Posted on 04/21/2013 6:15:23 AM PDT by Laurent.w
Some claim that the U.S. has hundreds of billions or even trillions of barrels of oil waiting to be produced if bureaucrats will simply stop blocking development.
But the Green River formation is the source of talk of those enormous oil resources — larger than those of Saudi Arabia —.
The energy requirements — plus the fact that oil shale production requires a lot of water in a very dry environment — have kept oil shale commercialization out of reach for over 100 years.
It is not at all clear that even at $100 oil the shale in the Green River formation will be commercialized to produce oil, although a number of companies are working on it and will continue to do so.
Thus, my prediction is that despite having an oil shale resource that may indeed be far greater than the oil resources of Saudi Arabia, the reserve will continue to be close to zero for the foreseeable future because there are still many technical hurdles to overcome to realize a scalable, commercially viable process.
(Excerpt) Read more at forbes.com ...
Oopps...Colorado/Utah...not that close to the Pacific.
I guess we shouldn’t try to get that oil then. Too hard.
Then you have your kerogen found in the Greenriver formation in the US west, Israel/Palestine, east europe, and Mongolia. This can be "cooked" into oil and then transported by conventional methods.
You can pipeline oil all the way down from Alaska to the west coast!
Hey rocket sceintist you can pipe line water as well!
We have the oil. We can get it out and process it now. The water needed can now be recycled. We lack the political will to do it.
The USA has more carbon based energy than anywhere else in the world. When you drive in the oil shale areas of Colorado you can see oil seeping out of layers of rocks. Before fracking The Denver post had an article on drilling wells and removing oil by heat for about $35 a barrel. Now with fracking and horizontal drilling and other new techniques it could be at least as cheap except for the EPA and anti oil government policies. I don’t remember the figures but it seemed to be 36B barrels of oil.
Too expensive. There are two techniques, Freeze Wall and Toe to Heel. Do a google search with the keywords Green River Freeze Wall.
Eventually, after Bakken, Eagle Ford, etc go dry and price goes up, then the Green River will be economically reasonable and technically feasible.
This is no different from the Bakken, Eagle Ford, or the Alberta Tar Sands. 10-12 years ago there was very little profit to be made producing there. But, under Bush, the price of oil quadrupled and there is very good profit to be made in those places
What policies did Bush implement (that Obama has obviously carried on) to make the global price of oil explode like that?
“The estimated amount of oil in place (the resource) varies widely, with some suggesting that there could be 400 billion barrels of oil in the Bakken. Because of advances in fracking technology, some of the resource has now been classified as reserves (the amount that can be technically and economically produced). However, the reserve is a very low fraction of the resource at 2 to 4 billion barrels (although some industry estimates put the recoverable amount as high as 20 billion barrels or so). For reference, the U.S. consumes a billion barrels of oil in about 52 days, and the world consumes a billion barrels in about 11 days.”
There’s your key takeaway. We’d probably be wiser to save it for a rainy day.
of which 1 T is recoverable with todays technology....
As an insight, 1 Trillion barrels is about equal to the known world's reserves of oil.
....and don’t forget the minor 15 billion barrels recently identified in the Monterey Shale in CA.
An interventionist foreign policy in the mideast.
Now, Obama has intervened because the liberal interventionists are influential in his administration but he hasn't militarily intervened, except for Libya because the liberal interventionists are also multilateralists.
But, if and when the bombing of Iran begins..............
Keep in mind that the NeoCon Republicans and the liberal interventionist democrats are foreign policy idealists and they want to intervene for idealistic reasons such as humanitarianism, nation building, and spreading democracy. They are opposed by the realists aka pragmatists who say we shouldn't intervene for idealistic reasons, only if it is in the US's interest.
We probably can’t use it because it is collateral for all the debt we are issuing.
Maybe our mineral rights have been sold.
Devaluation of the dollar.
Ping
Guess we are saving it for when they run out. I have friends like that.
How? Deficit spending? If that was the case, gas should be $40/gallon by now.
Devaluation. Dollar buys less, so price goes up. Horrible world economy has kept price low, or dollar drop would be giving us $200 oil.
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