The company I work for makes MANY a valve(and other parts) crucial for oil production, pumping, refining, etc..
Who do you work for, Soos?
If it took electricity to make it, coal or gas was needed to get the power...
Exactly right: the reason we are experiencing the natural gas boom (4 fold price increase so far, in last 2 years) is because of the Clinton Administration's allowing the EPA to run unbridled at "green people's" requests: actually, he was pushing the EPA to do it, as the Greenies donated lots of money to his campaigns. While I'm all for cleaning up the planet, here's what happened with this one, and it currently makes coal impossible to use (even clean coal):
Circa 1997, the EPA was allowed, with strong political pressure from the Clinton White House, to put through a bill that required 4 or more levels of 'scrubbing' for ALL coal fired stacks in the U.S. by July, 2009, to be operational by January, 2010. To a noob, this sounds fine. The reality: the first 3 levels of new scrubbing remove 93% of all pollutants and particulates from the coal exhaust, making the U.S. the cleanest coal-burning country in the world, already, by 2006. But, this last 'level' makes no sense: for example, in Denver, the power plants here must filter the incoming air, which is ABOVE the EPA limits for the outgoing stack, so that they can burn it and have the stack emissions meet the EPA requirement. In other words, they are supposed to ALREADY take in 'bad' air, and by burning coal, clean that air up even more(?) This is only at Level 3, now. The next level of equipment is so expensive to build and monitor, and takes so long to obtain, that none of the coal-fired plants for power or industry can make the goals in time. There is, for example, just one vendor in the whole U.S. that is approved to build the stack monitoring equipment: CISCO Instruments of Englewood, CO. They are building systems 24/7, but the stuff is so complex that it takes 8-10 months to put it together and test, then it still has to be installed at the site and certified.
So, about 2 years ago, the eastern U.S. industries,decided en masse to use cleaner-burning natural gas, but it is mostly found in the western U.S. The EPA approved this: the engine-driven electric generator people like Stewart & Stevinson and Caterpillar, who make gas-fueled engines, have been building them 24/7 ever since. Then, the drilling began out here, wells by the hundreds, and 3 major pipelines were laid out from here in CO, NM, and WY to points across the Mississippi River to distribution centers for eastern plants.
...and the price of natural gas has skyrocketed, and will continue to do so, until someone in Washington actually stops this EPA law that is too ridiculous to even imagine, let alone force a business to try to comply with. To date, no successful installation of this 4th level of scrubbing equipment has even worked, as it essentially blocks the exhaust of the stack so much in the filtering process that the stacks back up and won't breathe anymore. And, it's burning up the natural gas, that we need to convert to cleaner-burning gasoline, by the millions of cubic feet per day. Coal is a better solution.
And, every attempt by the Republicans to try to delay the law, until the technology could catch up with it, has been stopped by the Democrats simply because of the money the Greenies are pouring into the Dems coffers. At present development speed, the clean coal processing will be ready in 2010 for the large-scale systems we need.
So, if I ever sound like I'm against the current crop of Democrats, it's because they have displayed anything but sense, even common sense, ever since the Clinton Administration. Any legislator who is so short-sighted as to cause this sort of thing (and make no mistake, Clinton and his minions were also the ones to force Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac into this whole subprime mortgage business, too, that's recorded fact) is simply too stupid to be running this country.
(BTW, if you desire proof of the Freddie Mac - Fannie Mae problem that Clinton started, PM me at mgparis@concentric.net and I'll forward you a couple of the articles from the newspapers of the 1996-1999 era that blared out the grand rollout of the whole subprime thing.
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