U.S shale oil reserves 3 times the size of Middle East oil reserves.

TwoXForr posted:

I know of a vast untapped source of "oil" that we gave up on years ago, and it would not damage ground water sources, mar the landscape or need great pipelines to bring in to market.

Whale Oil, who is with me, bring back whale hunting. I firgure with some work we could maybe start whale farms and just grow the suckers in captivity.

Just kidding.


That's one "whale of an idea". It could lead to "wailing" and gnashing of teeth in the Middle East.
 
This reminds me of last year's debate over using corn to make biofuels. Rarely did any of the proponents want to discuss how using food to make fuel would lower the amount of available food in the world and therefore cause those prices to go up. Even worse, they didn't want to talk about how much energy it took to grow corn, fertilize corn, harvest corn, and finally actually change the corn into fuel. Some of the experts were claiming it took 95% of a barrel of oil to make a barrel of oil from corn. One guy had tried to account for all the tractors and equipment and he claimed it actually took MORE than a barrel of oil to produce a barrel of corn oil!

IMO, a lot of the shale oil is the same way. It takes a tremendous amount of equipment and energy to produce oil out the other end. So let's say that article is right and there is 10 bazillion barrels of oil that can be recovered. Is it really worth it if you spend 7-8 bazillion barrels of oil recovering it? Especially when you consider the damage you will do in the process? I personally remember when they built a pilot plan during the Carter Administration. One of the big negatives was that the solid end product (minus the oil) is now larger than it was when it was below ground. So they ended up with mountains of this stuff and nowhere to put it. If they left it in giant piles, it was unsightly and rainwater led to toxic runoff of the local area. And that was one little plant. Imagine the scale they would have to use to really produce enough oil to notice a difference!

We do need to build some more oil refineries. That's a fact.

We also need to come up with some new fail safe nuclear reactor designs. If China can do it, why can't we?

And those new solar plants sound very promising. They don't use cells, they use the heat of the sun. The US has vast stretches of the west that belongs to the US government and which is exposed to very high levels of heat from the sun. They are running a pilot plant right now. It looks very doable. Changing around the electric power grid would be the biggest problem.

Peak oil is a fact. It has to be since oil is non-renewable. It's like gold or diamond production. You could dig more mines and increase your productivity over and over again but inevitably you will hit a level of production which you will never be able to exceed. The _fact_ of peak oil is just that, a fact. The only dispute is when will we hit such a place? This year, ten years from now, or did we already hit it? Oil prices are being driven up right now by high demand from the developing countries. China is importing oil from literally all over the world. Their demand alone is expected to double by 2030. Are we going to somehow double oil production?!

We better start to plan hard for a world with less available oil and where the remaining amount is therefore more expensive. Or we will be in REAL trouble.

Gregg
 
Even the French have taken the plunge into the nuclear pool. Why are we still sitting in a poolside chair? We need to develop alternative energy sources for our long term strategy. There's no question about that. Our nations security depends upon it. However, in the meantime, we cannot be held hostage to the environmental greenies who are luddites in their ideology and would love nothing more than to see us go back to horse and buggy days. Wind and solar cannot sustain our energy needs today. Maybe someday in the future. Besides, you cannot make plastics, textiles, waxes, etc. which are petroleum based, with solar and wind power. Petroleum is not just about energy and automobiles. Our economy is like a fabric, and petroleum is the yarn. We cannot immediately change the yarn and have a the fabric remain the same. We need to transition to new sources. The sooner the better, but not at the cost of economic ruin.
 
Alternatives seem like just a supplemental thing right now to me. Solar cells have a pretty low conversion efficiency and the more economical ones that have been developed are even less so. Cover your roof and maybe your deck with cells and charge a bunch of expensive batteries and you might cut your bills to some extent. And you will need some kind of DC to AC converter too. How about a giant windmill in your yard? Farmers used to use windmills to charge a battery to run a dinky farm DC radio in the evening or pump water out to fill a horse tank, not light the house. That was kerosene lamps, running on cheap petroleum products. All I can see in the near future is expensive systems that provide supplemental savings to homeowners, not that give total independence. Go nuke or giant windmill farms. (Not in my neighborhood, they all say.) How about a sod hut with dirt floors and mansions for the elite? Some folks ideal world.
 
Rarely did any of the proponents want to discuss how using food to make fuel would lower the amount of available food in the world and therefore cause those prices to go up.
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Point in fact, food production has been increased since they started large-scale ethanol, and the number 1 factor in food prices is fuel prices, which large scale ethanol production has operated to relieve.
Counterintuitive but true nonetheless.
 
We also need to come up with some new fail safe nuclear reactor designs.
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Such designs already exist, and have existed for many years. The problem is convincing those in the grips of a religious fervor against nuclear energy of any kind (except what's 93 million miles away) to sit down and understand math. And that's a pretty big problem.
 
So let's say that article is right and there is 10 bazillion barrels of oil that can be recovered. Is it really worth it if you spend 7-8 bazillion barrels of oil recovering it?
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Bingo! The reason that the cost of oil shale goes up every time the cost of oil goes up, is that it takes a lot of energy to get that oil out.

Less energy than you get out, so it's not quite as bad as some of the biofuel scams, (Which are just oil laundering, when you get down to it.) but it does have the effect that the cost of getting at that oil is a function of the price of oil.

At some point, the curves cross, and the oil shale becomes economic. But God alone knows how high that price is. $200 a barrel? $300?

Nuclear makes more sense, the obstacles there are purely political, the technology already works, and is cost effective if you strip off all the politically imposed garbage.

However, given the rate of recent progress in solar technology, and how long it will take to free up nuclear power AND convince investors that it's going to stay freed up long enough to build the plants and make the investment back, we'll probably have a solar based economy before the nukes can get built.
 
How about a sod hut with dirt floors and mansions for the elite? Some folks ideal world.
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This is what I'm thinking all the over bearing environmental regulation is really about. Us middle class people are scaling back our fuel usage, but meanwhile enviro elites like Al Gore still flying around the world on private jets and living in mansions. Is there a plot to bring back fuedalism?
 
I'm familiar with one company which has licensed new technology to extract oil from shale, without disturbing the ground much or building permanent infrastructure to extract it. Their technology is a movable extraction structure which gets around most of the enviromental hurdles (the shale is there, the reserves are there, it is 100% enviormental roadblocks why it isn't being extracted now, especially with the price of oil as it is now) which they have been working on for about a year now.

http://www.petroprobe.com/

It's nearly impossible to to do any large scale mining or oil recovery in the US anymore. Cuba has oil rigs 45 miles off of the Florida Keys and Canada is drilling for natural gas in the Great Lakes but the US is controlled by activists and professional protestors. It's big money donations which drive these groups, and they are not about to give up their livelyhood, and their existance for earning it.
 
Germany used it in WWII.
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True, but it was very poor grade fuel and was very hard on the engines. Also very dirty exhaust. Not saying we could not improve the technology and make this a viable alternative.
 
how about using less petroleum in other parts of our lifestyle, getting rid of as much plastic containers and going back to glass containers:confused: things like that
 
There are already some start up companies doing coal to diesel. The governor of Montana (a democrat, no less) has been pushing it, partly as economic development for his state. Unfortunately, the coals being used are low quality, "brown" coals that have a lot of sulphur and other contaminates.
Shale oils are being looked at very closely.
Two problems currently exist, one is the amount of energy used to extract it, another is the amount of (again) sulphur it produces in air pollution.
Also, most of the current plants grind the shale to a slurry and use a pipeline for transport. This uses immense amounts of water, and its using it in an area where water is not particularly plentiful...
A lot of the complaining here sounds an awful lot like the conspiracy theories of the 70's. Back then, some guy was running around saying he had a carburetor that allowed cars to get 100 miles a gallon, but GM was keeping him from producing it......
 
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