I will not partake in Dick bashing....ok...just this once....YOU ARE WRONG, DICK...AGAIN!
Ten bucks a litre....jesssuus priest! Like he said last night on Sky, inflation will eventually raise the price...as well as wages and everything else. For a start, Link Energy...the guys who have the tenements in SA...can make diesel for $0.60 per litre now. Granted, the taxman will "equalise" that product. Technology will always fill a niche. We consumers will adapt that technology to our everyday lives as the economic argument merges with the reality. At work today we were commenting on how long we will be producing out of Bass Strait. When Long Island Point started in the early seventies, five ships a week exporting crude, now, it is about one a month. Most of the product coming out now is gas. It will still be producing for another thirty years. Short of another giant field off Tasmania...it will only be small fields by comparison. However, we have another five hundred years worth of that dirty brown coal in the Latrobe valley, let alone, an equally as big field that comes down under French's Island as well as south of Bacchus Marsh...this stuff is excellent for turning into diesel, just ask the Germans. If we can keep some of that natural gas from being exported we can convert to liquid fuel cheap, not to mention power the same trucks with LNG. Technology is there, it works, it just needs to be adapted to common usage.
Bloody CO2...hot air...tax! The only reason brown coal is "dirty" is because there is so much of it, no one can be bothered reducing the moisture content. Just burn more of it! Apply temperature and pressure changes the crystalline structure from hydroscopic to hydrophobic, reduces moisture content from about 60% to 18%...technology! Get more energy from the same tonne means less tonnes burnt meaning less bloody CO2. It just isn't sexy enough for the media. But, sorry Dick, hydrocarbons are going to be used for a very long time into the future....unless the taxman artificially changes the economics.