600 mile range Federal law needed

Not across the nation like you said initially.

Obviously LA and MS and the states served by those refineries are going to
be RFed (Royally F..ked) I never said they wern't. In fact if you reread
my
post you will see that I said the oil companies are overemphasizing the
shortage
in the press precisely so they can gouge the public and people will accept
it
and say "Oh it's just the storm"

You are missing the fact that many tens of thousands of cars got flooded out
and will be unusable, thus their owners won't be buying fuel. In fact the
city
of New Orleans won't see normal street traffic for at least 6 months, it
will
take them that long to get the dikes patched and the city pumped out -
assuming
anyone still wants to live there after the looters have finished stealing
everything
of value and burning the city to the ground. And a lot of other Gulf Coast
states are going to see a lot of economic problems and people who are
thrown off work onto unemployment because of it are going to be riding
the bus not paying high gas prices.

Nobody knows what the DEMAND of gas will do. If it is SIGNIFICANTLY
lower then it won't matter that a lot of refinery capacity got knocked
offline.
And I think it will be. I think the oil companies have very much
underestimated
how much people will be willing to carpool, use mass transit, and such in
order to avoid getting gouged, for the short term anyhow. The United States
population does an enormous amount of unnecessary pleasure driving every
day,
there is a LOT of cushion there which can absorb a fuel shortage.

With all those extra people your families have lots of opportunity to pool
driving, so
as a whole all your fuel usage is going to go down quite a bit. And this
will
be repeated thousandfold across those states. It will work out, you will
see.
In fact, this is EXACTLY how the free market is supposed to work as our
friend Mr. Putney will be happy to tell you. The shortages will produce a
price spike which will curtail the demand to the point that demand once
again
is no more than the supply. Then as that demand curtailment gets to be a
habit,
gets "institutionalized" as it were, and more supply comes on line, there
will
be an oversupply and the price will crash - until that is, everyone with
flooded
out cars gets their insurance money and runs out and buys new ones which
they then want to drive all over the place. ;-)

Ted

 

There is only one reason for me to wish for a larger fuel tank: be able to
cross the otherwise great state of Oregon without buying gas. Are you guys
going to change that ridiculous 'no self serve' law in any foreseeable
future? Is there anything genetically wrong with Oregon residents making
them unable to stick a nozzle in their gas tank when they grow up past high
school age? For goodness sake, find something productive to do for those
5000 kids 'employed' in your gas stations!

 

Its all fuckin% bullshi%. gas is $2.99 in one town and $3.35 in another, not
20 miles apart. You, me and everyone else is being lied to. the only think
katrina had to do with the price of a gallon of fuel is that it was an
excuse that sounded plausable.
this is from a yankee in new hampshire.
by the way screw the 600 mile theory it sounds dumb. it just makes your car
a bigger bomb, duhhhhh.

 

And if you do, it is far too late for running to be an option.

 

Be aware that many gas stations are independent or regional chains
that don't own refineries or oil supplies rely on the spot market.
Prices and supplies there are all over the place and constant flux.

The big-name, company-owned, stations have a more consistent supply,
and prices are often set according to corporate rules. They will rise
and fall at a slower rate.

 

But you weren't on an overloaded road with tens of thousands of cars.
If you look at the evacuation, it was mostly stop-and-go for MILES.

 

Isn't this or wasn't this the case also in NJ? Liberal union crap.

Bill Putney
(To reply by e-mail, replace the last letter of the alphabet in my
address with the letter 'x')

 

half of america can not afford to buy cars now they have to lease them
get real with what you say the price will go out of sight
what we need to do is is figure out hydrogen storage for cars and we can tell
the oil companys to **** off

 

Where do we get the hydrogen that takes more energy to produce
(separate) than the energy you get out? The reason our fossil fuels are
a net energy gain for us is that they've stored free energy from the sun
over centuries of exposure. If we have to pump the energy in that we
are going to get out (as in producing biofuels from raw plants, or in
separating out hydrogen) to run a vehicle, then you have a false economy
that will fail very quickly. Nuclear is one way to get a net energy
gain of pre-stored energy.

Bill Putney
(To reply by e-mail, replace the last letter of the alphabet in my
address with the letter 'x')

 

I typically buy gasoline in Washington County. I live in PDX and the
prices

I don't know the PDX situation but here in california cities and counties
may have their own additonal taxes on gasoline or may require special
formulation all of which may result in markedly different prices as you move
to and from their jurisdiction.

Howard

 

Thank you TED !!

I don't like to see the little guy get screwed anymore than anyone else
here.... however.. if there is EVER to be any "work" on alternative energy,
dino power has to get up there where the alternative people have a chance to
make a buck...( for the record Exxon stockholders voted against sinking
money into alternative energy) ... Sorry kiddies but when there's "no
change" (in something new) there isn't going to be any change or motivation
to change.
..

 

both stations are irvings

 

Puleez...

Hydrogen storage isn't the prime issue - hydrogen production is the issue.
It takes more energy to produce hydrogen from water than you get back when
you recombine it with oxygen just from the natrual losses involved in the
process from beginning to end. If you factor in the added material and
production costs, saftey and handling expenses (especially since hydrogen
has to be stored at incredible pressures and liquid hydrogen is a cryogen -
compared to fossil fuels that can be stored in a liquid bulk form at ambient
temperatures) then the expense of hydrogen begins to exceed it's benefit.
You need lots of electricity to seperate hydrogen from oxygen in water, and
the only efficient way to produce that kind of juice is nuclear, but now you
get into the "not in my backyard" argument and the whole mess of where to
store the spent nuclear fuel. Plus to make the huge amounts of hydrogen
required to power our millions of cars you will need fresh water, and since
all the natural fresh water is already spoken for you will have to build
desalinization plants and/or distillation plants - which also take a lot of
energy.

However, I do agree with the final part of your post - wholeheartedly!

Cheers - Jonathan

 

It's cheaper for us to use the gas stations as convenient job generators for
the bottom feeders than for us to run big social programs that create
make-work
jobs for them. The kids do pump some gas, true, but many people who might
otherwise be stuck permanently on welfare have used gas pumping jobs as
stepping stones to better jobs.

Considering that Oregon has practically no big corporate headquarters in it
left, after all the mergers gutted the economy here, there's not a hell of a
lot
to the economy other than extracting money from all the multinationals that
are operating here. PDX and Eugene have a few corporate headquarters
left, but profits for just about every industry, including forest products,
largely go
out of state. The most profitable economic sectors involve separating
transplanted Californians from the money they bring into the state, I'm
afraid, and growing Marijuana (which I believe we still lead the nation in)
The dope-growing profits all feed into the local economy since those
operations are all ma-and-pa ones that are headquartered here, and we don't
have the feds extracting their chunks. But just about every other industry
you can name, is headquartered elseware, and corporations in those
industries all carefully protect the high-paying jobs by keeping them close
to their corporate offices (which aren't here)

Of course you won't find this mentioned anywhere in the economic
reports! ;-) It took the oil companies a long time to figure out that the
people of Oregon understood this, but once they finally did they stopped
funding the self-serve initative ballot measures which kept getting
defeated.

The other thing is that the majority of voters in OR live in Portland
Metro and there's enough traffic to Vancouver WA for people here to
be familiar with fuel prices in WA (which has self-serve) We haven't
observed
any difference in fuel prices in WA than over on this side of the river so
the arguments that self-serve will save us money aren't believable.

Ted

 

That is true, but consider also that once the initial, expensive R&D has
been
paid for and these alternative energy industries are up and running without
the need for government incentives/support/etc, if we don't see an overall,
permanent decrease in the cost of energy, then really these alternative
energy
sources wern't worth developing.

The goal of a "solar powered car" and any other kind of alternative energy
program powered car should be to be able to reduce the cost of powering
the car. It shouldn't be to just replace one system with another just
because
someone is enraptured with a different system. Otherwise we really ought
to stop bothering with screwing around with vehicle fuel and just
concentrate
on building plants that convert coal into gasoline, or convert biomass into
gasoline, or some such.

Consider that oil AKA hydrocarbons, originally came from solar-powered
plant material and solar-powered plankton growth, it should be possible
to use genetic engineering to make an organism that you input sunlight and
get oil out of.

Ted

 

Bill, your making a whole bunch of assumptions there which I think
are wrong.

Vehicle fuel has a bunch of restrictions on it that are special. It has to
be easily transported (ie: mobile) it has to explode under controlled
conditions, and it has to be safe enough so that if the vehicle rolls over
it won't explode and destroy 3 city blocks, it has to have high energy
density, and it has to be available on demand.

Solid fuels like wood, coal, rocket fuel boosters, etc. do not meet this
criteria.

Fuels like sunlight also do not meet this criteria

Fuels like nuclear do not meet this criteria.

Gaseous fuels like natural gas, propane, fart-in-a-jar (methane)
hydrogen also do not meet this criteria for obvious safety problems.

As a result your assumption that vehicle fuel must realize a net
energy gain is wrong. Vehicle fuels like gas and alcohol still work
even if they don't realize a net energy gain simply because there's
no alternative. Obviously this raises the cost of running a vehicle
but it will not fail quickly because there simply is no alternative.
The only question is how much it will raise it and if the vehicle owners
are all willing to pay that.

Also another assumption your making is in the net energy gain -
net gain from what? Net gain from just using raw sunlight?

If that's it, then you are missing that wind also equals a net gain,
and additionally, an economy could survive where the net
energy gain of the fuel over raw sunlight was 0, ie: not negative, but
equal.

Last year GE's US wind installations generated 873 megawatts of power,
see:

http://www.gepower.com/about/press/en/2004_press/032904e.htm

In Oregon, the now-shut-down Trojan Nuclear Plant was a 100
Megawatt plant.

GE's turbines come in 1.5 2.x and 3.6 megawatt versions, see:

http://www.gepower.com/prod_serv/products/wind_turbines/en/index.htm

RE Power has a 5 megawatt version they are selling see:

http://www.repower5m.com/

20 of those in a wind farm and you have your nuclear plant.

Ted

 

It has been on the ballet 3 separate times the last time within the last
year or so, there are just to many lazy people who prefer sitting their car
not getting fuel on their hands to get enough votes to resend it!

I still can't get a straight answer about why the hell they ever enacted
such an asinine law... Everything from to put otherwise unemployable people
to work to some misconceived idea that it may be safer...

BTW the law evidently does not apply to diesel. (weather or not a particular
station knows it). I pump my own Diesel at a number of places.

 

Diesel & Gas prices in Oregon have been on the rise for quite a while, But
they took a 30-50 cent jump since Katrina hit land. All my other cars run
on gasoline, and the prices for regular gas though (most times) cheaper,
have for the most part risen right along with the diesel.
Today in McMinnville, the regular Gas was $2.79 Diesel was $3.10.
In Yamhill, regular Gas was $2.99 Super was $3.15 & Diesel was $3.11

I buy my diesel anywhere from Banks (north) to Brooks (south) and Yamhill
(west) to Canby (east). Because I carry 59 gallons, I can price shop for
quite a few miles.

 

According to a skit that Saturday Night Live did a few years ago for
Black History Month, Self-Service gasoline pumping was invented by a
black kid - in the "historical re-enactment", when a motorist pulled up
and honked his horn for gas, the kid yelled "GET IT YO' DAMN SELF!", and
history was made. 8^)

Bill Putney
(To reply by e-mail, replace the last letter of the alphabet in my
address with the letter 'x')

 

I know this is a foolish question... but is there any reason people
are still responding to Nomen's mindless ravings?