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Mega-rich paying top price for luxury submarines
A. Craig Copetas, Bloomberg News via Seattle Times
The luxury-submarine business is sometimes hard to fathom.
“If you can find my submarine, it’s yours,” says Russian oil billionaire Roman Abramovich. That’s all the reclusive owner of the Chelsea Football Club has to say.
The ocean floor is the final spending frontier for the world’s richest people. Journeying to see what’s on the bottom aboard a personal submersible is a wretched excess guaranteed to trump the average mogul’s stable of vintage Bugattis or a $38 million round-trip ticket to the international space station aboard a Russian rocket.
Luxury-sub makers and salesmen from the Pacific Ocean to the Persian Gulf say fantasy and secrecy are the foundations of this nautical niche industry built on madcap multibillionaires.
(11 July 2007)
Needed by 2050: decked freeways, tunnels, tolls, trains
Rong-Gong Lin II and Jeffrey L. Rabin, Los Angeles Times
Building the roads and transportation infrastructure needed to accommodate Southern California’s surging population could cost more than $100 billion, according to planners, leaving the region’s taxpayers with a tough choice ahead.
Local transportation agencies said the Southland’s freeways and mass transit need drastic changes to accommodate what state officials project as a 60% increase in the region’s population by 2050.
That would probably include adding upper decks to some Los Angeles County freeways, new rail lines and building freeways or toll roads in places like the Antelope Valley, Orange County and Riverside County.
“We are thinking here of a big system, equivalent to the interstate system,” said Hasan Ikhrata, director of planning and policy for the Southern California Assn. of Governments, referring to the freeway building boom of the 1950s and 1960s that revolutionized American auto traffic.
The population forecast, released Monday by the state Department of Finance, predicted that California’s population would swell to nearly 60 million by midcentury. Southern California’s population would reach 31.6 million by 2050, up from 19.5 million in 2000.
Some demographers believe that the state will only reach those numbers if it provides adequate public infrastructure. Others worry that the growth will come even without more roads, making congestion worse.
(11 July 2007)
Befores spending that $100 billion, it might be good to check out the predictions for liquid fuel availability. -BA
U.S. airlines may face huge plane bill
Dan Reed, USA TODAY
…If projections by the plane-making giants, Airbus and Boeing (BA), are to be believed, U.S. airlines could need as many as 9,000 new jets in the next 20 years. That could cost the industry nearly $1 trillion.
The high cost of fleet replacement and expansion will add to the financial pressures that already weigh heavily on the airlines, including the pressure to raise fares. But failure to launch the enormously expensive process soon could relegate the big U.S. carriers to flying antiquated aircraft for years while their foreign and low-cost domestic competitors fly newer, more fuel-efficient jets.
The planes flown by the USA’s six largest conventional network carriers are now, on average, 13.3 years old, according to industry tracker Back Aviation Solutions. That’s the oldest ever for this group of airlines.
(10 July 2007)
Australia fights jet-flight guilt over global warming
AFP
SYDNEY – Australia’s tourism authorities Tuesday launched a campaign to fight claims that long-distance air travel is a major cause of global warming.
With long-distance flights virtually the only way of reaching “Down Under”, guilt over climate change is seen as a threat to the country’s 75 billion dollar (62.7 billion US) tourism industry.
Negative press campaigns in major markets such as Britain had exaggerated the contribution of air travel to the greenhouse gases blamed for global warming, Tourism Minister Fran Bailey said.
(9 July 2007)
An egregious example of propaganda masquerading as news. No independent fact-checking, no attempt to get an alternate point of view. Bad form, AFP! -BA
Meet the Future of Flight
Byron W. King, Whiskey & Gunpowder
“HOW WILL YOU travel through life?” ask the good people of Boeing in their promotional effort for the revolutionary new aircraft they are developing and fielding, the B787 “Dreamliner.”
…I wrote about the B787 Dreamliner in two articles in Whiskey & Gunpowder last year (All Dreams at Break of Day, When Fuel is the Price of Champagne). But there is noting wrong with revisiting the issue now that we have real wings and real engines attached to a real fuselage, and now that the Dreamliner is more than a paper airplane.
The Boeing Dreamliner that rolled out on Sunday is just a beauty of a bird, using and incorporating large amounts of carbon fiber and other composite materials in its structure, including the fuselage and wing box, plus engine nacelles. Composite materials comprise about 50% of the aircraft by weight, versus 12% composites in the currently flying B777. The ultra-efficient engines developed to power the Dreamliner, products of the labs and shops of both General Electric and Rolls-Royce (with the aircraft purchaser having the final say), will burn 20% less fuel per passenger mile than similar-sized aircraft in current operation.
…if the Dreamliner really does prove to be 20% more fuel-efficient than the aircraft it is replacing, U.S. air carriers will have a built-in competitive disadvantage every time a pilot advances the throttles and spools the engines of an older model aircraft. Here in Southern California, for example, there are houses for sale in certain locales (ZIP code 90210, per an article in a recent edition of the Los Angeles Times ) for over $120 million, or almost the price of a new Dreamliner. So it is not for lack of funds in the broad economy that U.S. airlines will not have the opportunity, in the next few years, to recapitalize with new equipment. It is for lack of tax and industrial policies that encourage fundamental investment in productive assets.
…As the so-called “Peak Oil” correspondent for Agora, I have received many emails over the past few years asking for my thoughts on whether people will still fly in commercial aircraft as the world’s oil markets tighten up and costs for basic jet fuel feedstock increase. My answer is that I believe people will still be flying for quite some time, Peak Oil or no. People want to fly, and for the most part have developed expectations for the speed and access that come with, at the very least, long-distance flight.
There are essentially no substitutes for hydrocarbon-based feedstock for the manufacture of jet fuel. Jet fuel is, and must be, uniquely energy dense, in a way that permits engines to deliver thrust and wings to deliver lift, so that an aircraft will move into the sky. I don’t doubt that one way or another, either through market mechanisms or government mandate or a combination of market and coercion, there will be jet fuel available for airplanes to fly. Whether the jet fuel is refined from conventional petroleum or is a synthetic product made from coal or another form of carbon, people, operators, and governments will still demand the ability to fly.
Flying will doubtless become more expensive in the future, however, and many short-haul airlines and routes, and what might be called “impulse” flights, will no longer be available. As conventional oil becomes scarce in the future, quite a bit of the world’s tourism industry will also probably begin to tighten up, if not simply contract dramatically. So enjoy it while it lasts.
But something like 40% of the value of world trade currently goes by airfreight (that is “value” of world trade, not physical volume). This includes high-value goods such as electronic components and medicines and pharmaceuticals, and even relatively valuable and rapidly perishable items such as certain foodstuffs. (Canada exports fresh tuna fish to Japan by airfreight, for example.)
Doubtless, the marketplace will sort many of these transportation matters out as fuel prices increase, and some goods will wind up traveling by ship or not get shipped at all in an environment of higher transport costs.
(9 July 2007)
Contributor Byron W. King writes:
In the world of aviation, a 20% improvement in fuel efficiency is little short of revolutionary.
