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