And it will never happen, because the powers that be will never allow it.
first you get independence. then you kill the price. dirt cheap energy in the USA will produce enormous growth. it is pure oxygen to economic growth in the USA and around the world.
And it will never happen, because the powers that be will never allow it.
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Might have been true 30 years ago. Definitely not true now. Why not? Well first of all everybody body but everybody wants energy independence. The most popular means to that is byo fracking oi/gas. The Chinese have lots of shale gas deposits—some of the largest in the world. Even europe has shale gas deposits though they likely won’t use them. But you can bet the chinese are going to quick studies of fracking. The USA is already headed for oil independence in 3-5 years. The demand for oil is so strong and other oil fields are being depleted so rapidly that other oil producers around the world won’t care about rising US oil production. Its going to take another 5 years before enormous shale oil/gas reserves in other parts of the world come onstream in volume.
What will kill the cost of energy is something entirely different. It will be demand side collapse. But we won’t see it even begin for another half dozen years. It will come three ways. First natural gas will substitute for oil in trucks and buses. The infrastructure to support these vehicles has been completed. Growth in sales of natural gas trucks and buses in the USA is running about 30% @ year. Second, electric cars. Coming off a low base electric car sales have increased five fold in the last two years. Because they come off such low base growth rates will be high from now till 2020—while their share of total auto sales will remain minisule. Nevertheless, tesla alone expects to sell 500k vehicles in 2020. About 2020 natural gas trucks and buses and electric cars will slow down the demand growth for oil. But it will still be another 10 years before they stop it and turn down demand. Which will have the effect of dropping oil prices.
The killer is further off the wings. There are about 10 countries around the world gearing up for a very public competition to be the first to have a prototype thorium lftr reactor—one that can also burn waste uranium.
The thing about these reactors is that they will cut the cost of electricity to anywhere from 1/2-1/10 current cheapest coal/natural gas.
that’s what will bring the hammer down on oil—because then the move to electric cars becomes a stampede. But that’s still another 15 years away.