Do you know where the Alaska Pipeline starts and stops?
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 ...
isreal is suppsoedly sittign on a massive oil reserve too- if so- then we coudl import from them at a much lower price and hte rest of the world can go to .... wherever they wish-
We didn’t “liberate” Kuwait from Saddam for the Kuwait’s sake, we did it for our “friends” the Saudis.
Those same “friends” who have financed terrorism, including 9/11 and Boston.
Time to tell the Saudis to piss off.
According to Shell, to produce 100,000 barrels per day, 5 million tons of coal are needed each year.
As the U.S. is using 18,4 million barrels a day...
Do you know where the Alaska Pipeline starts and stops?
True for the first two, but in 1963 Sun Oil invests almost a quarter-billion dollars in the Great Canadian Oil Sands project. That facility remains in commercial operations today. Other commercial operations started and stopped going back to at least the 1920's.
The next big oil strike that will be bigger than bakken and eagle ford combined will be the cline shale formation in the permian basin of west texas. That one is expected to weigh in at about 35 billion barrels.
No. The world wide demand for oil has exploded as the rest of the world (including big population countries like china, india, brazil etc) have become rich.
So that indicates that the high price of oil is here to stay; in fact, it may continually get higher as those countries and others become wealthier and more modern. So, perhaps it will remain economically feasible to develop our shale deposits.
The solution to both importing sufficient water for the green river oil extraction—and creating sufficient energy cheaply to freeze wall and then cook the oil out of the kerigen rock is...wait for it...thorium reactors.
These will produce electricity at half to 1/4 or less the cost of current cheapest coal based electricity...and they can be made in small modules...aka portable nuclear reactors or portable nukes.
There is right now a big and growing world wide race on right now to create these reactors using molten salt designs (mstr)that went into perfectly functional reactors that ran at oak ridge labratories from 1966-1970.
These reactors can run on both thorium and waste uranium of which there are enormous volumes ready to be used for free—all over the USA and around the world.
I’ve heard of thorium reactors. How will they solve the “sufficient water” problem?
Been to India or Brazil lately? “Rich” is not the descriptor I would use.
Yes, Rest of World demand is increasing, but the demand curve of Europe, Japan, and the U.S. is depressed. That has indeed kept the price pressure lower than if the latter were enjoying robust growth.
So even if we have five billion people driving every day, they will be able to do so for 200 million years.
Even if we eventually have 10 billion people driving cars everyday, we are still talking 100 million years. So we will likely run out of hamburgers way before we run out of fuel.
This article discusses how Shell Oil in conjuction with the DOE is in the initial stages of funding research on thorium reactors. Shell Oil has an eye out to cheaply extracting keorgin in the green river formation where energy is half the cost of extraction.
http://www.smartplanet.com/blog/bulletin/and-the-doe-energy-innovation-award-goes-to-8230-a-new-type-of-nuclear-power/13905
Here are three designs for liquid floride thorium reactors
http://www.technologyreview.com/news/512321/safer-nuclear-power-at-half-the-price/
canadian design
http://www.the-weinberg-foundation.org/2013/04/12/a-simple-and-smahtr-way-to-build-a-molten-salt-reactor-from-canada/
imho the DOD could more efficiently fund and support this sort of enterprise than the DOE—as they have a better record of success byo of the DARPA and other agencies.
Well, after Global Warming™ fully kicks in, they will be.
Yeah you’re right overall. But, while all three countries still have many millions in poverty, hundreds of millions of people in these countries have moved into the middle class. That’s a huge surge in demand. So a country like India may have 1 billion people. 400 million have moved into the middle class. That represents an enormous leap in demand. But it still leaves 600 million people in poverty.
Yeah you’re right about demand in the USA—which has been falling in the last four years or so.
they’d be able to pump water from the Mississippi cheaply during spring floods.
ok so it’s not the west coast they just stopped too soon lol!
I think my point was made!
I’ve ran about 5000 miles of water pipeline in my day.
Not all in the same direction! lol!
MIT has a “Standing Wave Reactor” that was small and portable. It uses depleted uranium for heat source. Waste heat can heat oil for extraction. Salazar was a representative in Colorado but became secretory of the Interior and shut down Gulf drilling and drilling on public land. There will need to be a change of administration to do much as most of the shale is under government land. I think we will be amazed at the solutions they come up with for energy.
Just how stupid the feds can be is the fact that if they can master the technology for extracting oil shale kerigen the feds stand to benefit to the tune of approximately 25 trillion dollar range over the lifetime of the fields with oil priced in the $30@barrel range.
Yet the feds do little to actually push this technology beyond allowing companies like shell to do experimental work.
They are doing it on purpose to collaps the economy. Look up UN Agenda 21.
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