Slowly, it is sinking in that Israel will soon export liquid gas and oil. Meaning: We are no more a desert country fighting for survival, we are wealthy like Norway. I am from the generation of Pinchas Sapir (pic., 1955) and Benno Gittter who dedicated their life to Israel's economic independence. For me, this is disconcerting. A bit depressing, too.
15 comments:
Why do you think it's possible that Israel will be exporting more than it is consuming?
Russ
Yes. Already our gas salesmen are in Japan.
Don't count your oil wells before they are hatched - old saying.
K
In Fiddler on the roof, the socialist Perchik tells Tevye, "money is the world's curse." Tevy replies, "May the Lord smite me with it! And may I never recover!"
I think you should feel this way about Israel being awash in oil and gas, if you should be so lucky.
K
Natural gas prices are quite low right now. It might be better to switch automobiles to run on the gas rather than export it.
It is being tried. There are gas stations all over Israel but it didnt took off.
Compressed natural gas is not great for individual autos but it works well for fleets that return to a depot every night. Our local school buses run on CNG with some success. Gas or diesel is still the most convenient transport motor fuel but it should not be used much for stationary uses.
K
Japan can get natural gas from Russia, Alaska and Indonesia. This sounds like a feel-good story to me. On the other hand, if natural gas is indeed so plentiful that it is now available everywhere, we may have to revisit the Russian theory that hydrocarbons are of mineral origins.
Gas is a commodity - someone will buy it - if not Japan than someone else, assuming there is any and it exceeds Israel's domestic needs.
Gas is not everywhere but using modern techniques such as "fracking" a lot more is accessible than used to be. There's a lot of evidence that "fossil fuels" are indeed derived from plant sources and are not mineral. The fossil fuel era will someday have to draw to a close as usable reserves are exhausted even after advances in extraction techniques but it may not be for a century or more. Probably someday our descendants will curse us for taking a valuable feedstock for various chemicals and just burning it up.
K
K
Our descendants will live in a completely different economy. Leftist Neanderthal environmentalists probably were fighting to stop the killing deers, their basic economic resource. Deers are pests till these days. Well, you understand me. our descendants will have pay for getting rid of that black oily goo of the earth.
It's true that conditions change -in the early days of oil refining, gasoline was considered a dangerously explosive and useless byproduct of kerosene (parrafin lamp oil) production and they used to dump it in the nearest river.
However, I think that petroleum will be a valuable chemical feedstock for a long time to come, long after it is no longer used as a fuel.
K
Probably someday our descendants will curse us for taking a valuable feedstock for various chemicals and just burning it up.
I doubt it. Progress marches on, in another century we will probably be able to synthesize what we need.
> Leftist Neanderthal environmentalists probably were fighting to stop the killing deers, their basic economic resource.
It's a farcical thought - and yet, probably so precisely true in the Americas and Australia-Oceana. 20k years ago there were lions where I'm writing from, and giant ground-sloths, and I think some kind of elephantoids (not certain).
> Progress marches on, in another century we will probably be able to synthesize what we need.
I think there are probably other conceivable ways of doing it, besides doing reactions in solution. But not highly conceivable! As long as you have to do it in solution, it is always a total mess. If you just lose 10% of the material in each of 30 steps, you're talking real money. And I'm not sure but I think you have to purify it many many times as you go.
I don't think it's possible to make tetracyline from scratch economically. A ten-day course of it costs about a buck or five, but I bet it would cost 1,000x more if made by total synthesis. It, and almost all antibiotics, are produced by bacteria grown in vats. Then a couple of atoms (or, often, none) are changed synthetically. It's tough to total-synthesize anything comparable in size to taxol or tetracycline or azythromycin.
Most antidepressants are totally synthetic, but they tend to be smaller molecules that you could make in five or ten steps.
Anything is possible but there are questions of cost - crude oil is a rich chemical soup that gushes from the earth by the millions of barrels almost for free once you drill a hole to tap into them. Synthesizing hydrocarbons molecule by molecule is an expensive process in comparison.
K
Here in Mumbai the 3-wheeler taxis run on CNG "to reduce the pollution".
Anon.
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