netking81 netking81:
Well give me $5000 for start up cost and I can start to produce Bio-Diesel for less than $2 a gallon and still make a small profit. A couple of people in Idaho have figured out a way to bake Bio-Oil. Of course don't forget about the other technologies we have developed like Hydrogen/Oxygen fuel cells. In fact when I last checked Ballard Power Systems in BC was leading the pack in fuel cell technology.
$1.3 trillion would no doubt boost all these technoogies and could also produce new ones like the car in Back To The Future running off of fruits and vegetables! Ok I know only the time machine part did that and the engine still ran on gas. But with 1.3 trillion you could do anything, hell you could make alchahol from corn and call it Ethanol.... Or did someone allready figure that out?
Almost all of the bio-type fuels are net-energy negative. This includes bio-diesel, soy, and ethanol (ethanol is a farm subsidy program, not an energy program). That means, end-to-end, they take more energy to grow, process, distill, and distribute than they provide in energy output when you burn them. This translates into: although you can push the economic peanut around today and make a bit of money off of them, they will not save our asses in the long run. Technology might be able to push some of the marginal ones into net-energy positive territory, and I am all for research money to do that. Hydrogen fuel cells are a energy storage and transfer mechanism, not energy itself. It can be part of the solution in making alternative energy storable and maybe portable. But it will not save us either. I would like to see a lot of research, planning, and technology put into figuring out how to re-create communities, cities, transportation systems, food production, manufacturing, etc. to be much, much more energy
efficient (rather than just how to get more things to burn) and to use alternative energy that is not net-negative and that is low or non-carbon producing. We will continue to need petroleum products for as long as they last, so no Albertans start flaming me. I can see your resources going way up in price, but lasting a lot longer if such a program were pursued to remake society to be more energy efficient. That's not bad for the resource-rich areas in the long run. Especially if money for a lot of the research into all these new efficiencies is directed towards fossil-fuel-producing regions.
I know of Ballard as a leader in hydrogen fuel cells. (Something a Canadian company is known for here in the States, btw, and identified as Canadian.)
Mostly, I'd like to see money put into redesigning society for efficiency and use of renewable energy. Our cities and the way we live developed based on the premise of cheap energy that we can use indiscriminately, and that will not be true forever. There are many reasons to reduce how much we burn, regardless of the source. We, in both the US and Canada, need to live a little differently I think. It sucks that I don't see any hope of the US having the vision to pursue this kind of effort with all our dollars (and lives). Even if history plays out such that in 50 years invading and occupying Iraq doesn't seem as bad as it looks right now, we will eventually need to face the music on this one imho. I am not a doom-and-gloomer on energy; I just think we can do a lot better, and hopefully spend less on killing people around the globe for it.
CKA Super Elite 
