Category ►►► Black Gold

January 31, 2011

Energetically Mulling Over the Mullings Mullings...

Black Gold
Hatched by Dafydd

I love reading Rich Galen's webzine Mullings; he always has about the purest "Beltway bombast" available on the internets!

For example, in his most recent Mullings episode, he frets about the Tunisian and Egyptian riots, uprisings, conflagrations, whathaveyou, warning of the dire consequences should the upheavals against Arabic tyranny continue:

  • Southwest of Egypt is Nigeria. If the riots spread there (and to Angola and Algeria) disruption of oil production would have a massive impact on the U.S. economy. Why? Because we import about 1.5 million barrels of oil per day from those three countries.
  • And, if the riots spread east to the Gulf States of Saudi Arabia and Kuwait that could disrupt another 1.3 million barrels per day.
  • Together those five countries provide 2.8 million of the 10 million barrels of oil we import every day. Cut oil imports by 28 percent and it will make the $4.00 per gallon price spike of 2008 look like the good old days.

So wait -- you mean OPEC might collapse, and we might actually have to cease importing so much oil (4.5 billion barrels per year, ~ $400 billion), and instead be forced to begin exploiting the staggering proven and prospective reserves of oil (134 billion barrels), shale oil (2.6 trillion barrels), and natural gas (2.6 quadrillion cubic feet) we have in this very country?

Not to mention expansion of Generation IV nuclear reactors, such as Pebble Bed and Integral Fast, for generating grid-feeding electrical power; and fuel-saving developments for automobiles, such as high-temperature ceramic engines and flywheel technology to store angular momentum.

And perhaps even the ultimate power source: solar-power satellites that beam microwave energy to Earth from satellites with several square miles of solar cells in geosynchronous orbit, far beyond any rational measure of "atmosphere."

Goodness, gracious, great balls of fire! How will we ever survive?

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, January 31, 2011, at the time of 5:42 AM | Comments (5) | TrackBack

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