far OT: $2 bucks a litre?

we have 1.40 Euros/liter or a bit less right now with 1.45 after hurricane Kathrina - so with 1.30US$/Euro 2US$/liter this is about reality for us. And yes, most of the cars here are more fuel-efficient than US-cars - but do not forget European gas has more octane power. My car is a Renault Scenic (kind of mini-van) with enough space for a family of two adults and two children. I need 6-7.5 liters for 100 km when I drive outside the city and stay below 140 km/h I need about 8-9 liters in city-traffic and 10-11 if I drive really fast (160-190 km/h - remember there is no general speed limit on German "Autobahn"). My car has a 1.6 liter engine 16V and has 107 horsepowers. Some small cars stay below 3.5l/100km.
Hybride and O2-cars are in production and already on the roads but the gas stations are not too many. Germany tries to make more energy with "renewable sources" like wind and waterpower - some solar-power-plants too, but not too many. If I remember right, Bavaria is close to 10% with renewable energies.
In the US you semm to have quite some potential
methane from Texas (make money/enegy out of bullshit...)
heat from inside the earth in Yellowstone
waterpower near the great lakes, in the Rocky mountains and from the tide-differences at the sea-shores
wind-power from large rotor-parks in the sea (out of sight)
maybe in the south: ethanol from sugar...

some developments were bought and patented by the large gas-industrial players. BP advertises with "Beyond Petrol" over here. I guess they will make lots of money with gas - and when there is stagnation or less consumption they will come up with attractive alternatives right out of the drawer...

Andreas
 
Pan Tau here in the states there are several states that have speed limits of 75 miles per hour on their Interstate Highways, Oklahoma is one.:D
Some years ago a very few states had a speed limit of, "Reasonable and Prudent" which means that if conditions were right you could drive 120-130 mph without getting into trouble.:thumbup:
I think all of those speed limits were repealed when the double nickle or 55 mph speed limit went into effect nationwide in the '70s.:(

I'm too lazy right now to look up a Metric to English converter but I know that 100 kmh = about 62 mph so roughly using that figure 100 kmh + 50 kmh = 150 kmh = 62 mph + 31 mph = 93 mph.
I don't drive that fast anymore, fixed income and can't afford the ticket should I get one, but I used to almost all the time when I was young and working.;)
Generally over here if the speed limit is 75 mph and you're doing 80 you will be safe, under some cirumstances even 85 wouldn't get you a ticket for speeding.
Where the speed limit is 65 mph, going into Tulsa for example most people drive 70 and 75 mph and a few get tickets. Almost everyone drives 5 miles over the posted limit anyway.

Here lately I have slowed down and left a little earlier to get where I'm going but the difference in savings is small.
At 68 mph on cruise control my '05 Camry with the 5 speed automatic transmission runs about 2,100 rpm and at 58 mph the engine is running about 1,900 rpm. Saves about 1-1/2 mpg.:grumpy:
Not hardly worth it. But I have noticed with the cars passing me at an even greater rate of speed are oftentimes setting at a stop light when I pull up behind them after exiting from the freeway.:)
Our Camry gets 23-25 mpg driving in town. When we went to Phoenix earlier this year we averaged 31 mpg round trip.
I'll be glad when we get about 20,000 miles on it as the gas mileage should improve slightly.
Only have 7,000 miles on it now and bought it last November.:rolleyes: ;)
 
tychoseven said:
Personally, I can't wait. I'm probably in the minority, but I would welcome the collapse of Western society with joy and laughter. I'm going to bide my time and not make any predictions, dire or optimistic. We'll see what the long-term impact is eventually, and if it means economic collapse, I couldn't be happier. Humans aren't going to stop our cancerous growth unless forced to do so. It's the cultural values that need to change, and hybrid cars or more efficient appliances won't accomplish that. We could have been smart and used fossil fuels to build a sustainable society that would outlast oil, but instead we squandered it all making plastic junk that just ends up in the landfill 5 years hence.

I, for one, am not split on the issue. Bring on the apocalypse. Or not, but I'm still checking out of this diseased society and living in the hills where I can have a nice view of the trees instead of the strip-mall.

-Tycho-

You need to go watch the OLD movie: 'Things to Come' by H.G. Wells...While I do not agree with Wells' socialist leanings(and I do not think he would like the way the socialist countries turned out), this movie has a LOT that we can learn from... Warning, it is dated in the extreme, but IF you get a good copy, the special effects are STILL good, and the IDEAS have not aged at all... If anything, they are MORE important today, than then...
 
Satori said:
<snip>

The problem with vehicles driven by air, hydrogen, electricity, etc. is that the "fuel" in this case is just stored energy converted from another source - that source is usually petroleum. We're merely shifting the blame. It's a start but we have a lot of work to do before we've solved anything. Hybrid cars are a great idea but we're merely improving efficiency, not changing our strategy. (And, as some have found out, there are limits to what they can achieve, marketing hype aside.)

If you had not brought this up, I was going to!

But even more important that shifting the blame, is that EVERY time you change the form of energy there are LOSSES involved, and NOT small ones...
People keep bringing up hydrogen as an alternative energy source, but it is NOT. There are NO hydrogen wells...We make it with electricity! And at a net LOSS in energy!
Do not get me wrong, hydrogen is a MUCH better way to power automobiles than electricy, but you must have CHEAP electricity for it to work...
We need more sources of energy... and there are quite a few, but many of them are not economical right now...


Wind power is mantance intensive, and the eco-nuts(not the true ecologists) thing they hurt too many birds.

Ocean Thermal work, but is mantance intensive.

Ocean Wave is too distructive to use on a LARGE scale.

Geo Thermal is good in the areas that have the right conditions.

Fusion has been 20 years away for the last 40 years.

Cold Fusion is not really being researched in the US because of the Chemists/Physicsist's turf war, but the Japanese are researching it HEAVILY, because while no one knows if it is really 'fusion' or not, it IS producing more energy than is being put in.

Nuclear is HATED by the environmentlists, even though it is the cleanest method of power generation that we have(When done properly).
Pebble bed reactors MAY help to change that...

Oil...Ok, this is a strange one... We keep discovering more and more oil in different parts of the US(the latest is supposed to be greater than the sum total of oil in the middle east:eek:), but we find all sorts of excuses not to drill for it... I have been getting a sneeking suspission that we are just waiting for all the rest of the world to run out, and then suddenly say: 'Sorry about you all running out of oil, but we have a hundred year supply here, and our economy can continue while yours goes down the drain' or 'Sorry about you all running out of oil, but we have a hundred year supply here, and we are going to be nice and sell it to you for only a modest markup over what you sold it to us for(you know, when you were gouging us with price hikes) plus a modest amouse of taxes, duties, shipping charges, fees, etc...'
There is also the strange occurence of a lot of OLD oil fields all around the world that after being left unused for a long time, seem to be filling up again!:eek: There are varous theories about this, but one of the most interesting of these comes from Thomas Gold... HERE is a link to get you started. It is not the best report, but I do not have access to all my bookmarks here at work, what with me being the only person in a 20 story building after a hurracane!

There are many more, but I am too tired of typing right now to continue...
 
The story that gets tossed around a lot about "dry" wells becoming productive again, and the one that I'm inclined to believe, is this:

A well doesn't suddenly go dry one day. Instead, after a peak production is hit, the amount will gradually decrease over time. At a certain point it's no longer cost effective to work that particular well and it's considered dry, regardless of how much crude is left.

As the price on crude rises it suddenly becomes profitable to work some of these wells again, and voila! The well is no longer dry. In this case it's more a matter of one's definitions than anything odd.

Another good theory that makes perfect sense is that there are varying amounts of oil "around" the area actually being tapped, and if the well sits for a while this extra oil will seep back into the tapped area. The same amount is there; we just couldn't get to it all at once.

I've done some reading about the theory of endless oil and I'm far from convinced. Besides the fact that (as the author mentioned in that article no less) it's not usually profitable to drill that deep, the endless oil camp has yet to provide any real proof that they're correct beyond the fact that oil sometimes turns up where it's not expected. Oil is found in places it's not supposed to be in? So is gold, platinum, diamonds, and any number of other resources. It doesn't mean that the Earth is continually producing more of these - it simply means that we haven't looked everywhere yet.
 
Satori said:
The story that gets tossed around a lot about "dry" wells becoming productive again, and the one that I'm inclined to believe, is this:

A well doesn't suddenly go dry one day. Instead, after a peak production is hit, the amount will gradually decrease over time. At a certain point it's no longer cost effective to work that particular well and it's considered dry, regardless of how much crude is left.

As the price on crude rises it suddenly becomes profitable to work some of these wells again, and voila! The well is no longer dry. In this case it's more a matter of one's definitions than anything odd.

Another good theory that makes perfect sense is that there are varying amounts of oil "around" the area actually being tapped, and if the well sits for a while this extra oil will seep back into the tapped area. The same amount is there; we just couldn't get to it all at once.

I've done some reading about the theory of endless oil and I'm far from convinced. Besides the fact that (as the author mentioned in that article no less) it's not usually profitable to drill that deep, the endless oil camp has yet to provide any real proof that they're correct beyond the fact that oil sometimes turns up where it's not expected. Oil is found in places it's not supposed to be in? So is gold, platinum, diamonds, and any number of other resources. It doesn't mean that the Earth is continually producing more of these - it simply means that we haven't looked everywhere yet.

I agree that a nothing is proven, but a LOT of thing Gold said that were dismissed at the time were later proven...
Things like Deep underground life... Deep ocean vent life...
He also invented the ultra-sound device, but was told to stop work on it because it was not connected to his work(he was an astronomer at the time!)...
The man switched from field to field, and started from first principles each time... He noticed a lot of things that people that worked off of others theories did not... Sometimes it is a good thing to step back and start from scratch using what you know about other fields to rediscover the roots of another field...
There were many times where the experts in a field dismissed one of his theories, only to have that theory become mainstream YEARS later...

There have been a 'few' wells that have been filling up MUCH faster than expected from the other theories...
And these wells were not dry by economic definations, but had stopped producing almost compleatly...
I will TRY to find my old links...
 
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