AH Challenge: keep oil under 30 cents a gallon

It's pretty simple keep Gas under 30 cents a gallon, one twist Isreal has to exist and it has to be a US ally and the POD has to be after 1900.
 
Clessie Lyle Cummins

Clessie Lyle Cummins, lets say his diesel cycle engines are sold to more than farmers. They can run on oil produced from plant matter such as peanuts or sunflowers which a mechanized farmer can grow more of. Biofuels become prevalent especially in the depression because you farm it's source. Petrochemical fuels are still used of course for high performance engines and planes but the average Joe runs a diesel on biofuel. This lasts to the current day as diesels have evolved to a higher state than IOTL.
 
Clessie Lyle Cummins, lets say his diesel cycle engines are sold to more than farmers. They can run on oil produced from plant matter such as peanuts or sunflowers which a mechanized farmer can grow more of. Biofuels become prevalent especially in the depression because you farm it's source. Petrochemical fuels are still used of course for high performance engines and planes but the average Joe runs a diesel on biofuel. This lasts to the current day as diesels have evolved to a higher state than IOTL.

Um high performance engines and planes? So with the middle class now focusing on biofuel wouldent they be able to raise prices cause the people using high performance stuff (ie military) would still need petro and they can afford to pay hirer? Just a thought.
 
It's pretty simple keep Gas under 30 cents a gallon, one twist Isreal has to exist and it has to be a US ally and the POD has to be after 1900.

Keep it under 30 cents until today?

Easy. Butterfly away every major war and war in the Middle East, make automobiles incredibly expensive up until today (should be easy :rolleyes:), and so on and so on.
 
Clessie Lyle Cummins, lets say his diesel cycle engines are sold to more than farmers. They can run on oil produced from plant matter such as peanuts or sunflowers which a mechanized farmer can grow more of. Biofuels become prevalent especially in the depression because you farm it's source. Petrochemical fuels are still used of course for high performance engines and planes but the average Joe runs a diesel on biofuel. This lasts to the current day as diesels have evolved to a higher state than IOTL.

The reason plant oils weren't used and aren't used is that growing the source plants and producing the oil is more expensive than buying petroleum diesel or gasoline. Henry Ford originally designed the Model T to run on alcohol (pre-Prohibition) with the same idea in mind -- farmers could produce their own fuel. If gasoline is still 30 cents a gallon, per the OP, that makes plant oil even less attractive.
 
It's pretty simple keep Gas under 30 cents a gallon, one twist Isreal has to exist and it has to be a US ally and the POD has to be after 1900.

The only way to lower the price of gasoline is to lower the demand, so ... ban private gasoline-powered motorized vehicles worldwide.

But if you have a cheap, compact, high-energy-content substance, like gasoline, someone will find a use for it that will increase demand and thus make it more desirable and push the price up.

Or: Create scads more petroleum deposits than we have now.

Or: Develop a cheaper alternative -- fusion power and nanotube batteries, perhaps, for vehicle propulsion.

Bottom line: Assuming petroleum is as available in your TL as it is in ours and assuming society and technology develop somewhat along our TL's paths, then it's close to impossible to meet the OP's requirements.
 
Nature give the world a free gift

First post, pleas be nice :)

Ca 1950 an accidental breakthrough is made.

Melvin Calvin, James Bassham and Andrew Benson at the University of California, Berkeley, uses a mutated strain of Cyanophyta in there experiment to determine the Calvin cycle among simple microbes. The batch is producing "large" amounts of bio gas instead of sugar, slowly starving the bacteria. They find out that adding small amounts of sugar producing bacteria creates a symbiosis that produces bio gas surplus of pure sunlight. Further experiments give that the symbiotic mixture thrive in saline water.

Setting up experimental bio gas plants in the desert of Nevada shows that industrial scale production of bio gas is possible. The industrial process is refined and bio gas is gradually taking over from imported oil in several countries around the world during the 60's propelled by the Suez crisis and energy crisis (negating some of the effects of these) to become a public outcry to replace nuclear power in many countries after three mile island, Harrisburg and Chernobyl.

By 1990 its a over 40 year old industrial process whit extensive genetic engineering done on the mutated strains to increase the production. Melvin Calvin, James Bassham and Andrew Benson gets a Nobel price for the discovery.

World economy (and middle east politics) is developing different whit green energy production made possible in most countries. Oil and gasoline is still cheaper and used but most nations subsidies there bio gas production to keep there energy independence and making them more self sufficient on energy demand.
 
Let's say that Fischer and Tropsch develop their coal-to-fuels process at about the same time as the Haber process for making nitrates from ammonia; i.e., about six years earlier than in OTL. As part of the spoils of war, the US gets the requisite technology, which is bought into immediately by the coal barons of PA, WV, KY, and TN, since the demand for coal seems to be shrinking in the face of cheaper petroleum products.

F-T plants to produce coal-based alternatives to the products of the wells of TX, OK, and LA spring up near Charleston, WV, and Pittsburgh. In concert with the steel mills, the coke ovens of which produce benzene and other aromatic hydrocarbons, the northeast is soon operating automobiles fueled largely by synthetic fuels rather than refined fuels. Indeed, the Sun Oil Company (owned by the Pew family of Philadelphia) announces a new vertically integrated scheme wherein several coal mines are purchased, and the property at Girard Point in Philadelphia becomes a full-blown F-T plant: coal comes in by rail at one end and leaves as gasoline and kerosene (later, diesel fuel joins the products) at the other end.

That competition in the US (and by extension, Canada) should have done a fair bit to keep prices low.
 
Turtledove's got this one nailed in his good and IMHO surprisingly plausible Two Georges TL. Personal cars are powered by coal-fired steam engines, most air travel is by steamship, and only a few military planes use gas-like fuel.

I'm afraid F-T won't do it because it's more expensive than gasoline. That's because you have to add a serious conversion cost to coal's cost. Germany only did it in WW2 because they had nothing else. It's IMHO likely to eventually become big business here, too as we see oil'd price escalate from lowering supply.
 
IMO, by far the easiest way to accomplish this is to have worse inflation in the 70s, then when inflation stablizes, knock 2 zeroes off the dollar (as so many currencies have done over the years). Thus a 'dollar' today is worth about the same as a dollar in 1950 (say, about 10$ OTL). THus today's $3 gas is OTL's 30¢ gas....
 
One of Eisenhower's advisor's convinces him to use govt funds to keep the price of oil low rather than subsidizing the oil industry indirectly as we do today with the highway system. In turn the oil cos are expected to buy up land and build toll roads as America's interstates.

It'd be a corporate welfare nightmare for the public, or a wet dream for executives. Global warming would likely come even sooner under almost any scheme that keeps the price of oil artifically low.
 
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