Exxon's getting rich, BUT
10-31-2005, 10:07 AM
#11
Originally Posted by Nickfromny,Oct 31 2005, 01:26 PM
I bought their stock and have NOT made the killing I was hoping to. Where are they sinking their billions? 
10-31-2005, 11:25 AM
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Nuclear is actually supposed to be a good buy now. I had Exxon Mobil earlier this year, and dumped it. Oops. I'm such a bad stock-picker that I've switched over to mutual funds.
10-31-2005, 12:44 PM
#14
Sweet Cordy, I just wish I had more $$$$ to put in nukes. Our children are going to hate us for hugging trees and worrying too about nuclear waste. 
We reallllllly need to apply more time to finding really good places to store stuff (omg sounds like me worrying about closet space 
) and less time worrying about nuclear accidents. My silly little retired housewife/storywriter/cook brain cannot comprehend many things, but one thing I can comprehend is that burning coal, gas, and oil is using an awful lot of resources that take billions of years to replenish. Concerning ourselves about the storage of nuclear waste is a smart thing to do and nuclear is clean, doesn't pollute the environment and over the long haul wayyyy cheaper than anything else we've developed to date. Furthermore, I'd be curious to know just how many lives are lost or negatively affected by mining coal and other fossil fuels as compared to accidents in the operation of a nuclear plant. ANNNNND, we're depleting the ozone layer by burning the stuff. Okay, I'll give you Chernobyl, but that plant was thrown together and not run efficiently and the good ole USA stepped up and helped our friends in Russia clean it up. [be gentle, please, I'm just a lil ole lady throwing out some food for thought]
10-31-2005, 01:29 PM
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The problem with nuclear power is more to do with the radioactive waste it produces.
France was far ahead of a lot of countries for that in the 80s (having made a massive effort in the 70s) but is now struggling with waste. This is why the nuclear programme that was originally to make the country completely independent for its energy, had to be abandoned in the 90s.
Solar and wind power is the only way, if only people would accept wind turbine instead of protesting about how it damages the natural beauty of the site. The pollution we are all creating with burning fossile fuel is spoiling the whole planet.
I don't know if you have such protests on your side of the pond but we do here and they annoy me.
France was far ahead of a lot of countries for that in the 80s (having made a massive effort in the 70s) but is now struggling with waste. This is why the nuclear programme that was originally to make the country completely independent for its energy, had to be abandoned in the 90s.
Solar and wind power is the only way, if only people would accept wind turbine instead of protesting about how it damages the natural beauty of the site. The pollution we are all creating with burning fossile fuel is spoiling the whole planet.
I don't know if you have such protests on your side of the pond but we do here and they annoy me.
10-31-2005, 02:44 PM
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No case for a windfall tax on the oil industry - A strong presumption exists against changing tax regimes
Financial Times
October 31, 2005
Opinion
Asked why he robbed banks, American outlaw Willie Sutton famously replied "because that's where the money is". For much the same reason, it would be surprising if cash-strapped governments were not tempted by the idea of a smash-and-grab raid of their own on an oil industry awash with profits.
And awash it is. In the third quarter alone, five oil companies (Exxon Mobil, BP, Royal Dutch/Shell, Chevron and Conoco Phillips) reported Dollars 32.8bn (Pounds 18.4bn) in post-tax profits: a rate of about Dollars 360m a day. With motorists angry at high fuel prices, these companies are soft targets.
In the US, some Democrats are already pushing for a windfall tax on oil industry profits. In Britain, fear of a tax raid has led some analysts to warn against investing in UK oil producers. Let us hope this is just noise. A windfall tax, or anything like it, would be unjustified and should be ruled out.
Windfall taxes, which target "excess" profits, are among the worst forms of taxes. They are certain to undermine investment, unless a government can somehow credibly guarantee that the tax is a one-off levy. This is next to impossible, particularly for those that have imposed such taxes before.
What company would invest in oil exploration knowing that if prices collapsed, it would have to bear the cost, but if prices soared, government would grab back the profits?
It is not even obvious that there have been excess profits thus far. The oil industry requires large up-front capital investments, recouped over decades. For much of the 1990s prices were depressed, with oil trading below Dollars 11 a barrel in 1998. Massive profits today need to be set against poor profits then.
The trickier question is whether governments should tighten the tax regime on national oil reserves in the light of sustained high prices. In principle, governments should seek to capture the economic rent from oil reserves, over and above the risk-adjusted cost of capital. The higher the oil price, the higher the share of rent in corporate profit, so the higher the tax rate should be.
But an increase in the tax take at today's prices would still amount to changing the rules of the game after investors have committed their capital.
A government that expected little new investment in its oil industry might not care. But the rise in the oil price has raised the possibility of significant additional investments, even in mature areas such as the North Sea.
A tax grab now could jeopardise this. First, by lowering expected post-tax returns. Second, by undermining confidence that the tax structure is stable and will not be revised every time the government is desperate for cash.
Given these costs, a government would have to be very certain that untaxed rents were far above acceptable levels before it changed the tax regime. That case has nowhere been made. Until and unless it is: hands off the oil industry.
[SIZE=1]
Financial Times
October 31, 2005
Opinion
Asked why he robbed banks, American outlaw Willie Sutton famously replied "because that's where the money is". For much the same reason, it would be surprising if cash-strapped governments were not tempted by the idea of a smash-and-grab raid of their own on an oil industry awash with profits.
And awash it is. In the third quarter alone, five oil companies (Exxon Mobil, BP, Royal Dutch/Shell, Chevron and Conoco Phillips) reported Dollars 32.8bn (Pounds 18.4bn) in post-tax profits: a rate of about Dollars 360m a day. With motorists angry at high fuel prices, these companies are soft targets.
In the US, some Democrats are already pushing for a windfall tax on oil industry profits. In Britain, fear of a tax raid has led some analysts to warn against investing in UK oil producers. Let us hope this is just noise. A windfall tax, or anything like it, would be unjustified and should be ruled out.
Windfall taxes, which target "excess" profits, are among the worst forms of taxes. They are certain to undermine investment, unless a government can somehow credibly guarantee that the tax is a one-off levy. This is next to impossible, particularly for those that have imposed such taxes before.
What company would invest in oil exploration knowing that if prices collapsed, it would have to bear the cost, but if prices soared, government would grab back the profits?
It is not even obvious that there have been excess profits thus far. The oil industry requires large up-front capital investments, recouped over decades. For much of the 1990s prices were depressed, with oil trading below Dollars 11 a barrel in 1998. Massive profits today need to be set against poor profits then.
The trickier question is whether governments should tighten the tax regime on national oil reserves in the light of sustained high prices. In principle, governments should seek to capture the economic rent from oil reserves, over and above the risk-adjusted cost of capital. The higher the oil price, the higher the share of rent in corporate profit, so the higher the tax rate should be.
But an increase in the tax take at today's prices would still amount to changing the rules of the game after investors have committed their capital.
A government that expected little new investment in its oil industry might not care. But the rise in the oil price has raised the possibility of significant additional investments, even in mature areas such as the North Sea.
A tax grab now could jeopardise this. First, by lowering expected post-tax returns. Second, by undermining confidence that the tax structure is stable and will not be revised every time the government is desperate for cash.
Given these costs, a government would have to be very certain that untaxed rents were far above acceptable levels before it changed the tax regime. That case has nowhere been made. Until and unless it is: hands off the oil industry.
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10-31-2005, 02:55 PM
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How to Kick the Oil Habit
As prices rise, the race for new energy sources--from wind farms to liquid coal--heats up. Get ready for the withdrawal symptoms
By Michael D. Lemonick
Time
October 31, 2005
Analysis
If anyone harbored any doubts that hybrid cars are hot, last week the 2005 Tokyo Motor Show put them to rest. Carmakers practically ran over one another promoting their versions in attempts to catch up with Honda and Toyota, the technology's pioneers. Companies such as Mercedes-Benz, BMW, Mazda, Mitsubishi, GM, Volkswagen and Porsche showed new models or talked about plans to sell them by the end of the decade at the latest. On display were not only regular hybrids, the kind powered by gasoline engines mated to electric motors, but also variations adding hydrogen to the mix and a system that puts electric motors at the wheels. The frenzy to churn out hybrids and their technological cousins is so fierce that archrivals GM, DaimlerChrysler and BMW have teamed up to build a research and technical center in the Detroit suburbs. And Ford is so desperate to fill 200 open jobs in its hybrid program that it's competing with Toyota to hire engineers from the software and aerospace industries.
The stakes are high: Ford and GM announced third-quarter losses of nearly $2 billion combined last week, thanks in part to plunging sales of SUVs.
It doesn't take a Ph.D. economist to figure out why that's happening--just a stop at the gas station, where prices are roughly 25% higher than they were a year ago, and where, despite a slight easing as the effects of hurricanes Katrina and Rita recede, they will probably go higher still before too long. Home heating oil is 50% higher than last year too, and natural gas will probably jump similarly. Those dramatic increases, Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan said in a speech last week, will create a significant drag on economic growth "from now on."
The silver lining, said Greenspan, is that as oil gets more expensive, other energy sources and technologies that use less oil will become more competitive. And that's exactly what's happening. Says Daniel Yergin, chairman of Cambridge Energy Research Associates and author of The Prize, the 1991 best seller about the history of oil: "There's a lot of technological innovation kind of bubbling that really has captured the imagination and obsession of a lot of people." The question is, Are we moving fast enough?
The good news is that as the price of crude has headed steadily upward, technological innovation has driven down the cost of alternative energy sources. Wind farms cover hillsides near Palm Springs and Altamont Pass in California and are springing up in the breezy Midwest and on the Atlantic Coast too. Solar cells can churn out electricity at around 25cents to 35cents per kilowatt-hour, falling but still a multiple of the cost of energy from coal-fired power plants. Canada is extracting oil from the tar sands of Alberta for an amazingly efficient price of $15 to $20 per bbl., and the technology exists to convert the U.S.'s huge supply of coal into petroleum. This process, called coal liquefaction, creates a fuel that could power cars and is starting to look economically feasible. Conservation, too, benefits from technology: auto companies are suddenly getting more serious about boosting mileage by replacing steel components with materials like strong, lightweight carbon fiber.
At the same time, oil companies, worried that these changes could leave them behind, are starting to think of themselves instead as broad-based energy companies. "Shell and BP are already headed in that direction," says Amory Lovins, director of the Rocky Mountain Institute, a think tank that advocates a radical restructuring of the energy economy. Shell has become the largest seller of biofuels, he says: "We're talking about new processes for turning woody, weedy plants like switch grass and poplar--also crop waste like wheat straw--into cellulosic ethanol."
If this explosion of innovation has a problem, however, it may be that the developments are coming too late to allow a smooth transition to the postpetroleum era. Hydrogen fuel cells, ethanol from vegetable matter, solar cells, wind power, synthetic gasoline from coal--all could make a dent once they are available in sufficient quantities. But that won't be for years, maybe decades, says Richard Heinberg, a professor of culture, ecology and sustainable community at the New College of California in Santa Rosa and the author of The Party's Over: Oil, War and the Fate of Industrial Societies. Twenty years in the future, he argues, "regular old oil will still be the dominant fuel. We'll just end up paying more for it."
As consumers, we need time to make adjustments--often very expensive ones--to the new technologies. Not everyone can afford to junk a two-year-old SUV to buy a new hybrid. Most people can't afford to abandon houses built in developments 100 miles out in the countryside when oil was cheap. And although energy and power companies are investing in new technologies, they can't create a massive new infrastructure overnight. Coal liquefaction, nuclear power, wind power--"all of these things need an enormous lead time," says Heinberg. The problem with the free market, in short, is that while it may sort things out over the long run, people have to cope in the short run. "Price signals," he adds, "come much too late, and we will endure a tremendous amount of economic and social hardship that could have been averted if we'd acted sooner. We could see the equivalent of the Great Depression, fueled by extreme oil and natural-gas prices."
Things would have been different if we had been pouring money into alternative energy for the past couple of decades, as we did in the aftermath of the oil shocks of the 1970s. Back then, despite the ribbing Jimmy Carter got for appearing on TV in a cardigan and calling for sacrifice, there was a clear sense of national emergency. That crisis receded, thanks in part to conservation and investments in energy efficiency and in part to the worldwide recession the oil shocks helped trigger. As a result, a barrel of oil costs 30% less today, in inflation-adjusted dollars, than it did at its peak in 1981. This is not the first time the world has run out of oil. Yergin says it's the fifth or sixth.
But this may be the real thing. Matthew Simmons, chairman of Simmons & Co. International, an energy-industry investment-banking firm, says, "This is a shortage where demand actually exceeds supply. The two shortages in the '70s were artificially induced." Back then, OPEC was powerful and disciplined enough for Middle East oil producers, angry about U.S. support of Israel and the Shah of Iran, to be able to simply turn down production. But now a confluence of trends has made oil shortages inevitable, not optional. One is the unexpectedly rapid expansion of India's and China's energy needs. Fadel Gheit, senior vice president for oil research at the New York City investment firm Oppenheimer & Co., says, "They created the tight market we're in."
Another problem is refinery capacity. Even an unlimited supply of crude is useless if it can't be refined into gasoline, heating oil and other fuels. And for the past 20 years, says Gheit, the refining industry has been losing money--or has barely made it: "[The industry was] closing refineries because they weren't profitable." That set up a situation in which a hurricane like Katrina or Rita or last year's Ivan could trigger a shortage by putting even a few of the remaining U.S.-based refineries out of business for a few weeks. Yet the industry is reluctant to build more refineries, Gheit says, because "they've been burned before. It's like the boom and bust in real estate."
Beyond that, the supply of crude is not unlimited. Opening the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge or the coast of Florida for drilling, which congressional Republicans have been pushing for, is a relatively short-term fix. And the more oil that is removed, the more expensive the cost of extracting the remaining oil becomes. At some point--possibly as early as 2010--production will therefore reach a peak, though not necessarily a sharp one, and then gradually start to decline. "The problem," says Simmons, "is that the global economy and the U.S. economy are structured on the assumption that the oil supply will only increase."
The upheaval could be alleviated significantly if the government had a long-range policy for moving beyond oil. But no Administration or Congress in the past 25 years has put one together because such a move would involve spending money and offending powerful interest groups. Republican Senator Pete Domenici of New Mexico, chairman of the Energy and Natural Resources Committee, astonished environmentalists last month when he suggested that federally mandated auto-mileage (CAFE) standards had to be reconsidered. But because that could cut into automakers' profits, there's virtually no chance that such legislation would pass. Tax incentives for switching to alternative energy may be easier. Republican Representative Richard Pombo of California, chairman of the Resources Committee, says, "There is already an incentive to develop new technology. You just have to send a real clear signal that the Federal Government wants to." But a wholesale push to change our highway culture is unlikely. European countries decided long ago that it paid off to interfere in the free market by discouraging oil consumption and subsidizing mass transit, but that's not the American way.
The one thing that will probably cushion the blow of this new and permanent energy crisis is something old, with an air about it of discomfort and duty: conservation. There's nothing particularly sexy or chic about consolidating shopping trips, carpooling, turning the thermostat down in winter and up in summer, or biking to the office and back, but it does work. In the early '80s, in the midst of soaring oil prices, we doubled the average efficiency of cars, furnaces and insulation. Katrina and Rita might not have pushed us into another energy-crisis mind-set yet. With the inevitable price jolts to come, though, we're heading that way soon enough.
21 million Total barrels of oil that are consumed daily in the U.S.
10 million Barrels of imported oil that are consumed daily in the U.S.
1 million Barrels of oil that could be produced daily by drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge
Source: U.S. Energy Information Administration
"Price signals come much too late, and we will endure a tremendous amount of hardship that could have been averted if we'd acted sooner."--RICHARD HEINBERG, author of The Party's Over
[SIZE=1]
As prices rise, the race for new energy sources--from wind farms to liquid coal--heats up. Get ready for the withdrawal symptoms
By Michael D. Lemonick
Time
October 31, 2005
Analysis
If anyone harbored any doubts that hybrid cars are hot, last week the 2005 Tokyo Motor Show put them to rest. Carmakers practically ran over one another promoting their versions in attempts to catch up with Honda and Toyota, the technology's pioneers. Companies such as Mercedes-Benz, BMW, Mazda, Mitsubishi, GM, Volkswagen and Porsche showed new models or talked about plans to sell them by the end of the decade at the latest. On display were not only regular hybrids, the kind powered by gasoline engines mated to electric motors, but also variations adding hydrogen to the mix and a system that puts electric motors at the wheels. The frenzy to churn out hybrids and their technological cousins is so fierce that archrivals GM, DaimlerChrysler and BMW have teamed up to build a research and technical center in the Detroit suburbs. And Ford is so desperate to fill 200 open jobs in its hybrid program that it's competing with Toyota to hire engineers from the software and aerospace industries.
The stakes are high: Ford and GM announced third-quarter losses of nearly $2 billion combined last week, thanks in part to plunging sales of SUVs.
It doesn't take a Ph.D. economist to figure out why that's happening--just a stop at the gas station, where prices are roughly 25% higher than they were a year ago, and where, despite a slight easing as the effects of hurricanes Katrina and Rita recede, they will probably go higher still before too long. Home heating oil is 50% higher than last year too, and natural gas will probably jump similarly. Those dramatic increases, Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan said in a speech last week, will create a significant drag on economic growth "from now on."
The silver lining, said Greenspan, is that as oil gets more expensive, other energy sources and technologies that use less oil will become more competitive. And that's exactly what's happening. Says Daniel Yergin, chairman of Cambridge Energy Research Associates and author of The Prize, the 1991 best seller about the history of oil: "There's a lot of technological innovation kind of bubbling that really has captured the imagination and obsession of a lot of people." The question is, Are we moving fast enough?
The good news is that as the price of crude has headed steadily upward, technological innovation has driven down the cost of alternative energy sources. Wind farms cover hillsides near Palm Springs and Altamont Pass in California and are springing up in the breezy Midwest and on the Atlantic Coast too. Solar cells can churn out electricity at around 25cents to 35cents per kilowatt-hour, falling but still a multiple of the cost of energy from coal-fired power plants. Canada is extracting oil from the tar sands of Alberta for an amazingly efficient price of $15 to $20 per bbl., and the technology exists to convert the U.S.'s huge supply of coal into petroleum. This process, called coal liquefaction, creates a fuel that could power cars and is starting to look economically feasible. Conservation, too, benefits from technology: auto companies are suddenly getting more serious about boosting mileage by replacing steel components with materials like strong, lightweight carbon fiber.
At the same time, oil companies, worried that these changes could leave them behind, are starting to think of themselves instead as broad-based energy companies. "Shell and BP are already headed in that direction," says Amory Lovins, director of the Rocky Mountain Institute, a think tank that advocates a radical restructuring of the energy economy. Shell has become the largest seller of biofuels, he says: "We're talking about new processes for turning woody, weedy plants like switch grass and poplar--also crop waste like wheat straw--into cellulosic ethanol."
If this explosion of innovation has a problem, however, it may be that the developments are coming too late to allow a smooth transition to the postpetroleum era. Hydrogen fuel cells, ethanol from vegetable matter, solar cells, wind power, synthetic gasoline from coal--all could make a dent once they are available in sufficient quantities. But that won't be for years, maybe decades, says Richard Heinberg, a professor of culture, ecology and sustainable community at the New College of California in Santa Rosa and the author of The Party's Over: Oil, War and the Fate of Industrial Societies. Twenty years in the future, he argues, "regular old oil will still be the dominant fuel. We'll just end up paying more for it."
As consumers, we need time to make adjustments--often very expensive ones--to the new technologies. Not everyone can afford to junk a two-year-old SUV to buy a new hybrid. Most people can't afford to abandon houses built in developments 100 miles out in the countryside when oil was cheap. And although energy and power companies are investing in new technologies, they can't create a massive new infrastructure overnight. Coal liquefaction, nuclear power, wind power--"all of these things need an enormous lead time," says Heinberg. The problem with the free market, in short, is that while it may sort things out over the long run, people have to cope in the short run. "Price signals," he adds, "come much too late, and we will endure a tremendous amount of economic and social hardship that could have been averted if we'd acted sooner. We could see the equivalent of the Great Depression, fueled by extreme oil and natural-gas prices."
Things would have been different if we had been pouring money into alternative energy for the past couple of decades, as we did in the aftermath of the oil shocks of the 1970s. Back then, despite the ribbing Jimmy Carter got for appearing on TV in a cardigan and calling for sacrifice, there was a clear sense of national emergency. That crisis receded, thanks in part to conservation and investments in energy efficiency and in part to the worldwide recession the oil shocks helped trigger. As a result, a barrel of oil costs 30% less today, in inflation-adjusted dollars, than it did at its peak in 1981. This is not the first time the world has run out of oil. Yergin says it's the fifth or sixth.
But this may be the real thing. Matthew Simmons, chairman of Simmons & Co. International, an energy-industry investment-banking firm, says, "This is a shortage where demand actually exceeds supply. The two shortages in the '70s were artificially induced." Back then, OPEC was powerful and disciplined enough for Middle East oil producers, angry about U.S. support of Israel and the Shah of Iran, to be able to simply turn down production. But now a confluence of trends has made oil shortages inevitable, not optional. One is the unexpectedly rapid expansion of India's and China's energy needs. Fadel Gheit, senior vice president for oil research at the New York City investment firm Oppenheimer & Co., says, "They created the tight market we're in."
Another problem is refinery capacity. Even an unlimited supply of crude is useless if it can't be refined into gasoline, heating oil and other fuels. And for the past 20 years, says Gheit, the refining industry has been losing money--or has barely made it: "[The industry was] closing refineries because they weren't profitable." That set up a situation in which a hurricane like Katrina or Rita or last year's Ivan could trigger a shortage by putting even a few of the remaining U.S.-based refineries out of business for a few weeks. Yet the industry is reluctant to build more refineries, Gheit says, because "they've been burned before. It's like the boom and bust in real estate."
Beyond that, the supply of crude is not unlimited. Opening the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge or the coast of Florida for drilling, which congressional Republicans have been pushing for, is a relatively short-term fix. And the more oil that is removed, the more expensive the cost of extracting the remaining oil becomes. At some point--possibly as early as 2010--production will therefore reach a peak, though not necessarily a sharp one, and then gradually start to decline. "The problem," says Simmons, "is that the global economy and the U.S. economy are structured on the assumption that the oil supply will only increase."
The upheaval could be alleviated significantly if the government had a long-range policy for moving beyond oil. But no Administration or Congress in the past 25 years has put one together because such a move would involve spending money and offending powerful interest groups. Republican Senator Pete Domenici of New Mexico, chairman of the Energy and Natural Resources Committee, astonished environmentalists last month when he suggested that federally mandated auto-mileage (CAFE) standards had to be reconsidered. But because that could cut into automakers' profits, there's virtually no chance that such legislation would pass. Tax incentives for switching to alternative energy may be easier. Republican Representative Richard Pombo of California, chairman of the Resources Committee, says, "There is already an incentive to develop new technology. You just have to send a real clear signal that the Federal Government wants to." But a wholesale push to change our highway culture is unlikely. European countries decided long ago that it paid off to interfere in the free market by discouraging oil consumption and subsidizing mass transit, but that's not the American way.
The one thing that will probably cushion the blow of this new and permanent energy crisis is something old, with an air about it of discomfort and duty: conservation. There's nothing particularly sexy or chic about consolidating shopping trips, carpooling, turning the thermostat down in winter and up in summer, or biking to the office and back, but it does work. In the early '80s, in the midst of soaring oil prices, we doubled the average efficiency of cars, furnaces and insulation. Katrina and Rita might not have pushed us into another energy-crisis mind-set yet. With the inevitable price jolts to come, though, we're heading that way soon enough.
21 million Total barrels of oil that are consumed daily in the U.S.
10 million Barrels of imported oil that are consumed daily in the U.S.
1 million Barrels of oil that could be produced daily by drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge
Source: U.S. Energy Information Administration
"Price signals come much too late, and we will endure a tremendous amount of hardship that could have been averted if we'd acted sooner."--RICHARD HEINBERG, author of The Party's Over
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10-31-2005, 04:55 PM
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Lots of good info in these posts. Thanks. I don't get too upset about changes in gasoline prices, as long as they can be explained or likely are temporary. However, what really honks me is that at this time gasoline is $2.58 here and as low as $1.97.9 fifty miles away. There have to be some other bloodsuckers besides the major Oil companies and the insatiable tax man.
Besides wind and solar alternatives, we have to get back into nuclear energy in a very big way.
Besides wind and solar alternatives, we have to get back into nuclear energy in a very big way.
10-31-2005, 06:05 PM
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Our current gas prices are NOT temporary. Look for them to never go back down. With huge profits, everyone in "management" at the oil companies will have thier hands out, talk about right place/right time. With gas as a comodity now and so few oil companies, with the government letting businesses basically do anything they want, I don't think there is any real competition.
Nuclear - of course we are talking fission. The United States is a much larger country than France and we have ample locations to store nuclear waste (E.G. low population areas with huge deep caves). The hard part is not telling anyone where it is going nor how it is getting there, so people don't get they're panties in a bunch. Most of the spent fuel is stored on site, because of this issue. The U.S. has more uranium laying around than most.Estimated Worldwide Uranium reserves
Oil Reserves. There was some guy on CNN spouting off about reserves in Canada that are quite large (maybe bigger than the middle east), but currently economically unfeasible to get and process (needed some extra refining or something). This was about 2 months ago when the gas prices where hitting the fan.
One of many google "Canadian oil reserves" results
Another source of energy (well sort of), I read about was some researchers found that if if squeeze any organic componds hard enough (E.G. waste), it will make oil. Interesting use for recycling, paper, cardboard, spoiled food, and yes even human waste. Of course, that is not much of a solution, although I wouldn't mind driving to work on fuel made from my lawn clippings and leaves.
Of course these fuels are all stop-gaps. All being stored energy from the sun or from some supposed supernova explosion (me not being a huge believer in the big bang theory). The first nuclear fusion reactor is
Nuclear - of course we are talking fission. The United States is a much larger country than France and we have ample locations to store nuclear waste (E.G. low population areas with huge deep caves). The hard part is not telling anyone where it is going nor how it is getting there, so people don't get they're panties in a bunch. Most of the spent fuel is stored on site, because of this issue. The U.S. has more uranium laying around than most.Estimated Worldwide Uranium reserves
Oil Reserves. There was some guy on CNN spouting off about reserves in Canada that are quite large (maybe bigger than the middle east), but currently economically unfeasible to get and process (needed some extra refining or something). This was about 2 months ago when the gas prices where hitting the fan.
One of many google "Canadian oil reserves" results
Another source of energy (well sort of), I read about was some researchers found that if if squeeze any organic componds hard enough (E.G. waste), it will make oil. Interesting use for recycling, paper, cardboard, spoiled food, and yes even human waste. Of course, that is not much of a solution, although I wouldn't mind driving to work on fuel made from my lawn clippings and leaves.
Of course these fuels are all stop-gaps. All being stored energy from the sun or from some supposed supernova explosion (me not being a huge believer in the big bang theory). The first nuclear fusion reactor is
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