Originally published December 18 2005
Oil industry troubles are a boon to alternative energy research
by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, NaturalNews Editor
Wired Magazine discusses how the present hike in gas prices is benefiting alternative energy research, and discounts reports from oil executives that an energy crisis is looming.
The oil fields are running dry, the gas gauge is on empty, the American way of life is doomed - these ideas bob like plastic shark fins on the storm surge of current oil prices.
The main thing standing between those possibilities and your gas tank is cheap crude oil that costs Aramco barely $3 a barrel to bring to the surface.
For anyone with a fresh idea, expensive oil is as good as a subsidy - with no political strings attached.
Indeed, every extra penny you pay at the pump is an incentive for some aspiring energy mogul to find another fuel.
For the better part of a century, cheap oil has fatally undercut all comers, not to mention smothered high-minded campaigns for conservation, increased efficiency, and energy independence.
But growing demand is outrunning the oil industry's carefully computed supply curves, bidding up long-term expectations for the price of energy.
The long term may not mean a lot when you're standing at the pump, but the oil industry lives in a world where big projects take a decade to build and the checks that pay for them have eight or nine zeroes.
For years, the industry's long-term benchmark was $20 a barrel in today's dollars; to get a green light, new investments needed to be profitable at that level.
Three billion dollars in federal research money is now committed to making it happen.
These technologies join compressed natural gas, already widely used where it's worth spending extra money for cleaner exhaust.
The cost of developing entirely new energy supplies is daunting, but the money is available - and we're not talking about the $14.5 billion porkfest served up by Washington's recent energy bill.
That's the whole point of innovation: There's no telling where the next game-changing energy resource will come from.
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