I paid $2.19 per gallon Sunday at the Circle K station at the corner of Farmington Road and Swords here in Peoria. It was the first time in years I’ve paid less than $20 to fill up a nearly empty tank.
I’m resisting the urge to jump for joy at this bounty. I remember what the price was before Sept. 11, 2001. I’ll wait until I’m paying less than $2 per gallon before I even begin thinking things are back to normal.
I’m glad that the prices are dropping. But remember — what Big Oil giveth, Big Oil can taketh away. If consumer behavior runs true to form, a couple months of prices at or near the $2 mark and consumers will forget all about their previous pain at the pump and start buying guzzler’s again. And the lower prices drop, the less it makes less sense savings-wise for my parents to have bought a hybrid. I would have told them that, had they bothered to ask. Not that it would have done much good. Dad is a former traveling salesman, and he obsesses over gas prices, sometimes to the point of irrationality.
Still, GM just announced some movement toward hydrogen-powered vehicles. They’ve delivered a fuel-cell powered truck to the U.S. Army, and they plan to deliver 100 hydrogen-powered Chevrolet Equinox SUVs to consumers next year.
Hydrogen fuel cells are twice as energy efficient as the internal combustion engine, although fossil fuels are often used to produce the energy needed to manufacture fuel cells. That’s while the fuel cells will not lead eliminate pollution caused by the car in your driveway.
But don’t worry, folks! Your government is there for you by subsidizing the ethanol industry, which does very little to lower prices (what you don’t pay at the pump, you pay every April 15th) or our dependency on foreign oil (if every acre of farm land were used to grow corn for ethanal production, it would be enough to meet out fuel needs … and the entire world would go hungry). But ethanol sure does help politicians get elected.
[tags]fuel cells,hydrogen powered cars,equinox,ethanol,gas prices[/tags]
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I know corn belt politicians play up the importance of corn-derived ethanol. I was witness to Pekin’s proud display of their E85 city vehicles outside the recent Pekin Community Update last Thursday. However, IMO, ethanol produced from biomass could be an important PART (just a part) of achieving energy independence. We’ll see what happens once there is some more infrastructure in place. Apparently there are 3 stations in the Pekin area selling E85 now.
Utilizing U.S. corn production to produce ethanol would hardly make us starve. A lot of corn is used for animal feed, and at least some of the processes used to extract ethanol leave a high-protein animal feed as a byproduct. We could all do with a little less high-frucose corn syrup, anyway (patting overgenerous waistline).
Also, as long as the current levels of growth continue in China & India, I wouldn’t look for world oil prices to fall too far. If there’s a big economic downturn, demand could go down temporarily. Even that would only be a “reprieve” – not exactly the right word since an economic downturn of a scale large enough to decrease demand for oil would indicate a worldwide recession or even depression. Once the economy turned around, the insatiable Asian tiger would again begin to consume natural resources on a massive scale.
I think Tom Friedman has a great idea – implement a nationwide dollar gas tax. Higher gas prices would drive the market into the development of increased energy efficiency and alternative fuels. We could use money from the tax to spur further research. Hehe … (watching the libertarians starting to foam at the mouth).
At the moment the gas price down a bit, let us see how long it is going to last.