Ask them why the fate of the condors and little known species is more important than the family budget of Americans forced to make choices between more food and more gasoline.
Ask them why they continue to claim that global warming is a threat when the entire Earth is now in a decade-old cooling cycle.
Ask them why they insist on blaming investor-owned oil companies whose own reserves are barely four percent of the all the oil that exists worldwide? Ask them how they expect these oil companies to compete in the global marketplace when they threaten to seize their profits."
Ping
According the USGS’s outdated survey using old seismic acquisition and imaging technology the ANWR is said to hold 10-16 billion barrels of recoverable crude oil. Multiply that by 4-5 and that is what you can recover from that area.
Just pure runaway insane liberalism at work -—
That, of course, is why the scheme was designed and implemented.
Marxist revolutions don't happen when the peasants a warm, happy, well-fed, and comfortable.
Here in Oregon (my temporary home) people actually believe all that greenie moonbat crap. And they think that the sun shines out of Obama’s butt.
Insane. Can't wait to get home.
AMEN!!! AMEN!!!! AMEN!!!!!!!
AMEN!!! AMEN!!!! AMEN!!!!!!!
I'm almost afraid to read beyond this opening fallacy.
To our commie environmentalists and their enablers it is not a matter of how much and where the oil is located, as long as the US doesn’t drill for it.
These environmentalists have absolutely no interest in the preservation of the environment but only in the destruction of this nation. (And to think that many of these treasonous “environmentalists” occupy seats in Congress is an outrage.)
This “speculation” blame game is nonsense.
The price of oil has been going up for SIX YEARS.
Only in the short term - weeks at most - can speculation drive prices.
In the long term, price is dictated by the harsh reality of supply and demand.
The people who buy and sell oil contracts are full time professionals.
The result of EVERY trade they make is “zero sum.”
When one trader wins $1000, the trader on the other side of the contract loses $1000.
According to the “speculation” theory, journalists know why prices are going up, politicians know why prices are going up, news anchors know why prices are going up, and the man in the street knows why prices are going up.
But, thousands of professional oil traders - the guys who have been losing their own money by the billions for six years - they have NO CLUE why the price is going up!
So what's next?
Now that oil is at record prices will speculators force the price down?
Short sellers can make exactly the same amount of money on the way down that long buyers made on the way up.
Of course not.
The price of oil will come down when, and only when, there is more supply than demand.
In truth the Left is merely using the environment to reduce the power and prosperity of the US, which they loath, because they are self-loathing.
If you buy a contract in a speculation inflated position, when push comes to shove, nobody will buy your position back from you. Who wants to buy a contract to purchase oil at $130 when it is available for delivery at $125 at the end of the month.
The “speculators are driving the prices up” buzz words are better translated as the politicians want control of the free market.
IF people fall for this in America, socialist control of the markets will do what it always does, make the people who control the markets rich and destroy the economy.
For the politicians pushing for this, as long as they get rich and secure, if a million starve it is a good trade.
The reason Oil is going up is the dollar is falling and the Chinese are willing to pay what it takes to get the oil.
To say the price of oil is raising the price of everything is also a political lie. An example: A shipment of grain will go up because it costs more to deliver it, but a diamond ring will not, because it does not in relation to its price. The price of oil going up only raises the price of an object in direct relationship to its mass and size.
Gas prices doubling do not double the price of a diamond ring, because it takes very little gas to make it or move it. The price of grain will go up in a ratio of the cost of shipping, and the cost of manufacture. Yes it too will be higher, as oil is used to plant and manufacture. But the price of wheat, and diamond rings is going up nearly the same ratio.
Oil prices are a great indicator of the value of the dollar, than anything else. It is a commodity that is delivered at a constant rate, and is used at basically constant rate that is very very slowly increasing day by day.
We are in a bidding war with China and the rest of the world for oil. The price of oil is set in dollars.
But the value of our dollar is set on REAL ESTATE here in America. Everyone invested in real estate, and the market is having a setback. SPECULATION IN REAL ESTATE drove the value of the dollar UP, not speculation in a simple commodity drove the dollar down.
Real estate is not a commodity, it is a product. It is manufactured not dug out of the ground like copper, gold and oil.
Americans over invested in a market, and went into debt to do it. Investment by debt is a real unstable position and it is backfiring on many people who went into massive debt and bought at the peak of the market.
To make money you have to buy low and sell high, not go into debt to buy high and sell low. Not only do you loose money on the investment, but now you have to service the debt too.
Ouch.
But the big ouch is if we let the politicians and the talking heads brain wash the sheeple into calling for government regulation of the markets.
Even the Communists are smart enough to move away from that disaster, our leaders are stupid enough to move toward it.
As a people, Americans tend to have a very short term viewpoint. And our leaders don't care for the country's future, but their pockets today.
Evey time you hear someone repeat the speculators mantra, shoot them down for your futures sake.
Free Markets is all America has left now that property rights are gone.
That is because the dollar is falling, not because of shipping costs. Far more of the cost of wheat is farmer labor and packaging than shipping.
Our
More importantly, we are AWASH in convertible hydrocarbons, from agriculture waste, like the Butterball turkey carcasses being converted into diesel in Carthage, Missouri right now, to sewage sludge, to wood scraps and now algae that excretes ethanol, not to mention coal and oil shales.
The only issue is the cost of the finished product. At $4/gallon, it appears that many alternate technologies are way above break even.
The notable fact will be: watch what the left, the news media and their sympathetic politicians cheer. Notice that when stunning breakthroughs are made, they hardly cheer, and what cheering there is has a very short half-life.
For example: A process was recently announced where algae, swimming in seawater is used to produce ethanol. One would think this is a world-class announcement, one that environmentalists would cheer loudly because it is right in line with what they have been demanding for years.
Right? Judge for yourself. A search of news.google.com for “algae ethanol seawater” returns SEVEN hits:
“http://news.google.com/news?hl=en&ned=us&q=algae+ethanol+seawater&ie=UTF-8
see best story at:
http://venturebeat.com/2008/06/13/the-algae-claims-just-keep-getting-better/
Posted on 06/07/2008 12:08:06 PM PDT by DaveTesla
Politically Contrived
Gasoline Shortage
CRAIG S. MARXSEN
The 1972 book The Limits to Growth (Meadows et al. 1972) sensationalized
the theory that natural-resource depletion and rising pollution would soon
bring catastrophe. The authors theorized that, among other problems, running
out of basic resources such as petroleum would cause a collapse of industrial and
agricultural production as well as a resulting loss of a large part of the world’s human
population. An “energy crisis” immediately following the book’s publication enhanced
its credibility and brought it a great deal of public attention, although the
energy crisis later proved to have been only a temporary anomaly caused largely by
price controls. Recent, substantial increases in gasoline prices may revitalize the catastrophists’
conviction that imminent fossil-resource exhaustion demands prompt substitution
of renewable fuel sources, such as ethanol. Convinced that because fossil
fuels apparently are nearly exhausted as a practical energy source and we can abandon
them almost costlessly, opponents of fossil fuels advocate drastic reduction of their use
to prevent a ruinous crisis of carbon dioxide pollution. Yet the alleged crisis requires
a near-zero discount rate to raise the prorated present value of damage, per gallon of
gasoline combusted, far above the relatively modest figure obtained by use of a market
interest rate for discounting purposes.
A more serious potential economic crisis caused by rising motor-fuel prices, in
contrast, does not spring from pollution or resource exhaustion, but from the catastrophists’
mistaken belief in what has become their almost self-fulfilling prophecy
(see Marxsen 2003). Through the political system, they have promoted regulatory
actions that are discouraging the investment that would otherwise have prevented
today’s worsening refining bottleneck. Obstruction of investments in gasoline refineries,
achieved by regulatory interventions, is probably a more significant threat to the
affordability of gasoline than any approaching exhaustion of gasoline’s fossil sources.
Reestablishment of refiners’ reasonable property rights and adoption of strict liability
as the major instrument for controlling carbon dioxide and refinery pollution might
end what otherwise may become an ever-worsening, regulatory-induced “energy
crisis.”
The Price Mechanism
Robert Solow responded promptly to The Limits to Growth. He explained that the
price mechanism would induce substitution of alternative sources as oil became
scarcer (1973, 44–47). Production methods that rely on relatively more abundant
natural resources eventually will substitute for dwindling supplies of oil that had
previously been cheap and easy to exploit (Solow 1974, 3–5). Now, more than thirty
years later, specific forms of such substitution have become more visible to those
looking ahead toward practical alternatives.
Although crude oil still appears to be relatively abundant and supplies most of
the world’s material from which gasoline is refined, other fossil sources of gasoline
seem to offer commercially viable alternatives. These sources include methane (or
natural gas), coal, bitumen obtained from tar sands or oil shale, and crude petroleum’s
“bottom of the barrel” components, such as asphalt. Let us ignore nonfossil feedstocks,
such as corn and turkey guts, because they escape political opposition from
opponents of fossil fuels and, in any event, have potential to make only a small
contribution to present rates of gasoline consumption. Because available stocks of
petroleum, methane, coal, tar sands, and oil shale are sufficient for centuries to come,
however, the possibility of sustaining supplies of ordinary gasoline for motor fuel at
reasonable prices appears virtually assured, regardless of nonfossil sources, if the political
system will permit. Conversely, a complete transition to nonfossil sources at this
time would doubtlessly result in much higher gasoline prices.
Fossil-Energy Sufficiency
A great deal of fossil-fuel material remains buried in accessible places. In the U.S.
Department of Energy’s International Energy Outlook 2006, world energy use is
projected to rise from 421 quadrillion Btus, or “quads,” in 2003 to 722 quads in
2030 (2006b, 1). Paul Holtberg, director of the Demand and Integration Division of
the U. S. Department of Energy, and Robert Hirsch, a senior energy program advisor
at Science Applications International Corporation, estimate that 13,400 quads of
conventional crude oil and 14,000 quads of conventional natural gas remain exploitable.
At least another 15,000 quads are available from unconventional sources of
crude oil, such as tar sands and oil shale. In the lower forty-eight states of the United
States, geopressured brine and gas hydrates may offer as much as 335,000 quads,
according to Holtberg and Hirsch (2003). Bob Williams (2003a), former executive
editor of the Oil and Gas Journal, reports a global methane hydrate endowment more
than 190 times the amount in the United States. Worldwide coal resources exceed
135,000 quads, according to Holtberg and Hirsch. At the 2003 rate of global energy
use, and not counting the geopressured brine and methane hydrate endowment
outside the lower forty-eight states, such fossil-fuel reserves would apparently last
more than 1,200 years, and they would last more than 700 years at the projected 2030
rate of consumption. Moreover, Holtberg and Hirsch’s estimates seem to be conservative
ones. David L. Greene, Janet L. Hopson, and Jia Li estimate in a report
prepared for the U.S. Department of Energy by Oak Ridge National Laboratory that
the world’s remaining supply of exploitable oil (including that from shale and tar
sands) is about 106,572.2 quads, with about 32,885.6 quads recoverable under
technologies and prices expected to prevail before 2050 (2003, 9). Thus, fossil hydrocarbons
for making gasoline and other liquid fuels will almost certainly be adequate
for centuries to come. The real obstacle is the world’s political systems.
Obstructing Refining
Government interventions have constrained the petroleum-refining industry for decades.
A 2004 U.S. Department of Energy National Petroleum Council report documents
a variety of impediments to expansion of refining capacity. Not a single new-site
refinery has been built in the United States since the mid-1970s (Shackouls 2004,
I-19). From 1981 to 2002, the average return on equity for petroleum companies was
11.3 percent, and the S&P 500 average was 12.2 percent (I-14). The return on capital
employed in refining and marketing was only 5.3 percent, compared with a return on
capital of 7.7 percent for the industry as a whole (I-14). The low returns reportedly
derive from significant regulatory-driven investments that yield no return, combined
with the highly competitive nature of the business (I-16). Building a new refinery
involves a huge investment and is therefore subject to tremendous losses from any
delays. Environmental regulation—including New Source Review enforcement and
National Ambient Air Quality Standards—and uncertainties generated by waivers,
exceptions, and amendments to regulations create strong disincentives for investment
in new refineries (I-6). Ben Lieberman (2006), a senior policy analyst at the Heritage
Foundation, contends that as much as 25 percent of total capital outlays in the
refining sector are devoted to environmental regulatory compliance. Ever-changing
specifications for reformulated gasoline and low-sulfur diesel frustrate refiners’ efforts
to achieve maximum volumetric efficiency during peak demand periods and further
reduce the return on an investment in a new refinery (Shackouls 2004, I-18). The
government’s obstructions of the use of carbon fuels somewhat resembles its more
visible prevention of the expansion of nuclear power in spite of engineering advances
that have almost totally eliminated the more significant nuclear-safety issues that once
seemed relevant.
The potential for regulatory harassment may make refiners with less-thanextraordinary
prospective profits unwilling to remain in business in coming years. In
a 2002 report, Jerry Hill, principal environmental engineer at Bechtel’s Houston
office, illustrates what had then become a strategy emphasized by the Environmental
Protection Agency (EPA). The EPA’s Office of Enforcement and Compliance Assurance
had increased its focus on petroleum refineries, and inspection teams made a
number of detailed audits, each spending many days searching for violations of federal
and state pollution regulations. These armies of fault-finding inspectors compiled and
submitted to the U.S. Justice Department and filed in district federal courts long lists
of alleged violations of pollution laws. At the top of Hill’s list of violations was failure
to obtain construction permits, failure to install the best available control technology,
and flaring gas that contained sulfur. Other violations included insufficient labeling of
containers and inadequate record keeping. Hill describes the prompt and costly defeat
of a refiner who decided to go to trial. Thirty-six refineries in nineteen states settled
these actions for the most part with negotiated consent decrees that involved millions
of dollars for remedial expenditures and additional millions for payment of fines. The
consent decrees typically remained in force for years. Hill notes that such actions
against refiners “have made them subject to additional standards and regulatory supervision
without the typical rule-making process.” He describes settlements as “giving
the EPA joint dominion with several owners in the daily operation of a number
of refineries” (2002, 76). Affected refineries account for about one-third of U.S.
capacity. Fines ranging up to $10 million went to the U.S. government, with a
sizeable portion going to the regulatory agency involved. Hill’s report is not a polemic
to sway public opinion, but only a descriptive article in the trade journal Hydrocarbon
Processing. To an industry outsider, however, the account raises suspicion of an abuse
of regulatory authority for the purpose of obtaining, by extortion, nearly unqualified
pledges of compliance with bureaucrats’ dictates that are unbounded by statutory
limitations.
Al Gore’s near victory in the 2000 presidential election suggests that opponents
of fossil fuels continue to gain political traction. When subsequently asked what he
would have done differently had he won the election, Gore told George Stephanopoulos,
“I would have urged the Congress and done my best to lead the country
to take on this climate crisis, become independent of carbon-based fossil fuels as
quickly as we can, to shift toward conservation, efficiency and renewable energy”
(Stephanopoulos 2006). With this expressed ambition, Gore presumably represents a
powerful segment of the voting public that political candidates of both major parties
seem increasingly willing to placate. This tendency suggests an increasingly effective
influence of the voters lying between the median and the extreme, individuals for
whom, as John Brätland observes, “environmental enjoyment may be impossible as
long as the petroleum industry continues to exist” (2004, 530).
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
One has to wonder..
Does Gore and his crowd sit around in the evening and toast their glasses of Chablis while laughing hysterically at us?
Truth is we have more energy, particularly hydrocarbon fuels than we know what to do with.
Arresting man's development and controlling the population (serfs) is what this really about.
From The Article:
http://www.thestar.com/sciencetech/article/415215
(A must read as gas to liquid processes can use these reserves with a short time to market)
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2027596/posts
Applying Logic 101, anyone against our troops in Iraq should also be for drilling in the US. "No Blood for Oil?" Here's there chance to prove it.
And oil is not the only resource we have. We have coal, IN ABUNDANCE, to make America self-sufficient in energy for centuries to come. What happened to coal-to-liquid-fuel technology? We know it is there, we only lack the will to put it into practice. There is a process, called reformulation, that can change natural gas (mostly methane) into longer-chain alkanes, hexane, heptane, octane, nonane, dodecane, hexadecane and that gold standard for automobile engines, iso-octane.
And we have LOTS of natural gas. Major by-product of working oil wells, as a matter of fact. Not only that, there are underground deposits that consist of practically nothing BUT natural gas under extremely high pressure, in fact, the problem here is to keep it from coming out TOO fast. Natural gas in the process of becoming entrapped in sedimentary layers is simply lying on the ocean floor, where the temperature hovers around 38º F (about 4ºC.), contained in a water-methane matrix called Methane Hydrate, a totally stable substance that will remain that so long as the temperature does not rise above about 41º F. This substance resembles ice, and is rather amorphous. Simply scoop this substance up off the ocean floor, where it lies pretty immobile, deposit it in a containment vessel, and allow it to warm. The methane and water dissociate, releasing the methane (which has some 164 times the volume of the Methane Hydrate from which it came), and let the gaseous methane come to a surface ship, where it is cooled and compresed back into liquified natural gas, LNG, which then may be transported to ports all over the world. It is estimated that the quantity of all the Methane Hydrate in the ocean floor is a couple of HUNDRED times as much energy as is contained in all the known coal, crude oil and natural gas reservoirs everywhere on earth. More importantly, this Methane Hydrate is continuously forming, as organic materials that have sunk to great depths decompose into constituent molecules, methane being one of the simplest and most stable. These molecules of methane, under the constant steady pressure and unchanging temperature of 38º F. in the ocean depths, are physically forced into the Methane Hydrate conformation.
Note that this is not a chemical reaction. It is merely the most stable conformation that water and methane form at that temperature.
Natural gas wells are formed when deposits of this Methane Hydrate are buried in silt, which solidifies into sedimentary rock over time. As the Methane Hydrate is removed from the cooling effect of the water in which it was once beneath, by the gradual warming of the earth’s crust by residual heat radiating out from the molten center, the Methane Hydrate gasifies under tremendous pressure, resulting in the natural gas wells found at various depths beneath the ocean.
Is it beastly stuff to handle? Well, mmm, yeah. Nothing that is tougher, say, than anchoring a drilling platform at sea, and tapping into the ocean floor three miles below to a depth of seven miles or so, to capture trapped petroleum and natural gas there. In fact, in the process of hitting these deep wells, the operator often has to go through a layer of varying depth of this Methane Hydrate, just to hit the substrate below.
The Japanese are really interested in researching this substance, you might look up what kind of progress they have made already in recovering Methane Hydrate. They are very nearly at the commercial industrial level already.
The world is going to depend on carbon-based fuels for a long, long time. After all, the product of combustion of carbon is carbon dioxide, a very vital link in the life process of every living thing on Planet Earth.
Carbon dioxide is plant food. It is not, by definition, any more of a “pollutant” than water or oxygen.
No matter what the ruling of any politically motivated legislature or court may claim.
A remote drilling rig high in the Mackenzie Delta has become the site of a breakthrough that could one day revolutionize the world's energy supply.
For the first time, Canadian and Japanese researchers have managed to efficiently produce a constant stream of natural gas from ice-like gas hydrates that, worldwide, dwarf all known fossil fuel deposits combined.
“We were able to sustain flow,” said Scott Dallimore, the Geological Survey of Canada researcher in charge of the remote Mallik drilling program. “It worked.”
For a decade now, Dallimore and scientists from a half-dozen other countries have been returning to a site on Richards Island on the very northwestern tip of the Northwest Territories to study methane gas hydrates.
A hydrate is created when a molecule of gas – in this case, methane or natural gas – is trapped by high pressures and low temperatures inside a cage of water molecules. The result is almost – but not quite – ice. It's more like a dry, white slush suffusing the sand and gravel 1,000 metres beneath the Mallik rig.
Heat or unsqueeze the hydrate and gas is released. Hold a core sample to your ear and it hisses.
More significant is the fact that gas hydrates concentrate 164 times the energy of the same amount of natural gas.
http://www.thestar.com/sciencetech/article/415215
(A must read as gas to liquid processes can use these reserves with a short time to market)
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2027596/posts
For years I’ve made the assertion that the world is awash in oil.
It’s good to see it in a headline!