USA wollen ein "MANHATTEN II Project" iniziieren ! - 500 Beiträge pro Seite

[M_B_S]

Voices Mount in Call for
"MANHATTAN II" Project
to Wean America Away from Oil

One way to respond to the recent terrorist attacks is for the United States to begin another Manhattan Project, with the objective of finding alternative fuels.
If American scientists were to develop other ways to fuel our automobiles and heat our homes — whether hydrogen, solar, electric or fusion — we would no longer be dependent on foreign sources of energy.
Our dependence on oil from the Middle East now ties our hands both diplomatically and economically. Islamic militants, who assert that the United States exploits the Middle East oil resources, would no longer have another reason to despise the West, our trade deficit would vanish and pollution would decrease.
For a few billion invested in the right area, we would all win.

Letter to the New York Times October 3, 2001


"If we really decided that we wanted a clean hydrogen economy, we could have it by 2010."


Just do it now !

[götz]

Die Botschaft hör ich wohl - allein.......

Zwar hat sich Dschordsch Dabbelju in den zurückliegenden Krisenwochen wesentlich besser geschlagen als von mir antizipiert (vielleicht ist er ja doch lernfähig...), aber
ich kann mir (leider) nicht vorstellen, daß er seiner heißgeliebten Ölindustrie derart den Rücken zuwenden sollte.
Sicher gibt es auch in den USA Vernünftige, die jetzt vernünftige Vorschläge machen. Im Ernstfall wird aber doch lieber die Wildnis in Alaska geopfert.....
:-(
Götz

[M_B_S]

First, we must quickly strive for oil independence by almost any means.
Second, we must accelerate the coming hydrogen age -- which I prefer to call the "hydricity" age because it will employ the two energy currencies, hydrogen and electricity. Both hydrogen and electricity are carbon free and so, when manufactured by non-fossil sources, send zero carbon dioxide into the environment.

How will it work?

Both hydrogen and electricity are energy currencies, not energy sources. Both can be harvested from any energy source, fossil or non-fossil. Both are renewable: Hydrogen, for example, returns to water after it is used. The two currencies are mutually interchangeable -- fuel cells convert hydrogen to electricity; electrolysis converts electricity to hydrogen. (The same cannot be said about our oil economy -- oil may be converted to electricity but electricity cannot be converted to oil.)

Electricity will continue to power information technologies and some fixed-route transportation, like subways. Because hydrogen is storable, it will become the staple fuel of free-range transportation vehicles like cars, trucks, buses, trains and ships that employ fuel-cell engines. It will also power liquid-hydrogen aircraft that will fly farther (because hydrogen weighs about a third of what conventional fuels weigh) and fly cleaner (because the exhaust is water vapour.)

The synergies inherent in hydricity systems will permit extraordinary technical, industrial and regulatory flexibility, thereby improving efficiencies, reducing costs, adding security and bringing environmental gentility.

There`s another benefit: Had a liquid-hydrogen-fuelled jumbo hit the World Trade Center, enormous damage would have occurred but the towers would not have come down. The towers collapsed because tons of burning jet fuel softened the buildings` steel backbone, allowing top floors to sledgehammer lower floors. Liquid hydrogen can`t burn until it vaporizes and then, being so much lighter than air, it`s up and away. Structural damage, fire and death would have been confined to the floors the aircraft struck.

While the twin hydricity currencies can be manufactured from any source, to avoid climatic disruption we must rapidly move to non-carbon sources. We can harvest wind, tides, sunlight and the internal heat of the Earth to produce hydrogen that, in turn, can power airplanes, buses and our family cars. Whenever practical, those are the sources we should use.

These, however, will not be enough. To satisfy all our needs we must have the courage to re-examine one of our favourite hates: nuclear power. Ironically, nuclear power is probably the cleanest and safest of all non-fossil sources and the only one with any prospect of delivering the energy services we need.


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Open Letter from David Sanborn Scott, founding director of the University of Victoria`s Institute for Integrated Energy Systems, is vice-president of the International Association for Hydrogen Energy. October 13, 2001

[götz]

Schön und gut - das hatte ich auch gelesen, Danke!
Nur - unter www.nytimes.com von heute liest Du unter Rubrik "Science", daß die Vorarbeiten zu den geplanten Bohrarbeiten in Alaska voranschreiten. GWB ist und bleibt ein Ölmann - und die Wandlung vom Saulus zum Paulus möchte ich erst sehen.....

[M_B_S]

The last oil rush

BY GILES WHITTELL

Could the West survive without Saudi oil? The war on terrorism means that we may have to. The former Soviet Union could fill the gap, but this would bring its own set of pitfalls

It is mid-February, 2002. North America is in the depths of a bitter winter. Consumption of heating oil is at an all-time high and petrol use is back to prewar levels thanks to a long slump in world prices, but the war on terrorism drags on.
Contrary to most forecasts, Osama bin Laden has been captured alive and airlifted to the USS Carl Vinson by triumphant US Marines. In line with other forecasts, the terrorism has not stopped. The Strasbourg anthrax outbreak appears to be contained but a smallpox scare is unfolding in Los Angeles and well-sourced Pentagon leaks say that Saddam Hussein has assembled a “dirty” nuclear bomb with enriched uranium packed around a Scud warhead. Range: 1,300 miles.

The Bush-Blair coalition is intact but under intense pressure from Washington hawks who want to take the war to Baghdad. The nuclear leaks win the argument for them and, with Blair’s regretful non-cooperation, B2 bombers of the 509th air wing resume their 22-hour raids from Whiteman Air Force Base in Missouri, this time on Saddam’s revivified military infrastructure and key Iraqi oil assets.

Saudi Arabia erupts. The new offensive persuades millions in Riyadh and Jedda that the war on terror is in fact the war on Islam against which their imams have railed for months. Following the lead of a prominent dissident cleric, tens of thousands take to the streets to condemn the royal family’s tacit support of the American attackers.

To restore calm, the Saudi Government suspends oil sales to the US in what it privately assures Washington is just a temporary move. But Iraqi exports under the UN-approved oil-for-food programme have already dried up and the damage is done. With a third of the world’s known oil reserves in jeopardy, global prices zoom to $44 a barrel.

President Bush authorises an emergency withdrawal of 200 million barrels from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve held in underground caverns in Texas and Louisiana. It will make up the shortfall in US imports for barely a fortnight unless he can persuade voters to switch overnight from conspicuous consumption to manic conservation — a trick he is loath even to try. Instead, flanked by his energy secretary and an uneasy-looking clutch of oil executives gathered in the Roosevelt Room of the White House, he announces an historic ten-year plan to wean the US off Middle-Eastern oil and meet its energy needs elsewhere.

“My proposals,” he says, choosing words that would have been unimaginable six months earlier, “will end the Arab world’s unhealthy dependence on the petrodollar. They will boost export-led growth for our friends elsewhere in the world. They will bolster our national security and transform how we define it. They may even transform the health of the planet we call home.”

This scenario could be triggered in any number of ways besides the bombing of Iraq. Al-Qaeda terrorists could sink a supertanker in the Strait of Hormuz. Saudi Arabia could be overtaken by a full-blown revolution, or slapped with embargoes for failing fully to condemn future atrocities.

The result would be a seismic shift in patterns of oil procurement that would define the coming century. The losers, at least in the short term, would be the Gulf states of the Middle East. The winner, in the supreme irony of the post-Cold War period, would be Russia.

In fact, it is already happening. Immediately after the September attacks, President Putin endeared himself mightily to President Bush by ordering his armed forces to stand down from the heightened alert they would otherwise have adopted in such circumstances. But he also offered to make up any shortfall in Middle East oil exports to the West that might result from the war on terror.

As if on cue, an Italian tanker left the Russian Black Sea port of Novorossiysk last week with the first load of oil to flow through a new 990-mile pipeline linking the Tengiz field in Kazakhstan to the open seas.

To the west, a Russian oil terminal is to open before the end of the year at Primorsk on the Gulf of Finland to bring more crude from western Siberia, Russia’s booming oil zone, to Europe via the Baltic. In the Far North, Lukoil, Russia’s biggest oil producer, is building an Arctic Coast terminal from which to ship 250,000 barrels a day straight across the Arctic Ocean in a fleet of icebreaking tankers.

Plans for former Soviet Central Asia are even more ambitious. Starting in Azerbaijan, at least two pipelines will eventually carry oil and gas to the outside world via Georgia and Turkey, and in Turkmenistan, a land of scorching deserts and vast gas reserves bordering Afghanistan to the north, the current fighting has paradoxically revived hopes of long-term stability making possible the most Herculean undertaking of all: a gas pipeline over the Hindu Kush to Pakistan and India.

These are the outlines of the last great oil rush; a race to open the Caspian basin in the hope that it may replace the Middle East as filling station to the world — and the expectation that even if it doesn’t, its oil will find a market somewhere.


The stakes could hardly be higher. With America alone spending £100 million a day on imported crude, oil remains the world’s great wealth-creator. The rise of the personal computer notwithstanding, it still drives every industrial economy, provides profits for the world’s largest corporations, pays for most of the Middle East’s armies, and funds a sprawling culture of gilded vulgarity stretching from Dubai’s seven-star Burj Al Arab Hotel to the subterranean swimming pools of Kensington Palace Row.

“Access to large sources of oil has long constituted a strategic prize,” writes Daniel Yergin in The Prize, his seminal study of oil politics. “It enables nations to accumulate wealth, to fuel their economies, to produce and to sell goods and services, to build, to buy, to move, to acquire and manufacture weapons, to win wars.”

It also forces importing nations to do business with regimes they would otherwise condemn, and the race to the Caspian could lead the West into an array of new strategic relationships every bit as problematic as those now under strain in the Persian Gulf.

Azerbaijan, key to the Caucasus and the oil-drenched Apsheron Peninsula, is one of the most corrupt nations on earth. At the start of the 1990s its capital, Baku, was hailed as the next Houston and enjoyed a brief boom, depicted with surprising accuracy by Robbie Coltrane and a host of dancing girls in 007’s The World Is Not Enough. More recently, the multinationals have been pulling out in droves rather than adapt to Baku’s rising violence and bribery.

Kazakhstan is still run by its former communist chieftain, Nursultan Nazarbayev, ten years after the Soviet collapse, while his three daughters hold those levers of power that he does not. One is married to the son of the President of neighbouring Kyrgyzstan, another to the head of Kazakhstan’s oil and gas monopoly. The third controls state TV. And Turkmenistan has degenerated from its previous incarnation as a Soviet Socialist Republic (something few thought possible in 1991) to a parody of a Third-World dictatorship under the deeply eccentric guidance of Saparmurad Niyazov, who likes to be known as “Father of all the Turkmens” and has anointed himself President for life.

Qualms over democracy and human rights have not impeded the hunt for oil in the past. A more important question, as Western leaders reassess their energy policies in the light of September 11, is whether the former Soviet Union has enough of it.

Broadly speaking, it does. According to figures from the US Energy Information Administration and the London-based Petroleum Argus, the Middle East produces about 16 million barrels of oil a day, of which Saudi Arabia pumps 7.5 million. The US relies on the region for 2.6 million, or about a third of its imports.

The former Soviet Union pumps four million barrels a day, projected to rise to seven million over the next five years and much more within a decade as the Tengiz field and the even larger Kashagan reserves in the northern Caspian come on stream.

Kazakhstan, by the most conservative estimates, is sitting on more than 20 billion barrels of recoverable oil. Russia has nearly 50 billion barrels, and exploration has barely begun in some of the remoter reaches of Siberia.

For Putin and Nazarbayev, that is the good news. The bad news is that Saudi Arabia’s energy reserve remains the biggest and most accessible on the planet by such a margin that it would take a full-blown revolution there to end its dominance of Opec and the global oil business.

“Stick a straw in the ground there, and oil gushes,” says Ian Bourne, the editor of Petroleum Argus. “Then you put it in a tanker and ship it for $2 a barrel. It’s almost as simple as that.”

At 262 billion barrels, Saudi Arabia’s known reserves are still biblically huge. Its infrastructure is so extensive that if Iraq were to shut down production altogether, it could summon enough reserve capacity within 90 days to make up the shortfall and stabilise world prices. Over time, its shimmering sands have yielded so many new fields that successive predictions of a peak in production followed by decline have turned instead into a series of peaks — a plateau, as Bourne says, with no horizon in sight.

Iran, Iraq and Kuwait are similarly blessed. This is why, despite the region’s record of war, sanctions, ecological devastation and grotesque abuse of human rights, most major Western oil companies were returning there before September 11 in the hope of winning new access to old but reliable reserves.

Before the world changed irrevocably, Western companies were competing fiercely for new gasextraction contracts in Saudi Arabia that they still hope to use as toeholds in the Saudi oil business. In Iran, the prospects of an end to the national oil monopoly’s supremacy were better than at any time since the 1979 revolution that toppled the Shah. Even Iraq looked a good long-term bet, as pressure from Russia and elsewhere mounted for a complete end to sanctions.

Now Big Oil has fallen silent, sometimes to the point of hostility. No company I phoned would comment publicly on what the war on terror might mean for its business. Bourne says: “They’re holding their breath and crossing their fingers.” One British spokesman insisted on anonymity before saying: “Nothing will change.”

Analysts agree it is highly unlikely that Saudi Arabia will stop selling its oil to the West, or that the West will stop buying it. Yet if nothing changes within the world’s only oil superpower, it could detonate a demographic time bomb. The Saudi Royal Family has cleaved to power since the 1930s thanks to an unwritten social contract by which its subjects remain politically submissive in return for free, oil-funded education and healthcare and an average annual income of $7,000.


That contract is crumbling. Saudi Arabia’s population is young, fast-growing, underemployed and increasingly resentful of the institutionalised corruption that is said to siphon the revenue from 600,000 barrels of oil a day to fund the louche lifestyles of the country’s 15,000 princes.

The Saudi exchequer needs an oil price of $24 a barrel for the foreseeable future to put the economy back on a sound footing. The price is now $19 a barrel — barely enough to meet the country’s immediate expenses and service its debts — and Opec is loath to raise it for fear of being seen to profit in a time of crisis.

Next to most Middle Eastern governments, Putin’s Russia is a model of progressive development, even if the same cannot be said of his Central Asian neighbours. He has a vision of his country as a Eurasian commercial behemoth selling its oil to the highest bidder and earning transit fees on most of Kazakhstan’s as it flows from Tengiz to the Black Sea. In this vision, Moscow’s profits are limited only by the bore of its pipelines and the size of tanker that can squeeze through the Bosphorus.

There is a catch, of course. As James Bond learnt on his latest adventure, every pipeline is a potential terrorist target. And as Hitler showed with his murderous advance on Stalingrad — and, he hoped, the “oily rocks” of the Caspian shore — a thriving oilfield can drive the world to war even if it is embedded in the heart of Russia.

It is February 2002 again. The pundits are digesting President Bush’s brave switch away from the Middle East in search of apolitical oil. They ask if he has found the answer to America’s latest energy crisis and conclude that he has probably not, because oil, by its nature, will always be political. Instead they paint a picture of an America turning away from oil altogether in favour of liquefied natural gas, methanol, solar and wind power and hydrogen, the holy grail of alternative fuels. The Wall Street Journal says that America can lead the technological revolution that will lead the world into the post-oil era. Al Gore, with beard, emerges from obscurity to note that this might save the planet. This is a future that could work, the pundits say.

Whether Bush is the man to embrace it is another matter.

[M_B_S]

United States Launches
Manhattan Project 2002
Response to September 11 Arab Terrorist Atrocity


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

U.S. Ends Car Plan on Gas Efficiency;
Looks to Fuel Cells
New York Times January 9, 2002

The Bush administration is walking away from a $1.5 billion eight- year government-subsidized project to develop high-mileage gasoline- fueled vehicles. Instead it is throwing its support behind a plan that the Energy Department and the auto industry have devised to develop hydrogen-based fuel cells to power the cars of the future, administration and industry officials said yesterday. The new effort, to be announced in Detroit today by Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham, aims at the eventual replacement of the internal combustion engine. Fuel cells use stored hydrogen and oxygen from the air to create electricity, and the only emission from engines they power is water vapor.

"The eventual goal of this research are technologies that aim to solve many of the problems associated with our nation`s reliance on petroleum to power our cars and trucks."
U.S. Secretary of Energy Spencer Abraham


10 DAY MOVING AVERAGE
January 9, 2002 OPEN

Fuel Cell stocks take off in anticipation of U.S. Department of Energy`s Wednesday Announcement
GM Car, Reports Boost Fuel Cell Stocks
Reuters January 8, 2002

Es ist soweit das unvermeidliche ist eingetreten Bush jr. gibt grünes Licht für Wasserstoff Wirtschaft !

[hic]

Kernfusion ?

[flussaufwerz]

also ich sehe es auch nicht so euforisch eher so:
die araber "ärgern" die amis und begrenzen die förderung
nicht, offiziel könen sie es auf die russen schieben,
die wegen der schuldentilgung (iwf)
nicht weniger fördern wollen.
die amis brauchen aber einen preis so um die 27$,
haben ja schlieslich bush unterstüzt nun versucht
bush "konkurenz"(aber noch in weiter ferne b.z.w. in ölihand)
zu fördern,um den ölpres zu stimmulieren,das ist er seinen
ölis schuldig das dabei die wasserstofftechnik profitiert
ist beiwerk.
grüße von der donau
flussaufwerz

[M_B_S]

YEAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH


A high-level international conference sponsored by the U.S. Department of Energy, the Israeli Ministry of National Infrastructures and the American Jewish Congress will examine converting Israel to a hydrogen economy and renewable energy technology manufacturing powerhouse for the Middle East.
International Energy Agency to participate.
GO TO WEB SITE BUILT WITH ASSISTANCE OF THE CALIFORNIA HYDROGEN BUSINESS COUNCIL
http://www.energycooperation.org/

Alle grossen Werte explodieren !

Endlich mal was Gutes aus Israel ! Die haben verstanden , warum sie vom Oel weg müssen : es finanziert den Terror !


Ein neues Manhatten Projekt !

[M_B_S]

WASHINGTON (CBS.MW) -- President Bush pressed Congress Thursday to pursue his alternative fuel initiative, saying the plan to develop hydrogen-fueled automobiles and infrastructure could significantly lower long-term demand for oil and reduce pollution.





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Shares of several fuel-cell companies jumped in anticipation of the president`s speech at the National Building Museum in Washington and maintained gains through the day. Among the most heavily traded, Plug Power (PLUG: news, chart, profile) rose 43 cents, or 9 percent, to $5.23; Ballard Power Systems (BLDP: news, chart, profile) rose 6 percent to $10.48; and FuelCell Energy (FCEL: news, chart, profile) gained 4 percent to $5.83.

"If we develop hydrogen power to its full potential, we can reduce our demand for oil by over 11 million barrels per day by the year 2040," Bush said. "That would be a fantastic legacy to leave for future generations of Americans."

In his State of the Union speech last week, the president called for a $1.2 billion initiative to help automakers develop cars powered by hydrogen fuel cells. Actual new spending on the program amounts to $720 million spread over five years.

Combined with a program called FreedomCAR (short for "cooperative automotive research"), Bush has proposed a total of $1.7 billion over the next five years to develop hydrogen-powered fuel cells, hydrogen infrastructure and new automotive technologies.

Hydrogen fuel cells produce electricity by combining hydrogen and oxygen. Under ideal conditions, the only byproduct of the process is steam.

Democrats and environmentalists charged that the Bush plan does too little to promote the use of hybrid vehicles and other technologies available now.

"Next-generation automobiles offer real promise down the road -- but we can only strengthen our energy independence if we complete the picture with a creative, concrete and comprehensive strategy that starts us moving in the right direction today," said Sen. Joseph Lieberman, D-Conn.. "Lacking that, proposals like the president`s are nothing more than an exhaust pipe dream."

Lieberman, a contender for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2004, joined Sen. Jim Jeffords, I-Vt., in offering an energy plan that included calls for more alternative fuels incentives and abandonment of Bush`s proposal to open part of Alaska`s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil and gas exploration.

Automakers and energy companies are spending millions of their own dollars in efforts to come up with hydrogen-powered vehicles. A small number of such experimental vehicles have been tested but remain very expensive and impractical for consumer use. See earlier story.

"It won`t be easy to get there because there are obstacles," Bush said. "It`s important for the American people to know there are obstacles to overcome. I wouldn`t be proposing this initiative if I didn`t think we could overcome the obstacles."

Making alternate technology feasible

For starters, hydrogen is four times as expensive to produce as gasoline when derived from natural gas, its most affordable source, according to a White House fact sheet.

The Bush plan is aimed at reducing the cost to make fuel-cell cars competitive with conventional gas-powered vehicles by 2010. It also aims to advance methods for producing hydrogen from renewable resources, nuclear energy and coal.

The plan also aims to develop storage systems for hydrogen and to make fuel cells -- currently 10 times more expensive than internal-combustion engines -- more affordable.

Among other players in the sector, H Power (HPOW: news, chart, profile) advanced more than 9 percent to $4.06, Millennium Cell (MCEL: news, chart, profile) rose 6 percent to $2.08 and Hydrogenics (HYGS: news, chart, profile) gained nearly 11 percent to $4.76.