Geez.....$10+ gasoline will NEVER happen unless politicians interfere with the free market.
i.e. Democrats and their Greenie-Weenie Allies
First there are other alternatives to gas and I'm not talking about that crappy ethanol. We have oil in Alaska which democrats have so far prevented us from tapping. We have oil shale in HUGE abundance. We have coal in HUGE abundance.
1. Oil Shale
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oil_shale
2. Coal (Convert Coal to Gas)
This is a WW2 technology and companies like SASOL of South Africa produce synthetic gas today from coal. There is a company in South Dakota that converts coal to natural gas and they make TONS OF MONEY....
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fischer-Tropsch_synthesis
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sasol
http://www.sasol.com/sasol_internet/...1&rootid=1
http://www.dakotagas.com/
http://www.ibtimes.com/articles/2007...ls-success.htm
3. Untapped Oil reserves that policians have successfully prevented from being utilized.
So why have we not use oil shale and coal to make gas?
Answer: Money.
The captital costs of building an oil conversion plant is HUGE. The only way it becomes feasible to build such a plant is when three things happen:
1. Oil gets VERY expensive.
2. People believe that oil will continue to be expensive so that if they build such a plant....the prices won't fall causes the investors to go bankrupt.
3. Politicians and their Greenie-Weenie allies won't use the courts to bankrupt investors with nuisance lawsuits...
For synthetic fuels it costs in the ball park of roughly $35-40 a barrel ASSUMING the govt and the greenie-weenies don't sabotage their efforts via lawsuits and court injunctions. This means oil must me at least $45 a barrel to even think about building a synthetic fuel plant.
Item#1 is satified as shown by Dakota Gas's success.
BTW when this plant was first built...prices fell and they lost TONS and TONS of money. But now that prices are high....these people are hauling Brinks-Trucks full of cash to the bank....
http://www.dakotagas.com/
Item#2 I think it is safe to say oil prices will remain high for a long time but perhaps investors disagree with me.
Item#3 Is the Hard Part
These plants are EXPENSIVE so it will take a lot of investors pooling their money. If prices fall or if environmentalist use nuisance lawsuits to stop the building of these plants....the investors will go bankrupt (or lose tons of money). Consider nuclear power. Nuclear power is now a hip form of electricity production because of its ZERO CO2 production. But back in the 1970s/1980s environmentlists launched hundreds of nuisance lawsuits to stop building these plants for months at a time. The result was a $2.5 billion dollar nuclear plant started costing $6.5 billion and investors lost a ton of money.... The result was people kept building coal-fired plants because they were cheaper and there was no worry from law suits...
The lesson here is will the greenie-weenies torpedo synthetic fuel plants like they did the nuclear plants in the 1970s/80s? My guess is yes....and evidently a lot of others think so as well. The Greenie-Weenie's killed nuclear power in the 1970s/80s. Will they kill synthetic fuel production? Maybe.....there are lots of liberal judges that will order work stoppages on alledged 'safety' problems without being presented any hard evidence. This is what killed nuclear power....
Personally I think people will get very motivated in favor of synthetic fuels once gas get too expensive and the greenie-weenies will face a huge backlash if they try to interfere.