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Practical Method for Getting Oil from Oil Shale?
ConfigurationManager writes "An article in the Rocky Mountain News describes how Shell has demonstrated a practical way to extract oil from the shale deposits in Colorado. Since it describes those deposits as "the largest fossil fuel deposits in the world," that could be a very good thing for those of us who are currently paying anywhere from $3 on up for a gallon of regular unleaded."
3 Dollar a gallon -- how about 3 euro a Litre !
Dw
Many people here in Europe pay over $5.60 per gallon nowadays. We wish we had $3.00 per gallon prices.
The Official Steve Ballmer Webpage
My solution was to get rid of my car, and get a bike!
Instead of finding a more difficult technique to the problem, I simplified the problem of purchasing gasoline for a motor vehicle almost out of existence.
Won't work for everyone, but it worked for me. Some people may need to change the way they live much more than I have had to, but then again, it's been an ongoing process that's been worked on by myself for years, not overnight.
Dada Mail - Program, Art Project or Absurdity?
The US needs to learn to use energy more efficiently. Experts suggest that current prices are driven by growth and demand, rather than a supply shortage causing a spike as has happened in the past. This means that prices are not likely to drop quickly. Interestingly The Economist (not generally in favor of big government, taxes, or other impediments to business) says:
From:
http://www.economist.com/printedition/displaystor
(You have to pay for access...sorry).
http://www.welton.it/davidw/
The reason they're talking about getting oil from shale at all is because the gas price is $3/gallon. If it was less, they wouldn't bother, so you aren't going to see the price go down when they start on the sand and shale deposits.
Deleted
I am not sure we need more fossil fuels for our climate and our lungs.
Shell bosses feel chilly, find new way to warm Earth.
I was thinking this the other day... I read a story on CNN that said people in New Orleans were paying "as much as" $5/gallon. As if that was a major disaster. Now people are whinging about paying $3 / gallon?
/gallon = $6.96.
Everyday UK price = Very near GBP 1 / litre = GBP 3.78
When is the US going to wake up to just how much oil COSTS, and top subsidising their country's SUV's?
Every country in the EU pays prices near the UK ones (maybe not quite as much). Nobody really moans (except a little if they go up even further), because that's what it always has cost. What does the EU know that America doesn't? Or, more likely, what is America choosing to ignore in case whoever changes prices gets lynched?
Type in "1.30 aud per litre in usd per gallon" and get "1.30 (Australian dollars per litre) = 3.76065521 U.S. dollars per US gallon".
To make re-useable energy sources more and more attractive, we find a way to just heat this planet just a bit more.
Just place solar energy/wind energy systems on these shale places instead. It will yield more than oil in the long run (Break even point wind power: 6 years at current US energy prices).
My wife's sketchblog Blob[p]: Gastrono-me
which are mean to reduce use of cars. They also make it seem much less of a shock when the price of oil goes up.
but afaict most of the high fuel prices at the moment are due to catrina knocking out refining capacity not oil prices.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
The problem with oil shale is the same problem that the tar sands (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tar_sands) have, they require enormous amounts of energy to extract effectivly.
Where a conventional extraction of oil through drilling into the ground yeilds about a 1:80 energy ratio (1 barrel of oil worth of energy expended gets you 80 barrels of oil out of the ground) on average, the average energy ratio for tar sands is about 1:5 (or 16x less return). I do not imagine that the energy ratio for the extraction of oil from oil shale will be much better.
This poses the same fundamental problem that alternative energy supplies pose, the energy extracted vs the energy spent is MUCH lower then conventional oil drilledout of the ground, and even if such a system where today instantly implemented, where most of americas oil was from tar sands/oil shale, there would still be a MASSIVE jump in price, due to the expense of production.
In North America, people need personal vehicles due to the design of the infastructure, and the placement of essential services. This is particularly true for rural areas, and small cities to a lesser extent.
Gas prices have a greater direct effect on the average American or Canadian consumer than their counterparts in Europe.
Lot of folks want to throw out the "gas in Europe costs more than gas in the USA, so don't cry about your 'high gas prices'" line. What you need to look at, though, is where this cost comes from. The answer is taxes. From http://www.csmonitor.com/2005/0826/p01s03-woeu.htm l:
In Britain, the government takes 75 percent, and raises taxes by 5 percent above inflation every year (though it has forgone this year's rise in view of rocketing oil prices, and the French government has promised tax rebates this year to taxi drivers, truckers, fishermen, and others who depend heavily on gasoline.) On August 8, for example, the price of gas in the US, without taxes, would be $2.17, instead of $2.56; in Britain, it would be $1.97, instead of $6.06.
Given that, I'm not sure it's a fair comparison to make: Europe has decided to tax the hell out of gasoline, a decision the government can undo should there be a need, while the USA is paying higher prices to the oil companies, which can't be controlled as easily.
Not really sure what my point is, really,
robert
Don't complain about 3 Dollars. In order to have some decent effect agains global warming it should be IMHO closer to 20 Dollars!
Why don't the big networks talk about that in the long term it could be cheaper do seriously do something about global warming than give up a third of the northamerican continent due to increasingly hostile climat?
The article says this would be profitable even if oil cost $30 a barral. It is near $70 now.
"It is not how things are in the world that is mystical, but that it exists." -Ludwig Wittgenstein
Bye Planet Earth, it was nice knowing you. The last thing we need is another hundred years of oil. Even normal oil will last another 50-100 years, as technology enables us to retrieve it more efficiently and new supplies are found.
Last week's tragic events should have demonstrated to America the foolishness of such excessive consumption of fossil fuels. That said, I doubt Pres. Bush's recent failure to enforce reasonable standards of fuel economy on all vehicles will be overturned..
I have been a user for about 10 years. This ends Feb 2014. The site's been ruined. I'm off. Dice, FU
Since we will be buying Colorado-extracted oil from the Chinese, will this shale extraction technique benefit us? Are the Chinese going to sell this oil to us cheaper than the Arabs? I guess they will be able to since the oil is coming from the U.S. and won't have to be shipped.
See this Rocky Mountain News article from 8/23/05. http://www.insidedenver.com/drmn/business/article/ 0,1299,DRMN_4_4022438,00.html
I'm happy to pay a bit more to keep SUVs off the roads. I just moved from Canada (where petrol guzzlers are on the rise) to Australia (where there are very few SUVs). If paying an extra dollar or so at the pumps every couple weeks keeps them off the road, I'm more than willing. I honestly can't believe people still choose to drive those things.
They're estimating the energy cost alone to be 28% of the total energy extracted. Given all the other overhead involved, that's not going to turn into a gigantic profit margin. The most significant thing about this discovery is the potential to tap as much as a trillion barrels of oil from within the United States.
What scares me about this idea is the environmental impact. Anything growing in the ground in (or near) the affected region will die. How much "gunk" does the steam-cleaning process generate, and what will we do with it? How much is the targeted plot of land permanently altered by the process, and in what ways? There are all kinds of ways this could go wrong.
Still, I very much like the idea of the U.S. not depending on foreign sources of oil. Economic entanglement turns into political entanglement, and political entanglement has a nasty habit of turning into military entanglement. Maybe someday we'll have enough troops rested, trained, equipped, and ready to stop genocides and maintain order during natural disasters, like we used to.
There's no failure quite as dissatisfying as a complete and total solution to the wrong problem.
Personally I wish gas was more expensive, so people would be forced to take mass transit.
Problem is that at least in Fort Wayne, Indiana, mass transit does not run after 9 PM on weekdays, after 6 PM on Saturdays, or at all on Sundays or holidays.
Pronounced win-jing. It's not a made up word. It's in common use here in Australia. An example of its use might be "I wish those spoilt lard-arse Yanks would stop whingeing about the cost of petrol".
Fischer-Tropsch is the future of energy in the U.S. It produces oil from coal and generated $20/barrel oil in plants in South Africa that they used during their period of economic isolation. It is a simple process that converts coal to H2+CO and then into any kind of oil you want. It can also be used to produce fertilizer and plastics. It scales, it's simple and the U.S has the largest coal reserves in the world. This is really our ace in the hole in the upcoming global energy crisis. Expect their to be a coal to oil gold rush in the next 5 years. Apparently some people are catching on. Unfortunately for the environmentalists this is not what you wanted to happen when we started running out of oil but this is by far the most practical realistic solution that will work to give us time to find alternatives.
Shale oil requires hideous amounts of energy to extract and when it is used emitts all kinds of gross pollution. It's the worst of the worst fossil fuels. There have been massive protests in Australia over plans to extract it from North Queensland. It's a step in the wrong direction, not only because it means fuel prices will go down again but also because the fuel itself is dirty and contributes more to the greenhouse effect than normal oil. Oil prices in the US are artificially low and your government is unnecissarily plunging deeper into debt by subsidising petrol. Tax petrol, spend the tax money on developing alternatives. It's win win win win win win win win win - who cares if some rednecks complain. The worst thing a government can do is ignore common sense and strategic thinking for the future for the sake of appealing to the lowest common denominator.
We drive about 10x more than you guys. It's not uncommon to work in a completely different city than where you live, driving for an hour on a highway to get to work. I know a guy who commutes every day from another state, at least two hours away. In Europe, that'd be like commuting from another country.
/. sig) "anything you can do with hydrocarbons can be done with carbohydrates". Already pumps in Iowa deliver fuel which is 10% ethanol from corn.
Well, yes, and high fuel tax is partly intended to dissuade you from doing that. In "old" Europe, the roads wouldn't be able to take many more commuters, and we don't have the space to just build more roads. For the record, it's not uncommon to drive over an hour to work in the UK -- it's just that it'll take you an hour to drive 30 miles, much of that sitting in traffic.
(I laughed heartily when Slashdot reported the London congestion charge, and some American suggested "just make the roads wider")
Much of the USA is built around the car -- to the extent where it's often easier to walk from one strip mall car park to another rather than walk to the next shop. When you buy a house, you count the garages rather than think about how close the train station or bus stop is. Local shops are rare, Walmarts are common.
In rural parts of the States, it's not uncommon to live in a town of a few hundred residents, over 50 miles from the next one.
It's no wonder in the USA fuel is taxed as if it were a necessity, rather than a luxury.
Nonetheless, I've driven over 12,000 holiday miles in the USA, and even this year, with the papers full of outrage at rising oil prices, we would cackle with laughter every time we filled a tank for under $20.
Oil's going to keep getting more expensive. I hope to see a free market drive to alternative fuels. If CO2 emissions won't change people's buying habits, maybe the mighty dollar will.
The USA is capable of growing an awful lot of carbohydrates, and (as I read in a
I agree with almost all of this. I've driven across the USA three times, so I'm more than aware of its size -- and indeed there are plenty of places you just couldn't get to without a car.
... and how very American of you to equate "Success" exclusively with GDP ;)
My only major obejection is that a lot of rural Americans making those routine 30 mile drives you refer to, choose to do them in absolutely enormous pickups, or other massively overpowered cars.
My own car, perfectly capable of carrying two people and their luggage in comfort for all-day drives, has a 1.2 litre engine. Yes, it strains a little with passengers in the rear, but the 1.4 model would not.
Whereas, our standard midsize rental in the US was a 3 litre V6, and nobody considers this to be a powerful car. Perhaps the answer to rising fuel prices is to start driving more economical cars.
(Other minor points: Amercicans can underestimate the size of Europe too, imagining the whole continent to be crammed full of dense cities. Although we don't have anything quite like Iowa or Nebraska, we do have some areas of emptiness.
)
It sounds like this is a terribly inefficient process. One poster offered the 80/1 statistic for traditional oil pumping (1 barrel of oil in -> 80 barrels out). By comparison, this process requires that you burn about a third of your production. I could be thinking about this wrong, but it seems that (from a global warming perspective) it's as though we would take every car in America and reduce its fuel efficiency by a third.
From the article, it's not clear whether the "wall of ice" is taken into account when doing the energy calculations. If it's not, then it may be even less efficient, closer to a 2:1 yield perhaps.
From an environmental standpoint, it doesn't sounds downright scary. Drilling a shaft every ten feet around the perimeter of the site, freezing it, then heating the bedrock to 700 degrees? That's going to take a lot of equipment and manpower, and produce a lot of waste. Nor am I as confident in this "wall of ice" as the author. So they may have to scrub the groundwater once they're done, if there is any chance of contaminating drinking water. Finally, I do believe that most bedrock contains extremophiles, and while I don't want to be an alarmist or a eukaryote-rights activist, we can't be sure of the environmental impact of burning them away.
Can't we just agree to not do this? Our country has an energy addiction, and this article just goes to show how far we are willing to go to avoid facing the problem (Exhibit B being the way our lustful eyes keep falling on the ANWR). If we start the transition away from fossil fuels now, we could quickly become the leaders in alternative fuels and energy efficient technology. If, on the other hand, we use this process as a crutch to keep us strung out on oil for a few more decades, then it ends with us having the same energy-inefficient infrastructure we have now, a much more serious global warming problem, and no expertise in alternatives. We'll have to buy all our fuel efficient vehicles from the French.
C'mon, Republicans. You hate the French. Hop on board with this.
Rather than eliminating this option entirely, I think it would make more sense to put a tax on it, so that the break-even point is around to $7/gallon, not $3.50. The revenue generated would go to subsidize alternative fuels research and to mitigate the environmental damage from this process.
Also, if we're going to do this come hell or high water, it seems sensible to pursue the idea of using geothermal to provide the heat for this process, rather than heaters powered from the surface. Hydrocarbons are good heat carriers; that's one reason we use oil to cool and lubricate our engines. The oil is down there, the energy is down there. It seems like all you would need to do is heat it long enough to distill out a small amount of oil, then use that oil to circulate heat up from the hot bedrock below. Of course, that means deeper holes. Like I said, maybe this idea should just be scratched altogether.
You want the truthiness? You can't handle the truthiness!
Why high Oil and Gas prices have a good side too
or
The best way to force people to change is making them wanting to change
First of all - I live in Europa, Germany.
Today Fuel prices have reached 1.43 Euro / liter, this is about 7.9$ / gallon. Yes, driving is EXPENSIVE here.
In the last few years, cars with a high efficiency have become very high in demand - of course, when fuel is expensive, people want cars that use little fuel.
And the same thing is going to happen to the USA.
People will look at the prices, look into their purses and the next car they buy won't be a 15 miles per gallon SUV, but perhaps a 30 / 35 miles per gallon car. Or they might grab one of the ultra fuel-efficient cars (many of them are from Germany - guess why...) like the VW Lupo - 78 miles per gallon (Diesel) - well, truth to be told, it ain't a beauty, you've got no real storage space, and acceleration isn't, but if you want fuel economy, there you go.
And this is the positive side of the high prices - there will be a demand for fuel-efficient cars, thus the industry will build them, and people will buy and drive them. And overall, less Oil will be used, causing less pollution and conserving it for more important uses
+++ MELON MELON MELON +++ Out of Cheese Error +++ redo from start +++
Taken as a whole, Europe is pretty big too. What is very different is that not everyone thinks they have a god-given right to a spread-out, one story home with a big garden. People have learned to build up, rather than out, and out, and out some more so that it takes 1+ hours to cross some major areas by freeway (Phoenix, AZ, Los Angeles from personal experience).
Sure, it's a compromise, like most things are. It's nice to have a big back yard, at times. But that compromise begins to look less favorable when you have to drive 5 kilometers to even get food or go to otherwise basically available services. At some point, maybe it's good enough to have an appartment of your own, and a common green area that you can share with others...
Your point about who gets hit first is a good one, however, at some point, you've got to start changing, even though that means some pain. Perhaps the next time you are in the housing market, you will give some consideration to whether you could use the car a little bit less. Perhaps you will start appreciating politicians who do something about implementing changes making it easier to do more with less car use. Perhaps you will pay attention to vehicle fuel efficiency when you buy one...
As the article states, fuel efficiency in the US has been *declining*, which is absurd, considering that technology continues to improve energy usage in vehicles.
http://www.welton.it/davidw/
As a side note, there's also been talk about turning coal into diesel.
This is already being done. In South Africa, to name one country. For political stability and independance, it is in many nations' interest to secure their energy resources. Using coal to produce diesel is a very lossy (energy-wise and in account to CO2 and sulphur emissions) and a bit expensive process, but for many nations, especially those with big coal resources, it's still worth it as they're securing their energy.
The current coal resources are likely to withstand a thousand years draining at the current pace. This can be compared with the estimated 50 years (that also includes all the oil we know about but still is too expensive to harvest) for oil, so if you want to keep driving your diesel, there is no worry resource-wise.
However, it is likely that the current pace cannot continue as the greenhouse effect grows stronger by the day and the CO2 percentage in the atmosphere has by far exceeded its natural levels. To stop the atmospheric CO2 percentage at a country such as Sweden's target level, we cannot burn more fossil fuels than we have oil, and that means no coal burning at all. We don't have an energy crisis coming up, but we do have an environmental disaster growing worse by the gallon.
It should be clear that I strongly concur with the other posters noting that the USA need a pollution tax for its gas. I say we should let this country be the land of the free and not the land of the ignorant. It's of greatest importance that the USA bring the emission levels down as the country accounts for 23% of the world's total emissions.
Cheap gas enables speed and distance for both goods and people. This has many beneficial effects, including:
- Consumers can afford a wider variety of goods at a lower levels of cost. This means that a person in NY in winter can get Florida orange juice for a modest price.
- Consumers can afford to drive a little farther to find the best goods at the best prices. Rather than be forced to buy from an expensive, small store nearby (as much as I like Mon'n'Pop stores, they are more expensive and offer worse selection), consumers can shop around and buy the best items at the lowest cost.
- Workers can find a better job by traveling a longer distance at higher effective speed -- a fixed commute time, but greater commute distance. Mass transit, in most regions of the country, is much slower than a personal automobile. Our area has a decent mass-transit system, but the effective speed is half that of an automobile due to frequent stops, schedule intervals, and the walk to/from the bus stop. Speed has a quadratic effect: a 2X increase the average speed means 4X the number of possible employers within given maximum commuting time.
- Workers probably can probably get higher pay by finding an employer in their expanded commuting range. With more employers to chose from, a job seeker can probably find an employer who will pay a little more to get that employee's unique combination of skills and experience.
- Employers get better workers. Imagine a company that can only hire people living within a mile of the company versus a company that can tap into a much larger pool of applicants. When employees are mobile, companies get better workers. This translates into more success for the company, shareholders, workers, and greater tax revenues for government projects.
- Companies can tap into suppliers that are further from them. It means that a manufacturer in Arizona can find and buy the best components, even if they are made 2000 miles way in Georgia.
- Likewise, each company can sell goods to a greater part of the U.S. giving them better economies of scale.
The result is both higher standards of living and better economic growth than we would see if we had high gas prices. I'm not saying that gas taxes explain all of the disparity between the U.S. and Europe in terms of economic growth and unemployment rates, but I'd bet its a factor. My point is that low gas prices have under-appreciated, hidden benefits that are good for consumers, good for workers, good for employers, good for companies, and good for the country.I have no idea if these hidden benefits override the hidden costs, but I feel that both sides of the indirect effects must be tallied before declaring that gas/oil should be taxed to inhibit consumption.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
Out here in California, prices surged as people bet the price would sky rocket and bought gas no matter what the price. The local 7/11 had people topping off their tanks because their price, usually the highest around, was 10 cents lower than in town. Most of the people buying gas didn't need it but figured the price was going higher so they bought while it was "low" at $2.90.
If the price stays high for the next few years, people will get out of their SUVs and move into more efficient vehicles. The oil markets will respond, just as it did in the 80's, and prices will drop in real terms. Eventually, people will forget and they'll buy gas hogs again. People do that - they forget.
Those of you who are certain that we're running out of oil forget as well. In 1970, it was common knowledge that we'd be out of oil by 1985. Paul Erlich at Stanford made a fortune pitching his dystopian view of the future and we bought it. The futurists who got it right were the economist who argued that the real price of commodities fall over time as producers and consumers become more efficient.
It's worth noting that the shift to SUVs wasn't due to just the cheap price of gas. Congress played a major role as well. Business used to be able to depreciate the price of cars it purchased at an accelerated rate. Small business owners used that to their advantage by buying nicer cars which angered folks who didn't own businesses and hence, couldn't get the same tax write off. Congress responded by eliminating the write off for business-owned cars. The accelerated depreciation schedule remained for trucks which GM and Ford exploited by gussing up what used to be utility trucks for hauling workers around into SUVs. I saw a lot of new SUVs in my neighborhood after my accountant sent out a flyer advising his clients of the tax advantage which was considerable. A very smart friend of mine grumbled that the "I want my children to be safe and so I have to have the biggest car available" crowd just got a tax boost and the only way to retaliate was to drive a Peterbilt to work.
Let's assume that since it's coming from a SHell PR department, they're putting the best possible spin on this. That means for each unit of energy delivered down the hole, they get back 3.5 units of equivalent heat back up, in the form of oil and gas.
But if the heat comes from electrical heaters, the electricity came from coal and oil-fired generators, said plants are only about 30 percent efficent.
So you're burning about 3 units of good oil and coal and gas to get, maybe, if the stuff really is down there, 3.5 units back up. Doesnt sound like a good deal.
I suppose they could do something a bit more efficient, like burn coal down in the hole, or put down a small cleanish nuke down the holes, but those ideas have some non-negligble drawbacks too.. :)
It's not the absolute price that hurts people, it's the rapid change that's doing all the harm.
In the long term, the cost of energy gets rolled in to the cost of doing business, and is budgeted for. But if the price more than doubles in a very short amount of time, it HURTS economically, since there's often no quick way to reduce your energy usage overnight.
INsigNIFICANT
and the CO2 percentage in the atmosphere has by far exceeded its natural levels.
I also found your post interesting until I stumbled upon the above sentence. Really. There's been a lot more CO2 in the atmosphere before in Earth's history.
http://www.spacedaily.com/news/climate-05zzi.html
it's in my head
Read about this topic on the The OilDrum a few days back. Seriously, oil shale is not really a solution at all. Why? The cost of extracting this stuff is phenomenal. You use up 1 barrel for every 3 that you extract(30 %).
First misconception " Oil Shale Will Save Us"
I worked with a major oil company for 2 years trying to develop a way to commercialize oil shale. Trust me on this, it ain't going to happen. Most oil companies know this. The few (one??) that don't are totally deluded.
Oil shale is not oil. Oil shale is rock that has a relatively high concentration of organic carbon compounds in it. Geologists call this a source rock. If you heat this shale to 700 degrees F you will turn this organic carbon (kerogen) into the nastiest, stinkiest, gooiest, pile of oil-like crap that you can imagine. Then if you send it through the gnarliest oil refinery on the planet you can make this shit into transportation fuel. In the mean time you have created all kinds of nasty by products, have polluted the air and groundwater of where ever you have extracted it. You have also created an enormous pile of superheated rock that will take hundreds to thousands of years to cool off.
The biggest deposits of oil shale in the world are in northwestern Colorado. No other deposit anywhere else in the world (China, Jordan, Australia, etc.) even comes close in terms of size and richness. There are approximately 1.3 trillion barrels of POTENTIAL oil in this deposit of oil shale. However, even those in their wildest hallucinations have never proposed that more than about 300 billion of these barrels were POSSIBLY extractable.
Of course 300 billion barrels is a very large number. Assuming $50/bbl, these $300 billion would be worth $15 trillion. Quite an enticement to go after. HOWEVER, - I still haven't seen a good analysis that shows you end up with more energy at the end of the cycle than what you put in. Moreover, it takes about 3-5 barrels of water for about every barrel of oil you get. Last time anyone seriously looked at where all this water would come from was Exxon back in the late 70's and early '80's. Their solution was to RE-ROUTE THE MISSOURI RIVER to bring water to this very arid area. I am not shitting you.
Lastly, you will be leaving the biggest superfund site you could ever imagine.
Will we eventually extract oil from oil shale - maybe, but it has always been a last resort, and for good reason. In the meantime, DON'T EVEN THINK about investing in this, even if the offer seems really good. You can't imagine how much money has been poured into trying to commercialize this resource without any success.
There was a experimental oil shale extraction project running in Australia but it shut down a while ago(don't have exact links atm). If it were me, I would be thinking about conserving oil than messing with oil shale.
There is another benefit, too. Besides buying more fuel efficient cars, more people will be interested in building and using meaningful public transportation systems. Public transportation in the U.S. is abominable. A lot of that comes from the fact that much of the country was developed in a time when driving anywhere you wanted to go was a possibility, so things here tend to be very spread out, which makes efficient public transportation difficult to implement. Up until now, the major complaint most people have about driving has been traffic congestion. So rather than focus on meaningful public transportation, most people would rather see more/wider roads and highways, even though it's been pretty much proven that such increases do little to help congestion. Now that gas prices are reaching the point where they might be a real economic concern for some people, as opposed to a minor annoyance, maybe we'll see more people start to look for alternatives...
Personally, I do grumble a little bit now that it costs over $30 to fill up the gas tank even in my fairly fuel efficient car, but it doesn't bother me too much because neither my wife or I drive on a regular basis. It means that we'll have to budget a little bit more when we go on long driving trips, but that's about it. Over all, i think high gas prices that we are seeing right now are a) inevitable, and b) good for us.
And lastly, as an aside, I always find it amusing how much more Americans complain about gas prices compared to other people in the world, considering that our gas is still among the cheapest in the world. I guess that's what happens when you are brought up in a society where it is assumed that the only way to get from point a to point b is to drive.
If I don't put anything here, will anyone recognize me anymore?
I am glad to see a slashdot story regarding energy as it will be the single most important topic that effects the vast majority of users here, their families, their neighbors, people they know, their jobs, etc.
Indeed, $3 per gallon or even $4 per gallon as it will likely be soon is not a big problem. We complain about $3 per gallon. At the same time we enjoy some of the lowest prices in the world. Our energy bill, which is a free for all 1700 pages, does little to curb mileage. They have designed diesels that can exceed 100mpg. We give tax breaks for large vehicles over 8.5k lbs based on weight alone. The breaks are specifically targeted at these large vehicles so that their extremely privelaged drivers can be compensated for their higher gas consumption. This class of vehicles was in a list in this bill that mandates small improvements in mileage for these vehicles in the future but it was removed by the administration. If you think we are making progress then just look around. Look at what people are driving, where they are driving to, what they are driving for, how they are driving, etc. You might see a few Priuses or some Mercedes Benz diesels running on SVO. Maybe one hydrogen powered honda in your life if you are lucky. Do it in Europe, Russia or Japan and compare that with the US.
To think that this new oil shale techniqe will drop your price of gas is probably delusional. First off, by Shells own words, they won't know if it is profitable or feasible until 2010. If the going price for oil is $69 per barrel and there is a demand for it then that is what Shell is going to sell it for. If demand goes down then all oil will go down. The only thing that would likely cause this is major economic collaps or "demand destruction". Shell isn't out for your best interest, they don't make money off charity. To the contrary, eventhough big business is firmly entrenched in the goverment, pushing bills that rule the citizens with it's vast powerful lobbying power, it is illegal by corporate law to make any business decision that will create a loss. This rules out charity for consumers.
The administration has just admitted that global supply hasn't been able to keep up with demand for three months before Katrina hit. We currently are living mostly on old mega-field oil discoveries. We use 4-5 times as much oil as we discover. Discoveries are going down at a rapid pace, they are smaller and smaller and Saudi Arabia has finally admitted that it cannot currently increase supply anytime soon. The anti-peak oilers will argue that this is all hype when the new wells come online and drop the prices this year and perhaps a little next year. But look at the facts with the mega discoveries and the capacity that we are using - this will be a shortlived peak. There is a lead time for these wells to come online; we know about these and we know about the years where there will be no wells comming online. Once they are used up there are few others to take their place. The world uses well over 75 million barrels a day. How long would a "mega-field" of 500,000 barrels last?
As people are so accustomed seeing important, high payed people on tv talking positively about economic growth they tend to lose sight of the real problem with regards to energy: growth. Business depends on it. Anything less than 3% growth in Japan is considered a recession. Domestic or global sustainability is not a topic for discussion, as there is there is more money in consumption and growth. And money is what rules business strategy and business is what rules governments, at least to a large effect.
We don't have just growth, we have exponential growth. A number that has exponential growth of 7% will double itself every 10 years. Carter said once that every new decade consumes more oil than all the previous years combined - going back to the first drop that was ever consumed. If you need another example think of the one from Professor Bartlett that explains the exponential function. There is a mostly empty jar. You drop in a few organi
Chill, already.
The world was painstakingly set up so that people depend deeply, emotionally on the flow of oil and money; to connect those things to well-being and the ability to obtain food and shelter.
That's silly.
The world is capable of making just as much food today as it did yesterday, and it has just as many houses and places for people to shelter comfortably in. So why should a few numbers stop people from eating and living?
Are people really going to starve and feel fear just because a few numbers start to change? For goodness sake! There's food and shelter aplenty. All we need to do is work to maintain and share it and everybody will be fine. (We could start by perhaps firing the CEOs and Government officials who throw chairs across board rooms and try to hang on to old family money by way of keeping the people stupid and subjugated.)
The whole confabulation of banks and economic crises, yadda, yadda, was designed in such a way that it was very easy to upset it and thus extract a fine flow of fear and anxiety. Like tapping trees for maple syrup.
News Flash: The economy is ENTIRELY a fabrication of people's belief systems; It is just as healthy as the world believes it to be. Be a part of the solution. Love is the answer.
Perhaps this contrived oil scarcity will give the much-needed kick in the pants to get alternative power sources a boost in acceptance levels. It doesn't actually take that long to implement massive infrastructure changes so long as the people in the driver's seats want them to come about.
-FL
You're not going to do something silly like imply that the majority or even a third of SUV owners drive them because they're actually pulling boats or off-roading now, are you?
The movie file of his presentaton. And the indexed transcription
Unfortunately for the environmentalists this is not what you wanted to happen when we started running out of oil but this is by far the most practical realistic solution that will work to give us time to find alternatives.
I get the feeling that while it would give us time to find alternatives, if it provides enough supply we'll just wind up in the same boat we're in now. That is to say, we'll put off looking for alternatives until it's too late again. It's happened before, it's happening now, and should this provide enough supply, it will happen again.
This poo is cold.
The alcoholic murderer is just another example of the Gulfstream Liberal hypocrites, sneering down at flyover country from 35,000 feet, clucking their tongues at all those selfish SUV drivers below.
Teddy, his nephew RFK Jr., Michael Moore, Al Gore, Laurie David, Ariana Huffington, Barbara Streisand, and the list goes on and on and on. They live lives dripping with decadence and luxury. They live in 10,000 sq. ft. Malibu mansions with six or eight air conditioning subsystems. They go hither and yon in their Gulfstreams and Learjets. They drive around town in their limousines and Maybachs and S600 Mercs. I have two kids, but Al Gore has four, and the Kennedys breed useless mouths like rats. Their footprint on Mother Earth's limited resources is ten or twenty times my own. Yet these pampered hypocrites have the gall to criticize me for driving a Jeep? Fuck them. Fuck them hard.
-ccm
Too much Law; not enough Order.
According to Pimental only. You'll find that every single study that says that has his name on it. There are dozens of other researchers employed by diverse organizations that all come to the same conclusion - ethanol production is a net 30-70% positive.
Besides, it's not like that matters - nobody is proposing that you use ethanol to produce ethanol. You burn, say, biowaste, natural gas, use coal waste heat, etc, and you're converting something that you can't put in your tank to something that you can. The Nazis powered their war machine late in the war largely by coal liquifaction, powered by coal. It took a lot more coal to run the process than the produced oil had energy - yet, it kept their tanks and planes running (till their plants were bombed out, that is...).
The reason that Pimental always gets numbers way off from everyone else are a few things:
1) He uses the worst efficiency ethanol plant numbers
2) He assumes irrigation of all corn involved (little corn in the US is irrigated)
3) He assumes worldwide average fertilizer numbers instead of US numbers
All of these are very poor assumptions. First off, any new ethanol capacity will need to come from new plants. Secondly, if the corn demand increases, people aren't just going to go plant corn in the middle of the desert; corn will displace wheat, which will displace alfalfa, or whatnot - basically, you shove plants that can take drier climate into drier areas. Overall, you need to use a little more irrigation, but it's not a "one acre of corn equals one more acre irrigated" ratio. Lastly, the US is underproducing most fertilizers, and this would easily justify ramping up production if needed, so using global rates is bad in itself. However, it gets worst, as the fertilizers that we do import are from first world nations (plus Russia).
In short, Pimental is the only major anti-ethanol crusader (occasionally the papers are co-authored), and all of the "net negative" reports come from him. Additionally, it wouldn't even matter if it were net negative, as you're converting things that you can't put in your car to things that you can.
sed "s/SJW.*$/... never mind. I was about to say something stupid, and also, I'm a troglodyte./Ig"
Surely we'll never see "cheap gas" again, but with so many valid sources of fuel, we're not going to have a long term "explosion".
:)
;).
* Ethanol: Studies by everybody but Pimentel (who gets way too much press, as pretty much the sole dissenter) says that it gets 30-70% more energy than goes into it. Furthermore, you can use any sort of heat for the fermentation process, be it burning ag waste or power plant waste heat.
* Coal liquifaction: Last I heard, it took long-term prices of 30-40$ a barrel to make it economical. Well, we've got that.
* Biodiesel: Expect long-term economics similar to ethanol - only, it'll support the soybean industry instead of the corn and sugarcane industries
* Tar sands: Becoming very profitable. According to my father (a pres of Shell), they recently ordered the 5x-ing of production from their pilot plant in Canada. Vast tracts of tar sands available.
* Shale: Now becoming profitable, as the article mentioned, and very, very widespread. Again, Shell is a big leader on this front.
* Methane hydrates/clathrates: No major companies harvesting yet, but there's a lot of research on it. Monstrous natural gas deposits trapped in ice-like structures deep sea. Even better, harvesting them (cleanly) would eliminate a potential global warming runaway heating scenario (climbing temperatures cause the release of trapped methane, which is a greenhouse gas)
These are just hydrocarbon fuels being discussed here. There are countless ways to generate electricity as well.
sed "s/SJW.*$/... never mind. I was about to say something stupid, and also, I'm a troglodyte./Ig"
My only major obejection is that a lot of rural Americans making those routine 30 mile drives you refer to, choose to do them in absolutely enormous pickups, or other massively overpowered cars.
Take a minute to ask yourself if those rural Americans have a non-leisure requirement for those "absolutely enormous pickups." How about coal miners in Appalachia, or framing carpenters in Tennessee, or HVAC technicians in Kentucky? Do you really think that a population where nearly 80% of the mobile workforce is employed in an agribusiness or mechanical industry should haul around their equipment in a Honda Civic?
For most rural Americans, owning a vehicle with a decent payload capacity is not a luxury--it's a necessary way of life. And you need a clue.
I've lived in Colorado since '79 and every 10 years or so, somebody brings up oil shale as the next savior for high energy prices
Fact is, producing anything significant from oil shale is a mirage shimmering in the distance - impossible to reach. Like the fabled "hydrogen economy" it's just never gonna happen.
This may be the biggest technological breakthrough in oil shale production since the mid '80's but it's still far cheaper to import from the Persian Gulf. Hell, you can stick a fork in the sand over there and start pumping.
The price of oil today is nothing more than the result of futures speculators spreading fear and paranoia. Big oil was pissed as hell when the price fell to $10/barrel back in '97-'98 that they're using every excuse they can find to drive it up now. Oil executives drop to their knees daily and praise the Lord that their buddy Bush is in the White House now.
You think it's a coincedence that ExxonMobile just reported a whopping 44% increase in quarterly profits - just about the same percentage of gas price increases in the same period?
If we were all to take Caltrain (which is subsidized) it would cost about $36 for us to go. We can take a car for under $10, even adding in the actual purchase cost of the car, I would imagine its under $20. And my car isn't the cheapest or more efficient.
There are a lot of hidden costs with cars. The cost of building, maintaining, and policing the roads. Unless you are on a private highway, those are subsidies. As well, cars are much less economical than centralized energy production for mass transit. Trains and the like can all run on the same power grid, from the same industrial power plant with better environmental scrubbers than ever be viably put into cars.
There is also the cost of lost space and real estate. Most American cities are 60% road. Reducing the amount of roads required for day-to-day transit would dramatically decrease the cost of real estate.
Also, there are serious health considerations to such prolific driving. It is one of the most dangerous activities. I believe more people die in car accidents in a week than have ever in public transit accidents. As well, driving can be conducive to a sedentary lifestyle. New York is said to have the least obese Americans because of the high use of public transit. Houston is said to be the fattest for precisely the opposite reason: no viable public transit. While I am not sure I buy the causation, there is a definite correlation. Obesity causes an enormous burden on health care, particularly public health care. Let us not even mention the cost to health care from air pollution.
Finally, the permanent destruction of non-renewable oil resources is not truly reflected in the market price of oil. So, looking way down the road, when oil becomes truly scarce, the transition costs to alternate fuels will be staggering for defunct cars and useless roads. Public transit on an electrical grid can switch transparently to more readily available sources.
So while you can say that it costs 3 times as much to take transit to to San Francisco, it is only so because the government has done a splendid job of hiding the real costs of facilitating that cheap driving. But these externalized costs are real, and their aggregate is only now becoming readily apparent.
I don't undertand why this opsession with getting fuel out of the ground when instead of gasoline one can use ethanol http://runningonalcohol.tripod.com/ Which requers no vehicle modification. Most gasoline now is 15% Ethanol. You probablythink that its hard to make it. Guess what--NO! it cost about $1.50 per gallon. One can make it at home,this is basicly alcohol. Similarly, with Biodiesel one canmake fuel very cheaply around from corn oil and the like. Not only can you use plants like corn, to produce the fuels which far,ers know how to grow,and we are not dependant on Saudi Arabia to get it. Bio-Fuels have much less of the pollution then fosil fuels. And what-ever pollution they do have,it is not really a "pollution" since it came from plants around us, and is part of bio-system (Unlike Oil which is NOT). So why we still using this expensive poison in our vehicles? The problem is not that people drive tanks on the street the pproblem is --fuel. Why should I care if people fuel up their $50K Hummer with biodisel?
Don't know about Teddy, but I'm sure he's not representative of all idiot liberals when it comes to using wind power. As for ANWR though, even if the optimists are right, it'll only run the country for about a year going by the mean average of the estimates, if the actual amount ends up in the low end we're talking about just 6 months of gas. US consumption is ~8 billion barrels per year, mean average in ANWR is 7.7 billion with a low of 4.3 and a high of 11.8. Even if the high end is right we're still talking less than 2 years. US consumption is escalating while domestic production continues to fall, and we haven't even mentioned China yet, whose middle class is already bigger than our entire population, with a desire for the same kind of lifestyle we have now, and they're importing the oil to make it happen. By 2020 China will be consuming more energy than us. So gunning for ANWR to us idiot liberals looks like a a doctor suggesting a band-aid for a patient with a ruptured aorta. Global demand and consumption has now so far outstripped all known supply, that there is no silver bullet anywhere left that can rescue us. No mythical multi-trillion barrel oil deposits that can save us from the wall we're about hit head on (no new major finds in nearly a decade now). We have got to kick the oil addiction completely, starting now, period. Raping what's left of the planet for those last few drops of cheap oil, knowing it only delays the final reckoning instead of avoiding it, is the act of a desperate addict who no longer cares about the consequences of his actions. We usually put people like that in jail (unless you're POTUS of course).
PS: 2000 acres of desolate land is a bald-faced lie sir. Its not 2000 contiguous acres, its 2000 acres spread out over a much larger area (that would require hundreds of miles of crisscrossing pipes and service roads - no roads exist in ANWR right now, none) which is far from desolate considering the tens of thousands of caribou and moose and various other creatures that move into that area during the summer, along with the predators that depend on them. That's why its critical: those open fields next to the Artic Sea is a lynchpin location for the entire ecosystem of Alaska's Northern Slope. I don't see the point of destroying that for less than a year's worth of gas. By just putting off the pain, we're only making the pain worse when it finally does arrive. In fact, this idiot liberal actually suspects, due to your willfull refusal to think beyond your next tank of gas, that your IQ is somewhere south of his own.