[Vaquero]

You know Rush brought this up a month or so ago...the reason it hasn't been tapped up until now is that it is not cost effective to recover Oil Shale and Tar Sands until the price of oil is over $30 a barrel....now with $50 a barrel prices, things "SHOULD" move forward....but who knows what will finally trigger action on this...perhaps Orrin Hatch pushing it might get the ball rolling?

[beaver fever]

The price of upgraded heavy oil from the Alberta Oil sands is $25.00 bbl in the pipe.

Alberta has been shipping 500,000 bbls per day into the US market for the last five years.

The oil sand projects in Wood Buffalo have been under development for fifteen years but it are virtually unknown in the US except for a few savvy Texas companies due to the ready availability of cheap Saudi sweet crude.

To develop similar resources in the US will probably take ten years with exploration and infrastructure costs factored in if you started today.

I still remember when Syncrude first started development, all the naysayers said it would never be economical.

[Lonesome in Massachussets]

it is not cost effective to recover Oil Shale and Tar Sands until the price of oil is over $30 a barrel..

The problem, as I understand it, is that marginal production costs in the middle east are very, very low, at most only a few dollars a barrel. It would take enormous capital to recover this oil and that investment could all be wiped out if OPEC lowered their prices below $30 barrel (or whatever). Mobil lost something like five billion dollars developing this technology, only to see the price of oil collapse in the 80's.

I think taxing petroleum with a "security tax" that simply reflected the huge cost of maintaining a U.S. military presence in the Gulf would go a long way to leveling the playing field.

OK, Kuwait, Qatar, Oman, you like U.S. protection, pay up or we'll make our own oil.