Posted on 07/11/2016 7:49:40 AM PDT by Sean_Anthony
. . . our fearless leaders have no interest in going to get them
A new study shows that the United States has more energy reserves than Saudi Arabia or Russia. Most of it is still in the ground, but if we would bother to extract it, we would be truly energy-independent for the first time in our history.
The report comes from Rystad Energy, and indicates the U.S. is sitting on 264 billion barrels of oil. That’s 8 billion more than Russia and 52 billion more than Saudi Arabia. And all of this falls under the category of recoverable oil, which means it’s not just theoretically available but practically impossible to get to.
BUMP
That would pay off the debt and then some.
That’s money and security in the bank and the withdrawals will be made. Just a matter of time, need and politics. In the meantime the storage is free.
It's not that our leaders have no interest in getting these reserves; they are actively opposed to getting these reserves.
And then there’s Venezuela with the heavy crude, not difficult to get at; what stands in the way is the govt, as usual. The govt and the people who sit still for it.
Venezuela’s oil reserves are expensive to extract because the oil is either very viscous (I’ve seen samples of crude oil from Saudi Arabia and you could pour it out of a chemistry lab beaker at room temperature, while Venezuelan crude oil, if poured into a chemistry lab beaker after being heated, literally will stay in the beaker at room temperature just like California crude oil) or are in tar sands, which is even more expensive to extract out.
IF we had public servants that were concerned with that sort of thing...
As USAToday proudly proclaimed:
Republicans talked about “drill baby drill” but it was Obama that made it happen.
And a lot of LIVs believe it....
That’s right. Venezuela’s oil is heavy and dirty. It is good for some products which are no longer in high demand.
Saudi Arabia has been relentless in their pursuit to starve new US oil production of market share.
It costs about $6 per bbl to extract oil in S.A. (stick a straw in the sand) versus an average of about $35 per bbl in the US.
A Trump Administration could propose Congress to put a ‘price floor’ in place for S.A. and others that could be set year to year starting at about $35 per bbl. The Saudis would be crushed and the independent American wildcatter could get rich (nothing wrong with that).
A lot of stuck-in-the-past stupid ‘conservatives’ think any such price floor would amount to regulating prices as they bark back to the days of Reagan and the movement towards general deregulation. What they fail to see if that the pendulum swings. In Reagan’s day, deregulation was critically necessary to spur innovation and economic growth. Today the pendulum has swung so far to the opposite side that foreigners are eating our lunch and making us poor. At this end of the cycle, it’s time to put Americans first.
***Today the pendulum has swung so far to the opposite side that foreigners are eating our lunch and making us poor***
With a new built in mechanism to raise prices of fossil fuels called the Carbon Tax that was invented here in America by our own Owl Gore. So extracting and using our homegrown oil has another burden that SA oil never had.
Right. A Five Year Plan for the New Millennium!!
Sheesh.
Not unless the government nationalized the drilling.
For decades, we've heard the call of "peak oil", that we're facing an ever-decreasing supply of oil. The US simply cannot maintain it's current usage of oil because we are on the verge of a collapse of apocalyptic proportions because the last oil in the ground is being used right now. Makes wonderful news copy, and is a great way to castigate the energy industry and justify entire reworking of the economy, but there's a problem: it's not true.
The solution actually lies within the US. Actually, within Colorado, Utah, and Wyoming. For we have 276+ YEARS of 100% of our oil needs within those three States alone. That's right, we can eliminate 100% of the pumping going on now - Alaska, California, Pennsylvania, Texas, offshore, what-have-you - and supply 100% of our needs with just the states of Colorado, Utah, and Wyoming.
How? It's simple. It's called oil shale. And the US has enough to run 100% of our needs for nearly 3 centuries. There are somewhere between 2.8 an 3.3 TRILLION barrels of oil in shale worldwide, and the US has 62% of that. Assume the middle - 3 trillion barrels. That means the US has about 1.9 TRILLION barrels of shale oil. And nearly all of it is within the three states listed above.
Consider that number. One point nine trillion. 1,900,000,000,000. It's a mind-boggling number (well, maybe not so much any more, given that our budget deficits are around the same size!). It would be 271 barrels of oil for every single person on the face of the earth, or more than 6,300 barrels per person in the USA. Since there are 42 gallons per oil barrel, this represents about 266,000 gallons of oil per person in the US. Think about it. You know what a gallon of milk is like; imagine just over a quarter of a million of them! If you used a gallon a day every day, it would take 728 years for you to use it all.
What does that scale up to? Well, we use about 20 million barrels a day as a nation. Divide 20 million into 1.9 trillion and we find we have oil for 95,000 days. Or at least 260 years. And remember, this is the middle estimate value. Yes, we have oil shale for 260 years, minimum. A truly staggering timeline. If we started 100% of our consumption of oil from this reserve, and started in 2020, we'd finally be running out around 2250, sometime around the 110th President of the United States is elected.
Many will talk about how it's too expensive. But is that correct? Consider that today, May 2nd 2010, oil is selling for about $82 per barrel. Suddenly the estimated cost of $21-$25 per barrel, we could cut our oil expenses by 70% or more. A massive savings for the nation, amounting to over $1 billion dollars a DAY in reduced oil expenditures. Over $400 billion a year in savings, about 3% of our GDP.
And it goes beyond that. Currently the US produces about 8 million barrels a day of oil. Rather than consuming that oil, we could, in fact, sell it (since we get our oil from shale). At a sell price of $82 per barrel, that would represent the ability to export $656 million dollars a day of crude, adding $240 billion to the positive side of our trade deficit. And because we're no longer importing 12 million barrels a day, that reduces our purchases by nearly $1 billion a day, for a total change in our trade deficit by $600 billion. The US nearly becomes a net exporter, and that would immensely improve our economic standing in the world.
And it goes beyond the change in the trade deficit; we could cut the costs of gasoline and heating oil by 4; the boost to our economy by bringing gasoline to less than $1.00 per gallon would be immense. Remember the peak in 2008, when gasoline reached above the $4.00 per gallon barrier? That - along with the housing crisis - was a prime reason the recession of 2008 hit so hard and so deep. Cutting our internal energy costs by a factor of 4 frees up a massive amount of dollars internally for other economic activity.
The facts are clear: the US has nearly 3 centuries of oil sitting within its shores; we have the ability to tap that massive reserve in 10 years; we could become one of the largest exporters of oil in the world; we could nearly eliminate the trade deficit; and we could severely cut the dollars we spend on energy within these United States. Peak oil - and the hysteria that goes with it - is a myth within at least the borders of the US.
I have seen recent estimates of reserves that top 8 Trillion barrels. Might require some enhanced techniques to get it but it is there.
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