process should it promise to free us from bondage to the Middle East, and perhaps create true wealth here. If it is successful…count on it as surely as the protests against wind mills and clean coal plants…which they championed a few years ago.

Our Next National Purpose: The Lexington Project

Senator John McCain has a plan: 

Our nation’s future security and prosperity depends on the next President making the hard choices that will break our nation’s strategic dependence on foreign sources of energy and will ensure our economic prosperity by meeting tomorrow’s demands for a clean portfolio. John McCain has made the necessary choices – producing more power, pushing technology to help free our transportation sector from its use of foreign oil, cleaning up our air and addressing climate change, and ensuring that Americans have dependable energy sources. John McCain will lead the effort to develop advanced transportation technologies and alternative fuels to promote energy independence and cut off the flow of oil wealth to repressive dictatorships like Iran.

Source: The Lexington Project

Commentary

While I do not agree with every aspect of his plan, I believe it is a step in the right direction. Just by announcing our intent to drill more oil here at home would send oil prices lower.

I have problems with McCain’s extremely ignorant view on what he calls “speculators”. The very word belies a Marxist connotation. If he is against someone betting on prices going up (called going long), then he should be against someone betting on prices going down (going short), and one would think he is against people trading stocks, futures, or other financial instruments just to make money. Someone should educate the Senator on what makes Capitalism work. The markets are the best indicator of how the economy is doing, and makes judgment calls on the worth of companies and entire segments of the economy of far more efficiently than any economist, or group of economists ever could.

I support The Lexington Project just on the merits of using our own resources, which would be better than giving our money to despots in the Middle East. That money would be better spent paying Americans to do the work here. And oil jobs pay well. Very well. I have a friend who works on an oil rig off the coast of Louisiana six months out of the year, and takes the other six months off to do whatever he wants.
 
Something like this could supercharge our economy beyond our wildest creams…and the worst lefty nightmare.

Who Needs Oil or Ethanol When You Can Grow Algae?

…PetroSun BioFuels Refining has entered into a joint venture to construct and operate a biodiesel refinery near Coolidge, Arizona. The feedstock for the refinery will be algal oil produced by PetroSun BioFuels at company owned and operated algae farms to be located in Arizona….The refinery will have an annual production capacity of thirty million gallons and will produce 100% renewable biodiesel. PetroSun BioFuels will process the residual algae biomass into ethanol….Petrosun claims that Independent studies have demonstrated that algae is capable of producing in excess of 30 times more oil per acre than corn and soybean crops.

Source: Al Fin

The Free Market will find a way to solve our problems, if only the givernment will get out of the way…

West Carolina Report and Ten Myths About Nuclear Power

Not that they have anything to do with one another, I just didn’t want to do a post for each topic.

West Carolina Report

First, I have updated the first four pages of West Carolina Report with news headlines that link to the news of the day. Of course, the widgets on those pages are always up-to-date, thanks to the miracle of RSS Feeds. I will have my state and local widgets ready soon. I also have upgraded the hosting because I exceeded my bandwidth allocation for last month. I’ve got 600GB now…and I’m not likely to exceed that anytime soon (unless one of the big boys link to me again!) and it also affords me more hard disk space that will allow me to make the next phase of improvements I have been planning.

Ten Myths About Nuclear Power

1. Uranium is running out
2. Nuclear is not a low-carbon option
3. Nuclear power is expensive
4. Reactors produce too much waste
5. Decommissioning is too expensive
6. Building reactors takes too long
7. Leukemia rates are higher near reactors
8. Reactors lead to weapons proliferation
9. Wind and wave power are more sustainable
10. Reactors are a terrorist target

Source: Amy Ridenour’s National Center Blog

Be sure to click over to read Amy’s post, and follow her links and arm yourself to combat the Lies From The Left on nuclear power. I’m still disappointed that Duke Power didn’t go through with the nuke plant in Macon County. That would have been cool, and a great boost to the local economy, not to mention giving the local greenie weenies a heart attack!