Alternative Energy Slow to Take Hold

Mallory Overstreet/Oil and Energy/March 24, 2008/10:05pm

Unfortunately, the plunge for alternative energy is not going to happen as fast as we were hoping it would. According to researchers, no alternative source of energy has the strength to replace petroleum, and they say it will possibly take decades to develop different sources that work as well as it does now. This is simply due to the fact that petroleum works the best and it is (or was) the cheapest way to provide energy to the world. Now that the need for fuel is growing faster than it used to, our regular sources are struggling to keep up. This, of course, causes prices to sky rocket. Something else contributing to the high prices is the fact that they have not found something better to replace it. So we are stuck paying for the fuel because we have to. One thing that we could try though, is "saving and substituting efficiency for all the oil we use". Although this way is cheaper than buying the oil, it still does not solve the oil crisis. Also, only biofuels, such as ethanol, can only replace the fuel used for transportation, which is most of the fuel that we need in order to get the prices back down to normal. And even if ethanol is produced in very large amounts, it would only contribute to five percent of the fuel used by motorists every day. As well as not producing enough, researchers say that it would require more fuel to produce these specific biofuels than they would actually produce, leaving us deeper in the hole than when we started.
In conclusion, it seems like we need to just try to be patient about fuel prices, keeping in mind that researchers are constantly looking for better ideas to help us now and in the future.