Oil Reserves by country

“1. Coal does not grow food from the ground, nor carry it to shelves.“

Weren’t they making gasoline or diesel from coal back during WWll?

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Yes.

Tiny scale. We consume 19 million barrels of oil per day. There is no CTL (coal to liquid) process that gets anywhere near that.

If we looked in the vast protected lands of Alaska and all over the USA, bet we find huge reserves.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orinoco_Belt

https://www.boell.de/sites/default/files/uploads/2012/10/venezuela-orinoco.pdf

The world has had 20 years of reserves for the last 100 years.

Coal can be turned into gasoline.

Very little electricity is producing using petroleum.

Coal gasification could be set up fairly quickly.

The largest such conversion ever done anywhere is in North Dakota right now. Coal to gas as a synfuels effort.

Output appears to be about 1 billion cubic meters per year. US gas consumption about 900 cubic meters per year.

Not that this really is relevant to moving food from farms to shelves or seeds into the ground with tractors and trucks that require diesel.

The definition of “proved” reserve is an SEC pseudoscientific definition used in public reports and banking regs.

It’s doesn’t mean “we know there is oil there”. It means “we know there is oil there recoverable at X price and within 5 years where there are actual plans to go get it.” (Nor exactly, but close enough for our purposes here.

The USA has a ridiculous amount of oil we know is there, much of which is not economical at $70 oil. When you go up to $140 oil (which can happen), we’re a massive producer.

The US may only have 45 billion barrels in reserve but has “technically recoverable” oil reserves of 1.6 trillion barrels. It is estimated the US actually has over 2 trillion barrels of oil but some of that is not recoverable.

In addition to that, the US has hundreds of years’ worth of coal.

I forgot to add the US has 2400 trillion cubic feet of natural gas - or enough to last 100 years at current rates.

Note that like oil, more natural gas gets discovered all the time so that figure increases.

Between oil, gas and coal, the US has enough energy to last for hundreds of years.

When will Trump re-fill the Strategic Petroleum Reserves that Democrats emptied?

AI:

“Status of the Strategic Petroleum Reserve Refill
Recent Actions
The U.S. Department of Energy has awarded contracts to acquire approximately one million barrels of crude oil for the Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR).
Deliveries are scheduled to begin in December 2025 and continue through January 2026.

Current Inventory
As of late 2025, the SPR holds just over 400 million barrels, with a total capacity of approximately 700 million barrels.
The reserve was significantly depleted due to a 180-million-barrel drawdown in 2022 under the previous administration.
Administration’s Commitment
President Trump has pledged to refill the SPR, emphasizing the importance of energy security.
The administration is gradually working to restore the reserve to its full capacity, which involves both purchasing oil and addressing maintenance issues at the storage facilities.

Challenges

The SPR has faced structural damage due to previous drawdowns, requiring repairs that could cost over $100 million.

The process of refilling the reserve is complex and will take time, as it involves both acquiring oil and ensuring the infrastructure is sound.
In summary, while steps are being taken to refill the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, the process is ongoing and faces several challenges.

In short, senile Joe’s draining damaged the storage caverns.

I will note, the U.S. will not/ can not go to war with anyone if our Strategic Reserve storage facilities are not refilled. He plans to refill them, but in reality we may lose a lot of capacity due to storage problems.

Thanks Joe!

“We have 400 years coal.”

No ,not if you tried to replace the 100+ million bbls of oil consumed per day with coal to liquid synthetic fuels.

[Key Figures for 2023:
Total Consumption: 620 EJ.
Fossil Fuels: 505 EJ (81.5%).
Oil: 196 EJ (32%).
Coal: 164 EJ (26%).
Natural Gas: 144 EJ (23%).
Non-Fossil Fuels: 19%.
Hydro: 40 EJ (6%).
Nuclear: 25 EJ (4%).
Other Renewables (Wind, Solar, Biofuels): 51 EJ (8.2%).

In Terajoules (TJ):
Since 1 Exajoule (EJ) = 1,000,000 Terajoules (TJ):
Total Consumption: 620 EJ x 1,000,000 TJ/EJ = 620,000,000 TJ (620 million TJ). ]

This is with 2 billion people.using 80% of the above and 6 billion humans living virtually without access to energy consumption it’s under 1000kWh per year for those 6 billion. If all 8 billion humans consumed at EU levels which are 1/2 USA levels the world would need 6000 exajoules

Yeah no way no how coal puts out even 620 exajoules for anything more than a couple decades the number is 27 years and that’s resources at ANY cost not economically or technically recoverable.

Nope only at USA levels of current coal use and not a single tonne of export to a world fungible market would our coal even last 1 century let alone 4 and the environmental disaster from that much forever toxic ash piles, radioactive stack emissions << more uranium enters the air via combustion vapor than ends up in the fly ash bags. Hundreds of times more radioactivity than a nuclear reactor is allowed to release via fission gas venting.

So nope not.400 years not even close.

Fun fact there is more energy in the uranium in coal per.kg than burning the coal itself by a factor of more than 100 per kilogram of coal. Forget burning coal it’s best left in the dustbin of history, burn uranium in fast breeders, and do deep geothermal energy and thousands of gigawatt days worth of thermal storage too.

There is 43*10E15 exajoules in the top 3km of earth’s crust

That’s 43,000,000,000,000,000 exajoules the world uses 620 per year all in for all energy sources.

Geothermal is forever energy.

This is what 44 years of spent nuclear fuel looks like, remember 96% of that is still fuel when reprocessed each gram of that reprocessed spent fuel is 83.6 gigajoules worth of energy. One gigajoules is 277.78 kilowatt hours. That’s per GRAM.

The coal ash pile to generate 45 years worth of equivalent energy stacked in the same surface area as those casks would be 14,000+ feet high yeah read that again and get it through your coal brain coal is never the answer once humans split the atom nothing else matters except geothermal energy,and storage, solar in the deserts and wind in the high and low Hadley wind cells that’s it those are all thousands and millions of exajoules worth of energy forever they can never run out based on physics.

https://x.com/GovNuclear/status/2000644567591243934

Obviously I am a big nuclear fan, it’s one of four energy sources that can sustain 10+ billion humans at EU levels of energy consumption.

Those are first and foremost solar PV specifically....nothing anywhere comes close to this energy source.

[approximately 3.85times 10^6) exajoules or (3.85 million petajoules per year) is absorbed by the Earth’s oceans, atmosphere, and land. ]

The entire human consumption of energy in a year is 620 exajoules.

Read those two numbers again the math works out to less than 3% of any desert anywhere on earth could power 1000+ exajoules. We have fusion already it’s in the F@@@ing sky and we have energy harvesting machines to use it and HVDC and HVAC tech to move it across continent scale distances ask the Chinese they already do it today across 1200+ mile distances. And BYD just changed the game with sub $0.02 per kWh all in levelized cost of storage. It’s now cheap enough and dense enough to store 16+ hours of electrons for night time. Game set match.

Wind is solar power it’s the manifestation of temperature gradients into advection flow....

Global onshore wind resource...

“2005 study published in PNAS estimated the potential at 1100 PWh/year. This is equivalent to approximately 3960 EJ/year.

Offshore wind...

2,720 EJ/year:2018 ScienceDirect study suggests a higher potential with a lower capacity density of 5 MW/km^2

Second energy source is geothermal....

[Geothermal energy stored in the top 3 kilometers of the Earth’s crust is estimated at about 43 million exajoules (EJ). For context, this is approximately 86,000 times more than the total global energy consumption in one yea]

This is the tech to get at those top ten km not just 3.

https://interestingengineering.com/energy/us-firm-record-breaking-drill

“The demo, held at a granite quarry in Marble Falls, Texas, showed the company’s ability to vaporize rock using high-frequency electromagnetic waves, drilling 387 feet (118 meters) into solid granite without any physical contact...

At approximately 387 feet (118 meters), the hole is the deepest ever drilled with millimeter-waves, which are similar to the microwaves used in an oven. The waves were powerful enough to ablate the pink granite into grey ash at the demo site, where samples were made available during the tour.

This enables a radically different form of drilling, which is potentially capable of reaching the superhot, superdeep geothermal layers miles beneath Earth’s surface...

Although the team wasn’t focused on speed, they still reached drilling rates of up to 16 feet (five meters) per hour through some of the world’s hardest rock. “That’s extremely fast,” Lamb revealed.

Henry Phan, Quaise’s vice president of engineering, noted that typical commercial drilling averages just a tenth of a meter per hour through granite.”

5 meters per hour is 25 days to drill a 3km deep hole in solid hard granite the top km or so of most bores are going to be sedimentary rocks with 500 feet per hour or more ROP that’s rate of penetration and the term we Ops Geos use.

This tech also opens up spent fuel fission product disposal into deep granite boreholes more on that later.

Geothermal is 24/7/365 heat and therefore spinning turbines for electrons too. Fun fact as I posted above you can also store heat in the earth as long as the temp going down is higher than the local rock temp energy is stored so having a geothermal energy borehole can be used to produce energy or store it for long periods of time. You joule heat or nuclear heat your supercritical CO2 going down bore and pull said energy back later with deep bores you also get 150C geothermal heat everywhere on earth it’s down there you just got to drill too it.

Also fun fact having the ability to drill into granite at will and in multiple Km length well bores let’s you solution mine said granite using acids and a halide like fluorine or chlorine. Granite is 3-4ppm uranium and there is 40+ trillion tonnes of it in earths top 3km starting to see a pattern. It’s like God intended for us to be a Tier one civilization. The Sileach process grabs all the metals so the 10% by mass aluminum is coming too along with K and Ca and Mg. All of which are...battery anodes Fe,Ti,Mg,P are there in ppt and percentage amounts too. Want more Mg and Fe in unlimited amounts solution mine basalt. Every metal of interest uranium included form insoluble sulfates and can be selectively precipitated out of the returning fluid. Or use the different electro potentials and electroplate them out individually. Point is once you can solution mine granite you are never out of uranium or aluminum for that matter. Basalt gets you unlimited iron and titanium too.

Third forever energy is of course nuclear fission...

Assuming all atoms in a sample of Pu-239 undergo fission, one gram would produce approximately 0.95 gigawatt-days of thermal energy. This also applies to U238 breed into Pu239 one gram of U238 that captures enough neutrons to decay to Ou239 also would make the same 200MEV per fission event U238 is Pu mother.

There is 4.5 billion tonnes of uranium in the world ocean singular we have one ocean it’s all connected and completely surrounds all land not the other way around.

In the top 3km of crust there is 40+ trillion tonnes of uranium that MMW drill opens up all of it to solution mining effectively unlimited amounts.

[To fuel 660 exajoules of annual human consumption with 40 trillion tonnes of uranium using fast breeder reactors, it would last for approximately 45 billion years]

The the second largest store of energy on earth the deuterium in worlds oceans liquid...

4.6 x 10¹³ tonnes (46 trillion tonnes). This can also be stated as 4.6 x 10¹⁶ kilograms. Of deuterium.

fusing 1 kg of pure deuterium would release approximately 87,500 gigajoules of energy.

Those two numbers should show with zero doubt other than the giant fusion reactor we already have in the sky D-D fusion is limitless. Billions and billions of years per worth the math works out to 3.2 billion years.

Humans have mastered fission we had an INF reactor that breed more fuel than it burnt and output only fission products and used 99% of the energy in mined uranium. We are there today not tomorrow we have 45 billion years worth in the crust and finally have the drills to get at it. The ocean holds a billion years worth too.

We also have hit Q1 for fusion and the Chinese have 1000 seconds plus fusion at Q<1 but over 0.3 so we have the tech for fusion fission hybrid breeders with thousands of Kg per year of Pu fission fuel being breed given the already mined depleted uranium supplies with breeders we have over a thousand years from today worth of fuel for breeders sitting in storage its a crime against humanity to not use it.

Notice no where in this is a single fossil fuel why? Because they are finite and rapidly depleting if ten billion humans at EU levels of energy consumption. Oil goes in 12 years all of it gone forever that recovered at any cost as well not just economical, natural gas is 22 years at those levels of use again theoretically recoverable at any costs. Coal is 27 ish years again costs be damned. So no you absolutely cannot drill baby drill or mine baby mine there is a coming reckoning if we as a species do not move and move quickly to one or better all of the forever energy sources. It’s cold hard math that doesn’t care about feelings, beliefs,politics or guy feelings or “common sense” math is math and it’s universal.

Spent fuel is a political problem not a technical one. Besides even without reprocessing your lifetime electricity per CAPITA including all industrial use in the USA not per person would fit in a coke can. Using fast reactors its 6% of a coke cans volume.

That 6% is fission products with fast reactors and they only need 300 years of storage to fall back to natural uranium levels of activity at which they could be put back in the uranium mine hole.

Better would be to drill into shale in say the 200+ million year old Permian its impervious to liquids and been geologically stable for at least 200 million years. Drill a 20,000 foot lateral now common in that basin. Heel down toe up at a 3 degree rise. Drill it with a triple string 8” final inside casing. Pack it toe to 100 feet before the heel with stainless steel waste canisters filled with borosilicate glass that’s 13% by mass of fission products and then cement the whole string in. Walk away problem solved forever. You could use the same design to foolishly put while spent fuel rods down bore but you are wasting trillions of megawatts worth of energy in the uranium and actinides which are 96 of spent FUEL its not nuclear waste its still FUEL and 99% of the original fuel energy is still in it by mass.

https://whatisnuclear.com/calcs/how-much-nuclear-waste-per-capita.html

[Volumetrically, the uranium oxide waste has a density around 10g/cm^3
, thus, if you got 100% of your electricity from nuclear power, then:

For a lifetime, the average life expectancy at birth is 76.4 years according to the CDC, so if you got 100% of your electricity from traditional nuclear power plants for your entire life, you’d be responsible for 2.6 kg (5.7 lbs) of waste.

You’d make 0.11 fl. oz of nuclear waste per year
You’d make 8.7 fl. oz of nuclear waste per lifetime (less than a 12 floz soda can)

These calculations assume you’re using traditional reactors without recycling the nuclear waste. However, if and when nuclear power makes that much electricity, we plan to shift to breeder reactors that get much more energy out of each kg of fuel. If we used breeder reactors and full recycling, the average burnup would approach 800 GWd/tonne, and the thermal efficiency will approach 39%. The waste density would be lower, since more of it would be converted to fission products.

Then, the conclusions are even wilder. If you got 100% of your electricity from nuclear breeder reactors:

You’d make 0.011 fl. oz of nuclear waste per year
You’d make 0.83 fl. oz of nuclear waste per lifetime (6% of a 12 floz soda can)]

Storing it is not hard , dry cask storage is good for 100 years in the same cask plenty of time for the waste to cool for final geological entombment...which burying while spent fuel should be a crime against humanity for the energy lost alone.

You can put fuel rods down a triple string well bore into any geologically stable impervious strata and just leave it there. Permian salts and shales are 250+ million years old and stable for at least that timeframe. You need 1 millon more years for spent fuel to decay to natural uranium levels. That is a blip in geological time. I have my students do the freshman geology 1301 paper tape exercise even at the graduate level to remind them of how short human time is. Once millimeter is one million years of time. The whole strip is 4.5 meters long or 14.76 freedom units. All of human history is invisible in the last 15 microns or 15 millionth of a meter a human hair is 17 microns at its thinnest for comparison our entire species existence at this scale is only .25 mm or 250 microns. Spent FUEL only needs 1mm of storage time the Permian has been stable for 250mm or 250 times as long Central Texas Granite has been stable for 1.7 billion years again you only need 300 for fission products or 1 millon for whole rods.

Spent fuel is a political problem noting more.

https://x.com/Dr_Keefer/status/1391937720503652356

[This is all of the waste produced by Vermont Yankee NPP in its 28 years during which it produced 110 million MWh. A similar coal plant would’ve made 110 million tons of CO2 and 6 million tons of toxic ash which If confined to this pad would be 7000ft high]

seven thousand feet ash pile vs a few dozen concrete casks that are good for 100 years and hold 96% of their fuel energy value by mass. Again its a crime against humanity to just bury this fuel.

No no and NO do not dilute this precious resource down. You keep it nearly pure Pu 239 and mix it with depleted uranium metals both inside stainless steel fuel pins at a 13-20% Pu to U ratio. Then put those pins into a integrated fast reactor you know the type that ran until 1997 until the traitor Clinton shut it down.

That reactors was successful in all its program objectives. It proved without doubt sodium cooled fast pool reactors are melt down proof.

First they pulled all the control rods out and waited for it to overheat and run away it did no such thing it heated up slightly and the negative Doppler coefficient of metalic fuels kicked in and shut it down as the physics predicted it should.

Then while running it at 100% power they suddenly shut off the cooling pumps and waited for it to overheat and meltdown...nope again the temp rose abd Doppler kicked in stopping the reactors chain reaction the large mass of sodium in the pool served as thermal inertia so the temp rose but it also was being radiated from the tank to the guard vessel wall which was air cooled on its outside wall...this air cooling is enough all by itself to keep the sodium from reaching temps where it could boil which is still less than half the temp to melt stainless steel fuel rods inside that liquid sodium.

This was the first walk away safe reactor to be put to the actual test of lets try to melt it down.

They then did the absolute insanity for a PWR or BWR reactor they ran up to full power then pulled the rods AND cut the cooling pumps this is way beyond worst case its deliberate madness... The IFR just shut itself down via the immutable laws of physics and then thermodynamics carried away the decay heat. Simple elegant and genius.

The IFR also proved out pyroprocessing onsite spent fuel never left the plant it was pyroprocessed into new fuel by removing fission products and adding depleted uranium to the fuel and back to be burnt again. Only fission products in glass form left the plant it forever proved this process.

^^^^^^^ THIS IS THE WAY

Nuclear plants are safely storing spent fuel on site.

One day, it may be reprocessed for its valuable fuel and other isotopes.