RE: Senate Hearing on Gas Prices and Energy Industry Consolidation

Did anyone else happen to catch this Senate Judiciary Committee meeting on C-Span? If you missed it, I highly suggest you check it out when you get the chance. It's not up on c-span.org yet, though I expect it will be.

You can read the AP report here.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060315/ap_on_go_co/congress_oil

I'm still not sure where I stand on this one, but I do have a few questions to pose to those of you who have given some thought to the need for alternative energy development.

John Hofmeister, president of Shell Oil Co., said that his company will 'invest' 15 billion dollars, per year,over the next ten years to find new sources of hydrocarbon fuels (natural gas, oil, coal etc.)and increase production, in order to meet consumer demand.

He then went on to say that his company will 'invest' 8 billion dollars, over that same period, to research and develop (and I can only assume, market) new and alternative sources of energy (wind, solar, bio-fuel, etc).

So I'd like to know; regardless of the fact that we're talking about an 8 to 150 ratio in fossil fuel spending versus alternative energy spending, who else intends to dole out 8 billion dollars over the next ten years to research and develop, and hopefully market, reliable alternative sources of energy?

Ten years which is sure to see no end to increasing demand.

Now, before I get flamed as a Big Oil apologist, let me say that I find the idea of spending 150 billion dollars over ten years to tear up the Alaskan wilderness and destroy marine wildlife in the Gulf of Mexico, while at the same time reaping huge profits due to laws of supply and demand, and in the course of doing these things helping to accelerate potentially catastrophic global climate change, to be abhorrent on its face. I just think it is slightly naive to assume that somewhere out there, there simply must be some other entity with tens of billions of dollars of cash on hand which might be willing to take on the potentially unprofitable and highly unpredictable job of developing and marketing to the world, a safe, cheap and plentiful form of clean energy. Will the US Government stop playing world police long enough to play the role of alternative fuel developer. Remember our topic folks, the global energy market; where we're talking about developing and delivering small units of energy to billions of customers worldwide, everyday, on a massive scale involving a presumably huge cost(one of the many valid points made by Rex Tillerson, chairman of Exxon Mobil Corp., the world's largest publicly traded oil company).

Being absorbed by this singular thought, I paid less attention to the questions posed by the Committee. Chuck Schumer thinks it may be time to make the oil companies 'divest' some of their refining capabilities and gas stations, to whatever end, I can't tell. Sen. Grassley of Iowa was upset that people who are happy to spend money on bottled water would be so unhappy about paying for gas.

Any thoughts from anyone who saw the meeting? Any comments from the DU alternative fuels folks?

but gov't policies have always affected the direction of the R&D efforts.

Here's a thought - repeal the $7,000,000,000 gas royalty giveaway to big oil and fund a program to purchase alternative home heat/power systems from existing technology - about 400,000 systems. Take the $140,000,000,000 spent rebuilding Iraq and do that same program - another 5,600,000 systems.

Now we've put 6 million homes into position to provide their own power and potentially feed what they don't use back into the grid. Besides the jobs created and the instant drop in demand for foreign fuel sources to produce that power and then let the utility company take the money they didn't have to spend producing that power and spend it on R&D.