600 mile range Federal law needed

Not across the nation like you said initially.

Obviously LA and MS and the states served by those refineries are going to be RFed (Royally F..ked) I never said they wern't. In fact if you reread my post you will see that I said the oil companies are overemphasizing the shortage in the press precisely so they can gouge the public and people will accept it and say "Oh it's just the storm"

You are missing the fact that many tens of thousands of cars got flooded out and will be unusable, thus their owners won't be buying fuel. In fact the city of New Orleans won't see normal street traffic for at least 6 months, it will take them that long to get the dikes patched and the city pumped out - assuming anyone still wants to live there after the looters have finished stealing everything of value and burning the city to the ground. And a lot of other Gulf Coast states are going to see a lot of economic problems and people who are thrown off work onto unemployment because of it are going to be riding the bus not paying high gas prices.

Nobody knows what the DEMAND of gas will do. If it is SIGNIFICANTLY lower then it won't matter that a lot of refinery capacity got knocked offline. And I think it will be. I think the oil companies have very much underestimated how much people will be willing to carpool, use mass transit, and such in order to avoid getting gouged, for the short term anyhow. The United States population does an enormous amount of unnecessary pleasure driving every day, there is a LOT of cushion there which can absorb a fuel shortage.

With all those extra people your families have lots of opportunity to pool driving, so as a whole all your fuel usage is going to go down quite a bit. And this will be repeated thousandfold across those states. It will work out, you will see. In fact, this is EXACTLY how the free market is supposed to work as our friend Mr. Putney will be happy to tell you. The shortages will produce a price spike which will curtail the demand to the point that demand once again is no more than the supply. Then as that demand curtailment gets to be a habit, gets "institutionalized" as it were, and more supply comes on line, there will be an oversupply and the price will crash - until that is, everyone with flooded out cars gets their insurance money and runs out and buys new ones which they then want to drive all over the place. ;-)

Ted

There is only one reason for me to wish for a larger fuel tank: be able to cross the otherwise great state of Oregon without buying gas. Are you guys going to change that ridiculous 'no self serve' law in any foreseeable future? Is there anything genetically wrong with Oregon residents making them unable to stick a nozzle in their gas tank when they grow up past high school age? For goodness sake, find something productive to do for those

5000 kids 'employed' in your gas stations!

And if you do, it is far too late for running to be an option.

But you weren't on an overloaded road with tens of thousands of cars. If you look at the evacuation, it was mostly stop-and-go for MILES.

Isn't this or wasn't this the case also in NJ? Liberal union crap.

Bill Putney (To reply by e-mail, replace the last letter of the alphabet in my address with the letter 'x')

Where do we get the hydrogen that takes more energy to produce (separate) than the energy you get out? The reason our fossil fuels are a net energy gain for us is that they've stored free energy from the sun over centuries of exposure. If we have to pump the energy in that we are going to get out (as in producing biofuels from raw plants, or in separating out hydrogen) to run a vehicle, then you have a false economy that will fail very quickly. Nuclear is one way to get a net energy gain of pre-stored energy.

Bill Putney (To reply by e-mail, replace the last letter of the alphabet in my address with the letter 'x')

I don't know the PDX situation but here in california cities and counties may have their own additonal taxes on gasoline or may require special formulation all of which may result in markedly different prices as you move to and from their jurisdiction.

Howard

Thank you TED !!

I don't like to see the little guy get screwed anymore than anyone else here.... however.. if there is EVER to be any "work" on alternative energy, dino power has to get up there where the alternative people have a chance to make a buck...( for the record Exxon stockholders voted against sinking money into alternative energy) ... Sorry kiddies but when there's "no change" (in something new) there isn't going to be any change or motivation to change. .

The WW2 Jeep was a great vehicle for what was needed. So simple, and reliable. Why do we need something like a H-1 now?

Al

Puleez...

Hydrogen storage isn't the prime issue - hydrogen production is the issue. It takes more energy to produce hydrogen from water than you get back when you recombine it with oxygen just from the natrual losses involved in the process from beginning to end. If you factor in the added material and production costs, saftey and handling expenses (especially since hydrogen has to be stored at incredible pressures and liquid hydrogen is a cryogen - compared to fossil fuels that can be stored in a liquid bulk form at ambient temperatures) then the expense of hydrogen begins to exceed it's benefit. You need lots of electricity to seperate hydrogen from oxygen in water, and the only efficient way to produce that kind of juice is nuclear, but now you get into the "not in my backyard" argument and the whole mess of where to store the spent nuclear fuel. Plus to make the huge amounts of hydrogen required to power our millions of cars you will need fresh water, and since all the natural fresh water is already spoken for you will have to build desalinization plants and/or distillation plants - which also take a lot of energy.

However, I do agree with the final part of your post - wholeheartedly!

Cheers - Jonathan

It's cheaper for us to use the gas stations as convenient job generators for the bottom feeders than for us to run big social programs that create make-work jobs for them. The kids do pump some gas, true, but many people who might otherwise be stuck permanently on welfare have used gas pumping jobs as stepping stones to better jobs.

Considering that Oregon has practically no big corporate headquarters in it left, after all the mergers gutted the economy here, there's not a hell of a lot to the economy other than extracting money from all the multinationals that are operating here. PDX and Eugene have a few corporate headquarters left, but profits for just about every industry, including forest products, largely go out of state. The most profitable economic sectors involve separating transplanted Californians from the money they bring into the state, I'm afraid, and growing Marijuana (which I believe we still lead the nation in) The dope-growing profits all feed into the local economy since those operations are all ma-and-pa ones that are headquartered here, and we don't have the feds extracting their chunks. But just about every other industry you can name, is headquartered elseware, and corporations in those industries all carefully protect the high-paying jobs by keeping them close to their corporate offices (which aren't here)

Of course you won't find this mentioned anywhere in the economic reports! ;-) It took the oil companies a long time to figure out that the people of Oregon understood this, but once they finally did they stopped funding the self-serve initative ballot measures which kept getting defeated.

The other thing is that the majority of voters in OR live in Portland Metro and there's enough traffic to Vancouver WA for people here to be familiar with fuel prices in WA (which has self-serve) We haven't observed any difference in fuel prices in WA than over on this side of the river so the arguments that self-serve will save us money aren't believable.

Ted

That is true, but consider also that once the initial, expensive R&D has been paid for and these alternative energy industries are up and running without the need for government incentives/support/etc, if we don't see an overall, permanent decrease in the cost of energy, then really these alternative energy sources wern't worth developing.

The goal of a "solar powered car" and any other kind of alternative energy program powered car should be to be able to reduce the cost of powering the car. It shouldn't be to just replace one system with another just because someone is enraptured with a different system. Otherwise we really ought to stop bothering with screwing around with vehicle fuel and just concentrate on building plants that convert coal into gasoline, or convert biomass into gasoline, or some such.

Consider that oil AKA hydrocarbons, originally came from solar-powered plant material and solar-powered plankton growth, it should be possible to use genetic engineering to make an organism that you input sunlight and get oil out of.

Ted

Bill, your making a whole bunch of assumptions there which I think are wrong.

Vehicle fuel has a bunch of restrictions on it that are special. It has to be easily transported (ie: mobile) it has to explode under controlled conditions, and it has to be safe enough so that if the vehicle rolls over it won't explode and destroy 3 city blocks, it has to have high energy density, and it has to be available on demand.

Solid fuels like wood, coal, rocket fuel boosters, etc. do not meet this criteria.

Fuels like sunlight also do not meet this criteria

Fuels like nuclear do not meet this criteria.

Gaseous fuels like natural gas, propane, fart-in-a-jar (methane) hydrogen also do not meet this criteria for obvious safety problems.

As a result your assumption that vehicle fuel must realize a net energy gain is wrong. Vehicle fuels like gas and alcohol still work even if they don't realize a net energy gain simply because there's no alternative. Obviously this raises the cost of running a vehicle but it will not fail quickly because there simply is no alternative. The only question is how much it will raise it and if the vehicle owners are all willing to pay that.

Also another assumption your making is in the net energy gain - net gain from what? Net gain from just using raw sunlight?

If that's it, then you are missing that wind also equals a net gain, and additionally, an economy could survive where the net energy gain of the fuel over raw sunlight was 0, ie: not negative, but equal.

Last year GE's US wind installations generated 873 megawatts of power, see:

In Oregon, the now-shut-down Trojan Nuclear Plant was a 100 Megawatt plant.

GE's turbines come in 1.5 2.x and 3.6 megawatt versions, see:

RE Power has a 5 megawatt version they are selling see:

20 of those in a wind farm and you have your nuclear plant.

Ted

It has been on the ballet 3 separate times the last time within the last year or so, there are just to many lazy people who prefer sitting their car not getting fuel on their hands to get enough votes to resend it!

I still can't get a straight answer about why the hell they ever enacted such an asinine law... Everything from to put otherwise unemployable people to work to some misconceived idea that it may be safer...

BTW the law evidently does not apply to diesel. (weather or not a particular station knows it). I pump my own Diesel at a number of places.

Diesel & Gas prices in Oregon have been on the rise for quite a while, But they took a 30-50 cent jump since Katrina hit land. All my other cars run on gasoline, and the prices for regular gas though (most times) cheaper, have for the most part risen right along with the diesel. Today in McMinnville, the regular Gas was $2.79 Diesel was $3.10. In Yamhill, regular Gas was $2.99 Super was $3.15 & Diesel was $3.11

I buy my diesel anywhere from Banks (north) to Brooks (south) and Yamhill (west) to Canby (east). Because I carry 59 gallons, I can price shop for quite a few miles. :-)

According to a skit that Saturday Night Live did a few years ago for Black History Month, Self-Service gasoline pumping was invented by a black kid - in the "historical re-enactment", when a motorist pulled up and honked his horn for gas, the kid yelled "GET IT YO' DAMN SELF!", and history was made. 8^)

Bill Putney (To reply by e-mail, replace the last letter of the alphabet in my address with the letter 'x')

I know this is a foolish question... but is there any reason people are still responding to Nomen's mindless ravings?

Not in the Portland metro area.

Banks does not see the PDX-to-coast traffic as it's not right on US 26, everyone has filled their tanks long before going by there, that's a low-volume station.

Canby is not on a major arterial, most people use I-5 not 99E, once more it's low-volume

Most people buy fuel in Salem before hitting Brooks, it's low-volume

Yamhill you have got to be kidding, there's no major arterials out there, few people, a very low volume of gas sold, plus they are probably paying extra for hauling a tanker out on those roads.

All these are very small markets, and are remote, it is no wonder your seeing pricing rise - there's no competition. Those stations are pumping low volumes and they are already paying more for gasoline than the higher volume stations in Portland, and your seeing those station owners being opportunistic now.

McMinnville is closer to PDX which is why your not seeing that big a variance from the average PDX prices, there's too many people who already drive from there into the metro area via 99W. If you were to go another 15-20 minutes into Tigard you would see cheaper prices.

I'll see tomorrow what the 76 I usually buy from off US 26 is charging, on Friday it was 2.66 The stations along 26 are a lot higher volume than along 99W so they are buying a lot more gas at lower wholesale costs.

As I said, the Oregon attorney general needs to be shot for permitting the oil companies to violate the Sherman anti-trust act in most cities in Oregon after the last round of mergers. I guessed that sooner or later we would see gouging going on.

Ted