Do you think we should open up Drilling off the Coasts. Simple question. I personally don't have a problem with Offshore Drilling, I think there is plenty of ocean to go around, to put it simply.
I agree with you but people should understand, (1) It's only a small part of what we need to do. Reducing consumption will have a much greater impact on weaning us from these countries that hate us & (2) It will be many years before the first drop of oil from these new sources is refined. Someone in another thread said drilling was a "quick fix". There is absolutely nothing quick about it at all. The #1 agenda item should be putting more resources into developing alternative energy sources and not letting the oil companies buy these alternative technologies so as to control them. For maximum benefit to the public there must be competition. #1A should be raising fuel efficiency standards at a more rapid rate. Perhaps our new president & V.P. won't be bought and paid for by the oil industry and we can speed up progress. We must not start the drilling without a aggressive comprehensive plan going forward. National security and survival is at stake.
Amen.... Also, we should look at technolgies that use the current fuel source more effeciently. Oil companies for years have been buying up patents and companies that make fuel consumption much more efficient. Also, we are still using the piston engine....the same technology created in the late 1800s......there was a group of engineers that developed a turbine engine for cars (saw a discovery channel show on it) but the car companies did not want to retool their factories.... They were getting much higher MPG rates than the piston engines. DD
I'm all for reducing consumption, but how do you propose we 'reduce consumption'? If you think drilling a well for oil takes time (5-10 years), how long do you think it would take to revamp how and what we drive to work?
As Joe Biden repeatedly said yesterday on MTP we are not drilling/ pumping oil on 79% of the offshore lease areas already approved for the purpose. Some of these areas are off the shores of states that would have to grant a waiver -- South Carolina for example is one of them. Republican Senator Lindsey Graham (South Carolina) seems very open to drilling in Alaska/ Florida/ etc., but seems quite reluctant to spearhead the effort get the state waiver required for drilling off the coast of his state. Seems as though he has a classic case of NIMB -- not in my backyard.
I wouldn't mind some sort of compromise out of the whole situation. The oil companies can drill, and the government passes a feed in law. A tax on said oil could go towards subsidizing the cost of the tariffs.
Do you have a link to that? Turbines, especially small turbines, are horribly inefficient. Electric motors are more efficient than small combustion engines will ever be imo.
I have been looking for it, but if I recall correctly they had found a way to use a helicopter turbine engine in a Saturn and drove from Houston to New York on one tank of gas. They leaders of the deal were two ex HP engineers/executives.... They formed a car company and could not get any traction with the biggies because of them having to retool their factories...and they went away.... But their idea was solid, and they were getting insane mileage.... DD
This is a little off the deep end but I'm going to say it. I liken the oil companies to the regional bell telephone companies who would have the status quo last forever because that is in their interests. Think of how telephone service developed after Ma Bell was broken up. It didn't, very much. It took the introduction of cellular phone service to kick-start things into the huge snowball of change we have now. I don't like using the word, but I hated SBC Communications because of their business practices and what they represented. I could go on about this but no use in derailing the thread. When competitive alternatives to oil are researched and developed without the iron hand of control by oil companies, I think we could see the same kind of innovation in fuel and energy sources. I know the right-wingers won't like this, but government funding should be involved to expedite things. wesnesked, well spoken. The very painful fact is there is no quick action with long term benefits. Our new president needs to use the bully pulpit and demand more responsibility from American citizens in their use of energy and from vehicle manufacturers in what they build. You are right it will take time. Reducing consumption and developing alternatives isn't a "quick fix" either but has much bigger upside than just drilling more.
This is something that has annoyed me for a long time -- I can't believe we are still using 19th century technology as our primary means of transportation (power) and in many other applications of energy production.
Found a link to an article about them...will post more as I dig deeper First successful test <object width="425" height="344"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/xG66JQmdMv8&hl=en"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/xG66JQmdMv8&hl=en" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" width="425" height="344"></embed></object> and here is why the auto manufacturers did not buy in....so sad DD
Ultimately, drilling in ANWR or additional drilling off U.S. coasts may be justified, but access should be held hostage to massive government investments in alternative energy research/development and legislation mandating much higher mpg for the U.S. fleet and other conservation measures. If we don't do that, then opening up ANWR and the coasts will just delay our day of reckoning, drop gas prices a few cents a gallon, but make massive profits for the oil companies.
http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/06/18/business/ships.php Rush to exploit new offshore oil hampered by shortage of drilling ships By Jad Mouawad and Martin Fackler Wednesday, June 18, 2008 As President George W. Bush considers repealing a ban on drilling off most of the coast of the United States, a shortage of ships used for such drilling promises to impede any rapid turnaround in oil exploration. Slow growth in oil supplies, at a time of soaring demand, has been a major factor in the spike in oil and gasoline prices. In recent years, a global shortage of drill ships has created a critical bottleneck, frustrating energy company executives and constraining their ability to exploit known reserves or find new ones. As oil trades at more than $135 a barrel - up from $68 a year ago - drill ships around the world are booked solid for the next five years. Some oil companies have been forced to postpone exploration while waiting for a drilling rig, executives and analysts said. Demand is so high that shipbuilders, the biggest of which are in Asia, have raised prices since last year by as much as $100 million per vessel to about half a billion dollars. "The crunch on rigs is everywhere," said Alberto Guimarães, a senior executive in charge of developments in the Gulf of Mexico at Petrobras, the Brazilian oil company that has discovered some of the most promising offshore oil but been unable to get at it. "Almost 100 percent of the oil companies are constrained in their investment program because there is no rig available," he said. As a result, drilling costs for some of the newest deep-water rigs in the Gulf of Mexico, for example, have reached about $600,000 a day, compared with $150,000 a day in 2002. These record prices have spurred a wave of drill ship construction, which could spark a wave of offshore oil exploration that would eventually bring more supplies to an oil-thirsty market and push down prices. Already, 16 new drill ships are scheduled to be delivered to oil companies this year - more than double the number delivered over the last six years combined. In fact, 75 ultra-deep-water rigs should be delivered between 2008 and 2011, according to ODS-Petrodata, a company that tracks drilling rigs. Shipyards from South Korea to Norway are working overtime to meet a huge influx of orders. Robert Long, the chief executive officer of Transocean, the largest drilling company in the world, said he had nine new deep-water rigs under construction, eight of which have already been contracted for periods ranging from four to seven years once they leave the shipyards. He expects to get the new ships between the beginning of 2009 and the end of 2010. Transocean believes the deep-water market will continue to be constrained until at least 2012. More than three-quarters of the drill ships currently under construction have already been contracted to oil companies eager to benefit from triple-digit oil prices, Long said. Petrobras, whose full name is Petróleo Brasileiro, is expected to drive much of the growth in the booming market. The company has outlined an aggressive program to increase its drilling capacity, and plans to contract or build 69 deep-water drill ships by 2017. Brazil stunned the oil world when it announced the discovery of a massive oil field 200 miles, or 320 kilometers, south of Rio de Janeiro in November, turning the country's deep blue waters into the most exciting oil frontier. Energy experts said the field could turn out to be just a small part of the largest oil discovery in 30 years. But seven months later, the trouble is still how to get at it. Petrobras has only three rigs capable of drilling in waters that exceed 6,500 feet, or 1,980 meters, where the new fields are located. But drilling constraints are not the only problem facing international oil companies, which are seeking to expand at a furious pace after a decade of under-investment in the 1990s. They have also had to contend with a doubling of development costs across the industry in the past five years, more acute competition for energy resources, shortages in steel, engineering, and manufacturing capacity, and pressures posed by an aging work force. Also, gaining access to countries that hold oil reserves is becoming tougher. Many oil-rich governments see fewer incentives to lift production as they reap the benefits of higher prices. As a result, explorers are scouring ever-more remote corners of the globe in their hunt for hydrocarbons. That quest has unlocked petroleum reserves offshore from Africa and Brazil, and opened up promising exploration regions in the South China Sea, offshore India, or around the coast of Australia. But those sites will remain largely off limits until the new drill ships arrive. Most of today's new orders have gone to Asian shipyards. Companies in Singapore and China have benefited, but South Korea's big three shipbuilders - Samsung Heavy Industries, Daewoo Shipbuilding & Marine Engineering and Hyundai Heavy Industries - have gotten the lion's share of orders for the most complex and expensive types of vessels. "The market for offshore exploration is now the hottest sector in the global shipbuilding industry," said Lee Jae Kyu, a shipbuilding analyst at Mirae Asset Securities in Seoul. At Samsung's sprawling shipyard on the southern Korean island of Geoje, next to the gigantic hulls of half-finished supertankers, cranes and dry docks work overtime to construct odd-looking drill ships like the West Polaris. At 62,400 tons, the West Polaris, which is supposed to be delivered this month, is larger than a World War II aircraft carrier. The pipes and steel scaffolding of its drill loom over the other ships lining up the construction yard, like cars in an oversized parking lot. The shipyard and its 25,000 workers bustle with activity, emitting a cacophony of clanging construction sounds, the roar of motors and short musical ditties used to warn of moving cranes. These sounds echo in the emerald hills behind the yard, which stretches across one side of a deep blue bay. "The oil reserves that were easy to reach are all drying up," said Harris Lee, vice president in charge of Samsung's offshore drilling rig business. "The future is in exploring the deep seas and harsh environments." A big challenge in deep-sea drilling is staying over the same spot on the sea floor even as the vessel is buffeted by strong winds, currents and waves on the surface far above. Because water depths can reach up to 10,000 feet, far too deep for traditional rigs that are moored to the seafloor, ships like the West Polaris rely on high-speed computers that use global-positioning satellites to control an array of six swiveling propellers on the hull's bottom. The ship was ordered by Seadrill, a Bermuda-based offshore exploration company, for $453 million. Last month, Samsung said it had received a $942 million contract to build an even hardier type of drill ship designed specifically for Artic conditions. The vessel, ordered by Stena Offshore in Sweden, will have thick hulls strong enough to break through ice, withstand 50-foot waves and insulate the men and machinery within from outside temperatures far below freezing. Samsung's sales of all types of offshore drilling vessels had jumped to $7.8 billion last year up from $1.5 billion in 2005. Despite the construction frenzy, the tightness in the rig market could last several more years. The last such boom in orders came in the late 1970s and early 1980s, when exploration rose after the 1970s oil shocks. In the 1990s, low oil prices and overflowing oil supplies meant that oil companies drastically cut back on exploration. "It will certainly mean more drilling activity and more discoveries in the deep-water side," said Tom Kellock, the head of consulting and research at ODS-Petrodata. Jad Mouawad reported from New York and Martin Fackler from Geoje, South Korea.
I've long wondered why turbines haven't seriously been developed for cars -- it's like forcing airplanes to fly with piston driven props instead of jet engines.
Great article from Ben Rosen and how they were too early in the Hybrid car market, also it explains how slowly car makers move Here is an ex area 51 scientist who has developed a hydrogen conversion kit for existing cars, the government gave them problems but they finally got approved. Even more info about that hydrogen car from Bob Lazar. There are alternatives....we just need to use them. DD
They use a jet turbine engine on the M1 Abrams tank. It gives great performance results but they are incredibly inefficient. Essentially, they work best and most efficiently at sustained high RPMs. With cars which have to start and stop very regularly they become insanely wasteful.
