You are right. Anything is temporary.

Also, it is not clear that continuing our motoring ways is the best use of resources.

Hi Majorian,

I'm working on a post about T. Boon's idea for CNG powered cars, and you are correct. If you power all 134 million passenger vehicles with CNG, it would overwhelm our current production. But if you use plug-in hybrid CNG cars (CNGPIH - bad acronyms strike again!), then you only need about 10% to 15% more gas after 20 to 25 years, which is not too bad (time required to replace 134 M cars at current scrapping rate of 5.8 million cars/year).

I see at least two potential problems with a only CNG-auto approach:

1) If you invest lots of $$ in a CNG vehicle infrastructure, then you've got to live with it for awhile, otherwise, you'll have to pay in $$ AND energy to build a different one. So that implies that the car of the future would be either a CNG/biofuel dual fuel model, or you go in the direction bio-CNG as a replacement for oil/gasoline. I'm not sure CNGPIH only is the way to go.

2) Natural gas is now the lifeboat of choice for many, power plant folks included. Using the EIA’s data for proposed power plants, I calculate that between now and 2015, about 6.3 TCF additional will be needed to power them plants (see my response to Gail below). When you start to add all of this on to CNG's back, it makes me nervous, especially if we don't have a clear picture of what future gas supplies will be.

However, if CNGPIH’s are part of a balanced solution and/or peak oil strikes with a vengeance before we are ready, then CNGPIH’s would be a easy way to handle part of the loss until we can find and produce bio-fuels in sufficient quantities. - SMH

Thanks for the heads up, ROCKMAN.

From what you're saying, it sounds like these are highly speculative ventures, not only from a gelogical perspective, but from an operatonal one as well.

It makes one wonder whether the potential rewards justify the risks.

These domestic oil and gas producers face some pretty tough choices. Despite all the technological advances in seismic, drilling and completion technology, a panacea of quick riches doesn't seem to be in the cards: they can either opt for the low risk-low return that the resource plays offer, or they can go for the high risk-high return projects like the subsalt.

It's a hard business.

Joe Stiglitz has a new column out today. Even though I disagree with his conclusions, I nevertheless think his division of the economy into two parts--manufacturing vs. service--is insightful:

Some looking at the U.S. economy's decreasing reliance on manufacturing and increasing dependence on the service sector (including financial services) have long worried that the whole thing was a house of cards. After all, aren't "hard objects"--the food we eat, the houses we live in, the cars and airplanes that we use to transport us from one place to another, the gas and oil that provides heat and energy--the "core" of the economy? And if so, shouldn't they represent a larger fraction of our national output?

The simple answer is no. We live in a knowledge economy, an information economy, an innovation economy. Because of our ideas, we can have all the food we can possibly eat--and more than we should eat--with only 2 percent of the labor force employed in agriculture.

http://www.tnr.com/politics/story.html?id=947bf9e5-923b-409a-adac-579658...

Guys like yourself are out there doing the heavy lifting in the manufacturing sector. Meanwhile, the so-called "whiz kids" reap the huge monetary rewards in service sector endeavors like banking and finance.

Where I think Stiglitz gets it wrong is his characterization of the service economy as the "knowledge" economy, the "information" economy, the "innovation" economy. His blind spot is in thinking that guys like yourself, dedicated to the manufacturing sector, don't deploy as much knowledge, information and innovation as his fair haired boys in the service sector. The reality is that you probably deploy about 1000 times as much.

As much as I admire Stiglitz--his strident condemnations of the Iraq war and Bush's profligate and disastrous fiscal policies--I nevertheless think the time is rapidly approaching when we will see that he lives in a world of illusions, a dream world of smoke and mirrors.