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! :) _______________________________________________ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
