New oilfields are only half the answer. We need to increase refining capacity as well.
Most of the little tea kettles closed a long time ago. Big refineries are getting bigger and the owners of these plants are the first to object when new refineries are proposed.
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The only thing that is keeping us going is the vast reserves of oil beneath the Persian Gulf.
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Which Nazi leader showed that a lie oft repeated becomes the popular truth?
Canada has almost as many barrels of hydrocarbons stored in the form of oil sands as Saudi has in the form of crude oil.
The US has more hydrocarbons in the form of coal and oil shale than Saudi has in form of crude oil.
Even a new process, TCP, which right now is refining the waste of turkey processing into high quality fuel oil, has been shown to successfully refine *sewage* and *urban garbage* into fuel oil.
see:
http://www.discover.com/issues/jul-04/features/anything-into-oil/
Plant output based on various waste feedstocks:
http://www.changingworldtech.com/information_center/pdf/plantoutput.pdf
http://www.changingworldtech.com/when/index.asp
One competing technology (BioOil):
http://www.dynamotive.com/biooil/technology.html
On synthetic fuels made from 'stranded' natural gas:
http://www.forbes.com/forbes/2004/0524/100_print.html
Then there are methane hydrates, of which the government says:
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...gas molecules locked into hydrate crystals is up to 160 times greater than the same volume of pure gas. The result may be the largest single reservoir of carbon on the planet—at least twice as much as all other fossil fuels (e.g. oil, natural gas, coal) combined. The U.S. Exclusive Economic Zone (which extends to 200 m offshore) may contain as much as 200,000 trillion cubic feet of methane in hydrates (Kleinberg and Brewer, 2001). This is enough clean natural gas to power the United States for centuries.
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see:
http://oceanexplorer.noaa.gov/explorations/deepeast01/background/fire/fire.html
The only issue is what each will cost.
Liberals who would insist on only selling their family home for the going price, and who just take it for granted when they go to the grocery store that they will find the shelves stocked, cannot understand how the free market works for energy products, nor can they see the harm done when government tries to manage any free market better than it can manage itself.