Blaze Spinnaker <blazespinna...@gmail.com> wrote:
> It's also not hard to imagine Saudia Arabia and others panic dumping onto > the market in order to get out while the getting is good, thus driving the > price of oil down quickly. > An economist told me that is sure to happen with cold fusion. Even a strong rumor that cold fusion is real might trigger that. James Bowery <jabow...@gmail.com> wrote: I'm not sure where I stored Jed's book on my computer but I presume he > analyzed the critical point in EROEI where it no longer makes sense to use > various grades of the in-the-ground reserves even as chemical feedstocks. > As long as a given grade of reserve remains valuable as chemical > feedstock, the other valuations will remain to the extent they are related > to those grades. > I did not do the maths, but I read papers about this, and corresponded with petrochemical engineers. Plus I heard from a group of oil company honchos via Hal Putoff. (They wanted to know about cold fusion.) See chapter 13: http://lenr-canr.org/acrobat/RothwellJcoldfusiona.pdf Here's the story in a nutshell, from that chapter: ". . . I have discussed cold fusion with petroleum experts several times. They begin by saying that it will not matter in the long run if the market for oil fuel dwindles away, because oil has many other uses as an industrial raw material for things like plastic. Nineteen percent of oil is used in non-energy applications, but experts say that the market will grow in the future. When Hal Puthoff met with the presidents of Pennzoil, Texaco, Marathon, Coastal, and other oil companies, they told him they would welcome zero-cost energy. He paraphrased them: "When we take our precious resource out of the ground to make nylons, plastics, drugs, etc., we don't use up much and we have a large profit margin. When we take it out of the ground to power automobiles and heat people's homes, it's like heating your home by burning van Goghs and Picassos. Please take this burden off our industry. And, by the way, let us buy some to make our refineries more efficient." With all due respect, I think these executives were kidding, or this was false bravado. No sane executive would be so sanguine at the prospect of losing 81% of his business. Why should the oil company care what the customer does with the product? They get the same $40 per barrel whether the customer burns the stuff or makes nylon out of it. In any case, I think these executives are wrong. They will lose 100% of their business. Oil will be worth nothing. I have asked experts: "Could you synthesize oil from raw materials? If I gave you carbon and water, could you make any hydrocarbon petrochemical you like?" They say yes, but it would take fantastic amounts of energy. It would take as much energy to synthesize oil from carbon and water as you get from burning the oil, plus some overhead. This would be the most uneconomical chemical plant on earth. It does not occur to them, at first, that the plant would be cheap to run if energy costs nothing. . . ." Actually, they can probably synthesize enough petrochemicals for the feedstock and lubricant markets from organic sources such as garbage. This is done already with depolymerization, as I explained in the next paragraph. This would be a lot cheaper and safer than extracting oil from the Middle East and shipping it thousands of miles around the world. You can find local sources of garbage everywhere in the world. The people who have garbage will pay you to take it from them. You make money at both ends. The only reason oil is cheaper today is because they extract and ship so much of it already, they can ship an extra 19% with economies of scale. Using today's oil industry to produce only 19% of today's output would be a losing proposition. - Jed
