Axil Axil <[email protected]> wrote:
> That opinion is an overreaction. It will take 20 to 30 years before any > fraction of transportation is converted over to LENR. > The time it takes to convert is not so important. An economist friend of mine explained to me that markets respond to likely future events, either short term or long term. If it becomes generally known that over the next 30 years most of the market for oil will vanish, that will have an immediate effect on the price today. Producers will want to sell off their inventory as quickly as as they can while it still has value. When every producer does that, the price will plummet. They will rush to dig more wells to get as much oil out of the ground and sold as they can before it becomes worthless. "Rushing" to dig a well means you do it in 3 to 5 years. It is a slow business. In the context of building an oil extraction infrastructure, 30 years is a fairly short time. Once the writing is on the wall the price will collapse and never recover. I think it is starting to do that with coal, because natural gas, wind and solar have taken a large fraction of the coal market, and there is no reason to think they will not take the rest of it away over the next 30 years. They are getting cheaper every day, and there is growing public pressure to reduce carbon emissions. The biggest coal producer is China. They peaked in 2011 and will soon begin dropping rapidly. See p. 14 here: https://www.iea.org/publications/freepublications/publication/KeyWorld_Statistics_2015.pdf - Jed
