How much longer?

"Jay Honeck" wrote in
news:qcdLj.60058$TT4.34792@attbi_s22:

Right. And would you want that unregulated refinery built upwind from
your hotel?? Didn't think so.

Ah, yes -- another person who apparently hasn't flown over most of the
country -- which, by the way is almost entirely VACANT.

On that basis we should build it inside your head.


Bertie

"Bertie the Bunyip" wrote in message
...
"Jay Honeck" wrote in
news:qcdLj.60058$TT4.34792@attbi_s22:

Right. And would you want that unregulated refinery built upwind from
your hotel?? Didn't think so.

Ah, yes -- another person who apparently hasn't flown over most of the
country -- which, by the way is almost entirely VACANT.

On that basis we should build it inside your head.


Bertie

And you offer this pointless tid bit because you have no point, or don't
understand the issue, or both?

"Maxwell" luv2^fly99@cox.^net wrote in news:GKdLj.65016$y05.28316
@newsfe22.lga:


"Bertie the Bunyip" wrote in message
...
"Jay Honeck" wrote in
news:qcdLj.60058$TT4.34792@attbi_s22:

Right. And would you want that unregulated refinery built upwind
from
your hotel?? Didn't think so.

Ah, yes -- another person who apparently hasn't flown over most of
the
country -- which, by the way is almost entirely VACANT.

On that basis we should build it inside your head.


Bertie

And you offer this pointless tid bit because you have no point, or
don't
understand the issue, or both?



Just being constructive.


865


Bertie

On Apr 9, 7:30*pm, "Jay Honeck" wrote:
Right. *And would you want that unregulated refinery built upwind from
your hotel?? *Didn't think so.

Ah, yes -- another person who apparently hasn't flown over most of the
country -- which, by the way is almost entirely VACANT. * Of course you
wouldn't build a refinery in a populated area.


Apparently you have never flown over this country at night. When I
have, I have looked down at thousands of lights, everywhere. Other
than the mountains, there are not very many areas that are not
populated. But I notice that you don't want a refinery built near
your home or business. Well everyone else feels the same way, and
THAT is a major problem for building new refineries. That isn't a
liberal or a conservative issue. Even a teeth-gnashing conservative
like yourself doesn't want one of these things built near him.


It's too bad all those existing refineries were shut down. *It would
be a lot easier to expand those than to build new ones. *By the way,
from 1975 to 2000 the EPA received exactly 1 permit request for a new
refinery. *The oil companies haven't exactly been tripping over
themselves trying to build new capacity.

Wow, talk about confusing "effect" with "cause"! * The plain and simple
reason there have been almost no applications is because the draconian
environmental rules have made building a new refinery a multi-billion-dollar
nightmare of paperwork, hearings, and a never-ending web of interlocking
regulations that would keep a fleet of lawyers busy for decades.


No, Jay. They didn't build them because they didn't want to.
Refining has always been a low-margin business. It was more
economical to expand the existing refineries. The permits for those
expansions were submitted to the EPA, and they were approved.

What new American oil fields have they been prevented from developing?

Here's a quote from 2005 -- when oil was at "record prices of $50/barrel":
************************************************** ************************************************** **********************
"America has no shortage of oil. Washington has a shortage
of political will to let American workers go get it."
- Chairman Richard W. Pombo

I checked out your document. Here is another quote from the same
article:

"Contrary to the claims of special interest groups, we can produce
more energy to grow our
economy and continue environmental achievements at the same time,"
Pombo said. "These
efforts go hand in hand. They are not mutually exclusive."

I assume you are in the special interest group he mentioned. Seems
like your man Pombo disagrees with you, Jay.

By the way, did you even bother to read that article? It was about
"technically recoverable" oil. That is oil that up till now has been
too difficult or expensive to recover. Here again, this oil will be
more expensive than the current, easily recovered reserves. That
translates to expensive fuel, so it isn't going to decrease our energy
costs.


You might want to check this DOE document, which was the source of his
information: *http://tinyurl.com/5fv3nj
It's even more pertinent today than it was in 2005.

Here again, from 1978 until 2007 the NRC received exactly zero
requests for nuclear plant permits. *The problem isn't that the
industry is getting turned down. *The industry isn't trying to build
new plants. *The reason is that nuclear plants are so hideously
expensive, and the payback period is so long, that it is a huge
financial risk to build them.

Again, you've got the cart in front of the horse. *The reason reactor costs
are prohibitive isn't because the technology is any big deal -- just check
out the way the Navy builds reactors for the fleet, without incident -- but
because the regulation of domestic reactors has been made purposefully so
convoluted that they CAN'T be built without literally spending years in
court, supporting another fleet of lawyers.

There are about 30 new nuclear plants in the planning stages now. Why
all of a sudden is the industry going back to nuclear power? Did all
those nasty environmental laws suddenly get repealed? No. The reason
is economics. Here is an article for you to read. There isn't much
mention of environmental laws (except to note that any future carbon
tax would actually favor nuclear plants). There is a lot in this
article about the financial risk of building these plants. And that
translates to nervous regulators who regulate these public utilities.
But it is the finances that give them acid stomachs.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/16286304/


But before we ramp up the use of these, we need to
have a solution for long-term (10,000 years) storage of the
radioactive waste. *Right now it's just sitting around at the existing
plants.

Another environmentalist-induced catastrophe waiting to happen. *The safe
nuclear waste storage facility has been built (at a cost of billion$) and
has been ready for years -- but "environmentalists" (and I use the term
loosely) have the whole concept of long-term storage tied up in an endless
series of lawsuits. * So, all of our ever-growing stockpiles of nuclear
waste continue to be stored unsafely at each power plant. *It's criminal..

Yeah. The big problem is all those flaming liberal environmentalists
in Nevada don't want the storage facility in their back yard. Nevada
is full of flaming liberal environmentalists, right??


Sounds good, but where do you get the hydrogen??

Why, from the newly-built plethora of safe, non-polluting nuke plants that I
(as King) decreed -- of course!

:-)

I can see that you really want to believe that it is environmental
regulations that are causing these problems. *That gives you a nice
boogey man you can rail against. *But it is more complicated than
that.

I didn't say environmental regulations are "causing" the problems -- I said
over-regulation has made the problems virtually unsolvable. *Bottom line:
Until these onerous agenda-driven regulations are relaxed, we will continue
to see our economy thrashed by ever-increasing energy costs.

Well, the nuclear industry is moving forward and the "agenda-driven
regulations" haven't been relaxed. What does that tell you?

Phil

"Bertie the Bunyip" wrote in message
.. .
"Maxwell" luv2^fly99@cox.^net wrote in news:GKdLj.65016$y05.28316
@newsfe22.lga:


"Bertie the Bunyip" wrote in message
...
"Jay Honeck" wrote in
news:qcdLj.60058$TT4.34792@attbi_s22:

Right. And would you want that unregulated refinery built upwind
from
your hotel?? Didn't think so.

Ah, yes -- another person who apparently hasn't flown over most of
the
country -- which, by the way is almost entirely VACANT.

On that basis we should build it inside your head.


Bertie

And you offer this pointless tid bit because you have no point, or
don't
understand the issue, or both?



Just being constructive.


865


Bertie

73

In article Phil J writes:

Apparently you have never flown over this country at night. When I
have, I have looked down at thousands of lights, everywhere. Other
than the mountains, there are not very many areas that are not
populated.

Aha, back to AVIATION!!!

Flying at night is wonderful, but you must be from the east, since
night or day, much of Nevada and Utah looks pretty abandoned.

It is pretty amazing to come around the corner of the Sierras into
the central valley of California at night, and see the ground go from
almost completely dark to lit up all over.

Alan

Alan,

Flying at night is wonderful, but you must be from the east, since
night or day, much of Nevada and Utah looks pretty abandoned.


Great places for solar power plants. Just like Arizona, NM and parts of
Texas, too.

If Jay somehow shouldn't make it to tyrannical dictatorship with the
cozy name "Kingdom" applied, sensible solutions might just prevail over
utter madness...

--
Thomas Borchert (EDDH)

On 2008-04-09, Jay Honeck wrote:
Over the last forty years, environmentalists have innocently and quietly
influenced the wording and structure of our regulations in a way that has
ultimately made it quite impossible to address our current energy issues.

That's patently untrue.

Environmental regulation, on the other hand, has at least made those of
us who have oil refineries in their back yard a reasonable quality of
life.

It's all been innocuous, and "for the children" -- but it's completely
hog-tied us now that we really ARE in an energy bind.

It's for the adults, too. I've lived in an oil town, and even with the
environmental regulations we have today, the sky still turns green over
La Porte, and after flying a clean aircraft for a half hour, you land
and there's a film of gunk adhering to the leading edges of everything.
This is Texas City, Baytown, La Porte and most of the east side of
Houston today, not a story from antiquity. If you're flying the ILS into
Galveston, you can do without a marker beacon in your panel - the air
gets a unique stench as you approach the outer marker (and for most of
the rest of the approach). Texas City residents just have to live with
that stench.

The examiner I had for my instrument rating checkride came from Beaumont.
He's the lived the longest out of any member of his recent family - 50
years old. When he was a kid growing up, the rivers used to catch fire.

If that's what you really want, are you prepared to live in an oil town?
It's terribly easy to sit in rural Iowa and decree that oil towns should
be cancerous armpits. Having lived in an oil town, I think the
environmental regulations aren't tight enough.

Why don't you campaign locally to get oil refineries set up in Iowa
City?

--
From the sunny Isle of Man.
Yes, the Reply-To email address is valid.

On 2008-04-09, Jay Honeck wrote:
I'm curious how they are getting 110 volts for your outlets. I thought that
was unattainable with current (sorry!) technology.

It's been attainable to get 110vac from DC probably for the best part of
a century or more. The magic device is called an inverter.

I have a little solar photovoltaic panel on my shed roof for powering the
electric stuff in the garden, like lighting, pond pump etc. It currently
has 3 outlets - 12 volt DC, 6 volt DC (a DC-DC converter I built myself
for charging 6 volt lead acid batteries, for use with my bike), and 240
volts AC off an inverter.

Technology to make AC from DC, DC from AC, high voltage DC from low
voltage DC and all the combinations has existed for decades. It's very
basic stuff. I've made 1000 volts DC from 12 volts DC. It's not even
hard to do.

--
From the sunny Isle of Man.
Yes, the Reply-To email address is valid.

On 2008-04-10, Jay Honeck wrote:
Right. And would you want that unregulated refinery built upwind from
your hotel?? Didn't think so.

Ah, yes -- another person who apparently hasn't flown over most of the
country -- which, by the way is almost entirely VACANT. Of course you
wouldn't build a refinery in a populated area.

Where are you going to get the workers?

Refineries need infrastructure. If you want to build a refinery on
vacant land it will be an inordinately expensive proposition: you need
to build suitable roads, pipelines, houses for the workers to live -
you've got to get the materials in to build the refinery.

If you look at where the refineries are at the moment, there are good
reasons for why they are where they are, because they need to be close
enough for certain resources: engineers to run the plant, workers to do
the day to day operation, safety and security (fire crews, police). You
have to get the raw materials in and the refined product out. These go
in and out in colossal quantities, so refineries are often in a place
where you can get large ships into and out of. Since you have all those
workers now running the plant, the workers themselves need all the other
infrastructure to support their lives: shops, entertainment, and all the
other typical things you find in a city. If you want to build that in
the middle of nowhere, you're also going to have to build a city to go
with it and also find workers (many who need to be highly educated and
skilled) who are prepared to work in a new city, in the middle of
nowhere. Presumably, given your political leanings, you don't want this
to be the only class of people who are likely to want to do this -
immigrants from poor countries off your southern border.

Additionally, building the new city that must go with the refinery is
going to be orders of magnitude more expensive than simply extending an
existing refinery, or building one where the people already live that
doesn't turn the air green.

We don't have refineries that run as unattended automatons. A refinery
needs very close supervision because it's basically a giant bomb.

--
From the sunny Isle of Man.
Yes, the Reply-To email address is valid.