The US consumes about 20m barrels of oil a day. From that, we get about 20gal of gas/barrel, which means the US consumes about 400m gallons of gas a day!

So what? Well, if they price of gas has gone up $1, then that means we spend an additional $400m/day on gas! Over the course of a year, that amounts to $146B/year. As someone else pointed out in another thread, that is the size of the entire stimulus package.

There are about 100m households in the US which means, on average, each consumes about 4gal ($14) of gas per day. That is about 120gal ($420) per month, or 146gal ($5110) per year! That is just with $3.50/gal gas, take it up to $4 or $4.5 and things keep getting worse. That has got to hurt the consumer.

I don't see how we can sustain this, we really need a comprehensive national energy policy. All this renewable stuff is fun, but for real power, I don't see any answer other than nukes.

I don't think nukes is the answer either.
Uranium is in short supply also.
Pres Bush just signed a contract with Russia to supply uranium.
Maybe thats why no new plants have been built.

Chipdoc,

Heard of conservation? Between 2001-2008 we could have halved our gas consumption by encouraging GM, F and Chrysler to build more fuel-efficient cars. They would not have lost any more than they have, and we would all have profited.

Heck if we had started in 1995, imagine where we would be today!

Telecommuting alone can save about 10% of fuel consumption in the US! That is about $14.6B/year by your calculations!

I have no personal gripe with nuke, but people who keep pushing it need to think about the real costs. We have made the mistake of looking narrowly at oil prices and ignoring the warning we got in the '70s. If we decide to pursue nuclear we need to take a clear-headed long-term view - cost to build plants, how to store the waste, plans for contingencies, etc...

The same people who club everyone on the head about nuclear risks being trivial and tree-hugger propaganda are also clubbing us on the head about the MILLIONS who could be killed if terrorists get their hands on a crude radioactive dirty bomb. Just that alone is reason to pause and go "HUH?"

We need to have new thinking about all things, not get the old lobbies back into influencing the debate. I would like to see nuclear tech being used for power generation and even cars, but it should be smart and practical, not hype and pass the buck to future generations or the poor.

Whoa, I didn't mean to make the political with the nuke statement, it is just a engineering judgment. Calculate how much energy is in all that oil and gas and look at what the alternatives are. Yes, conservation absolutely vital and I have been bitching about that for a decade. Actually, I have been also saying the US needs $4/gal gas so they start thinking about an energy policy. But my post wasn't intended to be about any of that, it was supposed to show the cold, hard numbers facing American consumers, they are ****ed, ****ed, ****ed. $5000/year on average in gas? That is going to leave a mark.

It has been a long time since the average american has had to worry about food and gas, imho. i remember as a kid in the 70's that it was an issue, but not since then. The fact is that food and gas *are* a big issue, but that has not yet sunk in, it has not reached a tipping point. But it must be close.

Maybe it will sink in by the time people start raiding their 401k's to pay for food and gas. I see s&p cut in half by then.

Yep.

I remember the 70s well.

Food costs went totally out of control and gas was short - you had a limit on the amount you could buy at once.

Nasty stuff....

Maybe when Amazon says "yeah, sales are down because people are spending their money on feeding their families and getting to work, instead of books and crap from us", maybe then it will sink in.

Side note, if the increase in the number of spam emails from Amazon is any indication of weakness, tonight should be interesting. Anyone else see an increase in those emails?

My spam filter keeps me blissfully unaware of such things

Quote:

Heard of conservation? Between 2001-2008 we could have halved our gas consumption by encouraging GM, F and Chrysler to build more fuel-efficient cars. They would not have lost any more than they have, and we would all have profited.

or they could try implement Natgas fuels....lower imports of oil, more oil/gas companies spending money in home (there are still big reserves in the US), higher exports of Ag commodities as there wouldnt be need for ethanol.
Such plan would really help current US deficit.
Even as finite commodity, natgas could be used as transition fuel...

Natgas is impractical fr this purpose for a whole bunch of reasons.

comprehensive national energy policy

We have one already!! Its called - go to war at the drop of a hat "to protect our interests".

Encouraging conservation does not bring in huge PAC donations, so whats the point? Only encouraging consumption does that. Remember, common sense has no place in polite American Society. Let Big Corporations decide for you, what you want and what you need and everything will fall into place.

Quote:

Natgas is impractical fr this purpose for a whole bunch of reasons.

Its still impractial because its not widely spread. With wider penetration it could be really good fuel, not to mention less polution.
There is only problem with security limits in parking places, other current problems could be solved...

Teo, nope.

Look at the energy density problem. Its a major issue on the scale of the "electric car" type.

Works for a city bus due to the availability of much more space for a big tank, not so for the passenger car.

LPG conversions are huge in the UK as an alternative fuel. Just do a search on Autogas. Many options available for fuel storage like a donut tank in place of a spare tire. Some systems allow to switch between pump gas and LPG. Yes, energy density is less than pump gas, you have to refill more often. Those that use the systems claim savings up to 50%. Everyday short communiting why not? Now you can fill-er-up at home now.

http://www.myphill.com/

This is available here in the US. Each state has tax credits available for alternate fuels.

http://www.fleet-central.com/resources/S....

There's not much available here in the US for conversions at this time. Not sure why, but I bet it has something to do with big oil.

There seems to be a growing number of fleet vehicals using LPG. While some refill stations are private, some are public. Check out your state.

http://www.eere.energy.gov/afdc/fuels/na....

I just did the calculations and it appears we use about the same amount of energy from natural gas as we do from gasoline (18.9T MJ for gas, 24.3T MJ for nat. gas). So, converting cars to natural gas would almost double our usage, that scares me a bit because we are already importing natural gas. Kind of like going from the frying pan to the fire.

However, it appears that natural gas is cheaper than gas per unit energy: $0.01086/MJ for nat. gas versus $0.02707/MJ for gasoline. Assuming $12/1000ft^3 for natural gas and $3.50/gal for gasoline.

Page of interesting numbers: http://astro.berkeley.edu/~wright/fuel_e....

Gen

A friend of mine here in Los Angeles had a natural gas powered car and loved it. He had to sell it when he moved to Ohio because he couldn't fuel it.

Police studies say that natural gas powered cars get about 10% less power, so they don't like them. However, for most applications that is irrelevant.

It is a far cry from the wimpish electric cars.

http://earth2tech.com/2008/04/22/telewor....

Telework Isn’t Always Eco-friendly
Written by Stacey Higginbotham
4 Comments
Posted April 22nd, 2008 at 8:14 am in Misc

OK, so, I telecommute, although I’ve always thought of it as working from home. I get that I’m lucky, but around Earth Day or every time some corporate entity either offers or rescinds its work-at-home programs, I get frustrated by the environmental pass telecommuting gives corporations and even web workers.

I would argue that it’s not environmentally better at all.

Let’s start with the assumption that I’m at home all the time. As a teleworker, I don’t have to be. Flexible work means I can wander around to coffee shops, drop off stuff at the post office or even run by the store to pick up something for dinner, while working in between. The result is I may drive as much as a commuter — or even more — depending on my daily errands.

And consider the days I work from home. I live in a state that hits 100 degrees on many days during the summer. I live in a green home, but my A/C is running nearly all the time because I’m there and want to stay comfortable. When I was at an office most of the day, I’d program my thermostat so my house stayed around 84 degrees during the day. Now it’s at 77 degrees 24/7.

A general rule of thumb is two degrees of A/C counts for 2,000 pounds of additional carbon over a year. So with my heating needs causing similar problems, I’m adding 3.5 tons of CO2 to the air all by myself. At least in an office the cooling load is spread across multiple people.

There’s also the issue of getting out of the house after hours. When most people are settling down to relax, I’m practically pushing my kid and husband into the car to drive somewhere to get dinner, ice cream or something, anything outside of these four walls. And, because I telecommute, we live fairly far from services, meaning my car puts on a lot of miles. Those miles may not equal a daily commute, but when added to my A/C bill, incidental trips taken because I work from home and the flights I have to take in order to physically commute to my workplace in San Francisco, I have to question how earth-friendly teleworking is.

Natural gas is used to make fertilizer.

Do you want more food shortages and even higher prices?

Nad, the problem isn't power.

The issue is fuel RANGE. About 100 miles on a tankful, mostly because of the energy density and the tank requirements.

Its relatively cheap to fuel BUT if we started doing this en-masse you'd see an instant response in fertilizer (NG is used to make ammonia, which is a key component in nitrogen that goes into fertilizer) which again goes back to food.

I think they are something like 50 nuclear power plants set to come online in the next 15 years, which will put a small dent in the overall energy demands.

When all is said and done there will be no solution that will magically become available that will sustain the way of life we are used to thanks to the one time endowment of lightweight, relatively safe and concentrated oil energy.
Given the way the endowment has been squandered, it will be a wonder if the world has even 20% of the energy availability it has now in 100 years.

Quote:

I think they are something like 50 nuclear power plants set to come online in the next 15 years, which will put a small dent in the overall energy demands.

A quick calculation:

2GWatts per nuke plant = 6.3e10 MJ per year

We use about 18.9e12 MJ per year of gasoline, so it would take about 300 nuke plants to replace our gasoline use. Note, gasoline is only part of our oil usage (about 2/5ths of a barrel of oil is made into gasoline).

A lot of things are going to change in a lot of ways in the coming years.

Quote:

We use about 18.9e12 MJ per year of gasoline, so it would take about 300 nuke plants to replace our gasoline use.

300 Nuke plants for the entire US is a tiny number -- all it takes is commitment. The effort to fight WWII was, as a comparison, far greater in manpower and capital costs, and I expect 300 Nukes could be realized much more quickly than say the Apollo moon program. I further expect that it could be achieved within a *two or three year* timeframe, given the right political environment.

I'm not saying it would real easy, or real cheap, but I am saying it is quite within the realm of what is possible if the will to do so were to show up...

Also, Uranium 238 is relatively plentiful, as KD has mentioned before.

There are nowhere NEAR 50 NPPs set to come on line in the U.S. - perhaps you meant worldwide, which sound right. In the U.S. alone, we would need many more plants to even begin to address the shortfall that's coming.

From Wiki: "On September 22, 2005 it was announced that two sites in the U.S. had been selected to receive new power reactors (exclusive of the new power reactor scheduled for INL).[citation needed] In August 2007, TVA was approved to restart construction of Watts Bar 2. The reactor is scheduled to be completed and come online in 2013. Currently, no new reactors have been ordered in the United States. However, as of February 2008, five applications for Combined Licenses (COL) have been submitted [5]. Note that these applications are not declarations of intent to build new power plants, but submission of a COL application is one of the final steps a utility must take before construction can begin on a new nuclear reactors."

Flap: Yes, it could be done, but we're late to the party! People who shriek about Uranium running out apparently haven't accounted for reprocessing and breeder reactors. Proliferation problems are a constraint, of course.

WWII industry mobilization, Manhattan program, Apollo moon program - these things took place on the upslope of US domestic oil production and will likely not be an option in the future. The energy capital has already been spent, and we will be worse off for it.