homecomfort wrote: When gas and diesel cost upward of, what, $5, $6 or more a gallon.
Electric cars will fed primarily bby coal or NG power plants. If you're going to go that route it would be much more efficient to power them directly with coal or NG. Bring on the coal to liquid fuel tech, oil shale and CNG cars.
http://www.ncpa.org/pub/ba656
Benefit: More Stable Energy Prices. Rentech, a primary U.S. patent-holder of the technology, produces CTL fuel in Colorado at a cost of $45 per barrel. Though this cost is comparable to the current price of crude oil, the price of American coal is less volatile. Price stability makes CTL a valuable option for certain transportation needs. According to a 2001 Energy Department study:
* The price of coal-derived diesel at the pump would be about $1.24 per gallon before taxes.
* If every gallon of diesel currently consumed were CTL, users would spend an average of $30 million a day less on fuel.
* At that price, every American who switched to CTL-fueled diesel cars and trucks would save $1,082 per year in fuel costs, on average.
http://ostseis.anl.gov/guide/oilshale/
While oil shale is found in many places worldwide, by far the largest deposits in the world are found in the United States in the Green River Formation, which covers portions of Colorado, Utah, and Wyoming. Estimates of the oil resource in place within the Green River Formation range from 1.2 to 1.8 trillion barrels. Not all resources in place are recoverable; however, even a moderate estimate of 800 billion barrels of recoverable oil from oil shale in the Green River Formation is three times greater than the proven oil reserves of Saudi Arabia. Present U.S. demand for petroleum products is about 20 million barrels per day. If oil shale could be used to meet a quarter of that demand, the estimated 800 billion barrels of recoverable oil from the Green River Formation would last for more than 400 years1.
There is two heavily industrialized nations that can truly be energy independent when all things are considered, the US and Russia.
