The sky is falling, the sky is falling
In 1914, the U.S. Bureau of Mines declared that the United States would run out of oil in 10 years.
In 1939, the Department of the Interior predicted that oil reserves would last only 13 more years.
In 1950, when the world's estimated reserves were thought to be 600 billion barrels, the Department of Interior again projected the end of the age of oil by 1963.
Move forward to the 1973 Arab oil embargo, which prompted the highly respected journal Foreign Affairs to publish an article on "The Oil Crisis: This Time the Wolf is Here."
In 1981, a respected textbook on economic geology predicted that the United States was entering a 125-year-long energy gap, expected to be at its worst in the year 2000 with dire consequences to our standard of living.
In 1995, a prominent geologist predicted that petroleum production would peak in 1996 and that after 1999 many of the developed world's societies would look like Third World countries.
In 1998, a Scientific American article titled "End of the Age of Oil" predicted that world oil production would peak in 2002 and that we would soon face the "end of the abundant and cheap oil on which all nations depend." from a Chris Bennet article 11/26/2004
In March 2004 the U.S. Department of Energy reported oil shale reserves in the United States of more than 2,000 billion barrels, enough for consumption at our current rate for over 200 years. While we do need expand alternatives, we also need to kick the lie spewing enviro-crazies to the curb and beging developing our own resources.
beging = begin
Excellent and accurate post. But we still do need a few new refineries, ANWR and 10 new nuclear power plants.
Shale has all the problems of the tar sands plus the additional one of there being no commercially successful technique to extract it at this time.
The basic problem with the tar sands is scaling it up. Right now 1 million barrels a day of oil are produced from the tar sands. By 2015, that number should be 3 million barrels a day and by 2030, 5 million barrels a day.
http://energycommerce.house.gov/108/Hearings/12072005hearing1733/Smith.pdf
That sounds good until one notes that the world uses 84 million barrels a day and this country 20 million barrels a day. Our government predicts world oil consumption to rise to 120 million barrels a day by 2020. The tar sands can extracted at a steady rate but it is difficult to scale up production.
Shale oil (actually pre-oil technically) will have similar problems with ramping up production. In addition, there is no commercially successful operation in place now, nor has there ever been one in the United States. We can't just produce 10 million barrels from shale tommorrow or next year or in 2010. We'll be lucky if we're producing 1 million barrels a day by 2020.
It's not to say that we shouldn't go after the stuff but I think realistically that the tar sands and perhaps shale will be better at producing "relatively" small amounts over a long period of time, than large amounts over a short period of time.