Posted on 06/07/2008 12:10:09 PM PDT by Donald Rumsfeld Fan
NEW YORK (Fortune) -- You'd think this would be oil shale's moment.
You'd think with gas prices topping $4 and consumers crying uncle, Congress would be moving fast to spur development of a domestic oil resource so vast - 800 billion barrels of recoverable oil shale in Colorado, Utah and Wyoming alone - it could eventually rival the oil fields of Saudi Arabia.
You'd think politicians would be tripping over themselves to arrange photo-ops with Harold Vinegar (whom I profiled in Fortune last November), the brilliant, Brooklyn-born chief scientist at Royal Dutch Shell whose research cracked the code on how to efficiently and cleanly convert oil shale - a rock-like fossil fuel known to geologists as kerogen - into light crude oil.
You'd think all of this, but you'd be wrong.
(Excerpt) Read more at money.cnn.com ...
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In much of the West water rights are separate from the land and can be sold like timber taken down. But unlike timber the rights don’t grow back. So a person can buy the water rights from large tracts of land and never own any of that land. Of course that makes the land much lower in value.
There are many sources that will explain the phenomenon, but working through it takes a little effort. Once you've done the homework, you'll understand that NO alternative energy source, including oil shale, ethanol, coal to gas, tar sands, or anything else will spare us a lot of pain in the years ahead.
True, but largely because it would impact the Kennedy's views and yachting. Another 25 miles away, in someone else's back yard and Teddy would be fine with that.
From my automatic e-mail from Laura Ingraham:
“TIME FOR SOME TRUTH TELLIN’: Let’s face facts. The Democratic Congress is quickly becoming OPEC’s best friend. As oil has skyrocketed $15 over the last two days, Americans are left powerless by Democrats’ refusal to allow the U.S. to become energy self-sufficient.
There is no way OPEC could hold us hostage to their supplies, no way they could continue to stick it to American consumers, no way they could continue to extract an annual bill of over $700 billion without Democrats systematically blocking any increase in the domestic fossil-fuel supply.
And while Democrats build roadblocks to major new new resources like a 250-year supply of soil and shale, they’ve pushed boondoggles like corn ethanol, an attempt at turning food into fuel that’s backfiring dangerously.
OPEC itself could not have written a better game-plan to undermine America’s sovereignty.”
Note what Laura states: 250-year supply, and Laura does her research.
I first heard of Peak Oil about 5 years ago and at the time they said it would begin in 3-13 years. It was an excellent presentation, which most of them aren’t. It’s not necessary to try to convince anyone, although if they want to find out what it is about they will indicate so.
I think the point is that it’s indisputable that there are massive hydrocarbon reserves contained within the oil shales. Those were previously unrecoverable, but technology exists today to access them.
Sure, it will take energy to do so, and water. However, unlike solar power, it doesn’t take as much energy to obtain the energy as you will gain from the overall process.
It can be done. We know that. We can also expect that the process will become more efficient in the future if it is allowed to begin now. We will learn what works best. The Democrats say no. It’s like a religion to them.
She makes snap decisions based on emotion and sticks with the decision forever.
Extend it outward into Wyoming and Utah, and it's well over a trillion barrels.
She never changes her mind. Once she makes the snap judgement that is the end of it. Forget in depth research. Always running here, running there, hyper, no time to think.
Well, you picked a bad example to accuse her of it. One trillion barrels of oil equates to 50,000 years of total domestic consumption at current demand.
Presumably demand will increase over the next 50,000 years, but not to the point where she is exaggerating the amount of supply.
No it does not, and she runs true to form almost all the time.
Oops, you’re right. I divided the reserves by daily demand, not annual demand. Big difference.
If it were the only source of petroleum domestically, it would still provide all the oil we could use for decades after you and I are gone.
Not only that, but it is not sitting in a tank waiting for somebody to turn on the spigot. They’ll never run out because they’ll never produce it all.
The figures I posted were recoverable reserves, not original oil in place.
But apparently we won’t recover any as long as the Democrats have their way.
You won’t know that either until it has been recovered. We have both been in the oil industry and heard all kinds of professionally weird statements.
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