Posted on 09/02/2005 5:44:37 AM PDT by Herosmith
WASHINGTON — The United States has an oil reserve at least three times that of Saudi Arabia locked in oil-shale deposits beneath federal land in Colorado, Utah and Wyoming, according to a study released yesterday.
(Excerpt) Read more at seattletimes.nwsource.com ...
Then people should stop bitch'n about why there are no alternatives to cheap foreign oil. As long as we have wild price fluctuations no one is going to risk the tens of billions of dollars to convert oil shale into oil, or invest in other technolgies that will make any difference.
Putting a tax on imported oil is another way to make oil shale technology cost effective but do we put it into effect now and push oil up to $80 or $90 a barrel?
My preference is no taxes of any kind and open up every square mile of America to exploration. The second would be to condition all $ aid, including World Bank type funds, on the condition countries give their citizens land/mineral rights ownership over their property.
They've known about vast portions of the oil share reserve described in this article since at least the 1970s and 1980s.
During the Reagan Administration, political appointees within the Department of the Interior were pushing for executive orders and legislation that would make exploration and recovery more cost-effective.
Right now, I'm certain that there are Clinton era statutes and executive orders on the books that undid much of the Reagan era initiatives on this front.
We need to educate ourselves about this because such a recovery effort would be part of a longterm strategy to extricate ourselves from our current energy woes.
No, and according to Aristotle it is lacking in virtue.
Nothing more than released information that has been known for over 20 years.
I had a friend that worked for many years in that area doing nothing but exploratory drilling.
It's nothing but realeased info to pasifify the dummies.
Much of the oil shale lands in UT were locked up by the enviros and Clinton, the First Boob.
You never heard me bitch.
This is the same land that the last administration put off limits so that low sulfur coal would have to be imported from Indonesia and something about financing a campaign.
According to Marx and Lenin too.
Hegel, too. At least there is Veblen. Veblen alone to answer the chorus.
You in favor of the free market or force based control of property, goods, services, prices, and activities?
I remember Armand Hammer's oil company spent millions trying to remove the oil fom the shale but to no avail. It will probably take some enterprising tinkerer who thinks outside the box to do it cheaply.
Money rules. Any reason why money didn't make the list?
The point I was trying to make is that once we are sure we are passed the tipping point of oil production as we know it today, the economic justification to tap other sources will occur.
I wouldn't get my panties in a bunch over it, ANWR production estimates would near completely replace current Saudi and Iraq supplies to the US for a period of 10 years on the mean. Now they say 7 years to tap, but if it got into a dire situation, believe me, it would be up and running far faster than 7 years.
There will likely be pain whever we do start running out of oil, but we haven't depleated the reserves we KNOW about yet.... Not to mention, there are existing oil rigs in the continental united states already hooked up and could be turned on quickly.. but its currently cheaper and more efficient to just buy it from overseas.
If the price gets permanently to a high $$ per bbl, those rigs will start pumping again post haste.
We aren't there yet, all that is going on is a bubble in oil futures, its going to pop, and its going to be ugly when it does, and the folks who irrationally drove it up, will likely drive off in their sportscars leaving grandma and grandpa holding the bag, just like the last investment bubble.
Any reason why you didn't answer? So where do you stand?
Oil would have to get close to $100 a barrel. There was serious thinking about this in the late '1970s.
Dear Protagoras,
Tariffs, as used by the founders, were also used to protect industries. From what I've read, Alexander Hamilton pushed for tariffs to afford some modest protection to nascent industries, and his position was adopted to a signficant degree. Although also used for revenues, the fact is that arguments over the protectionist use of tariffs fueled many political battles between regions of the United States in the first years of the 19th century.
Thus, the use of tariffs for at least modest protectionist purposes dates back to the period of the Founders, and to at least some of the Founders, themselves.
But, there were some even then who opposed protectionist tariffs, so your own position also has a long pedigree.
However, it's not an ideological question to me. I don't believe, a priori, that tariffs are always bad or evil. Even ones that are protectionist in nature.
I don't believe that the operation of the markets is the only yardstick by which to judge governmental, social, and economic decisions. In general, I favor less government as opposed to more (at least less than what we have now), in general I favor lower taxes to higher taxes, and in general I prefer free trade to protectionism.
However, I wonder whether this is a place where those generalitities might not apply so well.
sitetest
I'm with Veblen. You?
I'd keep paying $3 per gallon (although I'd bitc- daily), if it meant not ONE frigging dime went to the middle east ever again!
Article says-
The report also says oil-shale mining, above-ground processing and disposing of spent shale cause significant adverse environmental impacts. Shell Oil is working on a process that would heat the oil shale in place, which could have less effect on the environment.
I know a mighty big pit they can dump it into once the water is drained.
Reclamation is part of strip mining these days. Once the deposit is mined out they put the top layer back in place, landscape it, seed it, and then you have a large parcel of very fine land for other uses. It adds to the cost, but in the larger view it also creates usable land even more valuable than it was before.
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