Donkey
I guess that soon the oil companies will be releasing those 100mpg carberators
As long as there is a question of who will have the ultimate control of the caspian sea oil, there will be price jitters. I think the caspian oil is the real prize in the iraq affair. It has been on the minds of american energy moguls since at least when bill richardson was us energy secretary. Besides wars and political chicanery, there is the jockeying for position by the huge oil companies.
Another energy source which has not even begun to be tapped is methane hydrates. http://www.fossil.energy.gov/programs/oilgas/hydrates/
A methane hydrate is a cage-like lattice of ice, inside of which are trapped molecules of methane (the chief constituent of natural gas).
This methane form contains more energy than regular methane.
Today, methane hydrates have been detected around most continental margins. Around the United States, large deposits have been identified and studied in Alaska, the west coast from California to Washington, the east coast, including the Blake Ridge offshore of the Carolinas, and in the Gulf of Mexico.
In 1995, the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) completed its most detailed assessment of U.S. gas hydrate resources. The USGS study estimated the in-place gas resource within the gas hydrates of the United States to range from 112,000 trillion cubic feet to 676,000 trillion cubic feet, with a mean value of 320,000 trillion cubic feet of gas. Subsequent refinements of the data in 1997 using information from the Ocean Drilling Program have suggested that the mean should be adjusted slightly downward, to around 200,000 trillion cubic feet -- still larger by several orders of magnitude than previously thought and dwarfing the estimated 1,400 trillion cubic feet of conventional recovered gas resources and reserves in the United States.
Worldwide, estimates of the natural gas potential of methane hydrates approach 400 million trillion cubic feet -- a staggering figure compared to the 5,000 trillion cubic feet that make up the world's currently known gas reserves.
This huge potential, alone, warrants a new look at advanced technologies that might one day reliably and cost-effectively detect and produce natural gas from methane hydrates.
Why the new interest?
If only 1 percent of the methane hydrate resource could be made technically and economically recoverable, the United States could more than double its domestic natural gas resource base.
See also http://www.sciencenews.org/pages/sn_arch/11_9_96/bob1.htm or do a search.
Beside this, is the biofuel technology. This could be turned into an industry, putting american and canadian farmers to work growing corn, or other suitable sources for alchahol based fuel. This also is currently latent.
SS