I’ve been looking at some web sites about shale oil reserves, which not only are massive, but much of it is in the USA (yea!). Though expensive to extract, the current oil prices seem to make this economical now.
Some shale oil technology was researched in the 70’s but abandoned as the OPEC tap was turned back on. Now it’s a bit different, the tap was never turned off and China is demanding more oil. It seems that if OPEC wished to collapse the price of oil (to kill it) they would have to crank up production to a level that would exceed their capacity to pump the stuff.
I think it’s proof that oil will not vanish suddenly, but rather gradually. Oil’s price will move slowly upward, which on the production side will drive things like shale oil and oil that’s deeper or in more inhospitable places or (damn) sitting under national parks. On the consumption side this will drive conservation and replacement.
For example, if memory serves, there are ways to synthesize oil out of coal. This is perhaps too expensive to serve automobiles as we know them, but might be OK for manufacturing lubricants and polymers, say. And there’s so much coal in the ground, in the US, that it’s hard to imagine how to use it all.
I think if Jesus got a good look at what the US does in the world to keep the oil flowing, he’d never stop vomiting - but I guess that’s opinion, isn’t it?
500 billion barrels of oil shale reserves? In Colorado?
1.5 trillion barrels of oil in Utah, Colorado and Wyoming combined?
The second link,
From the -
Deseret Morning News, Friday, March 04, 2005
One Utah man claims he has. Lindon resident Leon Smith says he can produce 14,000 barrels of oil a day at about $16 a barrel using his patent-protected process of extracting oil from shale.
Bolding mine.
:dubious: $16 dollars a barrel? If that was true, he’d be doing it and not talking about it. Instead of the other way around.
I hate reporters sometimes.
Oh, in response to your OP, Jesus probably drove a pick-up, he was a carpenter.
OK, so he’d be learning to write a business plan and talking to venture capitalists. I agree that somebody publically blabbing about a revolutionary idea they’ve come up with usually means they are a crank or have something not practical on a commercial scale. At best, it means they are naive about the process of establishing a business.
Here I speak as a man who has spent months dealing with investors, Angels and venture capitalists trying to get a business funded…
I utterly and completely guarantee you that all he would have to do is pretty a feasible means to extract significant barrels of oil out at DOUBLE that price ($32/barrel) and he’d be one of the richest men on earth within the year. Investors would be literally competing to gain access to his services.
That’s probably the case here – there’s a lot more guys with ideas on how to get oil out of shale cheaply than there are guys with good ideas on the subject.
But broadly, even a good idea is hard to get financed in the oil business. The reason is price volatility and the low cost of regular crude production. The Albertan oil sands are just sitting there, waiting to have the oil sucked out of them. There are a few projects, but not too many. Why? Well, because actually $16 (to use that other guy’s number) is actually an enormously high cost. Even the old Texas fields, which are mostly dry, have finding and extraction costs of under $11. So if you’re the CFO and faced with an opportunity choice between building the same oil rig you’ve built for 50 years and getting oil for $11 and building an untried technology which holds the possibility of getting oil at $16, what’s your choice? Even if you don’t have the first choice, are you confident that a $16 cost at the field will be profitable in a couple years when the extractor finally opens? Oil spent most of 1998 flirting with 10 bucks.
Yes I didn’t buy this either, but it seems like the oil is there and it is extractable. It seems like it has to be mined out as opposed to pumped out, but if such massive reserves do exist, it could serve to stabilize oil prices for years/decaded/centuries/mil… well hopefully we will fighure that fusion thing by then.
Years ago,I read about the oil shales. Apparently, the only feasible way to extract it today, is tomine it and bake in retorts, The whole process uses a lot of energy, and water as well. In addition, the retorted/baked oil shale then produces a huge volume of slag-like material which must be disposed of.
Really, all of this makes NO sense…it would be much easier to:
-enact sensible CAFE standards for ALL vehicles(including SUVs)
-encourage industry to operate on a 4-day week (to cut down on traffic and fuel wastage in traffic jams)
-give positive incentives to conserve energy (instead of incentives to WASTE energy, as we now have
Heck, if we could improve the CAFE by 10 MPG (not impossible), we would reduce our oil consumption drastically.
I would also advise that we look at tax incentives to encourage people to workat home. This would also reduce airp[ollution.
My Og! You want our fellow Americans to actually welcome more government regulation of our sacred right to drive giant oil-guzzling, fuel-inefficient vehicles instead of urging on the despoilation of nature?! What planet are you from, mister?
My oil-field experience is limited to writing software for it, but…
This sounds similar to the problem of processing oil sands in Alberta. They’re a few $$/barrel short of being a profitable investment, but I hear China is investing in extraction technology (they are a main oilfield investor). I see this as starting small, but definately happening in the next XX years.
On an unrelated note, the car I drive will have at least double the economy it has now just as soon as car manufacturers start caring that not everyone is under 6’ tall.
You know, it’s easy to demagogue about SUVs, but the fact is, if we all drove 40 MPG Priuses, it would not solve the problem. It would just flatten the curve a little, and move the problem a few years down the road.
To illustrate this, consider that transportation in general uses only 67% of the petroleum consumed in the United States. Of that, light trucks (including SUVs) make up 25% of the petroleum consumed. And in that category, SUVs make up about half of light truck sales. The rest is pickup trucks and other work vehicles.
In other words, SUVs as a category use less than 10% of the petroleum consumed in the U.S. (the actual number is about 6%, I believe). Now, many of those SUVs actually get respectable mileage. My Ford Escape gets only slightly worse mileage than our mid-size sedan. So let’s say that we could wave a magic wand, and turn all the evil SUVs in the U.S. into compact sedans that get twice the mileage. Hooray, you’ve just reduced America’s dependence on oil by 3%.
But of course, that’s not possible, because the fleet average for SUVs is not half of the fleet average for cars (the CAFE standard for cars is 27mpg, and for light trucks including SUVs it’s 21), and many SUVs are actually put to good use and cannot be replaced by a car. So if we suddenly compelled all SUV drivers to switch back to cars, you *might save 1% of petroleum use per year. But probably not even that much.
Ralph124c said:
That would depend on your definition of ‘drastically’. Again, transportation makes up 67% of petroleum use. Of that, cars and light trucks together make up 59%., meaning that small vehicles in total use about 40% of the petroleum consumed in the U.S. Increasing the CAFE average from 27 to 37 would therefore reduce total petroleum consumption by 16%.
We may get close to that with widespread adoption of hybrids, although it will take a long time - the average car in the U.S. is about 10 years old, so it would take about that long to turn half the fleet over, assuming that the only vehicles you could buy today were high-mileage hybrids. In reality, high-mileage vehicles are only going to enter the market slowly, and we’ll be lucky if they make up 25% of the entire vehicle fleet within 20 years. And hybrids are about the only technology that has a chance of moving the CAFE standard that much.
The conclusion: Even if we all turned into green-loving Naderites tomorrow, you aren’t going to see the oil consumption due to personal vehicles decline by more than 5% or so in the forseeable future.
jweb: Well, the basic numbers come from a variety of sources, but I believe they are correct (transportation using 67% of petroleum, cars and light trucks making up 59% of that, SUVs making up about half of the light truck category, etc). They should be easily findable on the web. The rest of it isn’t citable, because I just did the math on my own. Feel free to check my work. It could be wrong - I was working with my daughter on another project while I was doing that, and was a bit distracted.
I tried to do a bit of cross-checking. For example, this cite says that cars and trucks make up 40% of petroleum use, which is roughly the same number I came up with. Here’s one that says 65% of petroleum used in the U.S. is used by transportation, which is close to the 67% I posted from memory.