"... hopefully, by that time our transportation needs will be figured out."
You can't be serious? Twenty years?
An awful lot of people have been saying for an awful long time that the type of price rise you're seeing now would be along soon. This is not some temporary interruption in supply like all the other oil price hiccups since the early 1970s. Each 'oil shock' before had transient supply underpinnings. This is the real deal - the start of the long term increases in price that reflect the true supply challenges.
The saber rattling against Iran, the monetary policies of Greenspan and the fed and the failure in Iraq are adding to it, but the reduction in excess capacity are real. Excess capacity is now only 2%, down from 6% a few years ago. Watch the prices when it reaches parity and then flips.
This is not fantasy or politics, and not junk science as some would like to call it. The CEOs of the worlds largest oil companies are on record that we're at or near the peak of oil production and demand will soon exceed supply. The head of the petroleum industry trade group has said the same thing. Research it yourself.
I live in a place that changed its energy culture after the first oil shock in the 1970s. The Japanese said they would never be left in the same position again and stuck with it.
- Today, almost one half of all the solar power generated in the world is generated in Japan.
- While the GDP has doubled since the first oil shock, Japan has about the same energy consumption as it did in the 1970s. That is an amazing statistic. Japanese factories use one half of the energy of US or European factories to produce the same monetary unit of productivity.
I suspect that many companies will be looking to learn from Japan again in the future, as they did in years past.
It's Groundhog Day all over again.