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 ...
But considering energy is a national crisis, why not subsidize it? We can't be held hostage by the Islamic dominated middle east forever.
Because of the rules about mining on government owned lands, I suspect the entire field is claimed. And they are working on the extraction. Orrin Hatch is pushing it, for one, and I wouldn't be surprised if the locals in Colorado (which has the richest field) are working for it too...
One day.
"Cracking" is a catalytic refining process for producing one hydrocarbon from another.
Producing hydrogen from water is a chemical reaction involving the application of massive amounts of energy to break the chemical bonds between hydrogen and oxygen - where you going to get that energy?
From a nuclear reactor?
What do you suppose the enviro-nazis (or their friends, the Saudis) would say about that?
So I guess the trick is to wait until the ragheads run out of oil?
Because MINING is far more costly that PUMPING... You aren't talking float a platform, drill a hole and start pumping.... You have to build a well, whether its on land or on sea... the difference between the two while not insignificant is not nearly as large as shale extraction.
Think of it as, building a refinery vs building an oil rig. Both are large capex, but one is orders of magnetude larger than the other... and also requires far more labor and cost to keep operating once its in place.
BTTT! Even some in western Nebraska!
The problem ? I can't find an American gas comapany that can rightfully make that claim.
What would be your estimate of domestic oil sources that we have in this country that the environuts have kept us from tapping?
Effectively, yes.. when the steady supply of crude from existing methods becomes expensive enough and will indeed be that way indefinately, that is when other harder to extract oils will be tapped.
If true, this is a positive development BUT
the refinery shortage (thank the NIMBYs and ecofreaks) IS a big part of the problem as well as the wildly diverse local CLEAN AIR regs which require the refiners to produce multiple blends.
The current OIL PRODUCTION level is around 84 million barrels per day. Current world DEMAND is 87 million barrels per day -- and rising (thanks to the Chinese and others swapping their bikes and motorbikes for CARS).
We have at least a 3 million barrel per day shortfall.
The oil being taken from the ground today is from strikes discovered over 30 years ago: Very few NEW oil deposits are being found. ONE oil geologist (I THINK his name is Fox) has raised the prospect that geological forces are producing NEW oil and gas all the time and it is either forming NEW deposits or migrating thru fractures in the rock to the existing fields. That makes some sense but has yet to be confirmed by his peers. Even if true, it's hard to imagine that those replacement stocks can keep up with the growing demand.
What all this means is that we're headed toward ever-higher prices. That's the bad news.
The GOOD NEWS is that those higher prices are pushing us back toward some modicum of ENERGY SANITY where we will have no choice but to get on with NUCLEAR for stationary energy production. The Japanese SAFELY produce most of their power with nukes. Their plants are cookie cutter designs, making it easy to THOROUGHLY train their people in their safe operation. Even our good friends the French produce 80% of their juice with nukes!! And if THEY can do it, we sure as hell can.
One of the reasons electric rates in Georgia have remained some of the lowest in the nation is our half dozen or so NUCLEAR PLANTS. Many OTHER states NOT using nukes have switched from dirtier coal-fired plants to NATURAL GAS (NG)! It is absolutely NUTS to be burning a perfect – and finite -- mobile power fuel for a stationary application!
Even so, many power producers are using PEAKING PLANTS to cope with the summer air-conditioner demand. Those are generally jet engines strapped to a slab and coupled to an AC generator. They come up to speed and on line quickly when demand peaks. Those jet turbines burn FOSSIL FUEL (often NG).
What the move to nukes will do is free up the FOSSIL FUELS we DO have for MOBILE power applications (our vehicles). ANY internal combustion engine can be converted to run on NG or propane once a new tank is installed and (this is WHY the US hasn’t moved on this earlier) a CONSUMER SUPPLY INFRASTRUCTURE (GAS STATIONS!) is in place. NG also burns a hell of a lot cleaner and is easier on an IC engine than gasoline.
A few years ago, it was projected that there was around a 1,000 year supply of NG available under the GULF OF MEXICO at then current consumption. That was in the days when most major generating plants were coal fired. Even so, once we can get the nukes on line, that NG will become available for MOBILE applications. We need to get the nukes on line safely, of course, but 12 to 15 years to permit a new plant is just crazy! The technology proposed in the application is probably OBSOLETE by the time the thing is off the ground, adding countless millions to the project to bring it up with all the retrofits.
The concern about nuclear waste disposal is very real – but it is one we can and will solve. We MUST. If we are to maintain our living standard here, we have no choice. Even my bride – who is VERY vocal with her concerns on this topic – becomes silent when I ask her to imagine the lights going out and the A/C shutting down and remind her that the A/C here is almost certainly coming from a NUCLEAR PLANT up the road! The ladies LOVE their home A/C in August. So do I.
And, not incidentally, these current higher energy prices will put new legs under the quest for ALTERNATIVE fuel sources. We’re learning more and more about the physics of these new systems every day. I’m confident that our grandkids will be sitting behind the wheels of vehicles powered by systems we cannot even envision today. That has been the history of mankind – especially in the West -- throughout history.
And we can tell the Saudis and Venezuelans to DRINK the oil they have left – because we no longer need it!
As Arabian oil fields are played out, production costs will rise and alternatives will come on line. You heard it here first.
A few miles away, 75-year-old Shine Drennan looks lovingly at a jackknife drilling rig punching a 6,600-foot hole into Johnson County just north of Cleburne.
Drennan is a true legend of the Texas oil patch, having drilled since 1945 and worked through the great Snyder Field boom of the 1950s and '60s. He moved from his longtime home of San Angelo to Granbury last year to get in on the Barnett Shale action.
"I worked all the great booms since World War II," Drennan said. "I thought I'd never see another one. I'm just grateful that I've lived long enough to see the Barnett Shale take off. This one will make the others look tiny."
--the oilshale leases date back as far as the WW 1 era, which was when shale was first promoted as an oil source.
The economics haven't really changed since then, nor has the extraction process--you have to mine the kerogen bearing rock, heat it to 800F to get the "oil" out of it , then dispose of the spent shale. That requires considerable expenditure of energy and lots of water.
When I worked on it in the late '70's we came up with a realistic production cost of about $100/bbl---
We've know this for decades.
Right before TMI popped there was a lot of research going on concerning so-called "fast-breeder" reactors. There was a government pilot project, I believe, at Clinch River, TN. I think that there was a concern that there wasn't enough fissile material (enriched uranium) to last more than a couple of hundred years based on early-70's projections.
I wonder if, when we start building reactors, we use old-designs or we start with some variation on the fast-breeder scheme? Anybody know?
Both of these benefits could be achieved by the development of H fuel cells and the use of synthetic oil and grease instead of petrocarbon-based.
Yet another benefit would be that the money spent on fuel would for the most part stay here, meaning the circulation of money would expand here, instead of financing bombs, rockets, and bullets to be fired at us and our allies.
(Denny Crane: "Sometimes you can only look for answers from God and failing that... and Fox News".)
Dear AxelPaulsenJr,
"What would be your estimate of domestic oil sources that we have in this country that the environuts have kept us from tapping?"
Me?? I don't know.
It's not just the environazis. There are cost issues involved, too, like with the shale oil discussed herein.
But with a modest tariff on imported energy, and a slap-down of the environazis, we could tap the shale oil, we could tap off-shore of California, and Florida. There's ANWR.
As well, it's not just oil. If you add a tariff to imported energy, other alternative sources of energy become profitable. If you slap down the environazis, you can build more nuclear power plants.
It's nice to talk about "well, we can do all these things when the Saudis run out of easily-pumped crude," but that misses a few points.
The first is that peak world oil may sneak up and surprise us. We may find the easily-pumped stuff declining before we can get the infrastructure in place to mine and process shale in large amounts.
The second is that usage in the rest of the world is still increasing, and thus, when we get to peak world oil production, we're going to have two curves going in opposite directions, supply heading down and demand heading up. For a while, it will be pretty ugly.
The third is that we're entirely discounting the effects of oil shocks on our economy, and how it distorts our foreign policy. The US imports somewhere around 30% of oil sold on the world market, not used for domestic use. Reduce that to 0% over the course of ten years, and all of the sudden the Saudis go back to being camel drivers, the Iranians no longer have the cash to build nukes, and old Hugo Chavez down in Venezuela can drink his crude.
Some folks are saying, oh, well, when their oil runs out, we can do this stuff. I've seen estimate that it could be 30 - 50 years or more before the Saudis and some of the others go into decline. So, we want to incur all the external costs to our economy and society from getting a big chunk of our energy from these crackheads for another 3 or 5 or more decades? Yikes. Those costs are not just dollars and cents. They are also instability, and blood. American blood.
We would no longer have to worry about disruptions in the Persian Gulf, or wacko neo-Communists in Venezuela, or corrupt kleptocrats in Nigeria. The Russians oil leverage would no longer give them great power leverage over others, including us.
At least, we wouldn't have to worry about these folks and events crippling our economy in the short and medium term. And these folks wouldn't have quite as many petrodollars with which to whack each other around, or threaten other folks. Think Saddam with no significant oil money for the last dozen years. Or with no significant oil money for the dozen years before that. Probably no Gulf War I or Gulf War II.
And the costs to us aren't astronomical. We're talking about adding enough of a tariff to keep the price of energy at around the equivalent of $30 - $35 per barrel of crude oil.
Think where gas prices would be right now if crude were at $35 per barrel. That's 85 cents per gallon. And from Monday's price, not today's price, which has a 50 cent or more FUD (fear, uncertainty, and doubt) premium built in.
sitetest
--yes, that Jimmy Carter---
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