Posted on 07/03/2008 5:58:05 PM PDT by Kaslin
There is also a VERY large deposit that was found in central Utah by a small family oil drilling company out of Michigan a couple of years ago. Supposedly much larger than Prudoe Bay.
The Siggard discovery. A couple of nice wells. Not much in the way of a second act [at least by way of Google]. Wolverine oil. In no way another Prudoe Bay.
As I read it, that part of it's a big lie i.e. ANWR involves a hell of a lot more than 10 billion barrels. The biggest problem ANWR has is mosquitoes, which kill large animals and make it impossible for humans to work there in the summers. ANWR needs DDT in massive quantities.
Oil shale isn't convention crude oil. It takes a lot more than a drilling a hole, installing and cementing casing and perforation. That there is a lot of it goes without saying. Shell may have a viable technique ... all it involves is heating a few hundred few of rock in a mile or so large square, surrounding that square with a frozen barrier to keep the surrounding groundwater out and the product being extracted in ... then IIRC depending on gravity to bring the product to a producing “well.”
It may work. There can be absolutely staggering amounts of product inside the freeze wall. But it won't be cheap, it won't be easy and it won't be for at least a few years.
You might want to read up on it. The technology on getting the shale oil out has greatly been improved
I believe that only one hole has been drilled, fairly close to the sea. As I understand it, that was "tight holed" meaning that whoever knows what was found isn't telling. Any evidence to the contrary [please no Gull Island stories ... there are so many problems with that one that it has no credibility at all.]
A Shell executive who testified in front of a congressional committee recently said that their most recent test (for some reason only as recent as 2005) yielded 1800 barrels from a test plot.
The test involved heating the vertical section of shale under the test plot with microwaves to heat it up, while also inserting pipes containing refrigerant into deep holes drilled all around the perimeter of the site to create an underground "ice dam".
To me this sounds like something that is not yet ready to be scaled up to significant production levels.
I also think you may be doing is confusing / conflating “oil shale” [kerogen — absolutely not fluid without heating to 600 degrees or higher to thermally mature the kerogen -- see my comment on what Shell is testing but not yet doing on a commercial scale in the Green River Formation], gas production from shales [the Barnett and whole lot of others where the product is natural gas not oil and which has a lot of potential for keeping natural gas supplies adequate but isn't going to produce much liquid fuel] and finally the Bakken where there is a huge area where oil is producible from fractures [natural and man made] and from horizontal "laterals" carefully steered within a fairly dolomitic layer sandwiched between two shale layers. The sweet spots in the Bakken are pretty darn sweet, but the state of North Dakota is not one gigantic Elm Coulee.
I'm curious...Where do those people think oil comes from?
US companies have more advanced technologies than these countries. So there is no reason why U.S. companies cannot extract the 2 trillion barrels of oil from shale oil in the U.S.. Actually the Democrats have banned any shale oil extraction in the U.S... But if that ban is lifted then oil companies can produce oil from shale oil since other countries are doing it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oil_shale_extraction
"As of 2008, oil shale extraction is being undertaken in Estonia, Brazil and China,
As of 2008, only four technologies are in commercial use, namely Kiviter, Galoter, Fushun, and Petrosix.[3]
According to a survey conducted by the RAND Corporation, the cost of producing a barrel of oil at a surface retorting complex in the United States (comprising a mine, retorting plant, upgrading plant, supporting utilities, and spent shale reclamation), would be between US$70–95 ($440–600/m3, adjusted to 2005 values). This estimate considers varying levels of kerogen quality and extraction efficiency.
Royal Dutch Shell has announced that its in situ extraction technology in Colorado could become competitive at prices over $30 per barrel"
I am not the Rand Corporation, but I would much sooner start with coal; Beyond that bet on the true number being a lot more than $95 in 2008 dollars; then factor in the belief by a lot of market participants [aka "the shorts"] and most of the people frequenting this thread that a hundred bucks a barrel is outrageously high; and then consider the wisdom of making a huge fixed investment when the whole thing is going to collapse to to less than one Yergin [or $38 per barrel] after either the market comes to its senses ... or the Government steps in to save us from the market ... or those pesky Enron refugees voluntarily stop fleecing the American public.
So who are the real price-gougers?
From 1981 to 2006, the oil industry made $867 billion in profits. Yes, that's a lot. But over that same time, they paid total taxes of $1.2 trillion, Energy Department data show. And that doesn't include taxes of $519 billion paid to foreign countries.
If I read this right the $1.2 trillion in U.S. taxes the oil companies have paid is beside the taxes consumers pay at the pump. Government truly is the thief.
World supply has not kept up with world demand. That is the reason prices of oil keep rising.
The price of oil will keep rising. I'll see you here in a few months when it is $200 per barrel. If you are right then the speculative bubble will pop . It won't pop because it isn't a bubble.So oil from shale is feasible even at $95 per barrel or $110. Shell says they can do it for $30 per barrel.Actually I hope you are right about this being speculation but I think that is not true.
The government cannot save a anything from anything much less a market. The government can't do hardly anything and nothing efficiently. Which of the hundreds of state,local, or national governments in the world are producing good cars for example? Toyota? Oh that's right that is a private company (capitalism). Government schools, war on crime , war on drugs , war on poverty, all failures of government. government is a wasteful inefficient evil monstrosity.
The price of oil will keep rising. I'll see you here in a few months when it is $200 per barrel. If you are right then the bubble will pop . it won't because it isn't a bubble.
This is just one reason why government planning can NEVER work :
http://www.mackinac.org/article.aspx?ID=9529
Economist F.A. Hayek, most famous for his book “The Road to Serfdom,” developed a theory typically called the “knowledge problem.”
Essentially, Hayek argued that no one individual, or even group of well-informed individuals, could ever have enough knowledge to plan a market. Hayek said that knowledge was localized, meaning every individual has the best knowledge about their specific place, condition, needs and resources, but no one had enough knowledge about anyone else’s to make decisions for them.
Hayek’s free-market ideas were seen as sound reasons why government cannot, and should not, attempt to control economies.
I've got this thing going on now for some time, and I thought I'd share it with y'all ('specially since its an IBD sourced thread).
The above chart is a product of Excel and was created by myself based on Excel data gleaned from multiple Excel spreadsheets available at EIA
Stay tuned for more charts correlating different affects, etc.
ping for later.
Contact your Congress critters to let them know that you are tired of high gas prices.
Sarcasm. Sorry, I thought it clear that I did not believe line of “reasoning”.
I also don’t buy the “drill here, drill now, pay less” line.
If it was “drill here, drill now and pay less than you would have if you had not drilled here, and drilled now” ... I would endorse the slogan.
Dude. Gonna have to kick your ass. Sorry ‘bout that.
Anyways, what do you think this is?
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