Posted on 04/08/2014 9:51:16 AM PDT by Praxeologue
SHAFTER, Calif. — A bustling city is sprouting on five acres here, carved out of a vast almond grove. Tanker trucks and heavy equipment come and go, a row of office trailers runs the length of the site and an imposing 150-foot drilling rig illuminated by football-field-like lights rises over the trees.
It's all been hustled into service to solve a tantalizing riddle: how to tap into the largest oil shale reservoir in the United States.
Across the southern San Joaquin Valley, oil exploration sites have popped up in agricultural fields and on government land, driven by the hope that technological advances in oil extraction — primarily hydraulic fracturing and acidization — can help provide access to deep and lucrative oil reserves.
The race began after the federal Energy Information Administration estimated in 2011 that more than 15 billion barrels of recoverable oil is trapped in what's known as the Monterey Shale formation, which covers 1,750 square miles, roughly from Bakersfield to Fresno.
But getting at that oil isn't easy. The Monterey Shale is unlike other oil shale formations across the United States. In those booming oil fields, reserves are pooled in orderly strata of rock. Once the rock is cracked open by fracking or other means, operators can sink a single well with multiple horizontal shafts and pull in oil from a wide area.
California's geology is far more complicated. The earth under the Monterey Shale has undergone constant seismic reshaping that has folded, stacked and fractured the substrate, trapping the oil in accordion pleats of hard rock at depths of up to 12,000 feet. To reach the crude using conventional methods requires oil companies to drill far-deeper wells, and more of them — a prohibitively expensive undertaking.
(Excerpt) Read more at latimes.com ...
” And all while sitting in their ivory tower. “ and in which was built with someone else money , and someone else hands, and someone else expense or lives.
And the Global Warming Hoax.
I do, but I wouldn’t call them aliens... more like fallen angels, demons...
THERES OIL ( shale that is ) EM THERR HILLS ! GO WEST YOUNG MAN !
scientists announced “definitive evidence of lakes filled with methane on Saturn’s moon Titan”
In an atmosphere without sufficient oxygen, like Titan’s, methane, as well as ethane and the like depending on the ratio of atoms, are the lowest energy state of the atoms of carbon and hydrogen. Entropy exists in chemistry, same as physics. The second law of thermodynamics still applies outside the earth’s boundaries as well as within.
Methane, the simplest hydrocarbon, is a far cry from the complex long-chain molecules we find in crude oil including: paraffins, napthenes, aromatics and asphaltics.
Ya. I betcha that they’d be the first to whine like a baby if it were taken away from them. Why? Because they have never gone without food or shelter or known what is was like to live a borderline existence AND NOT HAVE A CHOICE.
One word: ingrates.
Yup. Hypocrites and ingrates.
The difference between modern day Democrats and Republican philosophies:
Democrats produce nothing and only exist to take other people’s hard earned money and give it to others so that they will vote for Democrats.
Republicans create the industry and economy that provides jobs and makes life comfortable for Americans.
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