Posted on 05/13/2024 7:25:17 PM PDT by bitt
When are we going to run out of energy?
You don’t hear that as much as you used to, since Those Who Know Best are working to plug up all our energy sources anyway.
Most energy sources put out carbon dioxide, and that’s going to make all the plants grow and devour us all, or it will heat the planet up and make Minneapolis a desert — and we’ll all fry.
Or something.
But we don’t hear much any more about running out of energy.
What do the experts say about it?
“According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration’s (EIA) International Energy Outlook 2023 (IEO2023), the global supply of crude oil, other liquid hydrocarbons, and biofuels is expected to be adequate to meet the world’s demand for liquid fuels through 2050,” a U.S. Energy Information web site stated.
Ah, but the site also gave itself an out regarding its predicted bleak future: “There is substantial uncertainty about the levels of future liquid fuels supply and demand.”
That’s another way of saying — “We don’t really know.”
And what they’re not saying, but what we know they believe is, “It doesn’t really make any difference when we’ll run out of energy since we want you all in 15-minute cities in your electric cars and on mass transit; just don’t ask us where the energy for that will come from.”
Or something.
And for sure, they’re not putting forth what seems to be the increasingly anti-human agenda of wanting us to freeze in the dark and starve.
But are there other experts besides the U.S. government (the people who four years ago gave us those wonderful lessons on public health)?
Indeed there are. And they give us an entirely different picture of energy supplies.
(Excerpt) Read more at westernjournal.com ...
Confused me a sec. Kerogen is oil shale, not shale oil.
And further, you said it correctly.
And those estimates are from what we know is available. There are many heologists who think that the creation mof oil is an ongoing process and that oil is actually a renewable resource, Many oil that were empty for years can actually renew themselves in certain instances.
One of my favorites from back in the day. Nat Geo, June, 1974. "Oil, the Dwindling Treasure."
"'THE END OF THE OIL AGE is in sight,' says U.S. petroleum geologist M. King Hubbert.... If present trends continue, Dr. Hubbert estimates, production will peak in 1995 -- the deadline for alternative forms of energy that must replace petroleum in the sharp drop-off that follows."
btt
Only 485 years? But don’t we have only 6 years to save the planet? 🤓
I saw a great You Tube of Charlie Kirk debating some idiot who was dressed as Jesus. Charlie Kirk was being a professional, but Jesus couldn't answer anything. He said to Charlie, I didn't write the Bible whenever he couldn't answer Charlie Kirk's questions.
Ping!....................
Don’t know about oil but I have read that the US is the Saudi Arabia of coal. IIRC I’ve read that we have something like a 300 year reserve of coal.
I remember great coal fields found near Tulsa OK and on the Escalante Staircase in Utah that have fields of coal under them.
In the Tulsa case a sub division was built over one coal field when requests to mine the coal were denied, and 55 years ago there were plans to build mine mouth power plants at the Escalante Staircase coal fields, before it was made a National Monument just to stop coal exploration.
Power plants in Page AZ and Farmington NM area have been shut down and destroyed in Obama’s plan to curb Glo-Bull Warming. The economic hit to these areas has been bad!
Now other parts of the 4-Corners area are being hit as the democrats want to ban oil and gas exploration, one of the things that keeps Farmington NM alive.
Probably a lot more. Just exploit the potential gas fields in the New York state portion of the Marcellus Shale and we could add another 85-100 years of petroleum fuels available.
When oil wells get drained, they are shut off for several years and they fill up again. Crude oil is a by-product of minerals and take up room where available.
It is true that we must heat that shale oil in the Green River formation to release the Kerogen oil. If we used coal or petroleum fuels to do this it would be a no go economically. Nuclear reactors are great at making heat, a lot of heat! Nuclear reactors should be for making electricity and heat for this. Colocate them and they can do both. Oddly we have a uranium shortage in our nation thanks to policy and not availability. Only a small percentage of the potential power from uranium is used. We should go to breeder reactors to make fissionable plutonium to use in reactors and also bombs, but we have enough bombs today. Use it all for power. We suffer from poor policy not resources.
Not really unless all my geology professors lied to me.
Actually you are marginally correct relative to time. It is common to pump a well for a few hours or days to let more oil flow into the bore hole while it is shut down. This has nothing to do with new oil but is a function of the permeability of the oil bearing strata. Yes, new oil is being created in the organic shale continuously but over eons but it is very slow to say the least, so slow that it is of no importance.
Oddly their have been cases in South Louisiana were wells started producing much more oil after a decline. This has always been associated with salt domes. A salt dome is not static. It is plastic under pressure of the overburden and migrates up. The specific gravity of salt is about 2.17. The specific gravity of the over burden rocks is about 2.7. The salt as a plastic literally floats through the overburden rock. It causes faulting. The faulting can open new channels from a deeper or adjacent oil reservoir to refill the producing well. This is rare but it does happen.
I have been singing the song of fast breed reactors for years. Thanks to Jimmy dang Carter the.USA lacks the critical reprocessing technology and the legal ability to do so. Without reprocessing you cannot recover the PU isotopes needed to start and perpetuate the breed cycle. So instead with PWR we burn less than 1% of the fissile material then throw it into fuel ponds and then into dry cask storage. They want to bury those wastes in a geological repository where it’s all wasted it should be a crime against humanity to do that.
Sodium reactors are just enough to make the process heat needed for kerogen cooking. The new Natrium reactor is 550C at the outlet of the primary heat exchanger then to the secondary then to the molten salt loop. You need 370C at minimum to cook shale so in theory you could use the heat from the tertiary loop directly. Electric joule heating from well casing to well casing string would be better since it penetrates the whole formation between the electrodes not just the immediate area around the well bores.
The idea is run the reactor flat out putting power to the grid during peak times and off peak send that electricity down the well bores using the thermal inertia of the whole formation to smooth out the 12 hour on off cycle. It would work but there is no will to put modular fast reactors all over the Green River Shale basin. You could just as easily use off peak wind power which tends to howl all night across the Great Plains.
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