Reply To: Remnant heat of Focus Fusion

[Brian H]

Breakable wrote: Great, we can use FF to synthesize gas from oil, to extract oil from shale sands, to strip mine coal much deeper, extract more oil from depleted wells and build undersea cities for oil mining….
that’s … just … fantastic!
Who needs electric cars when gas is 0.04c per galon?
And I was hoping for an alternative energy revolution…
Edit:Gas per galon

Edit of edit: gas is 4¢ per gallon (?)

Comments on edit of edit:
1) I assume you meant 4¢, not 0.04¢ (=1/25 of 1¢, or $0.0004)
2) I assume you meant cost per gallon of gas, since ‘gas per gallon’ is kind of circularly meaningless
3) to type the ¢ symbol, hold down the Alt key, enter 155 on the numeric keypad, and release.
4) I assume you meant “gallon”, not “galon”, since the latter isn’t a word
5) I wonder how you’d get from $4/gallon to 4¢/gallon, even if electricity were free. Reduced demand would certainly lower the price of oil, but it would still cost about $2/bbl to pump even in Saudi Arabia, and at least that to ship and refine, and at least twice that to deliver at retail, which works out to 8/42, or 20¢/USG. Which is what I remember the price being in the early ’50s. (Yes, I can remember that far back.)
6) That much price reduction could never occur in current dollars; probably about 50¢/gallon would be the lower limit, which would make ICE engines competitive with electric cars in cost/mile. Except for maintenance, lubrication, brakes (electric cars do about 90% or more of their “braking” with regen without touching the brake pedal), etc.
7) The vastly reduced cost of energy would have huge benefits, whether the actual energy source in any particular instance was coal, oil, or p-B11.