Lithium Battery Maker Bankrupt

Romney said today --- we do not have to accept 4 dollar a gallon gas.

I agree with Obama --Romney is a liar.

No No sorry --he does not embrace the truth.

Hoyt,---- drill drill drill --your kidding right?

What about cough ,gasp, splutter...............

 

Drill. More gas = cheaper gas.

 

No No its doesnt work like that. YOU Usa does not burn your own gas you prefer to buy and burn Saudi gas, and if they aint making 60 then they will close down so you dont have any and the price goes up again.

Now - if you were to say shut down trading of oil then you might have a point- after all you cant trade enriched Uranium,-- its too important.

Your never going to see cheap gas ever again get used to it.

 

We have never had such a high oil production in the world history and such high prices at the same time. That equation doesn't work.

http://www.indexmundi.com/energy.aspx?product=oil&graph=production

 

I got my second hitch (for the 2010 Prius) from the US, as it wasn't available here, but the hitch for the 2005 Prius I had came from a Toyota dealer in the Netherlands. I've just checked, and the current hitch I have is a Curt: http://www.curtmfg.com/HitchLookup/...year=2010&make=Toyota&model=Prius&style=Sedan

I'd say the Prius would be OK towing that weight on the flat, but might struggle in the mountains. The reason Toyota don't recommend towing heavy trailers is that the motor generators can run hot when subjected to heavier than normal loads. Having said that, it depends on the weight you have in the car to some degree, if you're running the car light (maybe just the driver and not much luggage) then it'd probably cope just fine. The car is designed to carry five people plus luggage, so as long as you tried to keep the total weight about the same with a boat on the back I can't see that there would be a problem. I have only towed boat and trailer combinations up to around 400lbs or so with mine, and with that light a load you don't even know there's a trailer on the back at all.

 

At the very best photosynthesis is maybe 8% or 9% efficient at turning sunlight into biomass energy. Solar cells are better than double that efficiency, so it makes far more sense to use land for solar cell arrays than it does to grow biomass crops. The snag with solar energy is we can't easily store it yet, which is where the development of very high capacity batteries may come in.

Biofuel is a complete red herring for the future. If you take the case of the UK, then even if we turned all of our available agricultural land and woodland over to growing the highest conversion efficiency biomass crops we couldn't ever meet more than a few percent of our total energy needs. There just isn't enough land available in highly populated countries to allow food and biomass crops to be grown.

 

Some not widely circulated information about the doings in Washington as follows. Early in the Obama administration he attracted Steven Chu to the sluggish department of energy. Most of his predecessors had been obscure politicians, business men, and one was even a dentist. The DOE was a political backwater. Chu is a theoretical physicist and Nobel prize winner with a background of playing with gamma rays and quarks at Bell labs, Stanford, and Berkley. Chu is a tone deaf politician, He was at the vanguard of a new brigade of egghead elites-a new, ultra confident Best and Brightest who marched into Washington because they believed in all that hopey changey stuff that Obama envisioned.

This is about energy and its future. Petroleum and carbon based energy is finite and we know it.. Chu set up an agency dubbed ARPA-E (Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy) and attracted some of the worlds best brainiacs....A thermodynamics expert from Intel publisher of 65 scientific papers, an MIT electrical engineering professor who also taught material science, Arunava Majumdar a world reknowned energy expert who had run Berkleys nanotechnology institute, Duke biochemistry profesor Eric Toone, and more serious brain power who had no interest in politics but were thrilled with research possibilities.

There is a consensus at ARPA-E that biofuels via photosynthesis is not the way to fly. Too inefficient. These are practical men who understand that even elegant advances in batteries and bio fuels had to be scalable and affordable in order to be useful. There is some serious study going on with synthetic biology which manipulates cells and molecules and the "extremophile" community which studies microscopic organisms in exotic eco niches like hot springs and ocean floors. Some of those organisms have evolved to absorb energy without photosynthesis. Some of them make electricity. It might be possible to train those bacteria to eat electricity for breakfast to fuel our transportation sector someday.

Some of this fervent research is being outsourced. A Boston outfit is working on a process for engineering E-Coli into a chasis for iso-octanes. A university of South Carolina team would study "electroalchoholgenesis-bioelectrochemical-reduction of CO2". A Harvard medical school team is planning to create a "bacterial reverse fuel cell".
Chu, a sports fan, says that they know that they will strike out a lot but that they just might hit a couple of home runs that will change the whole world.

You can call this pie in the sky or a waste of federal money, or you can regard it as razor sharp cutting edge exploration into the destiny of our nation. If we can develope a suitcase sized battery that takes the place of a shipping container sized battery we will be on the way to freeing ourselves from the petroleum tyranny of nations who do not like us. So Solyndra struck out as did A123. That does not mean that we should give up.

 

Alternately stated: It takes money and energy to get oil out of a well. (Or shale, or whatever other alternate oil source you are talking about.) This (and the original drilling) are the cost of getting the oil. We have already drained or at least opened the easy-to-access and recover oil locations. Therefore, the cost of getting the oil from any new source entering the market will be at least as high as the highest cost currently in use. (Otherwise it would have already made economic sense to extract that oil.)

Only real exception would be a newly discovered source that wasn't in use because it was unknown - unfortunately we can't plan on discovering any of those by the very nature of 'unknown', and it's highly unlikely any exist, because any likely locations for such have been extensively scouted.

 

The other side of the price curve is demand. While supply may have increased, demand has increased faster than the ability of the oil companies to find and extract oil. And with millions of new cars expected to hit the roads world wide in the next decade, demand seems poised to far outstrip world supply levels for the forseable future. There is no government policy that can make significant changes to this since oil is a world wide traded commodity, and the entire US demand is only a fraction of the world demand curve, and an even smaller part of the supply.

Frankly anyone who thinks that anything the US can do, absent seizing the Middle East as a colony, will have ay effect on US gas prices is just fooling themselves.

This is the free market at work.

Further since supply is a limited factor, the best we can do is decrease demand. This entails increasing fuel prices through taxes, or just waiting until fuel naturally inflates in cost. But either way prices will go up.

 

On this regard, please see my post #14.

 

I dont agree --new cars are being made but they are economically superior and even hybrid. As new comes in old guzzlers go out.

When I was 17 it was un-thinkable to not take your driving test, Today many kids cant even drive.

Improvement in transport such as mas transit overhead or underground transportation will also diminish fuel demand. I live in the city and never ever take out the car. That is for long journeys out of town.

 

Oligarchs like you know who want us all in the city too, where we will be easier to subjugate.

 

oh dear

 

Why doesn't anyone make diesel hybrids? Surely the combined mileage would be in the 60s (US) and 70s (Where imperial gallons rule).

 

I think the problem is accumulated cost. As is diesels are more pricey and batteries are costly (along the advanced drivetrain) putting those 2 together would make a car priced too high.

btw. mileage in 60s is not rare even in US gallons for many diesel models in Europe. Then again you don't even have lower hp models available in the US. For example VW offers 55kW engines for many models here (~75 hp). While that used to be normal in the early 90s and before now its considered very low. Even economy minded people would prefer 0-60 in 10 second range. Take an 1980s Benz 240D and see what it clocks 0-60 at....

Expectation for convenience has gone up significantly as well as safety. Modern cars weigh quite a bit more than the older counterparts.