Abd ul-Rahman Lomax <a...@lomaxdesign.com> wrote:
> When Rossi bailed from all agreements to allow more independent > replication, that's when the alarms got really loud.) I think you exaggerate. I am not alarmed. > I don't think so. If I were CEO of a fossil fuel company, I'd want to get > my hands on LENR ASAP. Not to suppress it, but to make it the future of my > business, the energy business. I'd want to save the oil for chemistry. > Plastics, etc. > I disagree. Cold fusion can only reduce total revenue from energy by a factor of a thousand or more. What you are saying is somewhat like suggesting that when Craigslist appeared, daily newspapers all over the county should have banded together and bought into it, because this was the future of classified advertising. The problem is, the total revenue from Craigslist is far smaller than the revenue from classified advertising used to be. There would not be enough revenue to go around. No matter who owns Craigslist, it can only lead to the bankruptcy of local newspapers, printed or electronic. Exxon Mobil earned $125 billion last year. The entire market for cold fusion fuel, worldwide, assuming it calls for heavy water, would be a few million dollars a year. If Exxon Mobil got patents for cold fusion they might make a lot of money, but nowhere near $125 billion. Plus they have 83,000 employees who would nearly all be redundant. Those people have no skills relevant to cold fusion. They can contribute nothing to the development of it. They have no more expertise than, say, the food scientists at McDonald's. The fact that oil is used for energy and so is cold fusion is irrelevant. (Actually, food scientists who know about hydrogenation catalysts for cooking oil are more likely to contribute to the development of cold fusion than geologists or combustion experts.) Furthermore, the oil used in plastics and other feedstock is only about 10% of the total. So the oil company revenue would collapse by 90%. No company can survive that without drastic restructuring and downsizing. In any case, cold fusion will soon make it cheaper to synthesize hydrocarbons on site from hydrogen and carbon (CO2 or garbage), which will eliminate the need for oil as feedstock, drastically reduce the cost of plastic, improve safety, and eliminate the need to transport oil. So there will be no future in oil. Not for any purpose. It will be as useless as slide rules in a world with electronic calculators and computers. - Jed
