Wednesday, July 14, 2010

The Petroleum-Electric Myth is Alive and Well


The International Business Times had an article today referenced in slashdot which starts:
"As the U.S. moves to reduce dependence on oil, the nuclear industry is looking to expand, with new designs making their way through the regulatory process."
The introductory paragraph is just wrong because it implies if we just had enough electricity we wouldn't need as much oil, but we don't use petroleum to generate electricity. If Prometheus came down to earth and created enough new nuclear power plants overnight to supply 100% of the electricity in the US, do you know how much this would cut our oil dependency? Zero, zilch, zip. We need the oil to run our cars. Having all the electricity in the world won't power our cars - yet. The real path to energy independence is electric cars that we can power with nuclear, coal, hydro, wind, or solar. Then we can use our domestic oil for industry.

source

1 comment:

Bret Ferrier said...

I think that you do have a point as only about .9% of our electricity comes from oil.. I do think that Nuclear power plants are part of the solution as it would make electric cars possible and you could also use the electricity from them to produce hydrogen cars.
I personally think that Diesel is the way to go as you can get Diesel from Petroleum, Coal, Algae, Vegetable oil etc.