Powered by a booming energy business, the Houston regional economy grew faster last year than any other in North America, the Brookings Institution reports.Bust:
Our little burg feels like a glass half empty, half full right now, and you can see that reflected in the national focus on us over the past few weeks.I still remember this. When you draw that trendline on a chart don't forget that the trend can be broken to the downside very quickly.
11 comments:
What prompted this is Kodak filing for bankruptcy today and wondering how this will effect Rochester, which is already hurting.
I think within our lifetimes we will see a breakthrough in how energy is stored and delivered that renders the oil & gas business moot and do to Houston what the changes in the imaging business did to Rochester. We'll still drive cars, just like we still take pictures and make copies. They way we do it will change, for the better. The change will be great for everyone except those who put their eggs in the oil & gas basket.
I should add that this time around it doesn't actually feel like a boom. I see a few high-rises and skyscrapers going up now, but nothing like when I was a kid. No new malls, few new master planned communities.
In all seriousness, all it takes is Paul Chu doing his thing and getting near (at least) room temp superconductivity. That would seriously change the world
Most lithium battery development has been on small cells for electronics.
Only in the past couple of years has there been a focus on 'large-format' cells for vehicles.
Get prices down to around $5,000 for a 50kWh lithium battery pack compact enough to put in a standard sedan and every car can be an EV.
Stack multiple packs together for larger vehicles (and offer incentives to convert long-haul trucks to natural gas)
At that price we could use the same pack as a whole-house UPS (charge it up with cheaper electricity overnight)
Lou Minatti said...
I think within our lifetimes we will see a breakthrough in how energy is stored and delivered that renders the oil & gas business moot
It might turn out like that Lou, but even if you have an energy storage breakthrough, you will still have to generate the electric power. It will take a lot longer to replace our energy infrastructure than it took to replace film w/digital media.
First of all, it won't be cheap. Let's assume the storage breakthrough occurs, and we start a massive switch towards wind and solar power generation. It will cost hundreds of billions of dollars to tie in remote wind and solar farms to the power grid, and the projects will take decades to design, permit, and construct the projects. Imminent domain issues will delay the projects for years.
Second, the market will respond as it always does - fossil fuel prices will drop as demand falls, making second and third wave conversions away from fossil fuels less attractive.
Third, the energy density of fossil fuels is without equal (short of concentrated fissile material). Long haul trucking, transocean shipping, rail, etc. will not switch away from fossil fuels any time soon.
A breakthrough in energy storage would have a large impact on automobiles, but the change would occur over decades, not years, and market penetration in other areas will be limited. I would expect to see a long, slow decline instead of falling off a precipice. Long enough that most of the industry 'die-off' would occur by not replacing retirees.
All valid points. I was thinking about this driving in to work this morning and mulling over Kodak: Who could have forseen 35-40 years ago that we would soon be taking pictures using powerful, very small computers that utilize an electronic sensor that costs pennies, and that the quality of the images these devices capture would far surpass anything a film-based camera could do, for a tiny fraction of the cost?
I don't know what the breakthrough will be but I expect it to be a breakthrough in the way we generate electricity and store the juice. Maybe a capacitor breakthrough combined with nuclear technology that we have all read about (pebble-bed).
Who knows. I do think it's coming pretty soon based on what I see on the roads. I see a crapload of hybrids and I am starting to see Volts on the freeway (!!). No kidding, I see 2-3 every morning.
On the natural gas for long haul vehicle front: the issue is not building the trucks...that is already happening. It's the fueling infrastructure. Already, you can drive a natgas vehicle from Denver to Los Angeles, because you can buy natgas at fuelling stations. You can't go East yet, because the infrastructure hasn't been built yet.
The entire foundation of this country is cheap oil, high consumer debt and perpetual war.
Ironically, it was none other than Kodak that invented the digital camera - in 1975.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kodak_DCS#History
You nailed it on the head Lou: it was foreseen 35-40 years ago!
Truth to be told, I was surprised Kodak was still eve in business. They were stripping their parts as early as 2001. I got offers for their surplus lenses at one point. The only Kodak products I had seen on the shelves in memory were little clamshell packed insta-cameras.
Rochester still has a lot of other consumer optics companies that have adapted pretty well, AFAIK.
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