Re: Viable hydrogen vehicle by 2010

From: Tkalbfus1 (tkalbfus1_at_aol.com)
Date: 09/25/04 

Date: 25 Sep 2004 17:39:18 GMT

>> But it does make the cost more bearable.
>
>You're not getting it. The cost of doing something is the cost of
>doing something. Period. That cust *must* be paid or the thing won't
>get done.
>

Yes, well what's the cost of a disrupted economy cause by a foreign oil
producer suddenly cutting off our oil supplies. The price of cheap gas is the
risk that it suddenly can get very expensive at the whim of a foreign supplier
or as a result of political events beyond our border, such as revolution or
terrorism. The US economy can absorb a higher price for transportation fuel if
that price is steady and predictable. If the corporate managers know what the
price of hydrogen is going to be next year and the year after, they can make
sounder business decision than if they can't tell what OPEC is going to do, or
what events in the Middle East may do to oil. The Car companies for instance
don't know whether to make fuel eficient vehicles or SUVs because of this
uncertainty. If the price of oil drops and they make fuel efficient vehicles,
customers may prefer the SUVs and that car company will lose money. Or else the
Car company can produce SUVs and the price of oil goes way up and few customers
want to pay for the gasoline bills that the SUVs generate. The decision on
future cars models must be made years in advance in order to give proper time
to set up the proper manufacturing equipment. In a hydrogen economy, it would
be easier for car manufacturers to anticipate what kind of cars that consumers
will prefer as there is a certain cost associated with making hydrogen, and
that cost is involved with the process and not politics.

>This merely shifts the cost it doesn't change the cost. In fact,
>there's a premium to be paid when costs are shifted in this way.

But eventually the economy would adjust, and grow. Per capita income will
increase to the point where the cost to produce hydrogen gas is no longer a big
deal and the hydrogen subsidy can be ended.

>Hiding the true cost of a thing might be defensible if there are
>important social benefits.

Yes like not having wild swings in energy costs which discourages investments
and job creation.

>Things like education, or the mails
>provide such benefits. Medicine some would argue has the potential to
>pay huge social benefits as well. There's just no similar benefit
>that you can mention for energy.

I just did. If the price of energy is predictable, business leaders can make
sounder business decisions with less risk of being wrong, and less risk of
laying off their employees because they made an unsound business decision,
because the business leader couldn't properly predict the true price of oil be
cause it goes up and down by wide margins.

Sometimes the price of oil costs $20 per barrel and sometimes $50. Now
supposing your the CEO of General Motors and you have to decide on what kind of
cars to build for the next 5 years, what assumptions on the price of oil do you
make? is it going to be $20 a barrel or $50? The right or wrong answer could
mean profits of losses of billions of dollars over the next 5 years. Now
wouldn't your business decisions be much easier if your cars and everyone elses
in the US ran on hydrogen instead of gasoline. Of course the startup costs are
huge and most of the time the initial costs of hydrogen aren't compedative with
gasoline so government needs to make hydrogen cheaper to make you decide to
build hydrogen powered cars.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: Cheap oil forever!
    ... The trend clearly refutes the claims you made in the first post ... 70s _other_than_1998_ has the real price of oil been less than it was ... >rent seeking by those OPEC fellows but rising cost of getting the ...
    (sci.econ)
  • Re: Contradictory Facts
    ... Been thinking of turning my nest egg into somebody else's ... 'Cheap oil' was a different complaint with another set of whining. ... change in the price of oil has an almost directly ... proportional effect on the cost of food, ...
    (rec.bicycles.tech)
  • Re: An oasis on the moon?
    ... > The cost of oil is already too expensive. ... The gas guzzling big cars ... Now you buy tiny effiecient cars, ...
    (sci.space.policy)
  • Re: Get with the program
    ... I think the price of products ... should reflect the entire cost of the product. ... The higher price of gas would be a wash since those added fees ... predicted that we will run out of oil every 20 years since the 1880s, ...
    (rec.outdoors.rv-travel)
  • Re: Very OT: the price of gas
    ... Like you say, there is a refining cost, transportation cost, ... >When dealing with crude oil, the measurement use for quantity is a "barrel", ... Is this not your standard 55 gallon barrel? ... >a huge leap in the per gallon price, of say $10.00 per barrel, when spread ...
    (alt.support.chronic-pain)