RSS Feed MenuTwo recent New York Times articles are worthy of note on the energy front.
Those of us involved in the energy biz have known for years that the need for water is one of the many stumbling blocks to large-scale solar power development. Those solar arrays in the desert need water to wash the panels, and that’s nothing compared to the water demand presented by solar trough technology. Now everybody else is finding out about it too. It’s not easy being green, as the song goes, and we are only beginning to discover just how hard it is.
On the other end of the energy spectrum is the discovery that there remains plenty of oil to be found out there. BP’s giant Tiber field might not be another Cantarell (the field that put Mexico on the oil map in the 1970s), but then again, it might be. In the last decade, technology has taken off, allowing fields that were supposed to be played out long ago (Alaska’s Prudhoe Bay, for example) to keep on giving. So when are we going to lift that bizarre ban on exploration off Florida and California and really start producing oil and gas in the US again?
Reason60 // Oct 8, 2009 at 11:00 pm
We are, as so nicely pointed out by GWB, addicted to cheap oil.
I do understand that alternative energy sources are expensive and difficult to obtain.
But it seems to be madness to continue to feed this addiction, by chasing after ever more difficult oil sources, even knowing that it is slowly killing us in myriad ways.
Of all the courses we could choose, attempting to make oil cheap is not one that makes sense.
sinz54 // Oct 9, 2009 at 10:12 am
America will have more trouble adjusting to the new energy realities than Europe.
America is a BIG country, 3,000 miles across, plus Alaska and Hawaii which are much further away. I can’t take Amtrak from Massachusetts to Hawaii.
Plus, America’s population density per square mile is much lower than Japan or any European country. The American lifestyle is oriented around suburbs, for which the family car is the only viable means of transportation.
And so, 70% of America’s energy needs go for transportation. I can’t run my car on solar power. Like many others, I park my car in the street, making electric recharging impossible.
Right now, the best compromise solution for cars and trucks and home heating seems to be natural gas. It’s straightforward to transport. It pollutes less. It gives off less greenhouse gas. And North America has plenty of it.
But I see no alternative to Jet-A fuel for jetliners. And jetliners are the only practical way to traverse the North American continent. As an engineer, I was accustomed to flying from Massachusetts to California on Sunday, having a four-day business meeting there, and then flying back home to Massachusetts on Friday. Rail would require two extra days, making business conferences like those impossible.
At least, the new generation of jetliners like Boeing’s 787 will be much more fuel efficient.