[...] According to the U.S. Department of Labor, $320 billion dollars is more money than the annual salaries of every elementary & secondary school teacher, physicist, chemist, economist, internist, pediatrician, registered nurse, … [...]…

First, ethanol is not terribly efficient. There are many other types of crops that can be used that produce better quality biofuels, notably biodiesel, which many more gallons/acre and smaller energy for production requirements. From everything I’ve read ethanol and its huge PR presence are a direct result of corn farmers and their lobbies.

Also stated was that hybrids are not going to have signifigant market penetration, which is true. However just about any vehicle running diesel is able to switch to biodiesel with minor modifications. Should biodiesel fuels be produced in quantity there is a ready market in almost all commercial, construction, mass transit and transport vehicles which are all diesel. This would require signifigant amounts of land as well, but using other crops such as palm and switchgrass could meet the needs with alot less real estate than corn.

As for the current batch of hybrids on the market they could be a lot better in terms of underlying design, at least as far as hydrocarbon fuel efficiency. We currently use parallel hybrids that are essentially a traditional car with batteries and electic assist backup. They net about 25% better mpg and retain all the usual maintenance issues of a car but with battery replacment/disposal as well.

A series hybrid like the Volt being designed by GM uses only electric motors for locomotion and gets rid of the combustion engine and drivetrain altogether. The batteries power the car, and when they run out an electric generator(which could just as easily be diesel) kicks in to keep the electic motors powered. Basically this means greatly reduced maintenance(no drivetrain, oilchanges, belt replacements etc..) and if the driver keeps trips under 80 or so miles doesn’t have to refuel at all. This of course greatly increases our demand for electricity if we switch all vehicles over to that style.

Any way you slice it we need to find ways to up electricity production. We have plenty of coal, but now is a good time to look into wind and solar as well. Home and commecial photovoltaics are expensive but if we want to really create a lot of energy, especially during peak usage hours its the way to go. Basically I think the gov’t needs to offer signifigant tax breaks and subsidies to homeowners and real estate companies that are willing to put of the money to install these systems. The technology is there but its not quite within the reach dollar wise for many people even though over the long run is saves money. The only organization with the resources to get the job done is the gov’t.

Already wind farms have been taking advantage of similar tax breaks there is a rapidly growing business for them. Considering the oil companies have been getting somewhere in the neighborhood of $8billion in breaks I think maybe somewhere we can come up with a similar program for those wishing to take themselves off the grid and/or feed back into it with solar.

Like Entropy said, one shot solutions are not viable. Its going to take a concerted effort from multiple solutions all going up at once to really get us off the dependence on foreign energy. But this is America, we have the know how and the money to do it if we really really want to.

The numbers put out in the article seem to be rather wishful thinking – I find it difficult to believe that and equivalent amount of oil could be extracted and processed for 20-30% of the current price of oil.

Personally, I’m not a one-size-fits-all kind of person when it comes to large, complex problems like oil dependency. No one thing will solve the problem. I think biofuels will have a role, and oil shale might as well, but I simply don’t believe the costs the author has quoted are realistic.

The second thing it fails to address is alternative energy practices. The energy sector does not consist of two sources–ethanol and petroleum. There are a wide range of options that can just as easily be turned on immediately. We have multi-megawatt wind turbines, solar cells exceeding 40% efficiency in testing and over 20% efficiency in mass production as well as other technologies such as geothermal, hydro and nuclear power as well.

Rather than spending hundreds of millions of dollars now to develop these fields and then billions of dollars later to clean them up, how about we simply invest in the renewable energy infrastructure now and get off oil for mainline energy production once and for all?

Today if we were to use the existing technology to extract oil shale to give you an idea of the cost…..gasoline would be 22 dollars a gallon.

But all in all this was a good article. He is mostly correct in his assertion that all the screams are just what politicians do.

Immigration, Ethanol etc. are all means of smoking mirrors to keep America afloat one more year or decade until the current crop of politicians retire.

The fact is that America is fast becoming bankrupt. That despite our “Cash Flow” we have NO money. Immigration was meant to rectify that by increasing our tax base.

Ethanol and biofuels is meant to keep the price of gasoline at modest levels while attempting to keep the massive bleeding of money “OUT” of our country to try and stem the fall into bankruptcy that the USA is facing.

Oil shale is our salvation “IF” we can develop a meaningful and cost effective means to extract it. If not……it is like the guys trapped in the submarine and running out of air…….above their heads only perhaps 300 feet away is all the air they could ever need to breath………the problem?……….they cant reach it.

You say that biofuels will not solve our energy problems. It would be much more accurate to say that biofuels won’t solve our energy problems yet. That doesn’t necessarily mean they will eventually, but the nuance is important. Certainly at the point we are in biofuels now they couldn’t cover our needs, but the solution is not to abandon that option, but to invest strongly in research. Projecting the needs in terms of land is dangerous because we simply don’t know how much fuel could be gotten from biological sources, nor how efficient cars can be made to be, through future research.

Certainly while one option is unviable, you need to invest in others, but without abandoning the original line of research. I say this because though I know that there are plenty of people who only care about what is best for the nation, I don’t think they populate the power-circles in our energy industry. The industry is perfectly capable of repressing alternate avenues of research until they are sure that they can dominate the new market.

As for the turn-over of new cars a question for you. Most people probably will keep their car until it stops functioning or their personal needs change (like having children). However, would the appearance of a car that is far more efficient (read: cheaper) rather accelerate turnover? If you could double or triple the fuel efficiency of hybrids vs. traditional cars, wouldn’t the change happen more quickly?

I hope I don’t come off as anti-oil shale. Its extraction might be part of an energy solution. But it isn’t clear that the picture presented here shows all of the costs yet.

Personally, the “solution” to me has always seemed to require a little bit of this and a little bit of that – decrease consumption by a few percentage points here, get a few percent from solar and wind there, get a few percent from biofuels over here, and have a few percent off geothermal, etc. Each one by itself cannot solve the problem, but add them together and you’ve reduced petroleum dependence by 50%. All solutions will probably take 50 years.

Since the bio mentions you as a venture capitalist, could you disclose any financial interests you have in oil shale development? Such investments, of course, do not make anything you have stated inaccurate, but it will help readers know the background of the piece. Naturally, feel free to stay vague on names as you please.

Next up, why isn’t everyone in the world already jumping on this? From your piece, it sounds like we are sitting on vast reserves and yet few are even mentioning them. I’d like to think the reason is due to climate concern, but we’ve never shown any serious desire to change our energy consumption and development due to that reason to date.

The only real critique I have is to disagree with the ‘China is an even worse polluter and so it’s okay for us to pollute too’ argument. That’s like saying I can punch Billy in the stomach because Joe already punched him in the face. Despite my disagreement there, I do thank you for sharing a negative of this resource. What do you think the prospects are for not just saying we might use tax revenues to offset carbon emissions from oil shale development but actually making that part of the business model? Does the potential technology actually work in an affordable manner? If you can create a business plan that in 10 years could both drastically decrease dependence on foreign oil and, through technological development keep carbon levels the same or less than now, you’d have a winner.

By the way, since many of the reserves are on federal land, what type of land is it? (Are we about to dig up national parks?) And do you have any info on how rights to the raw materials would be divied up among interested producers? Finally, what do you see as the time scale for substantive oil shale development? Is it actually any faster than biofuel production? One doesn’t mine a trillion tons of oil shale in a year or two either.