Autosanity|Just another WordPress weblog

Like it or not, oil (and gasoline), coal and natural gas will be in our future for as far out as we can see. No, we haven’t reached “peak oil“,  as the doomsayers like to think. New reserves are being located around the world, with potential supplies increasing, proving “experts” wrong at every turn. If we just had the guts and the leadership in the US to allow US oil companies to extract the oil that is rightfully ours. The Chinese have no such problem - they’re 50 miles off our southern coasts sucking up oil that we should be taking.

Alternate Technologies

Sure, we would all love to have a car that we could fill with water and drive to work. Or one that we’d plug in at night, and by morning would be charged up and ready to go shopping. Or, top off the fuel cell family cruiser down at the local hydrogen fueling station for the trip to grandma’s. Here’s the reality - the water car is a fraud (at least with conventional technology), battery technology won’t really give the range for modern commuter needs, and the hydrogen fuel cell car costs at least a million dollars a copy, so far. As one or more of these technologies becomes viable down the road, it will take some time to become mainstream. Remember, with the advent of the automobile a century ago, horses were still in use some thirty years after most people were driving cars.

Power For A Nation

Coal fired power plants will be with us for a long time - note that “environmentalists” over the last few decades have effectively prevented any new US nuclear plants from being built. Even if we started today, attempting to meet the energy needs of a modern and productive society with anything but coal will take decades. Energy-wise, short-sighted policies aimed mainly at appeasing the environmental lobby has cost the US dearly. France has learned well. After the energy shocks of the early 1970’s, France embarked on a nuclear power plant program and today derives 76% of its electricity from the splitting of the atom. The US? A paltry 20%.

How about wind and solar power? Although these technologies can be quite successful in certain locations, don’t expect them to fill a large portion of our future energy needs (about 1% by 2025) - and the technology is still developing.

For now, the future is here, if we just have the courage and vision to make it happen.