The Los Angeles Times has an article about a San Diego company trying to produce ultra-clean versions of gasoline and diesel from algae: "The year-old company, called Sapphire Energy, uses algae, sunlight, carbon dioxide, and non-potable water to make 'green crude' that it contends is chemically equivalent to the light, sweet crude oil that has been fetching more than $130 a barrel in New York futures trading... The company wouldn't give details about the production process or where its pilot project would be located. It expects to introduce its first fuels in three years and reach full commercial scale in five years... Robert Nelsen, managing partner at Arch, could barely contain his enthusiasm for the venture. "We want to displace the existing petroleum system with a continuous production system that is essentially an oil field on top of the ground that produces oil on a continuous basis for as long as you want it to," he said. "You wake up in the middle of the night thinking about the implications of this."Rico says the Arabs should be waking up in the middle of the night screaming about the implications...
OPEC has to walk a fine line. They need to maximise the price of oil but not make it so costly that their customers look for alternatives.
ReplyDeleteOil at $125 a barrel will (1) force conservation, (2) make alternative energy look economical, (3) turn uneconomic oil discoveries into money makers and (4) break the stranglehold that the Greens have on new exploration in ANWAR, Florida coast, SC Coast, etc.
When that happens, OPEC will lose production and the customers won't return.