[Tumbleweed_Connection]

With all due respect to Rush, the U.S. is NOT facing an energy crisis in the future.

Really?

This country doesn't "rely" on Middle East oil -- it simply prefers to buy much of it from the Middle East because it's the least expensive source of oil on the world market.

Where would you think they'd buy it? And why do you think they prefer to import versus American resources?

[Alberta's Child]

It's true -- the U.S. is NOT facing an energy crisis in the future. I challenge anyone here on FreeRepublic to come up with a specific case in the modern world (post-Industrial Revolution) in which a natural resource was depleted to the extent that it caused a "crisis" in the economy of a major industrial nation. You won't be able to identify any such case, because any such "depletion" simply makes a different material more viable as an alternative. If the world ran out of nickel and iron, for example, then what we know as "steel" would be made out of something else. Maybe it wouldn't even be called "steel," but it will be a similar type of alloy (or even a manufactured plastic compund) that serves the same purpose.

As far as foreign oil is concerned, it is worth examining oilfield activity in the United States at various points in recent history. When oil was trading at $40 per barrel back in the 1970s, there was a boom in oil drilling in the U.S. in places like Oklahoma and Texas. When oil was trading at $12 per barrel a few years ago, these drilling operations came to a halt. The drilling didn't stop because we ran out of all, it stopped because it makes no sense to extract raw crude oil in Texas at a cost of $15 per barrel when the market price is $12.

It is estimated that the tar sands region in northern Canada contains enough oil to sustain 500 years worth of oil for all of North America at the current level of consumption. The problem is that the oil cannot be drilled from these tar sands -- the extraction process is actually a mining operation that involves removing the sand and separating the oil from it. This costs about $14 per barrel to produce, so nobody in their right mind is going to do it unless the price of oil is high enough (say, $25 per barrel) to guarantee a decent profit. Even at prices below $25 per barrel, there is still a substantial amount of oil activity in the Fort McMurray area of northern Alberta. If every Middle Eastern country stopped producing oil tomorrow, the price of oil would shoot up dramatically (let's say, up to $60 per barrel), at which time everyone in the oil business (and everyone who ever thought of being in the oil business) would be up in Alberta digging that oil out of the ground.

It might be worth your while to go back and do some research of all those "doomsday" predictions about an energy crisis since the 1940. Every one of them goes something like this (the actual numbers aren't real, but you get the point):

In 1950, someone determines that the world only has about 10 billion barrels of oil reserves left. Between 1950 and 1960, the oil industry refines 35 billion barrels of oil.

In 1960, someone else determines that the world has only 150 billion barrels of oil. Over the next ten years, the oil industry produces 400 billion barrels.

Etc., etc., etc.

What I find amazing is that the people who promote these "doomsday" scenarios are about 0 for 150 when it comes to the accuracy of their predictions, and yet many of us (maybe most of us!) are willing to listen to them the next time they make one of these predictions!