Posted on 05/17/2008 8:29:12 PM PDT by Cannonphoder
Crude Mistake
By INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY Posted Friday, May 16, 2008
Energy: With the price of oil spiking above $127 a barrel, the search for scapegoats has begun. Some point to the Saudis, OPEC's No. 1 producer. Others blame the oil companies. We have a better candidate: Congress.
As President Bush traveled to Saudi Arabia to ask the House of Saud to open the oil spigots a bit wider, Congress showed once again how clueless it is when it comes to energy policy.
Underscoring its failure to grasp the nature of our current problems, the Senate Appropriations Committee on Friday refused to end its moratorium on oil shale development in Colorado.
"If we are really serious about reducing pain at the pump," Colorado's senior senator, Republican Wayne Allard, said, "this is a vote that would make a difference in people's lives." He's right.
But the shale proposal went down to defeat with Allard and 13 other Republican members in favor and 15 Democrats opposed. Once again, Democrats were on the wrong side, opting to keep oil in the ground and punish you with higher prices as a result.
This was no minor thing. Estimates put the amount of oil locked in shale in both Canada and the U.S. at more than 1 trillion barrels. Pulling out even a tenth of that would quadruple our current reserves.
This is the same Congress that refuses to allow drilling in Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, which holds up to 20 billion barrels of crude, or offshore, where another 30 billion await.
(Excerpt) Read more at ibdeditorials.com ...
“I guess we are planning to lock up our reserves so the Muslims and Chinese can eventually develop them with our slave labor.”
Democrats would have no problem at all with that idea. In fact, they encourage it.
I guess the one silver lining to all of this is that American oil isn’t going anywhere (at least that on our mainland). IF it all comes apart in a few years, and everyone else is tapped, at least we’ll have our supply. I just hope that our political will to use it isn’t completely gone and the Muslims have overrun us by then.
I dunno...I think they pretty much have us at the moment. Not a thing we can do.
It is AQ, the DC dolts and a hundred other things. And it has become politically impossible to get anything worth doing done.
We cannot even build a fence! A simple old fasioned fence of all things.
I think you’re right!
They don’t have to contribute to their “campaign fund” but in the Swiss Bank Account thus avoiding having to report it.
And they can get the money when they leave Congress or some other “payday”! All without doing anything illegal!
I wonder how many of them become millionaires since beginning service in the Congress. We need to check this out!
We are being hoodwinked!!!
btt
That may be true, but Americans voluntarily allow themselves to be ruled and not governed. And, in that case, it's no surprise that the government's position is that everything, including oil deposits on lands within its jurisdiction, belong to it.
How can this great nation have so many asinine politicians making critical decisions on energy production? The Founding Fathers never meant for so much to be left up to rot like these sleazy zits.
Why go get more oil when you can simply use less?
Now smoke your pot and keep voting Democrat. :D
Extremely expensive and a CO2 emitter. See SASOL in South Africa
There are waste-to-power plants that consume solid-waste trash and rubbish, by a method known as Plasma Arc Trash Reduction...
Gasification more expensively done by electricity
The watchword is actually to produce more and more of our energy in the form of electricity, by fueling the generators with compressed natural gas, drawn from the depths of the ocean as Methane Hydrate ....or from using the Fischer-Tropsch process to convert any of a number of carbon compounds to syngas
First if you suck it up from the ocean it's no longer compressed. This has been looked at for years and still isn't feasible.
Fischer-Tropsch doesn't make syngas; it uses syngas as a feed.
If we NEED petroleum, we can manufacture it out of otherwise waste organic material, by a process called Thermal Depolymerization This could be used to reduce the effluent in wastewater plants....
Pyrolysis has been around for years and is still too expensive. Even Union Carbide gave up on the Purox process. Also produces a lot of bad materials (phenols, etc.) in the wastewater.
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While I admire your enthusiasm, you really should stop reading all of those DoE labs, university seeking funding, and process developer press releases. If there were any good cheap solutions, they would have been done by now.
One of the things that frosts me most of all are the number of process developers trying to get rich by selling poorly thought out, obviously uneconomic process concepts to politicians! [ethanol from corn]
If you have a good economic process, you don't need to sell it to politicians as the market will do quite fine with it. We would not be in this mess if congress wasn't composed of lawyers who don't know a damn thing about engineering or economics!
I think Alaska should tell the Feds that they are going to drill in ANWR. If the Feds try to stop them they should then explain to the Feds that Alaska has chosen to secede from the union and will be taking over all federally held ground and armed forces on Alaskan soil.
If any state could secede and survive it would be Alaska. It’s time for the states to start standing up and taking back more state’s rights.
This is so true. It applies to illegal immigration as well. The political elite don’t have their property or their lives affected by illegals like other people.
Where I used to live we had killings, drugs, and other crime getting out of control as the illegals moved in. It got to the point I wouldn’t let me wife go to our local Wal-Mart after dark because of all the illegals causing trouble in the parking lot. They finally had to have security start patroling the parking lot.
bump
Here is some even more interesting facts Senator Hatch kicks their Butt over it with:
HATCH ASKS ENERGY COMMITTEE TO LIFT MORATORIUM ON OIL SHALE DEVELOPMENT
http://hatch.senate.gov/public/index.cfm?FuseAction=PressReleases.Detail&PressRelease_id=ee6b47f8-1b78-be3e-e028-f16f10d0e3a5
Quoted From Sen. Hatch:
“The question . . . for the members of this committee, and I should add, for the Democratic leadership of Congress, is whether you will adopt the anti-oil agenda of the environmental movement as an element of your own energy policy.” Hatch said in the statement.
“So far, I have heard of proposals to tax successful energy production, to investigate the oil futures markets, to ban Canadian oil imports in favor of oil from Venezuela, Russia, and the Middle East, and to call for delay after delay in the commercial production of oil shale. ... These policies would not produce one drop of oil.”
“Mr. Chairman, do you know how many barrels of oil would come from one acre of oil shale? On the low end, one acre of oil shale will produce about 100,000 barrels of oil. On the high end, one acre of oil shale will produce one million barrels of oil.”
“Let me make sure everyone in this room heard me correctly: that’s about five barrels of ethanol for each acre of corn and between 100,000 and one million barrels of oil for each acre of oil shale.”
“A typical acre of oil shale will produce ten times more oil than a typical acre of conventional oil. There is no other hydrocarbon resource on Earth that is this concentrated in terms of yield per-acre basis.”
“It is a well-established fact that oil shale resources in Utah and Colorado hold somewhere between 800 billion and two trillion barrels of recoverable oil. Can we get it out tomorrow? No. Can we begin to develop it in a few years? Yes. Is it economic at $40 a barrel or less? Yes.”
I don’t like asking Freeper’s to do stuff, but please consider yelling these peoples crimes to every Conservative host or Website you can. These Democrats are costing us $600 Billion in Oil imports at a time we are all hurting. We don’t have this money, it’s being stolen from our future.
Don’t make the mistake of going quietly into the night as they ruin the middle class, show them there is a cost to corruption.
We pay so much attention to oil because it is a daily necessity, things like Syngas or Oceanic Methane are interesting, but not a likely replacement for unleaded gasoline.
And oh my yes, the Democrats really should wear the mantle of “We want you to pay more for...just about everything...”
I have a question. How much of the oil in the U.S. and Canada should we keep reserved in the ground in order to have it available for a future date in which we may seriously need it?
Perhaps it would be wiser to keep our oil in the ground? In the long-term future, when the rest of the world has dried up it’s supply, wouldn’t it be better to have our oil supply fully preserved?
What was the price of a gallon of gasoline in Nov, 2006, when the Democrats won Congress? What is it today? Why isn’t this difference being shouted from the rooftops?
I am not convinced that having more domestic crude on hand is an issue. With our aging refineries running at 100% (special blends notwithstanding), big oil cannot push more gasoline out the door if it wanted to. And with the current level of profits, I am not entirely sure they want to ...
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