In another thread I wrote: "If this were true, sailing ship makers would have made steel steam ships, the railroads would have started airline companies, and Data General would be selling PCs." I should explain that none of the sailing-shipbuilders of the 19th century survived the transition to iron and steel-hulled steamships. They all went out of business. Obviously, railroads never entered the airline business and Data General is long gone. Data General did try to sell PCs but the effort was halfhearted and I believe it was defeated by opposition within the company.
The sailing ship example was one of many listed by Clayton Christensen, a prof. at Harvard Business School, in a book that I highly recommend: Christensen, C., *The Innovator's Dilemma*. 1997: Harvard Business School. I described this book and quoted from it extensively in chapter 7. I think it is very unlikely that any fossil fuel company or electric power company will survive the transition to cold fusion, for the reasons I spelled out in the book. They have no relevant expertise. Oil companies are good at drilling holes and transporting massive amounts of liquids across oceans and continents. They know nothing about building high tech engines or batteries, which is what cold fusion devices will most closely resemble. Exxon-Mobile can no more make a battery than the Energizer Battery Company could drill an oil well. Jones Beene wrote: "The new energy companies will make even more money than oil companies now make, eventually, and will pay more in taxes!" If the companies transition to some completely unrelated field, such as terraforming Mars, perhaps they will make money, but no one anywhere will make money on energy. For all practical purposes, energy will be free. The cost will soon fall by a factor of a 1000, and more after that. Today, oil companies sell thousands of dollars of products per year to each American. When those sales fall to a few dollars in heavy water -- something that any chemical company can make as easily as an oil company -- the oil companies will lose 99.9% of their business overnight. The value of cold fusion fuel (heavy water -- or perhaps even ordinary water) will *never* come close to the value of oil, gas or coal. This will be true even if our per capita energy consumption increases by a factor of 100. That will only happen after energy costs decline by a factor of 1,000 or 100,000 -- as inevitably they will. To suggest that someone will make money on energy is like saying someone will make money selling postage for e-mail. The whole point of e-mail is that it is virtually free. You would not send dozens or hundreds of messages a day if it cost anything; it only has value because it is free. Years ago I wrote an essay describing the first refrigerators, made in the 1840s. They were used to produce ice in Florida. Ice was an valuable commodity which had to be shipped by sea from the northern states, where it was cut from frozen ponds and stored in sawdust. A person making a refrigerator from 1840 to 1870 stood to make a lot of money selling ice. In the 1920s, ice was still delivered to houses icemen in horse-drawn wagons. But obviously, as refrigerators become more and more widespread, the value of ice declined until it became worth practically nothing, although it is still sold in grocery stores for people who need a lot for a party or something. Energy costs will decline the same way, to the same extent. To predict that that giant corporations such as Exxon-Mobile will be selling cold fusion energy 100 years from would be like looking at the cost of ice in 1850, the growth in refrigeration, and predicting that by 1950 gigantic corporations will make huge sums selling ice, and that ice will be one of the largest industries on earth. In 1950 refrigeration was a giant industry, and it was about to expand tremendously, as airconditioning was just taking off. But refrigeration is not the same as selling ice; it is a much broader industry. Ice production is only a small part of it. Companies will still be selling energy 100 years from now but it will be only a small part of much larger industries. For example, automobile companies will sell you all the energy you need to power your car for the life of the vehicle. The fuel will cost a few dollars, and it will be built-in to the machine. The energy cost of the vehicle will be roughly as important as the cost of battery acid is today. It will be a fraction of 1% of the total cost; the sort of thing only a cost accountant notices or cares about. No doubt specialized companies (or divisions of companies) today make good money selling battery acid for use in automobiles. I expect hundreds of people make a living doing this -- perhaps a few thousand. But it is not a giant industry rivaling Exxon-Mobile. A century from now energy production will be a small but important field of product engineering, with perhaps 100,000 well paid experts world-wide, and a few billion dollars worth of equipment. It will be a good living for many people, but as I wrote in the book, in chapter 2, it will be roughly one-fourth the size of the bubblegum business is today. I am sure people make a good living selling bubblegum, but not many people. The number is roughly 20,000 people, based on the employee count at the Wm. Wrigley Jr. Company, which makes half the world's bubblegum. - Jed
