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 ...
[[These will produce electricity at half to 1/4 or less the cost of current cheapest coal based electricity]]
Why aren’t htere such reactors producing the nation’s electricity? Dear leader whines about lowering our dependence on fossil fuels, and then doesn’t pursue a system that can cut the usage in half? Are we producing these reacotrs? Is congress stifling the production of these plants liek htey do with oil refineries to keep the price of domestic oil artificially high?
Oh yeah- I forgot- the dear leader’s ideology is to raise energy prices to thep oint where peopel are forced to stop using it just liek they did with cigarette taxes and soon with gasoline taxes-
There was also a big push on not long ago to use geothermal steam to power electric grids- I wonderr if that ever got started? or if that too was squashed by big govenremnt because it was prmkossing to be too effective at cutting costs?
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