Current Gasoline/Petrol Price$

Calliban · 2022-06-08 08:27:08

kbd512 wrote:

Calliban,
I think I'd much rather synthesize sufficient quantities of gasoline so that we don't have to worry about going back to burning wood. Everybody ditched those wood burners immediately after WWII for a reason. Even though it technically works, it was always a substandard solution when compared to gasoline.

Agreed liquid fuels will always be a more practical proposition for the end user. Having to mess about with gasifiers would make any job a lot more difficult. Syngas also has poor volumetric energy density, which reduces engine power.

Wood gas is what we will end up being left with if large commercial and government interests fail to get their arses into gear and make the investments neccesary to produce industrial quantities of synthetic liquid fuels. Right now, the only solid progress in this area is coming from biofuels and these are minor additives to gasoline and diesel that are manufactured from cereal grains. These grains must be sowed and harvested using diesel powered tractors, fertilised with natural gas derived fertilisers and then heated to ferment or liberate oil or alcohol using natural gas. With the world now facing a food crisis, this would appear to me to be a very retrograde development.

There are lots of possible options for manufacture of synthetic fuels capable of filling the gap left by declining conventional oil production. But they all require large upfront investments to develop the technology and then build out the required infrastructure. We are not seeing this happen on a large enough scale at present. Western governments have generally failed to make any proactive moves towards easing supply shortages. The UK government's 25% windfall tax on North Sea oil producers is nothing short of retarded. It tells me that they have no understanding of the situation and no solutions to offer other than punishing producers for high prices. Government and industry bodies should be working closely behind the scenes at this point to explore technological options for plugging the supply gaps. These options do exist, but I see little evidence that anyone in government even understands the problems they are facing. Unless the people in charge suddenly wake up to reality and do what needs to be done, wood gas is what we will need to get by with thirty years from now.

Last edited by Calliban (2022-06-08 08:46:59)

tahanson43206 · 2022-06-08 11:59:39

For Calliban re post #676

Government and industry bodies should be working closely behind the scenes at this point to explore technological options for plugging the supply gaps.

There is NO need to be exploring anything. This forum contains a plethora of fully worked out solutions.

All solutions at scale involve risk.

What we NEED are human beings willing to take risks at the scale of the problem.

Capitalism ** could ** solve this problem handily.

There is an adequate amount of government funded research in the knowledge bank

I'd like to see a few financial plans for businesses in this space.

Russia has made the betting field much more favorable, through it's gamble of epic proportions.

Here is where governments have a place in the grand scheme of things....

Refusing to buy hydrocarbons from Russia is an obvious step.

Refusing to buy hydrocarbons from other suppliers would be a logical step, if the need is to provide incentive for capitalists to be able to imagine making a profit.

(th)

kbd512 · 2022-06-08 18:36:15

I don't know what to say to these people to let them know how abhorrently bad the alternatives to energy abundance happen to be. It's as if they're either so ignorant or so dismissive of the possibility or running out of energy that they lack the capacity to understand what life was like when energy wasn't abundant, or worse, entertain some totally false romanticized notion of what life was like before industrialization. Every aspect of modern society that took multiple generations to create can functionally, if not literally, disappear inside of a single generation. It's not written in stone anywhere that we will continue to progress technologically / socially / environmentally. All of the desirable aspects of energy abundance are predicated on energy availability. As total energy output declines over time, it becomes increasingly difficult to "get it back". A 1% production decline, year-over-year, is not a serious problem over a single year. After 5 to 10 consecutive years of declines, a monumental effort is required to restore production capacity.

I think we "jumped the gun" on the notion that electricity and electronics would solve most of our energy problems. We supply around 2% of the total energy demand using these new energy generation or storage technologies. From the perspective of people with no understanding of technology, it's just a matter of money. There too many people who think we can overcome basic physics by throwing some indeterminate amount of money at the problem. They were misled by the media and/or academia to believe in grossly unrealistic conversion rates. Unfortunately for all of us, we only managed to supplant 2% of TPES using alternative energy while incredibly abundant and cheap energy / capital / labor inputs were available. The world prior to COVID, which was flush with cheap energy / capital / labor, simply doesn't exist anymore. Everything from here on out gets much more difficult and expensive to do. If we keep going about "business as usual", then the task of restructuring our energy supplies will become functionally and eventually literally impossible to accomplish. I'm not opposed to any solution that actually works, but I define that as affordable to the vast majority of users and available whenever required.

Trying to turn everything from washing machines to cars into electronic / battery-powered marvel machines was a mistake. Any given Tesla driving down the road makes the Space Shuttle look like a cheap child's toy that's out-of-date by several decades. Anyone who thinks making every vehicle on the planet at least that sophisticated, and that such a practice is also long-term sustainable is delusional in the extreme. Looking back over 40 years of solar panel and battery technological development history, it should've been obvious to everyone that only small incremental improvements were realistic to expect, and that's exactly what we actually achieved over the past 5 decades, going back to the 1970s.

Developing batteries of any kind with an energy density on par with liquid hydrocarbon fuels is at least an order of magnitude more difficult technological problem to solve than putting a colony of a million people on Mars. We haven't even started our colonization endeavor and we're clearly not very serious about doing that, either. None of the rosy predictions about where we would be by now have panned out. Mass manufacturing brought down marginal production cost from something unaffordable to something that superficially appears to be cheap if and only if all the energy inputs to outputs and operating limitations are completely ignored. For example, treating solar as if its cost is indicative of a viable 100% solution without storage costs included in the price tag, then ignoring the fact that anything plus storage is even more expensive than nuclear. The moment we start talking about providing 24/7/365 reliable power using wind turbines / photovoltaics / batteries (highly sophisticated electronics by any other name), the associated costs go exponential.

Due to cost or simple unavailability of resources, the probability that we could convert all or even most energy consuming devices over to using electricity within a human lifetime is near-zero. The time it took to convert from burning coal to burning oil or natural gas should've made that very clear, since that process is ongoing to this day.

From where I'm sitting, it looks like real planning for the future was almost ignored in favor of "hopes and dreams". National economies run on abundant and always-available energy, not catchy campaign slogans or emotions about complex esoteric problems such as climate change. Whenever that falters, only bad things happen from there to both humans and the environment. Everybody eventually suffers, not simply the poorest amongst us, even though they get hurt first. At the end of the day, no matter how much money I personally have or don't have, I don't think it's ever acceptable to do things that hurt people who are less well-off. Few things hurt the poor more than depriving them of energy, so I view that as an unacceptable evil, even if that means some ill-defined greater degree of climate change.

If someone told me, "We have to go back to living the way we did before the industrial revolution on the mere assertion that doing so might mean the planet will be some fractional degree cooler decades from now if absolutely everyone else does the same", then I'd probably tell them to go pound sand. Little wonder that nearly everyone else in the developing world has made the same decision. Ideology alone doesn't provide solutions, it merely creates new problems.

Which problem is worse? That's the real question.

Is no energy-on-demand better than some of us, possibly even myself based upon where I live, having to move further inland about a century from now?

Are we willing to reset human progress to back before the industrial revolution over climate change?

If not, then can we all have our "Come To Jesus" moment over what a future without hydrocarbon energy actually looks like when a like-kind replacement is not "ready-and-waiting"?

If so, then are most of us prepared to live the way we did in 1800s America?

We can take care of this, either way. If enough of us are truly dead-set on "going back in time", then we will revisit our history. It will be a much simpler way of life. There will be far fewer computers or cell phones, not much in the way of transportation outside of walking or horses and mules. Pretty much all jobs will have to be very local. This notion of sharing our thoughts at the speed of light will likely be limited to public libraries, which ironically would benefit in some ways. You won't see many airplanes or ships. We'll still have trains for mass transport.

SpaceNut · 2022-06-08 20:33:47

I find it interesting that manufacturers are still turning out the latest and greatest even while what we currently have is still functional as well as doing just fine. That so many fall for that new shiny piece of crap just be cause that want to keep up with the Jones.

Back a dozen posts we began to talk about electrolysis and how elevated temperature, dissolved co2 and in another topic perchlorites present in it would be a means to lower the amount of electricity we would require to make fuels or a variety based on catalysts. This not only would benefit mars since we need more energy than we can provide but if we are using a thermal nuclear as in a Krusty for its heat we are than able to pass a loop around or in the chamber that we are trying to break down the water into usable component elements for making fuels we need there by using the heat which is excess.

kbd512 · 2022-06-09 08:51:24

SpaceNut,

I think what you're getting at is the artificial scarcity created for sake of having shiny new toys that only a very limited number of people can possibly afford. For example, the 1,000+ microchips in a Tesla could or 400+ microchips in a Cadillac could, at least in theory, be used to control the electronics in hundreds of "regular" cars that are affordable to the masses. Rather than having many thousands of cars doing their best impression of paperweights, for lack of microchips, they could be completely usable cars with some of the "nice-to-have, but not necessary" features removed.

As for synthesis of cryogenic liquid hydrocarbon fuels on Mars, due to the atmospheric dust and distance from the Sun, yes, that process probably requires a nuclear fission reactor of some kind. We've talked at length about why solar power of any description is just barely feasible to do on Mars at small scale where the total power requirements are very low.

The issue here on Earth is the scale of power input required. We need about 25TWh/day, just to pump the water, split the Hydrogen, and capture the CO2. On top of that, we need another 25TWh/day required to transform the ingredients into alcohols and then into gasoline / diesel / kerosene fuels. This is for total replacement of extracted hydrocarbon fuels with recycled / synthesized hydrocarbon fuels used by America. The input power figure assumes no new Earth-shattering efficiency improvements to any part of the process or the combustion engines themselves.

The scale-up of nuclear power required would be very difficult to move past the regulatory hurdles and the solar thermal will last at least as long as nuclear thermal, so despite the relative materials consumption inefficiency of solar thermal when compared to nuclear thermal, solar thermal still ends up being the most workable solution. We're talking about deploying more GW-class fission reactors, here in America alone, than the entire world uses, combined. That's going to be a very tough sell when solar thermal can feasibly supply as much energy.

I prefer to "pick-and-choose" my battles. I'm no longer willing to fight with the anti-nuclear people when we have an alternative solution, however poor in terms of material consumption, as compared to nuclear. Construction can be rapidly completed using solar thermal, because there's almost no environmental and regulatory hurdles to clear. Solar thermal maintenance requires very little in the way of specialized training, because most of the plant is a simple heat engine and plumbing job. It'll create and maintain jobs that pay a living wage, using government contractors who supply the maintenance labor. We'll use Army Corps of Engineers and SeaBees as construction labor to save costs and make use of their "ruthless efficiency" models for combat construction.

Long story short, we're getting ready to "go back in time" if we stay on our present course, and it's not going to be pretty. It's going to get very ugly and that will happen rather quickly. We have a golden "window of opportunity" to prevent irreversible economic decline, and we need to convince enough people in business and government to seize it before it's too late.

tahanson43206 · 2022-06-09 09:17:39

For kbd512 re #580

This post to SpaceNut seems to me to be slightly improved over your (many) previous efforts to create a sales pitch that would persuade Americans to support your vision, while trying to avoid gratuitous insults that turn off half the population.

I think your vision is achievable in terms of matter, energy and educated work force.

However, at the present time, the psychological state of the American population is fragile.

NewMars forum now has a capability of storing data in "permanent" storage, thanks to the NewMars Dropbox account.

Please consider making a single, concise, mathematically compelling presentation that shows total replacement of ground sourced hydrocarbons.

A single facility can be replicated all over the world.

The first facility doesn't need to be huge. It just needs to be large enough to be believable.

The facility you design would fit on land that your readers can imagine releasing for the purpose.

The facility you design would provide a modest return to investors, so long term investors would be candidates for a sales pitch.

The facility you design would provide modest but adequate income to staff employed in sustained operations.

In short, the facility you design would serve as the model for similar (if not identical) systems replicated all over the world.

The world already ** has ** facilities that perform part of the job.

This forum includes posts about many of those facilities.

What this forum does NOT have is a single, concise specification of a facility that would take in sunlight, sea water and air, to make gasoline.

I'd appreciate your having a draft proposal ready for discussion at the Night Owl Zoom on Sunday ... Friday, Saturday ... that's over 48 hours.

You've already posted the parts and pieces multiple times.

What is needed is a concise, easy-to-follow presentation.

Such a presentation would be totally free of editorial comments designed to inspire crowds with enthusiasm.

The presentation I have in mind would slide effortlessly under the gaze of a financial analyst.

(th)

Mars_B4_Moon · 2022-06-09 13:16:11

When Gasoline price went near $5 during the Iraq War people thought it the Apocalypse and things would never be worse
Not 6, not 7, not 8 $ not 9 but now almost 10 Bucks for Gasoline?

Price of gasoline in Canada was an Apocalyptic Canadian $8.10 +.

The old 1973 oil crisis or first oil crisis began in October 1973 when the members of the Organization of Arab Petroleum Exporting Countries led by islamist mohammedan theocratic monarch Saudis proclaimed an oil embargo. The embargo was targeted at nations that had supported Israeli politics during the Yom Kippur War. The initial nations targeted were Canada, Japan, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom and the United States with the embargo also later extended to Portugal, Rhodesia and South Africa. By the end of the embargo prices of oil had risen nearly 300%, from US$3 per barrel ($19/m3) to nearly $12 per barrel ($75/m3) globally; US prices were significantly higher. The embargo caused an oil crisis, or "shock", with many short- and long-term effects on global politics and the global economy. It was later called the "first oil shock", followed by the 1979 oil crisis, termed the "second oil shock"
https://web.archive.org/web/20070609145 … round/oil/
https://web.archive.org/web/20140306225 … il-embargo

However today Food prices might also go crazy

I always thought no matter what mix no matter the method of measure Liter, Quart, Gallon, no matter the method to refine and deliver the US Price would remain lower. Australia, France, Northern Macedonia, Brazil, Portugal, Canada they would always be higher, they did have weird economics and strange social systems and funny ways of doing business but now it is almost 10 Bucks in California.
How long before you must sell your furniture to fill up the vehicle?

A Chevron station in the coastal village of Mendocino about 175 miles north of San Francisco was charging $9.60 a gallon for regular

The Mendocino station, Schlafer’s Auto Body & Repair, is the only one in the tourist haven — described on the county website as “an enchanted place filled with real, unspoiled California opportunities” — and is routinely considered the most expensive in the nation.

https://nypost.com/2022/06/04/gas-nears … -5-in-nyc/
'Schlafer said that if she didn’t charge $9.60, she’d be out of business.'

Another California Exodus about to begin??

Last edited by Mars_B4_Moon (2022-06-09 13:29:07)

kbd512 · 2022-06-09 13:28:36

tahanson43206,

I'm going to be away on business travel this Sunday and won't be able to participate during the call due to the time that my flight is scheduled to depart.

kbd512 · 2022-06-09 15:37:15

Mars_B4_Moon,

California voters are the ones who have caused their high gas prices by continually voting for Democrats. Democrats always do their level best to punish poor people for being poor. I can only presume Democrats do this because they despise poor people, which also explains why Democrats constantly attempt to pit brother against brother so that they can distract ignorant, overly-emotional, and/or poor people from focusing on the criminal activities of the Democrat Party, which are primarily intended to funnel money from the impoverished to their opulently wealthy donor class, who then use the money on whatever their agenda happens to be at the moment.

If any part of what Democrats have done and continue to do was intended to alleviate rather than perpetuate poverty, then at some point we would expect to see a poverty reduction success story whereby fewer and fewer people were dependent upon government handouts. Since we only see the exact opposite over time as a result of Democrat economic policies, we must conclude that no matter Democrats' stated intentions to the contrary, when the result is consistently the exact opposite of what they assert was intended, then whatever the result is must be their actual intended result.

If we put up "No Dumping" signs, but everywhere you see such a sign someone has dumped a pile of trash there, yet while we continue doing that the end result is always a trash pile under said "No Dumping" signage, then eventually you have to conclude that the people ordering more such signs to be erected have no actual interest in reducing illegal dumping. The point is, signs don't prevent illegal dumping. The sign costs plenty of public money, but it's not solving illegal dumping problems. No sign is required to know that it's illegal to dump your trash along the roadway. People already know it's illegal, but they do it anyway if they think they can get away with it. They don't respect the property of others, which is the root cause of the problem. In short, it's a human behavioral problem. Making more laws and erecting more signage won't solve the problem. Only enforcement will change behavior.

The same applies to economic policies that don't work. Ideology doesn't equate to a valid economics plan, no matter how earnest and strong the belief. Democrats are almost universally ideas people, not managers. A few of their ideas are good, but most of their ideas are abhorrently bad, and to a person most of them don't know how to manage anything, which is why they constantly look to someone else, such as government, to manage things for them.

So long as someone with my sort of mentality is managing things that need to be managed, such as energy resources, then as a function of what I know about energy, there's not a problem. The moment we allow people who start mixing in their personal ideology with foundational concepts as important as energy policy, then the entire economics system goes haywire because it's run by people who are unable to separate their personal desires from sound management policy.

People in California with a 25 gallon gas tank are now forking over a rent payment on a very nice apartment or a mortgage on a small house, simply to fill up and go to work. It's deliberate, and everyone who points the finger at the oil companies doesn't understand that 2/3rds of all investment dollars into drilling were redirected to "green energy", because we were supposedly going to transition off of fossil fuels inside of 10 years. The ideology which drove investment dollars allocation and the underlying thought process amongst these wealthy, who are almost all very liberal people with very imaginative but very false ideas about an "energy transition", was that nobody but them would be able to afford to use fossil fuels in another 10 years. As such, they stopped investing in oil drilling. Groupthink ideology drove bad investment decisions that now cause gasoline to cost double, then triple, then quadruple as much as it did. At the same time, they shut down pipeline projects to pay off their wealthiest donors, such as Warren Buffett, which in turn doubled to tripled the cost of transporting heavy crude oil from Canada to the refineries in Texas. It's still being transported there in BNSF tanker cars which burn a lot more oil in the process, but now it's even less environmentally friendly. That's how we wound up with total clowns like John Kerry and Al Gore lecturing us about climate change while they continue to buy McMansions on beachfront property, travel around the world by private jet and limo, and generally behave like entitled princes / princesses while our poor people slowly starve to death.

If you force these little twits to live by their ideology, what you quickly find is that almost none of them, apart from the most mentally defective amongst them, psych ward patients like Greta Thunberg, are truly committed to it. Even people like her are too ignorant to realize that the jacket she wears was made with petroleum products, much like the hull of the sailboat she used in her virtueless-signaling experiment with sailing across the Atlantic.

We need to correct the behavior of these adult-children and their attitudes towards energy by forcing them to live the way they preach to everyone else who is not a complete fool. Doing so will mean that most of them are totally naked, have no home, no means of transport except for their own two feet, no medical care, no ability to share their insanity with the rest of the world since all the electronics they use to showcase their exquisite ignorance were made with hydrocarbon energy, and ultimately, no influence over how to solve problems that they have no mental capacity to solve by do anything meaningful and positive. Anything meaningful and positive doesn't include homelessness and starvation of large numbers of people, driven by anti-humanist ideology and anti-social behavior. The mere fact that they were taught to hate themselves and see humanity as a problem is not indicative of a real problem. There were also many millions of people who the nazis brainwashed to hate other people, which did not make nazism particularly useful for humanity to pursue.

As we eradicate the idiocy and morally bankrupt ideology of these anti-humanists, we need to replace their screed with ideology that promotes compassion and a sense of community with even the least of our brothers and sisters.

Calliban · 2022-06-09 17:18:04

We are heading into harder times. Hard times breed hard men. And those men will presumably have little patience for the ideological stupidity that made them poor.

Problems cannot be solved by the same kind of thinking that created them. In the political world, problems cannot be solved by the same people that created them. Up until the 1840s, the balance of power in Britain was held by a selfish landed aristocracy, who enacted corn laws that kept the price of food artificially high by restricting imports. It took the Potato Famine in Ireland and The Hungry Forties in mainland Britain, to finally break their monopoly on power.

Maybe a new great depression is what will ultimately be needed to break the monopoly of the New Left in America and the West. Sometimes you need to go through hell to get to a better place. I think what is coming will be hell for most people. But it is baked in now. If there is any natural justice in this world, the New Left will find themselves in the same position as the French aristocracy in the 1780s.

Last edited by Calliban (2022-06-09 17:31:22)

tahanson43206 · 2022-06-09 18:12:54

Here is a rarity ... a TED talk in support of nuclear power ....

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N-yALPEpV4w

(th)

SpaceNut · 2022-06-09 21:18:01

I am trying to understand how a democrat Californian controls the fuel costs clear across the country.

kbd512 · 2022-06-10 07:36:12

SpaceNut,

Gasoline is $4/gallon in Texas, up to $6/gallon in other parts of the country, but nearly $10/gallon in California. In Alaska, a state where absolutely everything is much more expensive than it is in the lower 48 states due to transport costs, the average gasoline price is $5.50/gallon. The only explanation that passes muster is that those who are running the show in California did something to drastically increase the cost of gasoline in California. 2 years ago, gasoline was $4/gallon in California, $2/gallon in Texas, and $3/gallon in Alaska.

It's not transportation costs, it's not marketing or advertising costs, it's not production costs, and it's not oil companies being greedier than usual, but just in California and nowhere else. If any of the nonsense that you Democrats try to toss out there was true, then gasoline should be a lot more expensive in Alaska than it is in California. However, gasoline is not more expensive in Alaska, because the absolute truth is that your fellow Democrats have a monopoly on local and state government in California and they are the ones who drove up the cost of gasoline in California as a function of their ideology, which asserts that gasoline is bad and should be more expensive to comport with their ideology, which involves punishing people for using any form of energy that their ideology disagrees with.

Calliban · 2022-06-10 10:22:51

From Large-scale Solar Thermal Power by Werner Vogel: Transmission losses from 800kV DC transmission lines are 8% for 2000km and 11.5% for 3000km. I do not have any information on the costs of these transmission lines. But it is possible in principle at least, to generate power from solar thermal plants in New Mexico and Arizona and transmit this power to New York and Washington DC.

The solar thermal concepts that we have discussed here are so far concerned with production of synthetic fuels. Solar thermal has a particular advantage over PV or wind in the generation of bulk electricity. Between the collectors and the steam plant, energy can be stored very cheaply as heat. Many modern plants have molten salt tanks to help maintain power generation over day-night variations in insolation. This is an example of latent heat energy storage. However, sensible heat storage without phase change materials may provide a cheap way of storing weeks worth of energy. A sensible heat store could be a concrete walled tank, containing rocks and compressed clay with sand providing insulation around the edges. Heat woukd be deposited and removed by steel pipes containing oil, running through the tank. The materials involved are extremely cheap, to the point of being almost costless. It should therefore be affordable to include extremely large thermal capacitancies into solar thermal plants, sufficient to store weeks of power generation.

This affords solar thermal power the capability of providing reliable baseload power. Something that PV and wind cannot achieve. In the case of these energy sources, a gas turbine backup plant is needed to cover 100% of the output from the wind farm and PV farm. But for solar thermal equipped with a large heat store, only a single steam plant is neccesary.

Last edited by Calliban (2022-06-10 10:44:25)

kbd512 · 2022-06-10 11:15:57

The Contradictions of Battery Operated Vehicles | Graham Conway | TEDxSanAntonio

This guy at least has a clue about the cheap accounting trick used to fool profoundly ignorant people into thinking that their EVs are "greener", but also totally ignored the CO2 produced by burning all the coal, oil, and gas required to make the photovoltaic panels and wind turbines he's advocating for. However, it's still interesting to note that a single horse emits more CO2 to travel an equivalent distance as a LS / LT V8-powered Corvette.

CO2 emissions from a 650hp+ gasoline-powered supercar are lower than the CO2 emissions from a single horse that can't sustain 40mph for very long, let alone 75mph, and vastly lower than trying to make batteries that provide equivalent range as compared to a Corvette, but we still have people whining and gnashing their teeth about CO2 produced by considerably more fuel-efficient cars while totally ignoring the CO2 emissions generated when we make EVs and photovoltaics and wind turbines, because they don't have enough understanding of the nature of the problem to recognize their errant "thought process", or lack thereof, for what it is.

tahanson43206 · 2022-06-10 11:35:02

I went back to the first post in this topic out of curiosity...

Palomar wrote:

*Can't find the old thread via Search. It's probably 13 pages backlogged already...will start a new one.
Late last week a gallon of regular unleaded averaged $2.37. Friday night it jumped to $2.49.
My mother recently traveled to the Peoria, Illinois area; she saw $2.75 per gallon there.
I'm wondering if it's prices going up prior to the Labor Day Holiday, but that's still 2 weeks away.
Yours?
--Cindy

Prices in the region where I live are hovering just under $5.

In comparing $2.50 in 2005 to $5 in 2022, I have to note that inflation would increase by some amount over that time.

Google found an inflation calculator:

$1 in 2005 is worth $1.48 today - Inflation Calculator
https://www.in2013dollars.com › Inflation › 2005
The average inflation rate of 2.33% has a compounding effect between 2005 and 2022. As noted above, this yearly inflation rate compounds to produce an overall ...

So $2.50 in 2005 would be $3.70 today with normal inflation.

We had prices in this area as low as $3.09 not long ago, so the abnormal spike is apparent.

***
Regarding making wind devices and solar panels with fossil fuel ... I sure hope we stop doing that soon! As kbd512 points out frequently, the practice is self-defeating.

(th)

Calliban · 2022-06-10 12:55:21

kbd512 wrote:

The Contradictions of Battery Operated Vehicles | Graham Conway | TEDxSanAntonio
This guy at least has a clue about the cheap accounting trick used to fool profoundly ignorant people into thinking that their EVs are "greener", but also totally ignored the CO2 produced by burning all the coal, oil, and gas required to make the photovoltaic panels and wind turbines he's advocating for. However, it's still interesting to note that a single horse emits more CO2 to travel an equivalent distance as a LS / LT V8-powered Corvette.
CO2 emissions from a 650hp+ gasoline-powered supercar are lower than the CO2 emissions from a single horse that can't sustain 40mph for very long, let alone 75mph, and vastly lower than trying to make batteries that provide equivalent range as compared to a Corvette, but we still have people whining and gnashing their teeth about CO2 produced by considerably more fuel-efficient cars while totally ignoring the CO2 emissions generated when we make EVs and photovoltaics and wind turbines, because they don't have enough understanding of the nature of the problem to recognize their errant "thought process", or lack thereof, for what it is.

Good talk. A few things this chap misses:

(1) If the world were powered by horses, there would be insufficient food for the human population. Billions would starve. Whilst fertilisers, pesticides and mechanisation has improved land productivity, a big forgotten factor in our food revolution is that we no longer need to feed draft animals. All those fuelds they were growing hay a century ago are now growing corn and wheat.

(2) If cars were powered by renewable electricity, they would still emit CO2 because of the GT backup plants and all the coal and NG used to make the RE stuff in China.

(3) CO2 is far from being the only environmental impact that humans have on the world around them. If we have to invest in infrastructure that contains ten or twenty times more steel, concrete and rare elements than what it replaces, there is clearly going to be an environmental price to pay for that.

4) Hybrids are indeed a better prospect than electric cars. But hybrids don't necessarily need to rely on electric batteries at all. There are other options for recovering braking energy. A compressed air tank would be more efficient and would last for decades - it could even be stripped out of one car at end of life and put into another. By using waste heat from the engine to heat the air during expansion, life time fuel consumption could be halved.

5) Cars are only one mode of transportation. Most people didn't own them at all before the 1950s and still did OK. We have had electric trains and trams for a long time. These do not have the same resource problems as electric cars. It may turn out that the car is a fossil fuel optimised system and not affordable to most people without it. Maybe we need to imagine a different way of living, rather expecting technology to maintain exactly our existing way of living?

tahanson43206 · 2022-06-10 13:40:19

For Calliban re Carbon Tax

Both you and kbd512 have repeatedly made a solid case for making long chain fuels from Air and sea water using non-fossil fuel energy.

You have been a champion of nuclear fission power, and you have hinted that you can imagine a future in which all long chain fuels are manufactured by human beings using fission provided energy.

Likewise, kbd512 has written often and equally convincingly that he sees an alternate future in which all needed long chain fuels are made by humans beings, using Solar trough supplied energy.

After reading your most recent post, it crossed my mind to consider that a Carbon Tax would be a problem for humanly made long chain fuels. To the best of my knowledge, despite lots of talk, no one has implemented a carbon tax. I would like to propose that such a tax should be specified to apply ONLY to ground sourced fossil fuels.

A Carbon Tax on manufactured long chain fuels would be counter-productive.

A Tax ** Holiday ** for manufactured fuels would seem to be the way to go.

The Capitalist system is capable of solving this problem.

However, entrepreneurs operate within a framework created by their societies.

a great variety of management tools have been employed by various societies, to influence the productivity of capitalism. In the present case, it seems to me that a carefully calibrated squeeze on ground source fuel, combined with an equally carefully calibrated tax holiday for non-ground sourced fuels might be worth considering.

(th)

SpaceNut · 2022-06-10 18:36:54

Upward climb continues with the price at the pump tonight being 4.93 a gallon.

If you are looking for hydrogen to be a savior a gallon of gas is equal to 1 kg of hydrogen and to get that you need to break down 2.64 gallons of water to obtain the equivalent in hydrogen as there is only 110 grams of it in a liter of water.
For earth that is not a problem as we use free air in the engines of choice but for mars we need to capture the oxygen for reuse.

It is also said that the electrolysis input to get the hydrogen is just 70% efficient.

Pipelines unclogged, but Canadian crude now faces U.S. Gulf Coast glut

https://www.gasbuddy.com/usa

2018 map 180620-bsmapaaa-graphic.JPG?update-time=1529524534837&size=responsiveFlow970

current map
https://gasprices.aaa.com/state-gas-price-averages/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_state … lue_states

https://gasprices.aaa.com/news/

SpaceNut · 2022-06-11 17:09:21

propane generators are basically the same generator just with a different fuel being delivered to it with electric power being the output from its use. Of course the size of the power output relates to the consumption rates for doing so. Most generators can not run continuous as well. All engine seem to have these flaws....
https://www.generatorhero.com/how-much- … rator-use/

Home Generator sizes, a 22 KW Generac generator would consume 5.9 cubic meters per hour of natural gas which is similar to propane in use.

Can we ever get information without needing to convert it....

https://preparednessadvice.com/propane- … st-choice/

Propane produces 92,000 BTUs per gallon, gasoline is capable of producing 114,000 BTUs per gallon, and diesel is capable of producing 129,500 BTUs per gallon. This means that it will take more propane per hour that either gasoline or diesel to run a generator.
Propane is a gas that is stored in liquid form. When the tank reaches a certain pressure, the propane turns to gas and dispenses from the tank. The pressure in the tank is measured in pounds per square inch (psi).
On average, a generator uses 2 to 3 pounds of propane per hour. However, this amount can vary depending on the size of the generator and how high the wattage is.

So it appears that liquid fuels are the way to go but for how long as the price continues upward.

propane is stored in a pressurized tank which takes energy to do.
https://www.wtamu.edu/~cbaird/sq/2013/0 … as-is-not/

https://afdc.energy.gov/fuels/propane_basics.html

https://uwaterloo.ca/chem13-news-magazi … fuel-gases

of course if we are direct using the fuel it might not need a lot of energy to make it usable.

SpaceNut · 2022-06-12 19:25:20

Wood gassifier

https://youtu.be/a6e3CprVTi8

SpaceNut · 2022-06-15 19:23:25

The price of gas did go back down 4 cents to $4.89 a gallon.

SpaceNut · 2022-06-18 06:45:29

The pump price dropped another 4 cents last night and now rides at $4.85 for regular gasoline.

Son informed me that the price of electrical was going to go up and then handed me my electrical bill from the mail.

while this last month was a low $130 down from the month before which was $170.

tahanson43206 · 2022-06-18 07:00:50

For SpaceNut re #598

Thanks for adding electricity rates to this topic ...

Electricity (kWh) Prices by State
STATE
Sep 2021
MOVEMENT
Ohio
12.64¢ / kWh
DOWN
Oklahoma
10.72¢ / kWh
UP
Oregon
11.02¢ / kWh
UP
Pennsylvania
14.38¢ / kWh
DOWN
Electricity Rates (June 2022) - ElectricChoice.com
www.electricchoice.com › electricity-prices-by-state
About Featured Snippets

There should be a statement of the rate charged by your utility on the bill. It would be interesting (to me for sure) to see how New Hampshire compares.

Of course usage has nothing to do with the rate charged. They are completely independent variables.

(th)

SpaceNut · 2022-06-18 07:10:33

The electrical has been covered before in that under deregulation its split into delivery and source energy supplier of which one is used to calculate each separately along with rate brackets for the kwhrs used such as to have a low to high range depending on usage.

right now the warmer months my energy costs will drop towards this value for 6 months or so but will climb as it gets cold to double that at the peak of winter.

edit
I here today that the state PUC is allowing an increase to the rates that our power company can charge coming soon.

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