Dollar a gallon gasoline

[Ronn! Blankenship]

At 10:34 PM Monday 7/21/2008, hkhenson wrote:
>At 12:00 PM 7/21/2008, you wrote:
>
>Keith wrote
> >>If someone in the area can think of another venue to talk about
> >>dollar a gallon gasoline,



I found it interesting that over the weekend I heard a sound bite on 
the news from Al Gore where he was also using the figure of the 
equivalent of a dollar a gallon.



>  I can make a case and I have slides.
> >
> >Why don't you make a case to some venture capitalists and/or
> >industry representatives who can get started immediately on
> >actualizing the project?
>
>It's my understanding that projects are not funded unless the people
>are known to the VC's.  If you know some and want to be part of the
>project, let me know.



No.  I was just thinking that in the current situation, there would 
probably be investors who would be very interested in getting in on 
something which looked like it really would provide even a partial solution.



>It's not even a particularly risky project.  If you have electrical
>energy to burn, making syngas is easy from coal, even from
>trash.  Sasol knows two ways to turn syngas into oil.
>
>The only drawback is the size, it's on a par with the cost of a few
>years of the Iraq War.



I was thinking that what you would want to do would be to find 
investors willing to fund a pilot facility and show that it worked 
locally (city?  county?  state?  whatever . . . ).  If it did work as 
predicted, it would be an easy matter to sell it to those willing to 
expand it to larger areas.  That's one problem with some of the 
suggestions out there:  they talk about savings (resource or 
financial) to be realized only after the whole energy infrastructure 
(at least of the entire US if not the world) has been converted from 
what it is at present to the proposed new version.  Few people seem 
to be talking with any specificity about how to accomplish the 
individual intermediate steps to get from here to there and what the 
incremental savings or other advantages to be gained from those 
intermediate steps will be.  And the proposals which require the 
whole system to be replaced before any advantages might be realized 
are so costly that the only way they could be funded is by the 
government with taxpayer money, and we have seen for the past 40 
years how well that works.  With a good proposal, hopefully private 
industry would be interested in funding the initial local facility 
and then expanding from there when it shows results.


. . . ronn!  :)