The Sandman
Banned
Ouch. Just how much of Houston is gone? And how badly is this going to tank the economy?
The Future is Green
- Thread starter TheMann
- Start date
Most of Houston's eastern suburbs are a mess. Most of Galena Park is a mess. The channel is a wreck, most of the ships in it are wrecked. Houston itself is in fairly good shape, albeit with millions of pieces of broken glass and minor damage - stuff knocked over, broken tree branches, damaged roofs and the like.
As far as the economy goes, the loss of refinery capacity is going to cause gas shortages across the country, which hammers the point home about the need to work more on energy efficiency. Prices skyrocket during most of 2003 on gasoline, diesel fuel, jet fuel and many others.
FDW
Banned
Which in turn, is going to lead to a significant increase in ridership for Public Transit agencies across the US five years earlier than OTL. This incident probably also does some minor damage to the currently ITTL under-construction LRT line in D.T. Houston, pushing it's opening back by 3-4 months (it opened in January 2004 in OTL). Other projects that open during the same period after the POD are going to much higher ridership at the start (compared to OTL) because of the situation you lay out. If you want any solid figures on what would be a realistic increase in Public Transit ridership during this time just ask, this is one area where I consider my knowledgeable.
So...use HVDC, like most long-distance power lines. And you can always use superconductor interties rather than going to the trouble of building whole superconducting power lines (that is, at certain critical locations use superconductors to link up otherwise highly distant grid sources).
Ah...thanks for fucking over my home town. At least I was on the other side of the city at the time (now? not so much. Although probably distant enough to avoid getting incinerated).
I'll probably do that later on. Even if you handle the problems of superconducting components and their refrigeration and subsequent power needs, cost is still an issue and a stiff one.
Hey, you'll be fine. Besides, they will now get a chance to rebuild, and there will not be screwups like Katrina had here. USS Texas and the San Jacinto Monument survived the disaster (damaged somewhat in both cases, but repairable) and the area around it will be rebuilt.
True, but you'll still have NIMBYs dictating that some power plants would have to be giant ones, especially if you are using huge dams and nuclear plants. (No, the nuclear industry is NOT dead in the US. Curveball coming on that one.)
FDW
Banned
So TheMann, would like more info on how this is going to affect public in the United States?
FDW
Banned
Public transport? Sure. My rail knowledge is in the freight business, honestly.
Well, like I said earlier, the Opening of Houston's first LRT line will be pushed back from January 2004 OTL to April-May 2004 ITTL due to the damages in D.T. Houston from your incident. If you're going to have gas to 4 dollar per gallon, (which you've been hinting at here) then you're going to see a big spike in Public Transit ridership (similar to 2008 OTL), so that means that a number of extensions and Lines are going to start off better than OTL, so let's what opened in the US during the 2003-2005 period:
2003:
-BART SFO extension: Let's see, given the line added about 20,000 trips a day OTL to BART when it opened, given gas prices, I say we jack up ridership by about 50% over OTL levels, still less than the OTL projections, but ridership will continue to rise throughout the decade, so BART probably won't change service patterns on the line every six months like they did OTL.
-Los Angeles Gold Line: This line also had a rather mediocre opening act, but again the principle applies here that I applied to BART, a 50% increase over OTL seems likely, probably more given how low ridership was Gold Line when it first opened. (or about 20,000 daily in 2004)
2004:
-Portland Interstate Line: I don't know as much about this line, but again, the 50% increase can apply here as well.
-Houston LRT: Short Line, but it gets really high ridership for it's short length, being second only to Boston in terms of ridership per mile, here it should surge to it's OTL 2008 levels right at the opening (to about 40,000 daily in 2005)
-Minneapolis Hiawatha Line: This line also should surge up to it's OTL 2008 levels. (or about 35,000 daily in 2005)
-San Jose Capitol Extension: Yes, Silicon Valley has a Light Rail system, a rather large one for that matter, but it has a big ridership issue. Ridership on the system hit 30,000 daily before the dot-com crash wiped out half the ridership, here high gas prices will force the agency that operates San Jose's LRT system (VTA) to not make some of the cuts that were made in the 2003-2005 period OTL.
2005:
-Los Angeles Orange Line: Let's see, this line should hit about 25,000 daily right away ITTL.
-San Jose Vasona Extension: Between this extension and the Capitol extension VTA's LRT system should recover roughly to it's 2000 ridership by FY 05-06, and rise from there. (combined bus/rail ridership is still going down from 2000 levels by about 15% though)
-Washington Metro Extensions (Blue Line and Red Line): Again I don't have as much knowledge about DC, but one area that will change is that Bush administration isn't going to be able to stonewall DC's proposed Silver Line to Tyson's Corner and Dulles International Airport like it did OTL, so this line will go ahead faster than OTL.
Okay, any responses before I continue?
loughery111
Banned
I like this and really want to see where you take it, but I hope you plan on "rehabilitating" LNG in the eyes of the public? Or perhaps butterflying an earlier exploitation of the Marcellus Shale?
I say so only because the US is desperately going to need a cleaner, if not totally clean, power source as it weans itself from oil, and I suppose eventually from dirty coal. Natural gas is probably the ideal bridge until we can start wringing some real efficiency from solar and wind, get some reprocessing going in fission, and eventually bring fusion online.
FDW
Banned
Well, Public Transit is one where I consider myself knowledgeable. I don't really have an on LNG, but encouraging the development and expansion of public transit with more cash would also be a big part of the "weaning" process away from oil along with alternative fuels.
Any chance of Space Solar Power ITTL? California and Japan are looking into it as is IOTL, but might the idea have more backing, what with Houston destroyed and a minor nuclear disaster in Ohio?
The Sandman
Banned
Two thoughts.
First, is the nuclear revival going to involve the thorium fuel cycle? It does seem like one of OTL's classic missed opportunities.
Second, any chance of amortizing some of the expense of the long-distance transmission lines by bringing the rail companies in as partners and dedicating some portion of the power production to electrifying the entire rail net? Especially if it leads to maglev development later on, and ultimately high-speed freight rail across the US.
First, is the nuclear revival going to involve the thorium fuel cycle? It does seem like one of OTL's classic missed opportunities.
Second, any chance of amortizing some of the expense of the long-distance transmission lines by bringing the rail companies in as partners and dedicating some portion of the power production to electrifying the entire rail net? Especially if it leads to maglev development later on, and ultimately high-speed freight rail across the US.
Truthfully, considering the loss of that refining capacity will result in gas rationing for at least eight months to a year, I think you can take the mass transit ridership numbers and boot them probably 25-30% ABOVE the 2008 peaks. The SUV boom is going to stop cold, which is initially going to be a big problem for Detroit, but only for a few months until GM's European offerings turn up on North American shores in numbers and their plants retool for them. DaimlerChrysler, which has virtually no real small cars or good mid-sizer cars to handle this hit, is going to get gutted - at first. For car nuts, how this gets handled is going to be a pleasant curveball.
loughery111 said:
Truthfully, the plan is to reduce oil usage. There is not yet (and won't be for some time, I figure) a way to replace oil. LNG works, but setting up a whole new distribution network to make it work nationwide is a very difficult thing to do. There is still fun cars, but as far as transport goes, Mass Transit is going to get a BIG boost from this TL, SUVs are going to be massively reduced in numbers and diesels are gonna turn up on American roads in huge numbers. Fun cars aren't going away, though.....
Nuclear energy combined with clean power (wind, solar, geothermal, hydroelectric) and waste-to-energy and biomass plants can provide the US electricity needs here. As I pointed out earlier, the attitude of the US since the 1970s with regards to energy policy has been "get more" not "use what he have better". Davis-Besse and Houston have effectively ended that view. No Iraq War (too costly and irrelevant, bigger things to worry about at home) and no BP Gulf Disaster (after the mess in Houston, public opinion comes down HARD on the regulatory authorities responsible for the oil and gas industries, which means they gotta clean up their act - or else).
Polish Eagle said:
Oh yes. I'm researching ways to reduce launch costs, which is what kills space-based Solar Power more than anything. From an engineering standpoint, high-efficiency solar cells in space is a virtually perfect energy solution - the sun's energy is almost limitless, and getting satellites to geosynchronous orbit is nowadays a cinch. But its very costly, which is the main problem with such ideas.
The Sandman said:
Between that, as well as pebble bed and heavy water reactors, they are the future of nuclear energy.
The Sandman said:
Maglev trains require unbelievable amounts of power or large amounts of costly superconductors. Rail is going to stay steel wheel on steel rail for a long time to come. But it is going to get more usage, in both passengers and freight traffic. After the energy crisis in 2003, electrification will become a whole lot more likely in the US than IOTL.
Well, there's the Venturestar Single Stage to Orbit Launch Vehicle, which nearly came to fruition in 2003 when a suborbital prototype, the X-33, was about 90% complete, and then the funding was pulled due to a temporarily insurmountable engineering issue (due to a demand that its hydrogen tank be made of composites, the strange shape of it and the joints made it heavier than a competing aluminium design). Potentially could have reduced launch costs to $1000 per kilogram by being fully reusable (read: 1/10 Shuttle cost, 1/3 cost of cheapest OTL launch systems). Requires a more 'sustainability'-based approach to the successor to the Space Shuttle. Not Apollo-on-Steroids, but Shuttle-done-Right. Potentially feasible.
There's also railgun/scramjet. The idea is that a maglev railgun accelerates a scramjet to about Mach 3 while still at sea level. The plane carries on its back a small shuttlecraft with rockets. The scramjet gets as high and fast as it can go, and then the spacecraft launches from the top of that, delivering 5 tonnes to LEO. Potentially fully reusable and ready for relaunch every day. Requires development of scramjet (we are well on the way to that IOTL) and Railgun (also well on the way towards). Once the scramjet engine is developed, this, I believe, will be the most likely path to space.
Those are the most feasible methods of making access to space more efficient. That done, and space solar power becomes much easier. But it would most likely take a government program to get it off the ground (so to speak), as, well, it'll be expensive and a long-term investment.
FDW
Banned
Truthfully, considering the loss of that refining capacity will result in gas rationing for at least eight months to a year, I think you can take the mass transit ridership numbers and boot them probably 25-30% ABOVE the 2008 peaks. The SUV boom is going to stop cold, which is initially going to be a big problem for Detroit, but only for a few months until GM's European offerings turn up on North American shores in numbers and their plants retool for them. DaimlerChrysler, which has virtually no real small cars or good mid-sizer cars to handle this hit, is going to get gutted - at first. For car nuts, how this gets handled is going to be a pleasant curveball.
25-30%!!! That's going to open a can of worms right there, with public transit agencies trying to provide enough service for a ballooning ridership while not having enough, in the case of BART, that's asking for an accident, because BART literally cannot handle that number of additional passengers. So, it probably won't be a universal 25-30% rise over OTL 2008 it'll just be the average with some agencies (Like San Jose's VTA) seeing their ridership double, while others (Like BART, and several other heavy rail systems) getting much smaller boosts as they hit their designed capacities.
(I'll talk more about MT expansion butterflies in my next post.)
"Houston did something that even 1973 hadn't have done - it galvanized a vast cross section of businesses, industries, citizens and regulators to do something about a problem that had festered for decades. Davis-Besse had woken everyone up, now Houston kicked them in the teeth. Nobody's heads rolled over Houston. Instead, the differences got shelved. Really, while Houston residents would probably be infuriated to hear it, the black cloud that rocked their world on the morning of December 14, 2002, had a lining that was not so much silver as platinum. Americans didn't take the problems posed by the country's energy habits and infrastructure as something worthy of blame or scorn. They took it as a challenge - "OK, we have a problem, and its a big one. But we can fix it, so bring it on." Their leaders followed that opinion, and so began the building of so much of what exists today."
-- The Future is Green by Adrian Jackson, written 2044
"Fate has caused a horrible disaster to afflict the people of Houston and pain to inflict us all, and in the months and years to come, we now have the duty of not only rebuilding the lives of those unfortunate souls in Houston, we now also have the task of making sure it never happens again. Houston and Davis-Besse have made us all see the problems in our world. But America overcomes challenges. And we will overcome this one."
-- House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), speaking in Philadelphia, PA, January 19, 2003
"I cannot say what people will do, and I cannot say what God will do. But I CAN say what Washington will do. We WILL rebuild Houston. We WILL make sure this never, ever happens again. And we WILL make sure that in the future, our homes and our families have reliable energy, and we WILL be able to do what is necessary to ensure our future, and that of those who come after us."
-- President George W. Bush, at a rally in Galveston, TX, January 26, 2003
"There is but one way of ensuring that our children have a safe, reliable source of energy in the years to come. That is to make our economy able to work with the resources we have and the alternative energy that we can generate. There is no other way to do what the President says he'll do, and I do hope he understands that fully. I hope we all understand that."
-- Congressman Dennis Kucinich (D-OH), in Congress, January 28, 2003
The disaster in Houston prompted massive recovery efforts from around the world, including the dispatch of naval vessels of over a dozen different nations and aid packages from all over the world, from Canada and other NATO members to more unlikely help from places like India and Venezuela. Hugo Chavez, the well-known and very loud Venezuelan President, made a point of offering a substantial amount of fuel oil and diesel to several US cities on the condition that it be used for poorer populations and mass transit usage. (Nobody turned this down. President Bush would later publicly thank Chavez for his help, despite the nastiness between Chavez and the Bush Administration.) Refineries in Canada, Europe and Australia went full tilt to try and alleviate the shortages. This caused a rather unwelcome rise in gas prices in several countries, but it was not forgotten in the US. The Bush Administration's idea of going to war with Iraq never happened - the US had better things to worry about, and despite the advice of some, President Bush felt that the problems at home would occupy all of his time.
The aftermath of Houston was a massive spike in fuel prices in the days after Houston, a most unpleasant surprise to holiday travelers who found that the costs of travel went crazy. Thankfully, most American homes had natural gas heating. But by the end of the month, gas prices had soared to as much as $6.50 a gallon in some places, which caused massive problems for commuters, particularly in spread-out cities with long commutes such as Atlanta, Dallas and Los Angeles. Similar massive fuel price increases affected the prices of everything, and caused a short but fairly sharp recession in 2003. But the optimism of the time caused that recession to be short. Despite the disasters at Houston and at Davis-Besse, the country hadn't taken a sense of trouble about it - it had taken it as a challenge.
The outgoing Congress was called back by Speaker Dennis Hastert at the request of a number of his colleagues, but an attempt to shove through an energy bill giving substantial tax breaks to several oil and gas companies for the purpose of "exploratory efforts" was shot down by Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle, and President Bush indicated that he would have likely vetoed it anyways, as polls showed overwhelmingly that Americans were against the idea of subsidies for the oil and gas firms after Houston.
The New Congress sat on January 7, 2003, facing a raft of problems and some divided leadership, as the Republicans held the White House, the Democrats held the House and the Senate was an even 50/50 tossup. This forced Vice President Dick Cheney to sit in the Senate of most key issues, particularly because of several Democratic Senators, including John Kerry of Massachusetts, Paul Wellstone of Minnesota and John Edwards of North Carolina, were openly talking of running for the Democrats' Presidential nomination in 2004, and as such were making their names known.
Divided leadership did nothing to hurt efforts to fix Houston, however. Nobody denied the need to do that, or begin rapid reconstruction of the destroyed facilities there. But public message meant that simple rebuilds were simply not gonna happen - after Houston, many new refinery plans were built with much of the refinery piping and facilities inside huge buildings, with the goal of stopping huge fires if they broke out. This was eventually included into Houston's building codes, with that becoming law in November 2003.
Across the nation, this new energy crisis was both a crisis and an opportunity. Public pressure after Houston and Davis-Besse, as well as a hope for energy security after 9/11, led to investors and companies across the nation showing off plans for alternative energy facilities.
FirstEnergy's massive wind power plan was the first such serious proposal, but it was merely the first of many. Some had brushed off that ambitious proposal as fantasy, but FirstEnergy, dealing with its own capacity problem as a result of losing nearly 900 megawatts of generating capacity, quickly proved that it was not kidding in the slightest. With the assistance of shipyard in Fore River, MA, for assembly purposes, the pieces of the first FirstEnergy wind turbine headed out to a site near Cleveland, Ohio, on February 23, 2003, and was erected in March 2003. The turbine went online on April 16, 2003, followed by all 250 of its companions between April 2003 and May 2005. The first of the high-tech waste-to-energy incinerators went online, built at the Davis-Besse site, on August 21, 2004, after a massive investment.
The reactor at Davis-Besse was over the course of 2003 encased in a massive octagonal shell made of 3/8-inch stainless steel plate, which was then covered over with nearly six inches of reinforced concrete, and THAT was coated in synthetic liners. Underneath, more of the polymer linings were installed under the reactor to ensure no leakage of anything. The shell around it was completed in May 2004.
Most of the plans for major overhauls of the infrastructure system would require big investments, and to pay for this, the incoming Congress proposed, and approved, a gas tax system. The aim of this tax would be to keep prices for gasoline and diesel fuel at a stable level, with the aim being to solidify gas prices at about $4.25 a US gallon, a number which the Departments of Transportation and Energy agreed would work best to balance costs for consumers and plans to get America's energy usage down. As a compromise to get the bill passed, however, the Congress agreed to not collect the tax if prices of gasoline hit over $5.25 a gallon, and that all the numbers involved would be adjusted for inflation over time.
Gasoline shortages were common through 2003, as well as incredibly high prices for it. Several states, including California, Illinois, Florida and New York, introduced various systems of trying to keep some order to this. The shortages did, however, have a major effect on vehicle markets. The Detroit Three had been caught badly unawares - Ford, which had just released a new model of its Expedition full-size SUV, was in particular PR hock. Quickly countering, both GM and Ford wholesale committed to bring many of its European models to North America. History, for them, had not been forgotten - their rushed subcompacts in the 1970s had been safety nightmares and PR messes, and instead of trying to develop new cars in a huge hurry, GM and Ford quickly brought over many of their European offerings. While Ford had been doing this on a smaller scale for years with the Focus and the Contour, in both cases most of the lineup suddenly appeared in dealerships. The dealers were genuinely happy about that, too. GM's small Chevrolet Cavalier/Pontiac Sunfire pair were initially seen as good enough for the job, the appearance of the European Ford Focus put that idea to bed, and for most of 2003 and 2004 the lineups of the Detroit automakers were a mess as they tried to sort out what could be used, and what couldn't be.
"It was like we all of a sudden got hit in the face by a shovel. The company had been making sport utility vehicles and pickup trucks because they made profits for us, and all of s sudden we couldn't sell them. In the space of a month we went from selling millions of pickups and SUVs to being unable to move them at all. We had to do something, and we had to do it fast, and with Toyota, Honda, Nissan and Volkswagen already well established and ahead of us, another Vega could have buried the company. We had to play for keeps, and we did just that."
-- Bob Lutz, GM Chairman for North American Development, in a 2007 interview for Motor Trend magazine
A 2004-model Saturn Astra at a proving ground in Michigan
Chrysler, however, was in deep trouble. DaimlerChrysler had no small car wings, with the majority of its efforts focused on larger vehicles and Daimler's Mercedes-Benz car lines, which took some hits but stayed steady. Many of Chrysler's smaller Dodge Neon models sold well, but as the small cars from the imports and its Detroit rivals came in numbers, Chrysler's sales dropped like a stone. The knowledge that gas prices were going to stay high didn't help matters. DaimlerChrysler took a $4.5 Billion loss in 2003, bigger than GM or Ford. They needed new products, right then and there. And while work was underway and being shoved hard, it wasn't likely to be fast enough, particularly as Daimler caught to reduce losses.
The salvation, in an incredible ironic twist, came from Britain. Daimler needed small car designs and fast, and the bankrupt MG Rover Group, which was teetering on the verge of liquidation, provided them. The older designs never made it very far, but it was quickly ascertained that the aging MG ZR and ZS designs could complement the cars Chrysler made for a little while, and they started turning up at US Chrysler dealers in mid-2004. The new cars actually proved fairly popular, with many dealers intelligently using flashbacks of the MG sports cars of the past as part of the attempt. Chrysler also intelligently sought the expertise of Daimler's heavy truck division for better diesel engines, particularly for its bigger models, and began replacing V6 engines in its bigger Stratus and Intrepid models with the turbocharged four-cylinder engine from the SRT-4 sports sedan, something which both improved fuel mileage and performance over the older V6 designs. Chrysler also found customers for its minivans, which offered similar space and somewhat better mileage than the many sport utility vehicles. Chrysler's new smaller cars began turning up in their dealers in 2006. By that time, they had outright bought the remains of MG Rover, and the company used variants of its K-series engines in newer products. Combined with turbocharger technology from Garrett, Chrysler was able to switch entirely to four-cylinder engines for its small and mid-sized car lines for 2006, offering versions of the K Series and its own 2.4-liter turbo with up to 355 horsepower in everything from the tiny Dodge Caliber and MG ZR right up to the Dodge Dakota pickup truck.
"You gotta love the arrogance of the Germans who run DaimlerChrysler. Claim credit for Chrysler's turnaround, will you? Yes, Chrysler went for broke, no two ways about that. They had no choice, because they had nothing. The only reason Chrysler bought MG Rover was to put new cars in their showrooms and to get the K-series engine, and considering what they paid for the company, it was a great move indeed. But if anything, the knee-jerk reactions at Chrysler and the lack of any development of new cars before Houston showed the primary problem with DaimlerChrysler - Daimler had bought them just to get the profitable trucks and to get premiums on parts from suppliers. When the going got rough, the German management, led by these two idiots, treated the company as a bastard child, and Eaton and Chrysler's American and German engineers, along with the new British guys whose jobs depended on this deal, worked their asses off with no money to do the impossible. And now Jurgen Schrempp and Dieter Zetsche are claiming credit for fixing that mess, as if anybody in this business doesn't know who actually fixed it. Bob Eaton ought to tell them both to kiss his ass. He ought to ask Lee Iacocca for an apology for calling him incompetent while he's at it, too."
-- Brock Yates, in the July 2007 issue of Car and Driver magazine
GM's gas-electric Volt concept was another milestone. GM was adamant right from the start that the Volt would be built, though its striking design over time lost much of its edges. GM's European small cars also coincided with a major transition to diesels in its truck engines. All of Detroit did this, though Chrysler was the only one brave enough to use diesel car engines. Detroit's new diesels were almost immediately beginning improvement programs, as well.
This huge, costly effort paid dividend almost immediately. American auto buyers, first surprised at the sudden changes in models on offer, soon found that some of them were very satisfactory indeed. Chrysler's Garrett Turbo-equipped machines proved to be both frugal and able to make all the power one needed. Requiring premium fuel was at first an issue, but the cost difference (usually about 50 cents/gallon) was smaller than the difference in fuel economy, and customers noted this quite quickly. By 2007, the Detroit makers were all alive and well, and SUVs and Light Trucks, which had taken more than half the new vehicle market in 2002, had plummeted back to about 20%. This resulted in an initial loss of profitability for Detroit, but they quickly adapted to this. Incidentally, Chrysler's actions resulted in the survival of MG Rover, and ultimately Chrysler's expansion into European markets from a UK base, which resulted in thousands of British jobs. This did NOT go unnoticed in the UK, either, with the British government being quite happy to help Chrysler's efforts, even to the point of having a number Chrysler 300s being used as vehicles by the British government.
The suddenly-high fuel prices contributed to a renaissance in public transportation, too, especially in cities which were already working on such expansions. As with the alternative energy proposals, ideas for mass transit improvements quickly became a dime a dozen, with cities from San Francisco to Boston to Miami beginning such efforts. Diesel fueled-buses weren't in most of the more ambitious ones - many of the ideas involved electrified rail transit of some form or another, though trolley buses soon became a fairly common (and cost-effective) idea. The sudden and massive rise in traffic levels caused problems in many areas, with big systems such as BART (San Francisco Bay Area), MTA (New York) and Metrolink (Los Angeles) hardest hit.
Commuter rail lines and regional rail became common proposals too, even on relatively sparsely-populated routes such as Albuquerque-Santa Fe in New Mexico and Minneapolis-Duluth in Minnesota. High-speed lines also became common proposals, with serious proposals showing up in Texas and California on ballots in 2003. A sudden rise in fuel prices hit airlines, already still struggling to recover from 9/11, right in the gut, though for others it proved a surprise - Amtrak, for example, saw a sudden (and very large) increase in the usage of its electrified Acela Express, Northeast Regional and Colonial routes. America's freight rail lines, particularly in hydropower-rich areas such as the Pacific Northwest, began studying electrification again. General Electric, smelling blood in the water, offered to underwrite electrification efforts if they used GE equipment and locomotives for them.
In September 2003, Sasol announced that it would jump into the US market with its synthetic oil production technology. For the relatively-small South African company, this was a big, big leap of faith - but with fifty years of experience at producing oil from coal, they knew what to do and how to do it. They didn't take long to find an ally in their efforts - Hess Corporation offered to market their fuel produced if it met their standards. Sasol announced its first plant would be built near Nazareth, PA, on March 22, 2004. The plant was completed in May 2006, and soon after when it appeared that the idea of gasoline entirely from American sources had a certain appeal in the post-9/11 world, Hess began marketing the fuel as "Sasol by Hess". This was mostly successful, but the two firms would during 2007 and 2008 be expanding their efforts with Sasol-branded gas stations in markets Hess did not already serve. Government support was originally hard to find - the attempt by President Jimmy Carter to enact a synthetic fuels law in the 1970s had been a disaster - but after the plant opened and it was seen that the idea did indeed work, The Sasol-Hess consortium had little trouble getting support for their work, and the two companies expanded very rapidly in the 2000s and 2010s as a result.
-- The Future is Green by Adrian Jackson, written 2044
"Fate has caused a horrible disaster to afflict the people of Houston and pain to inflict us all, and in the months and years to come, we now have the duty of not only rebuilding the lives of those unfortunate souls in Houston, we now also have the task of making sure it never happens again. Houston and Davis-Besse have made us all see the problems in our world. But America overcomes challenges. And we will overcome this one."
-- House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), speaking in Philadelphia, PA, January 19, 2003
"I cannot say what people will do, and I cannot say what God will do. But I CAN say what Washington will do. We WILL rebuild Houston. We WILL make sure this never, ever happens again. And we WILL make sure that in the future, our homes and our families have reliable energy, and we WILL be able to do what is necessary to ensure our future, and that of those who come after us."
-- President George W. Bush, at a rally in Galveston, TX, January 26, 2003
"There is but one way of ensuring that our children have a safe, reliable source of energy in the years to come. That is to make our economy able to work with the resources we have and the alternative energy that we can generate. There is no other way to do what the President says he'll do, and I do hope he understands that fully. I hope we all understand that."
-- Congressman Dennis Kucinich (D-OH), in Congress, January 28, 2003
The disaster in Houston prompted massive recovery efforts from around the world, including the dispatch of naval vessels of over a dozen different nations and aid packages from all over the world, from Canada and other NATO members to more unlikely help from places like India and Venezuela. Hugo Chavez, the well-known and very loud Venezuelan President, made a point of offering a substantial amount of fuel oil and diesel to several US cities on the condition that it be used for poorer populations and mass transit usage. (Nobody turned this down. President Bush would later publicly thank Chavez for his help, despite the nastiness between Chavez and the Bush Administration.) Refineries in Canada, Europe and Australia went full tilt to try and alleviate the shortages. This caused a rather unwelcome rise in gas prices in several countries, but it was not forgotten in the US. The Bush Administration's idea of going to war with Iraq never happened - the US had better things to worry about, and despite the advice of some, President Bush felt that the problems at home would occupy all of his time.
The aftermath of Houston was a massive spike in fuel prices in the days after Houston, a most unpleasant surprise to holiday travelers who found that the costs of travel went crazy. Thankfully, most American homes had natural gas heating. But by the end of the month, gas prices had soared to as much as $6.50 a gallon in some places, which caused massive problems for commuters, particularly in spread-out cities with long commutes such as Atlanta, Dallas and Los Angeles. Similar massive fuel price increases affected the prices of everything, and caused a short but fairly sharp recession in 2003. But the optimism of the time caused that recession to be short. Despite the disasters at Houston and at Davis-Besse, the country hadn't taken a sense of trouble about it - it had taken it as a challenge.
The outgoing Congress was called back by Speaker Dennis Hastert at the request of a number of his colleagues, but an attempt to shove through an energy bill giving substantial tax breaks to several oil and gas companies for the purpose of "exploratory efforts" was shot down by Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle, and President Bush indicated that he would have likely vetoed it anyways, as polls showed overwhelmingly that Americans were against the idea of subsidies for the oil and gas firms after Houston.
The New Congress sat on January 7, 2003, facing a raft of problems and some divided leadership, as the Republicans held the White House, the Democrats held the House and the Senate was an even 50/50 tossup. This forced Vice President Dick Cheney to sit in the Senate of most key issues, particularly because of several Democratic Senators, including John Kerry of Massachusetts, Paul Wellstone of Minnesota and John Edwards of North Carolina, were openly talking of running for the Democrats' Presidential nomination in 2004, and as such were making their names known.
Divided leadership did nothing to hurt efforts to fix Houston, however. Nobody denied the need to do that, or begin rapid reconstruction of the destroyed facilities there. But public message meant that simple rebuilds were simply not gonna happen - after Houston, many new refinery plans were built with much of the refinery piping and facilities inside huge buildings, with the goal of stopping huge fires if they broke out. This was eventually included into Houston's building codes, with that becoming law in November 2003.
Across the nation, this new energy crisis was both a crisis and an opportunity. Public pressure after Houston and Davis-Besse, as well as a hope for energy security after 9/11, led to investors and companies across the nation showing off plans for alternative energy facilities.
FirstEnergy's massive wind power plan was the first such serious proposal, but it was merely the first of many. Some had brushed off that ambitious proposal as fantasy, but FirstEnergy, dealing with its own capacity problem as a result of losing nearly 900 megawatts of generating capacity, quickly proved that it was not kidding in the slightest. With the assistance of shipyard in Fore River, MA, for assembly purposes, the pieces of the first FirstEnergy wind turbine headed out to a site near Cleveland, Ohio, on February 23, 2003, and was erected in March 2003. The turbine went online on April 16, 2003, followed by all 250 of its companions between April 2003 and May 2005. The first of the high-tech waste-to-energy incinerators went online, built at the Davis-Besse site, on August 21, 2004, after a massive investment.
The reactor at Davis-Besse was over the course of 2003 encased in a massive octagonal shell made of 3/8-inch stainless steel plate, which was then covered over with nearly six inches of reinforced concrete, and THAT was coated in synthetic liners. Underneath, more of the polymer linings were installed under the reactor to ensure no leakage of anything. The shell around it was completed in May 2004.
Most of the plans for major overhauls of the infrastructure system would require big investments, and to pay for this, the incoming Congress proposed, and approved, a gas tax system. The aim of this tax would be to keep prices for gasoline and diesel fuel at a stable level, with the aim being to solidify gas prices at about $4.25 a US gallon, a number which the Departments of Transportation and Energy agreed would work best to balance costs for consumers and plans to get America's energy usage down. As a compromise to get the bill passed, however, the Congress agreed to not collect the tax if prices of gasoline hit over $5.25 a gallon, and that all the numbers involved would be adjusted for inflation over time.
Gasoline shortages were common through 2003, as well as incredibly high prices for it. Several states, including California, Illinois, Florida and New York, introduced various systems of trying to keep some order to this. The shortages did, however, have a major effect on vehicle markets. The Detroit Three had been caught badly unawares - Ford, which had just released a new model of its Expedition full-size SUV, was in particular PR hock. Quickly countering, both GM and Ford wholesale committed to bring many of its European models to North America. History, for them, had not been forgotten - their rushed subcompacts in the 1970s had been safety nightmares and PR messes, and instead of trying to develop new cars in a huge hurry, GM and Ford quickly brought over many of their European offerings. While Ford had been doing this on a smaller scale for years with the Focus and the Contour, in both cases most of the lineup suddenly appeared in dealerships. The dealers were genuinely happy about that, too. GM's small Chevrolet Cavalier/Pontiac Sunfire pair were initially seen as good enough for the job, the appearance of the European Ford Focus put that idea to bed, and for most of 2003 and 2004 the lineups of the Detroit automakers were a mess as they tried to sort out what could be used, and what couldn't be.
"It was like we all of a sudden got hit in the face by a shovel. The company had been making sport utility vehicles and pickup trucks because they made profits for us, and all of s sudden we couldn't sell them. In the space of a month we went from selling millions of pickups and SUVs to being unable to move them at all. We had to do something, and we had to do it fast, and with Toyota, Honda, Nissan and Volkswagen already well established and ahead of us, another Vega could have buried the company. We had to play for keeps, and we did just that."
-- Bob Lutz, GM Chairman for North American Development, in a 2007 interview for Motor Trend magazine
A 2004-model Saturn Astra at a proving ground in Michigan
Chrysler, however, was in deep trouble. DaimlerChrysler had no small car wings, with the majority of its efforts focused on larger vehicles and Daimler's Mercedes-Benz car lines, which took some hits but stayed steady. Many of Chrysler's smaller Dodge Neon models sold well, but as the small cars from the imports and its Detroit rivals came in numbers, Chrysler's sales dropped like a stone. The knowledge that gas prices were going to stay high didn't help matters. DaimlerChrysler took a $4.5 Billion loss in 2003, bigger than GM or Ford. They needed new products, right then and there. And while work was underway and being shoved hard, it wasn't likely to be fast enough, particularly as Daimler caught to reduce losses.
The salvation, in an incredible ironic twist, came from Britain. Daimler needed small car designs and fast, and the bankrupt MG Rover Group, which was teetering on the verge of liquidation, provided them. The older designs never made it very far, but it was quickly ascertained that the aging MG ZR and ZS designs could complement the cars Chrysler made for a little while, and they started turning up at US Chrysler dealers in mid-2004. The new cars actually proved fairly popular, with many dealers intelligently using flashbacks of the MG sports cars of the past as part of the attempt. Chrysler also intelligently sought the expertise of Daimler's heavy truck division for better diesel engines, particularly for its bigger models, and began replacing V6 engines in its bigger Stratus and Intrepid models with the turbocharged four-cylinder engine from the SRT-4 sports sedan, something which both improved fuel mileage and performance over the older V6 designs. Chrysler also found customers for its minivans, which offered similar space and somewhat better mileage than the many sport utility vehicles. Chrysler's new smaller cars began turning up in their dealers in 2006. By that time, they had outright bought the remains of MG Rover, and the company used variants of its K-series engines in newer products. Combined with turbocharger technology from Garrett, Chrysler was able to switch entirely to four-cylinder engines for its small and mid-sized car lines for 2006, offering versions of the K Series and its own 2.4-liter turbo with up to 355 horsepower in everything from the tiny Dodge Caliber and MG ZR right up to the Dodge Dakota pickup truck.
"You gotta love the arrogance of the Germans who run DaimlerChrysler. Claim credit for Chrysler's turnaround, will you? Yes, Chrysler went for broke, no two ways about that. They had no choice, because they had nothing. The only reason Chrysler bought MG Rover was to put new cars in their showrooms and to get the K-series engine, and considering what they paid for the company, it was a great move indeed. But if anything, the knee-jerk reactions at Chrysler and the lack of any development of new cars before Houston showed the primary problem with DaimlerChrysler - Daimler had bought them just to get the profitable trucks and to get premiums on parts from suppliers. When the going got rough, the German management, led by these two idiots, treated the company as a bastard child, and Eaton and Chrysler's American and German engineers, along with the new British guys whose jobs depended on this deal, worked their asses off with no money to do the impossible. And now Jurgen Schrempp and Dieter Zetsche are claiming credit for fixing that mess, as if anybody in this business doesn't know who actually fixed it. Bob Eaton ought to tell them both to kiss his ass. He ought to ask Lee Iacocca for an apology for calling him incompetent while he's at it, too."
-- Brock Yates, in the July 2007 issue of Car and Driver magazine
GM's gas-electric Volt concept was another milestone. GM was adamant right from the start that the Volt would be built, though its striking design over time lost much of its edges. GM's European small cars also coincided with a major transition to diesels in its truck engines. All of Detroit did this, though Chrysler was the only one brave enough to use diesel car engines. Detroit's new diesels were almost immediately beginning improvement programs, as well.
This huge, costly effort paid dividend almost immediately. American auto buyers, first surprised at the sudden changes in models on offer, soon found that some of them were very satisfactory indeed. Chrysler's Garrett Turbo-equipped machines proved to be both frugal and able to make all the power one needed. Requiring premium fuel was at first an issue, but the cost difference (usually about 50 cents/gallon) was smaller than the difference in fuel economy, and customers noted this quite quickly. By 2007, the Detroit makers were all alive and well, and SUVs and Light Trucks, which had taken more than half the new vehicle market in 2002, had plummeted back to about 20%. This resulted in an initial loss of profitability for Detroit, but they quickly adapted to this. Incidentally, Chrysler's actions resulted in the survival of MG Rover, and ultimately Chrysler's expansion into European markets from a UK base, which resulted in thousands of British jobs. This did NOT go unnoticed in the UK, either, with the British government being quite happy to help Chrysler's efforts, even to the point of having a number Chrysler 300s being used as vehicles by the British government.
The suddenly-high fuel prices contributed to a renaissance in public transportation, too, especially in cities which were already working on such expansions. As with the alternative energy proposals, ideas for mass transit improvements quickly became a dime a dozen, with cities from San Francisco to Boston to Miami beginning such efforts. Diesel fueled-buses weren't in most of the more ambitious ones - many of the ideas involved electrified rail transit of some form or another, though trolley buses soon became a fairly common (and cost-effective) idea. The sudden and massive rise in traffic levels caused problems in many areas, with big systems such as BART (San Francisco Bay Area), MTA (New York) and Metrolink (Los Angeles) hardest hit.
Commuter rail lines and regional rail became common proposals too, even on relatively sparsely-populated routes such as Albuquerque-Santa Fe in New Mexico and Minneapolis-Duluth in Minnesota. High-speed lines also became common proposals, with serious proposals showing up in Texas and California on ballots in 2003. A sudden rise in fuel prices hit airlines, already still struggling to recover from 9/11, right in the gut, though for others it proved a surprise - Amtrak, for example, saw a sudden (and very large) increase in the usage of its electrified Acela Express, Northeast Regional and Colonial routes. America's freight rail lines, particularly in hydropower-rich areas such as the Pacific Northwest, began studying electrification again. General Electric, smelling blood in the water, offered to underwrite electrification efforts if they used GE equipment and locomotives for them.
In September 2003, Sasol announced that it would jump into the US market with its synthetic oil production technology. For the relatively-small South African company, this was a big, big leap of faith - but with fifty years of experience at producing oil from coal, they knew what to do and how to do it. They didn't take long to find an ally in their efforts - Hess Corporation offered to market their fuel produced if it met their standards. Sasol announced its first plant would be built near Nazareth, PA, on March 22, 2004. The plant was completed in May 2006, and soon after when it appeared that the idea of gasoline entirely from American sources had a certain appeal in the post-9/11 world, Hess began marketing the fuel as "Sasol by Hess". This was mostly successful, but the two firms would during 2007 and 2008 be expanding their efforts with Sasol-branded gas stations in markets Hess did not already serve. Government support was originally hard to find - the attempt by President Jimmy Carter to enact a synthetic fuels law in the 1970s had been a disaster - but after the plant opened and it was seen that the idea did indeed work, The Sasol-Hess consortium had little trouble getting support for their work, and the two companies expanded very rapidly in the 2000s and 2010s as a result.
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