The "Pickens Plan"

[Buck]

If you know who T.Boone Pickens is then you know him
to be a very savvy businessman. He has a plan to get
America off oil ,short term (10yrs), to bridge the gap
until that time America can be energy independent.

Watch his explanation of his plan and get a cold feeling about
how much oil America DOES import today!!

http://www.pickensplan.com/

[kawalekm]

The gist of his plan is to replace a good part of electrical generation with midwestern wind farms and use the natural gas saved to power tomorrow's car fleet.

On the plus side, there are already NG powered vehicles on the road today, and I suppose that many existing vechicles can be converted to burn natural gas. So, this is a workable stratege that can be implemented today!

On the down side, we'll be replacing one fossil fuel with another, and natural gas is peaking/will peak/has peaked already. This may give us more time to develop real biofuel alternatives, like biomass ethanol, and algal biodiesel.

I don't really know what will become of this. One thing I think is clear is that wind only won't replace all our electricity, nor will gas only replace our liquid fuels. Will Americans learn their lesson, or will we just squander away natural gas the same way we are squandering away all the oil?

[MadTripper]

I'm curious about the NG cars. It was my understanding that compressing NG to a liquid requires near as much energy as you would get out. I hadn't heard of vehicles that were running NG fuel except for some companies that produce (really extract and clean) natural gas.

I'm more apt to think that biofuel produced from algae is more of a viable option. There is very little if any change needed to our current fleet.

Tripper

[Buck]

While this plan might help mankind will never
ever advance until......we stop buring something
for the energy in it!!

My gosh, all we have today is gone from burning wood
to burning wood etc. that's aged into coal & oil.

Some advancement huh?

[kawalekm]

Hi MT
Perhaps you're thinking of the compression of hydrogen gas. I don't know the particular numbers, but I see a lot of liquified natural gas (LNG) trucks driving around and I do see gas powered cars. So they are out there. Then of course there is propane, which sits right under every barbecue grill in America. The cost of that is only between 2-3$/gallon. So the technical hurdles are nowhere near as high as with fuel-cell technology and the price of propane at least is comparable with gasoline.

But, it is a fossil fuel, and we will run out of that too! But again, it gives us time to convert over to serious bio alternatives; stuff that's still in the research phase now. Algal biodiesel seems to be the front-runner. Now if they can devise a cheap way to "crack" algal biodiesel into octane we might all be saved!
Michael

[msta999]

NG is a pain in the butt. A lot more cost to get the vehicle converted, less mpg, and more maintenance. I would rather see the bio algae or cars that run off compressed air. Our power plants will also have to produce more electricity/green house gases to produce NG. Where is the benns.

[Drawbar]

Then of course there is propane, which sits right under every barbecue grill in America. The cost of that is only between 2-3$/gallon. So the technical hurdles are nowhere near as high as with fuel-cell technology and the price of propane at least is comparable with gasoline.

Actually its not. Gasoline has 125,000 btus per gallon where as propane only has 91,900 btus, plus a lot of water in it to boot.

You might not be wrong however in the big picture as a home that is heated by propane is far more efficient to heat then a home that is heated via fuel oil (131,000 btus per gallon.) The reason is simple, with oil you can only cut down the flame to 65% before the injector starts sooting up. Since propane is a gas, it can go from 1% to 95% with out soot problems. In other words you can control how much it burns far more easily.

You might be able to get a few extra mpg's out of it with technology, but so far that has not worked. Propane powered trucks have been around for a long time and the mpg's is like 1-2 mpg compared to their diesel counterparts that get 4-5 mpg.

Propane powered tests on snowmobiles proved to be troublesome too in mpg tests.

[aintaokie]

All I can say about T Boones idea is that it brings attention to the oil import issue and that we better get up off our butt's (preaching to the choir) and look at alternative energy before we have a real SHTF. And we ain't far from that. We will be leaps and bound ahead if we can start being independent with our energy use.