(I’m sitting on my wallet. See Part 1 for context).
The safe bet is down, says Gwynne Dyer [link to recent article]. And “the same fate [as befell horse-drawn vehicles] is likely to overtake oil-fuelled vehicles in the next 35 years.”
Dyer makes the following points:
The shift will be driven by concerns about...
foreign exchange costs
energy independence
the need to curb greenhouse gas emissions
The shift will start with...
ever-tightening standards for fuel efficiency
The shift will be followed by...
the first mass-market generation of electric vehicles, due in the next two or three years
The coup de grace will be delivered by...
third-generation biofuels, probably produced from algae... fully competitive with oil in price and energy content
Based on the above factors, Dyer predicts American oil consumption will fall “quite fast, quite soon” and the same is true elsewhere.
Then he concludes, “It is a safe bet that the demand for oil is going to fall faster than the supply over the next 10 or 15 years...and if demand falls faster than supply, the price will also collapse.”
I’m going to think, and sit on my wallet a bit longer, because I smell something fishy.
Could it be the algae?
.
2 comments:
I've heard about the algea farms for making fuel. INteresting concept. But my suspision is that the prices are low because all over the country auto makers have an overload (in the US atleast) of SUV's that are gas guzzlers.
Call me cynical but I'm sitting on my wallet too.
My wallet will stay firmly in my hip pocket on that one. Because I have this dread that shortly after January 20th, we here in the States will see a steady increase in prices at the pump. Unless something happens that can possibly link our newly elected administration to a price spike, in which case forget steady it'll be ballistic.
Cynical? Probably. And I hope I'm wrong. But Big Oil can't be happy with the results from last November and they've got enough Big Money to be patient, and absorb whatever "losses" are involved until the opportunity presents itself to slam us all over again.
Then again, I suppose it's possible that we learned something from the last climb up the roller coaster and we've managed to find ways of cutting consumption.
Nah... what a silly thought.
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