RE: High-Speed Rail Grants Announced
I don't like light rail. If the traffic density isn't heavy enough to support separate-grade rail, you are better off with buses. I think we agree on that. As much as possible, make the buses electric trolley buses and let them run down the medians of boulevards; that makes a lot more sense than light rail to me.
I don't like diesel trains. We need to get to where all passenger trains, and as many freight trains as possible, are electric. And then generate the electricity with nuclear.
We are only going to reduce our oil usage by making something other than oil the prime mover for as many applications as possible. If it's all Priuses, that's certainly better than nothing. But I think there are cases where the density will support trains. And if the density is marginal now, running a rail line will influence future development patterns to favor places with easy access.
That's the big issue in Houston now. This developer wants this route because that's where he has properties, that developer wants that route because that's where he has properties. And Houston politics has always been the dance of the developers.
We need to wean ourselves of 13 million barrels of imported oil. Drill here, drill now can take care of 2-4 million; importing sugar can ethanol can take care of another 2-4. Yes, we're still importing, but it's cheaper (or at least cheaper than oil will be if there's a price spike) and it gives us some leverage to play ethanol agianst oil. And giving Latin America a new cash crop helps us with our illegal immigration and drug problems. These things get us about halfway there (maybe a little less).
The rest is all going to be bits and pieces. There just isn't anything else that will make a major contribution. We are probably going to need 10 different things, each helping us less than a million barrels a day. When something like switchgrass ethanol comes online, it can replace sugar cane, but best guess is 25-50 years, and we'll die waiting on it if we don't do something now. Hydrogen cars are sexy, but right now it takes significantly more energy to extract the hydrogen than the yield, and the delivery infrastructure is going to be a nightmare. Without a quantum jump in electricity generation and transmission, we're probably limited to a million or two electric cars, and that probably saves us less than a million barrels a day. CNG is bieng touted right now, but I think we are better off moving to electricity as a prime mover for more applications and using more natural gas to generate electricity. One of the many dumb-@$$ things Carter did was to regulate against natural gas, that's why we have the apparent bubble now. That bubble looks big because we are underutilizing gas because of Carter, but if we step up utilization, the denominator gets bigger, the numerator stays the same, and the resulting reserve life goes down big-time. What we should do is make the numerator bigger, but that means "drill here, drill now" and we already discussed that.
This is the problem with the alternative energy approach. There are alternatives to "energy" but there aren't good alternatives to "oil." And oil is fungible, but energy is not entirely so.
That and the numbers. The numbers are just so big that you need a lot more than the alternatives crowd will have any ability to deliver in our lifetimes. That's with a crash program, which we certainly fall far short of right now.
So whatever little piece trains get you is useful in the final calculus.
(This post was last modified: 02-03-2010 01:16 PM by Owl 69/70/75.)
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