Too little oil or too much money?

[EJ]

Who's on first? Are the central banks causing commodities prices to rise or are they simply printing the money they need to print to meet money demand due to tight supply?

[BK]

I vote for too much money is available to people who desire to use oil.

Loose Banking standards around the world have created a lot of debt - you need CASH to service that debt. The more cash that is around the bigger risks people take with their cash. to keep pace with inflation and make money. The rising Debt increase the price you can get for your home or a commodity - the availability of Liquidity - drives the value of real assets and services. This creates Economic confidence for the Debtors.
Debt begets more debt and this drives the need for more CASH.

Meanwhile commodities, Medical Services, education, local Government services (paid for by property taxes) all increase because there is no low cost alternative supplier and there is cash (credit, cash, HELOCS, Bonds) available to pay for these ever increasing items.
The Perception of the average Joe and the local Governments is that you can always access more financial capital. Anyone who knows Economic history knows this is a false premise. If we perceived Cash to be hard to find we would hoard the cash (choosing to give up oil to keep more of our cash).

[ChessMan]

"$10 per barrel in 1999 to over $72 today. Not to put too fine a point on it, that's a 720% increase"

A correction: that's a 620% increase, though the new price is 720% of the old price. Easy to see when you think of oil at $20, that's a 100% increase, not 200%.

[ChessMan]

You state erroneously that the laws of thermodynamics are holding us back from more efficient means of transportation. The thermodynamic efficiency of a typical internal combustion engine is 25% to 35%. That is, of the energy chemically stored in the fuel, 25% to 35% is converted into work, the remainder is converted into heat.

You are right in saying that we can't get more heat from fossil fuels. The generation of heat is always 100% efficient, it's the final form of energy. So you cannot improve the amount of heat in your home without investing in better insulation, without reducing the heat lost up the chimney, etc.

Engineering a significantly more efficient engine may be nearly impossible, but that is not what you were saying. If I understand your argument, you were saying thermodynamics prevented more efficient transportation. That isn't true.

[EJ]

Are you responding to Part II which will be posted next week?

[ChessMan]

I think it's this line that motivated me to reply: "Instead, the world will soon be forced back to a time when a lot more work, in a thermodynamic sense, was required to heat homes and fuel transport."

[econoblogger]

Shale oil, oil sands, pebble stone nuclear reactors, coal, solar, wind and bio are all viable alternatives at current prices. Conservation alone can easily drop another 20% off the USA demand side for oil. We will adapt, just as we did in the 70s when we lowered the demand for fossil fuels through conservation by 20% and oil prices subsequently collapsed. Human beings will adapt. Let the free market decide!

[blazespinnaker]

Yup, I agree.

The only crisis Oil will create is as a trigger into a recession / hard landing for the housing market.

In many ways, that will lower the demand for oil due to decreased demand in itself. We may find that oil prices then crash.

[Alfredo Dominguez]

In many ways, that will lower the demand for oil due to decreased demand in itself. We may find that oil prices then crash.


Except that the point of the article is that the oil price rises are only in small part a result of supply/demand factors and have had much more to do with money supply. If a decline in demand (recessionary) is met with a reflation effort by the Fed (which is what the Fed does after it has caused a recession) that negates the price effect of the demand reduction, how will the oil price crash?

[econoblogger]

Oil prices may be up over 600% in 7 years, but the dollar is down by about 40%. So, in real terms oil prices are still high relative to liquidity. Another way to look at it with respect to liquidity (inflation) is the amount of new drilling activity. If there wasn't any money to be made then this would not be happening.

I think there is a lot of speculative money in the futures markets that are holding the prices where they are. It's not all demand driven. If you look at gasoline stockpiles in the USA they are about average or even a little above average for this time of the year. I think prices are vulnerable should the speculators turn their attention away.

[Chris Coles]

Eric,

You have made a bold statement that is absolutely not true. I quote :"oil will eventually be overtaken by less-costly alternatives" can't possibly be true unless the laws of thermodynamics are repealed.””

You have arrived at your argument through a modern presumption that has already been shattered. And, even more importantly, the end game for heat as an energy source started way back in the 1960’s. I well remember finding a book by an English professor extolling the amazing virtues of what was then a totally new technology, rare earth magnets. He predicted small electric motors at a time when the only vehicle that had an electric starter motor was a car or lorry, (an automobile or truck to Americans). Have you not noticed the very small starter motors on motorcycles, for example, or the tiny electric motors on your new electric tooth brush? Almost everyone has failed to notice that these new motors were leaping ahead in efficiency. But like any inventor before him, one man had both the vision and the courage to walk ahead of everyone else and try and beat that 100% limit. Remember; never say to an inventor “impossible” as all you will achieve is to spur them on to even higher efforts.

One of the fascinating aspects of walking down a technological road is watching how fast innovation can work once unleashed and moving forward. You are actually watching the end game for heat energy. Heat as a source of power will disappear very soon now and a man called Minato will soon become as well known as any in history.

http://japaninc.com/article.php?articleID=1302&page=1

Read on, and remember, this is just the start. The end game will realise the wildest dreams of the most futuristic science fiction writers.

Chris Coles.

[Chris Coles]

And this came in fresh immediately after I posted, another example of how magnetism is way ahead of heat engines.

+--------------------------------------------------------------------+
| Electric Car Faster Than A Ferrari or Porsche |
| from the quite-a-cart dept. |
| posted by Zonk on Friday May 05, @11:50 (Businesses) |
| http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/05/05/151234 |
+--------------------------------------------------------------------+

jumpeel writes "CNN's Business 2.0 has photos and video of a Silicon Valley-made electric car with a 0-60 acceleration rate that's [0]faster than a Ferrari Spider and a Porsche Carrera. From the article: 'In fact, it's second only to the French-made Bugatti Veyron, a 1,000-horsepower, 16-cylinder beast that hits 60 mph half a second faster and goes for $1.25 million.' The X1 is built by Ian Wright whose valley startup WrightSpeed intends to make a 'a small-production roadster that car fanatics and weekend warriors will happily take home for about $100,000 --a quarter ton of batteries included. The X1 crushed the Ferrari in an eighth-mile sprint and then in the quarter-mile, winning by two car lengths.'"

Discuss this story at:
http://hardware.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=06/05/05/151234

Links:
0. http://money.cnn.com/2006/05/04/technology/business2_wrightspeed/

[EJ]

Apologizes for the confusion. I refute Greenspan's assertion in the second part and only raise the question at the end of Part I to let readers know what Part II is about. You'll hear my full argument next week and I look forward to a lively debate afterward.

In brief, I will focus on fuel for transport because that's where we're really going to run into trouble if the transition from cheap to expensive fuels happens quickly, say, over a decade versus several.

What most do not appreciate is the amazing power density of gasoline, BTUs by volume, and how so many aspecets of our economy, from the structure of our transportation system (especially in the US) to the way we socialize depends on a cheap, high BTUs-per-gallon fluid that we can burn in internal combustion engines.

Oil is simply incredible stuff! You can pump it out of the ground, refine it, transport and store it at all naturally occurring temperatures on earth, pour it into two 84-gallon tanks that take up a mere 23 cubic feet of space under the rear of the cab of an 18-wheeler, and it takes that fully loaded tuck over 1000 miles. Amazing! Nature's battery made for us millions of years ago.

Every single other source of fluid transport energy has to be in one way or another manufactured by humans at considerable cost. Biodiesel requires agriculture that use scarce resources, including ariable land, water and petrochemicals for fertilizer. Hydrogen must be manufactured via the energy intensive process of hydrolosis, and is very expensove to transport and store as zero degrees Kelvin. All other substitutes for nature's batter, oil, are really batteries must be charged before we can use them... you can't just dig them out of the ground. This is where the net thermodynamic and thus economic cost of alternatives vs oil comes into play.

Pure electric cars charged via electricity from pebble bed nukes (I'm a big fan of that technology), are prectical in any climate where you do not need to either heat or air condition the vehicle, that is, just about nowhere. If you use batteries to heat and air condition a vehicle, their range drops to impractically short distances between charges. You can use hydrogen as fuel but as I mentioned it costs more than the equivalent of $200 per barrel of oil to manufacture, distribute and store. Then there's the problem of power density: for our 18-wheeler; you'll need two 1,100-gallon liquid hydrogen tanks that take up 316 cubic feet of space in the trailer to get the same 1,000 mile range, plus space for fuel cells that are needed to convert the hydrogen into usable energy.

All in all, there's no way around it. In the age of expensive oil, we'll have alternatives, but economics and thermodynamics means that we'll do a lot less travelling and moving things around the way we do it today ecause it will become very expensive to do: fewer private cars for long distance travel and more use of public transport is one obvious result, less commuting to work and more working from home is another. Energy economics will favor cities over suburbs. Think real estate is expensive in cities today? You ain't seen nothing yet. Details next week.

[Chris Coles]

You missed the point about Minato, there is no battery. He instead uses the immense power in the permanent magnet to drive his new motors. No oil. No Battery. No heat.

[BK]

Chris,

I think Eric was trying to drive home that heat generation is still required for heat generation.
So, often people forget how deeply Petro has built our civilization because of the ability to heat. Look at the population density you have in colder climates - it wouldn't be possible without easy/cheap heat generation.
I moved from a Boston area to Philadelphia area. I had never thought about how much climate affected the economics of an geography prior to Air Conditioning and cheap heating.

This magnet electric motor might be useful for Air Conditioning in the future, but you'll still need heat generation in the northern areas (where the bulk of the US Population lives). We'll have to drastically increase our Non-petro electicity sources and build out more electric grid infrastructure - all this requires Oil.

I see sleep caps coming back into style in the future.

[EJ]

Interesting. How much energy is required to create the magnet that is storing the energy that is converted into kenetic energy via the motor? You can't get out of it than you put in, else we are talking about a perpetual motion machine. Or are these magnets mined from the earth in a net positive energy process?

[Chris Coles]

BK,

You still miss the point. We have for so long seen the burning of fuel as being the only route directly associated with the production of energy, heat, that we fail to see the potential of using energy to produce heat. Yes, you could use nuclear, but again, that is burning fuel . Yes, if you create energy withouut heat there will need to be a wider electricity grid, but that cost pales into insignificance against the price we are now paying for heat. Let alone the long term implications for continuing to use heat to produce energy.

Heat engines directly stem from steam engines, which led to the internal combustion engine. We have been stuck in technology from over a century ago for too long now.

A permanent magnet is seen as not producing energy as it does not move when attached to a steel plate. That misunderstanding has lain at the heart of why we have not been able to see beyond heat engines. Minato is not the only inventor that has seen the potential and tried to drive out of the backwoods, but he is the first to show that all of us were right. It is possible to produce a rotating shaft using permanent magnets alone.

The whole world is in denial and so stuck to the heat engine paradym that it ignors the reality of an inventor that has solved the problem. Stop digging and look around, the present hole is too deep and we need that new thinking to survive as a species.

[Chris Coles]

I have permanent magnets that were energised in about 5 seconds that are still as strong more than a decade ago. This planet has a magnetic field billions of years old. Science does not fully understand magnetism, though it certainly is making great strides forward. In the same way, science does not understand gravity. But that is another matter.

The primary problem is that mainstream science has become a sort of theocracy, where ridgid thinking rules and free thinking is shunned. Thus perpetual motion is invoked when anyone can see that as soon as the magnets lose their power, (as they certainly will), they are not perpetual.

The future is all around you, but to get to it you have to cast aside tradional thinking, turn your backs to the fire, heat, and look up and see beyond technology that is over a century old.

Oh! and how much is that oil worth when Minato's thinking sinks in?

Effectively worthless. And that really brings this debate into focus doesn't it?

[EJ]

So the magnetic energy that drives Minato's magnetic motors is used up in the generation of kenetic energy. But how does the energy get stored in the magnets in the first place?

[Chris Coles]

Eric,

you need to go see for yourself. They take a mixture of fine particules of what, as a solid from melt, would be described as an alloy, exactly as they nowadays make sintered tips for machining metals or complex gears when making gear wheels for a Ford engine. They take the stamped amalgum of particles and briefly heat it to a high temperature, (sinter it), but in a strong magnetic field as it cools. Some can be magnetised afterwards, and then they take the sintered object and place it in a very strong magnetic field and turn the power on and off again. And still another way is to magnetise as they stamp it simply to align the magnetic poles of the individual particles. They just turn the power on and then off as they stamp it using a resin to hold the particles together. - That is IT! Nothing more. You are talking pennies of investment compared to oil.

Sure beats all those drills to ten thousand feet, refinaries, pipelines, trade and retail outlets. And you can hold it in your hands, no heat, no harmful effects, no polution. Pure stored energy. Beats petrol hands down.

But another thought comes to mind, who owns the rare earths?

[Chris Coles]

Let me see if I can bring this into focus. If you take a fridge magnet and weigh it. What? about two ounces? Now, how long has that magnet been stuck on the fridge, how many years? Let us say simply for a year.

OK. Now, let us take any other, non magnetic object of two ounces weight and see how we might hold that new object in that exact position for that timescale.

Say we will instead attach a tiny electric motor driving a small fan that gives enough thrust to hold the object still against the fridge door.

So what can we use as the energy source? OK, let us use small batteries., so how long are those batteries going to last. A day? I have friends flying tiny airplanes on such motors, but they last for 20 minutes. A day would be beyond belief.

Now, instead of a fridge magnet imagine something the same size that holds enough energy to hold your own weight off the ground. Permanently.

Your petrol generator will last four hours?

Your sintered rare earth magnet will last years. Its energy tank was filled in seconds. Oh! and science will shun you for being so bold as to suggest that there is work being done by that fridge magnet. Think about that?

[EJ]

I'm still stuck on the 1st Law of Thermodynamics, Conservation of Energy:

http://www.grc.nasa.gov/WWW/K-12/airplane/thermo1f.html

Where does the energy come from that is later converted into magnetic energy and later converted into kinetic energy with these motors? Is the stored energy in the magnets created at the point where they briefly heat the magnet to a high temperature, or from the electricity needed to generate a strong magnetic field as the magnet cools or to magnetize it afterwards, or when it's placed in a very strong magnetic field and power is turned on and off again. All of these processes involve power that mist be generate and then stored as magnetic force in the magnets. The magnets are the battery in this case versus liquid hydrogen, but you still need to charge them. Then there's the matter of the efficiency of the motors at turning that stored energy into kinetic energy. Perhaps these motors are better than electric motors, in which case the electrical energy used to charge these magnetic batteries must be less than the energy required to run electric motors from an electric source directly. That's unintuitive to me as it involves and extra step and therefor energy loss.

[ChessMan]

I have a degree in Chemical Engineering, so I know what I'm talking about.

You cannot create energy out of nothing.

Kohei Minato's electric/magnetic showpiece is at best a frictionless electric motor. That's the absolute best possible achievement. It's almost certainly not that good, but theoretically speaking, frictionless motion is possible.

That part where the gauges show less energy going in than energy coming out is bullshit. That's impossible over the long run. It's possible for the first few moments to have more energy coming out than going in but it's fleeting.

It's analgous to obseve a 1 Kg weight fall 10 stories, observe the energy and say, "1 Kg weights atop 10 story buildings are a new source of energy!" That is technically true, but how do you sustainably get 1 Kg weights up that high without expending energy? You cannot. Likewise, a magnet doesn't have the ability to sustainably provide energy in excess of what is put in. They have the ability to do a very limited amount of work in excess of input energy, but once the excess is used up you have to expend energy to replenish it.

Finally, if the reports of investors are true, then maybe somewhere in this gimmick there is some minor innovation. Maybe he's figured out how to slightly increase the efficiency.

So Chris, if no one has pointed this out to you before, please do some research and you'll see that what I have said is true.

If you continue to spout this bullshit, I'll think you are a liar.

[Chris Coles]

And the Earth is flat too.

That is why you have inventors. They do not trammel themselves with what is in a book, they look forward, beyond the impossible and into the future.

None of us can argue against Minato without first of all relpicating his motors. The patents are on full view in the United States Patent Office records. So, please, let us keep this debate in focus. I have opened up your thinking to a Japanese inventor that is selling motors yes, selling motors, that use much less electricity.I gather about 70% less electricity.

That alone should catch our attention full on.

Within his laboratory are devices that have been observed to break the fundamental laws of energy in a heat engine environment.

But this is a magnetic energy environment.

I suggest that you dampen down your anger and scientifically replicate his work. Either he is correct, or, you will have new reasoning beyond anger.

But arguing that to talk about new work that you do not understand is some form of heracy is not going to stand up as an argument.

Let the experimental results do the talking. Not your instincts.

As to the way the magnetism is stored. As I understand it, it is simply that you use electricity for a few seconds to magnetise. From there onwards, the magnet stays the same power for a very long time.

[EJ]

Most successes I've had have come by being open minded. Most failures by insufficient due diligence.

Buying precious metals in 2001 when the investment community hated them, my friends literally called me "nuts" and many of the folks I could find who supported the idea imbued PMs with magical powers. To my way of thinking they were at the time under-valued, largely due to the dynamic that developed over 20 years between the zealots and the phobics. Undervalued is what mattered to me, and being neither phobic nor zealot promoted a rational assessment.

I've also invested in more than one idea that didn't work out. Usually the error involved overlooking something obvious in the due diligence phase. The culprit is "believing" before belief is justified by the facts, followed by confirmation bias, the search for evidence that supports a belief after it is developed.

As for believing in this motor, so far can see that the efficiency of the motor is potentially exciting. Conserving energy will be a critical part of the solution to today's energy problems. A more efficient electric motor will, for example, increase the range of electric vehicles that use them. However, the fact is that the motor, like any motor, consumes energy; it does not produce energy. To believe that the motor produces energy one must also believe that the 1st Law of Thermodynamics, Conservation of Energy, is something that can be got around. I do not believe that it can.

[blazespinnaker]

Maybe it cools your drink while you drive

[Chris Coles]

Again, this is not thermodynamics.

His motor is very simple. Spread your fingers to represent a part of a disc with five elements on one side of the disc.. Take your index finger and make that an electromagnet, the thumb and finger on one side and the other two fingers are simply permanent magnets. Balance the forces with counter weights. On the outside, as a stator, you simply place one single electromagnet. Energise that outside electromagnet to attract the first two magnets. As they come to opposition, you turn on the on disc electromagnet and "bounce" that disc through the point of oppositioin so that the final phase is to change the polarity of the central electromagnetic area so as to repel the other two permanent magnets in the same direction of rotation.

All the electromagnets are doing is changing the magnetic polarity at appropriate moments in the rotation. Very simple. The power comes from the permanent magnets.

No one should invest in new thinking without being certain that they can accept failure. For failure is a natural part of innovation. To quote William Kingston, "Luck is an essential element of discovery, invention and innovation". It takes courage to travel down a road never before trodden my mankind.

[EJ]

Again, this is not thermodynamics.

No one should invest in new thinking without being certain that they can accept failure. For failure is a natural part of innovation. To quote William Kingston, "Luck is an essential element of discovery, invention and innovation". It takes courage to travel down a road never before trodden my mankind.



It's about thermodynamics if it's about producing energy.

Re investing and innovation, fair point. iTulip.com is a place for the skeptical, so true to form you're going to see a lot of skeptics here hammering on your idea. iTulipers don't accept anything at face value, so don't be offended by the grilling. I get it, too, and welcome it. That's how fresh hypotheses are honed into actionable ideas.

Skepticism has saved iTulipers bundles from losses such as from the collapse of the stock market bubble and soon losses from the housing bubble...

http://www.itulip.com/#dnews119

[Chris Coles]

Hammer away everyone. No one who is used to working with inventions has any bother taking debate fully on the chin. In fact, let it be said, innovation comes from someone else looking over the shoulder of invention and saying... hey, I reckon you have got it wrong... try this way???

The final contrarian point? Thermodynamics is definitely NOT magnetics. .. Well, just a point of view worthy of an ongoing debate.

Good Night all.

[blazespinnaker]

Yup, if this was frictionless (I doubt it) this would go on for quite awhile.

However, thermodynamics is everything here. This device needs some like of joints and it'll be releasing heat via friction which consumes energy.

It's energy which is required to spin into the magnetic field. That energy could have come from the repelling force, absolutely, however the friction on the way out consumed some of that energy.

Here's another example: take an astroid and all the energy it creates when pulled into the planet by gravity. So, you think, wow gravity is a source of energy.

Not so.. that energy was actually created in the big bang when the asteroid was forced out (or whatever caused the asteroid near our planet).

I think the best bet, really, is solar energy.

When you think about it... lots of different forms of solar energy: ethanol, oil, hydro electricity, etc.

The big problem, actually, isn't so much generating energy, btw. it's storing it. If we could solve that problem, we'd be golden.

I think hydrogen is the answer to that question.

[nunya]

Seeing Kohei Minato mentioned in one comment and slashdot.com mentioned in the next, but not seeing any mention of the slashdot article about Kohei Minato, I had to post - http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/04/15/1928229 The article is over 2 years old and has some of the same quotes as Chris.

[Chris Coles]

EJ, I think you have left us stunned with the perspicacity of your final observations. You have made us all rush to read survival books we bought years ago and threw to one side. But the one thing you do not mention is the dramatic influence this will have on food distribution.

When I was a child, late 1940’s to early 1950’s here in the UK; everything was created locally. Local production of food was a staple of the society we lived in. Napoleon once described the UK as a nation of shopkeepers. But that was our strength. Everything we needed was available from within a few miles. There were very few transport companies, and similarly, few trucks or lorries. And what there were, were small and grossly under powered.

The local butcher, did exactly that, he butchered the meat from the local farm. Very little indeed came from any distance. Every imaginable variety of food was locally manufactured. The basics are meat, bread and cakes, but then mostly bread. The cakes were made at home using spare eggs some sugar and fat, mostly lard. The soft frits such as currents and raisins were to be purchased in the small corner shop.

All that will have to change back again. But, the real problem is that, if you get any sudden breakdown in transport today, there is nothing available to act as a back up for the present supermarket chain environment. All those local producers were put out of business half a century ago. The little shops no longer survive and all the produce comes from hundreds of miles away.

It is my opinion in an emergency where transportation breaks down because of fuel supply problems, that we may see mass starvation, particularly in the major cities. Many people are at least fifty miles from any sort of rural environment where the local food production will be forced to return. And you can bet your bottom dollar that the locals will look after themselves first. Pure survival rules the rules of survival. I am off to stock up. My mother used to have a food cupboard full of the things we could not get easily. I think we must all return to those ways of thinking.

[EJ]

Chris, glad you got something from the piece. Not sure it' time to stock up the pantry... the process is going to take decades, conservation measures will buy us a lot of time, and with several energy shock induced recessions along the way we can expect periods when prices collapse again and it appears we've gotten the "all clear" signal to become wasteful again as we have been for the past 20 years.

BTW, the reason I haven't called is the the my mac had a hard drive failure. I'm pecking away on my wife's PC, hope to get my drive restored and email etc up and running later today.


EJ, I think you have left us stunned with the perspicacity of your final observations. You have made us all rush to read survival books we bought years ago and threw to one side. But the one thing you do not mention is the dramatic influence this will have on food distribution.

When I was a child, late 1940’s to early 1950’s here in the UK; everything was created locally. Local production of food was a staple of the society we lived in. Napoleon once described the UK as a nation of shopkeepers. But that was our strength. Everything we needed was available from within a few miles. There were very few transport companies, and similarly, few trucks or lorries. And what there were, were small and grossly under powered.

The local butcher, did exactly that, he butchered the meat from the local farm. Very little indeed came from any distance. Every imaginable variety of food was locally manufactured. The basics are meat, bread and cakes, but then mostly bread. The cakes were made at home using spare eggs some sugar and fat, mostly lard. The soft frits such as currents and raisins were to be purchased in the small corner shop.

All that will have to change back again. But, the real problem is that, if you get any sudden breakdown in transport today, there is nothing available to act as a back up for the present supermarket chain environment. All those local producers were put out of business half a century ago. The little shops no longer survive and all the produce comes from hundreds of miles away.

It is my opinion in an emergency where transportation breaks down because of fuel supply problems, that we may see mass starvation, particularly in the major cities. Many people are at least fifty miles from any sort of rural environment where the local food production will be forced to return. And you can bet your bottom dollar that the locals will look after themselves first. Pure survival rules the rules of survival. I am off to stock up. My mother used to have a food cupboard full of the things we could not get easily. I think we must all return to those ways of thinking.

[CJ]

As a long term iTulip lurker (glad to see you back), I thought it was about time to contribute to the discussion. In answer to the topic question, I'd have to say both. Too many dollars being printed can't be discounted as a cause for the recent rises, but peak oil is something that we need to face up to sooner rather than later...

I agree with a lot of the comments in the article, but I think that there is one key point which has been overlooked. The low cost and ready availability of (geological) oil has had the effect of depressing investment in the development of alternative fuel sources. If you look at the back-catalogue of research into alternative energy sources there is a spike in activity immediately following the 1970's oil crisis, followed by an inexorable decline as governments and investors withdrew money from the projects. It's noticeable that with high oil prices, these projects are now coming back into favour. There's no shortage of alternative energy sources out there, it's just that they need the kind of billion dollar investments that are bread and butter to the oil industry to be directed their way. Of course, that will only happen when investers see a better ROI than putting their money into oil... and I think that tipping point is getting very close.

Of course this doesn't solve your 'how will I fuel my SUV' problem. The way I see it is that by the end of the century, the internal combustion engine will look as archaic as the steam engine does now. We already use electricity regularly for long haul transport (think trains), so the demise of the long distance trucker is well overdue. For local transport and commuting, current battery technology is already adequate, and the energy density of batteries has been increasing dramatically over the last few years.

In summary, I'd be worried about peak oil if there wasn't the technology and resources ready to replace it, given the right market conditions. As it is, I think that any country with a well developed (electric) rail transport system, which is geared up to generate a substantial amount of its electricity from renewable and nuclear sources and which does not rely on oil-hungry air travel for its domestic travel infrastructure will manage just fine. Hmm.. having put it like that, it might be worth moving to France.

CJ

--
The easy answer is: There is never an easy answer.