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 ...
Canada developed this shale oil method about six to eight years ago...but the cost was a limiting factor. The Fed's have known about this possible shale field for a long time...I bet over 20 years. And its funny...all of it is government-controlled land. And with oil over $60...the profit of using the Canada method makes this a brilliant move. Makes you wonder who in the oil business is buying the rights to this government land for oil. I'll bet some middle-men have been sitting on the oil ownership rights for at least ten years.
At some point, you have to tell these people to STFU and go ahead and do it anyway and ignore the courts.
good one.
Uh, actually, it's not me saying this is an oil bubble - it's the folks who make a living at the study of economics.
Consider a couple sources, the Wall Street Journal, The Economist; the rest is, as they say, left as an exercise for the student.
I learned about shale oil in 1970 in Geology class, but I cannot imagine a process that would extract it. If prices are high enough now to do so, my vote would be to get with the program.
But if they're high enough for this, then they're probably high enough to look also at cracking either water or ethanol to extract hydrogen.
Either strategy would be fine with me, because either one would deny the OPEC nations their seemingly unstoppable flow of petrodollars that's giving them more money than sense.
They still have low marginal cost and much smaller 'capex'. Mobil, I believe, put about $5 Billion into shale oil recovery in the early 80's and shut it down when deregulation lead to the Reagan oil glut that lasted until 2004.
So where's Ellis Wyatt when you need him? :D
"Producers have a variety of techniques to win monopoly power and higher profits that come with that power. What's a way for OPEC to gain more power? I have a hypothesis, for which I have no evidence, but it ought to be tested. If I were an OPEC big cheese, I'd easily conclude that I could restrict output and charge higher oil prices if somehow U.S. oil drilling were restricted. I'd see U.S. environmental groups as allies, and I would make "charitable" contributions to assist their efforts to reduce U.S. output. Again, I have no evidence, but it's a hypothesis worth examination."
If you need heat, why not use nuclear power for the energy in order to optimize the quantity of recovered oil. You may not even need to conver the nuclear energy to electricity. Just use the heat from the nuclear reaction directly. I wonder if that's how oil builds up deep underground.
Sorry there isn't. Pumping a liquid out of a pocket in the ground, is always going to be far cheaper than processing oil out of ROCK.
You can't subsized crude production at $15 a bbl to keep it competative with overseas production.. it would bankrupt the government.... how many BILLIONS of bbl a day do we use? Now take that number, multiply it by 15, and then multiply it by 365...
WHEN the liquid, easy to get to oil is truly starting to depleat and supplies shrink, that is when shale extraction will become profitable and worth doing. We aren't remotely there yet, in spite of what doom and gloomers say.
Oil is high because of market manipulation, its a bubble, its not based on lack of supply, or lack of more supply.. in fact, reserves have been at highs for a good while now. However every hedge fund in america is buying oil futures, creating the exact same bubble nonsense in oil that they did in tech stocks.. and the exact same result will occur. Oil is going to return to 30-40 a bbl... its not a matter of IF, its a matter of WHEN.
Retail gas in the US is going to go up for a while, but that's due to the fact that the refineries in LA are offline, and until they are back online we are going to have trouble keeping up with demand.
This is a direct result of capitulating to eviroweinies on energy policy. It is unconcionable that we haven't built a new refinery since 1976, when our energy needs have more than doubled since then. In fact Bush Admin just authorized the building of the first new refinery since 1976.
So gas prices will go upward at the pump, but that is due to refinery restrictions in the US... NOT CRUDE SUPPLY... The price of CRUDE per bbl is high simply because of bubble, not because of lack of availability.
I knew about it for years. This is news? Problem has been the practicality of extracting it.
Why not just subsidize it?
That ought to work out just exactly as well as the bio-fuel projects are doing.
Yes!
See post 8.
We can't even do drilling in the frozen hellhole in the northeast corner Alaska. How is it we are going to be able to do something in real prestine country like Colorado, Utah and Wyoming?
Drill, dammit Drill !
Should read:
its NOT a matter of if, just a matter of when
Ellis torched his fields. That's not exactly what we need right now. ;^)
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.