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Oil Deposit Could Increase US Reserves 10x
HighWizard notes the upcoming release, on Thursday, of a report by the US Geological Survey on the Bakken Formation. This is an oil field covering 200,000 square miles and underlying parts of North and South Dakota, Montana, and Saskatchewan. A geologist who began surveying the field, before dying in 2000, believed it may hold as much as 1 billion barrels of recoverable oil. Later estimates have ranged to the hundreds of billions of barrels. Such a reserve would go a long way toward securing US energy independence.
Awesome! ...And in the nick of time too, the dealer just called and my brand new 6000SUX just came in!
http://youtube.com/watch?v=FLMVNyYb1SE
I wonder what this does for theories of for oil. Some people theorize that petroleum is left over from the formation of the earth, rather than created by the fossilization of carbon life forms.
This reserve may be difficult to tap fully because of the nature of the rocks. I wonder if nuclear weapons would help. I guess it depends on how and where they were deployed.
How many tons of CO2 would be created with the burning of 500 billion barrels of oil? BTW, 500 billion barrels of oil would be about 1/6th of the world's oil reserves.
Is there really that much oxygen in the atmoshpere to burn all that? Let's see. The earth's atmosphere weighs 5 quadrillion metric tons... OK, no worries there.
but, but, the global warmings! The sea level could rise 50 feet in the next century. [checks current elevation of homestead] OK, that's fine.
But it would be hot! [checks average temps for homestead] ok, yeah, I can get behind that.
What about the polar bears? [checks polar bear shares in 401K] We're looking good!
But the crops! The crops won't grow! [Checks map of world showing land in permafrost] Looks like a net gain to me.
Ok, yeah! We have more oil! Can we exploit it faster than we have more people?
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Sorry Canada. You're like a really cool older well behaved cousin to the US but if you have oil it's all over. Good thing Bush can't read, just be careful about Cheney!
Copyright Reform
Too bad oil is fungible, so OPEC can still hurt us monetarily.
So, how far back does this push "peak oil"?
If I have nothing to hide, don't search me
I wouldn't. Even with that much oil it still is going to run out someday. If anything we should leave it alone for now to ensure that we don't end up with massive shortages as we transition to alternative fuel sources.
Even if the field is as productive as the summary makes it sound, it should be treated as a reprieve, not as an absolute solution.
Soon it will be flooded with Albertans.
Giant shale fields still make for expensive recovery costs. And will this make make large expanses of the Dakotas like the strip mines of West Virginia?
-Rob
Biblical fiscal responsibility
There is already production happening, so go ahead and take a nice long deep breath now...
Moreover, with the oligopoly control of oil production, we may still never see such sources utilized because the companies that control the flow are more than happy to benefit from high oil and gas prices.
TFA says it's a shale deposit. We've known for decades that there's more oil in tar sands and shales in North America than there is in the Saudi fields, but there's the small detail of how much it costs to extract it.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
I'm sorry, I must have missed the part that explained how having a huge excess of oil was going to stop global warming... "Energy independence" doesn't mean having as much oil to burn as you would ever like.
There's a joke to be made about drinking milkshakes here, I'm sure of it...
This sig is false.
There, fixed that for you...
'Every story, if continued long enough, ends in death.' --Ernest Hemingway
For how long?
All this positioning and optimization and such is still missing the big picture.
And even if this does secure energy independence, is it really going to drive prices down that much?
do we have the oxygen to burn that much fuel?
Dear Canada,
Concerning this oilfield which lays below the Dakotas and Saskatchewan: if you have a milkshake, and I have a milkshake, and I have a straw. There it is, that's a straw, you see? You watching? And my straw reaches acroooooooss the room, and starts to drink your milkshake... I... drink... your... milkshake! SLURP I drink it up!
Bludgeonly yours,
the USA
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
We got to finish off the Arab oil first, to reduce their political influence in the world.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
How do you say "HA-HA!" in Arabic?
If we pump another 100 billion barrels of oil into the sky, it will destroy us.
If there's really that much oil, then some of the energy in it could be used to suck the CO2 and other emissions into liquid or solid byproducts, sunk into plastics or other materials we'd use to make things out of, instead of just letting all that pollution spew into the air. It might seem more energy efficient to let the byproducts just fly out, but the energy required to clean it up (if that's even possible) is like the energy required to put the smoke back into a match after lighting it.
--
make install -not war
Last I heard -- a long, long time ago -- extraction of shale oil deposits required abundant water, as the technology then used steam to liquify the oil and release it from the shale.
Last I heard, there was not abundant water in the area of the deposits. If a /. reader with recent expertise in the extraction of oil from shale would post a reply on the most recent technologies and the free or cheap water requirement, I would be, as they say in the Western Movies, "beholden."
Otherwise, like those in California's Central Valley, the extent and practical worth of such deposits is debatable.
Of course, we can hope.
I Drink your Milkshake you see?? ....
I am keeping my Hummer! This global warming thing is nothing but B.S.
Increasing our supply of oil will only extend the problems of climate due to excessive CO2 in the atmosphere.
Just invade. You'll be welcomed as liberators.
all this oil and were still gonna pay $4 a gallon for it even though we will be pumping it out of our own back yard... lol
...what would we do with the giant hole left after extracting that petroleum?
Cool, now I can gas up the 31 gallons in my Avalanche for less than $125. And my Toyota Corolla for less than $40.
~S
After the midwest turns to desert again (for most of its geologic history it has been) it would be nice to have huge tracts of arable land nearby. When Canada thaws it will be that.
I recommend we send Ballmer as a special envoy to Canada. If he handles it like Yahoo the negotiations will be short.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
There won't be any massive shortages.
As supply diminishes, prices will rise. We're starting to see this happen already; remember when $1.20/gallon was expensive?
As prices rise, it encourages people to conserve. This isn't happening very much yet, but that's just because the price is still relatively low. Yes, $3.50/gallon is relatively low. Think about how much driving people would do at, say, $10/gallon, or $20/gallon.
Rising prices also makes alternative sources of oil profitable, and thus exploitable. For example, Canada has enormous oil reserves in tar sands. It used to be economically infeasible to extract these reserves. But now that the product fetches a higher price, it becomes profitable and those areas are booming. This effect helps to stabilize supply, since as supply goes up, prices rise, making it more economical to find new supply.
And lastly, rising prices encourage development of alternative energy. If gasoline had stayed at $1/gallon forever, I doubt that hybrids and electrics would have ever been more than curiosities. Now they're becoming serious business, and as prices continue to rise they will become ever more viable. Alternative energy sources that look foolishly expensive now will become useful money savers above a certain price point. The higher oil prices rise, the more money becomes available for research and purchase of alternatives.
We won't wake up one day to discover that the oil has run out overnight and we're all doomed. Instead, we should see a steady rise in oil prices as reserves continue to diminish, and alternatives will slowly take over as this process continues. This is bad news when it comes to global warming, because I doubt that anything is going to stop people from burning oil aside from it becoming too expensive due to reduced supply. But it's good news when it comes to the survival of modern technological civilization, because there shouldn't be any great supply shocks as it slowly decreases over time.
It's interesting to note that price controls and subsidies on oil such as exist in Venezuela defeat this process and would be extremely harmful if implemented more widely than just a few medium-sized nations. The surest way to guarantee that we do hit a supply wall one day would be to have the governments of the Earth band together and decide to guarantee $3/gallon gasoline to all of their citizens forever.
I don't think that this "theoretical" oil field is going to help anything. The US reserves are higher now than they were in 1990. What needs to happen is the retrofitting of the new refineries that are currently out there to produce less waste and more petroleum products. ( I was talking with a representative from BP recently)
Queue George Bush declaring Canada a terrorist haven, starting a war without Congressional approval and invading yet another soverign nation... And Haliburton stock becomes more valuable than Berkshire Hathaway....
So predictable really.
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
Absolutely nothing!
This is inaccurate:
"Such a reserve would go a long way toward securing US energy independence."
This is correct:
"Such a reserve would go a long way toward securing US energy dependency on oil."
... Canada has just begun to beef up the military defenses on its long southern border.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
The region has sufficient water to deal with this issue. There are challenges here but his is not one of them.
There is also enough geothermal energy here that we don't even need the petroleum if we could convert and store it properly.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
It has been known for decades that there is a tremendous amount of oil shale and tar sands in this area. The challenge, and it is a significant challenge, is to extract the oil from these deposits in a way that isn't an environmental catastrophe of epic proportions. As is often the case, the wikipedia article is a great introduction to the topic.
Extracting oil from oil shale in the most obvious way involves heating it (probably with oil, but you do get more out than you put in, usually). So, you scoop it out of the massive open-pit mine, heat it, get the oil out, and then dispose of the remaining rock. Paradoxically, you end up changing the nature of the rock, so that it takes up more space than it originally did -- so even if you put all the tailings back into where it was mined, you'd end up with a new set of mountains. The net energy you end up with after processing the oil shale isn't a lot, and ridiculous amounts of water are necessary in the process (water the mountain west just doesn't have.)
It should be noted that the Canadians are talking about building nuclear plants in their tar sands regions to supply the energy necessary to liberate the oil from the tar sands, in sort of a nuclear->oil scheme.
According to the Wikipedia article, there have been oil shale processing programs in the past, some on a fairly large scale. They have fallen by the wayside as conventional oil has been so inexpensive.
I believe that the environmental impact of extracting oil from oil shale on the scale required to keep the world running on oil as it is today would have a devastating environmental impact. Probably not as bad as a nuclear war fought over the remaining conventional oil resources...probably.
I love Mondays. On a Monday, anything is possible.
Resource, my burning asshole. They have to say billions of barrels. Who the hell would buy in if they said thirty-eight barrels? Grandiose estimates like this are nothing more than the modern equivalent of salting the mine. That's a more complicated way of saying "pure horseshit".
The larger the "estimates", the more pressure on and from the local politicians, especially the those in the involved states. Those whores will, of course, attempt to push the development as "a valuable tool in securing energy independence."
And who gives a rusty fuck how much oil we "harvest" domestically? You know fucking well that we won't see lower prices from it. Hell, we won't even see a drop of the oil. All China and India have to do is hold out their hands with more dollars per barrel than we hold out and the vicious grasping bastards who run our oil companies will say, "Stand aside, American cheapskates -- we found a better price." Then you can be damned sure our domestic prices will be forced up to meet the price the rest of the fuckers holding our national debt are willing to pay.
Admit it -- oil is co-fungible with money and America hasn't got enough money left to avoid pimping itself out to the highest bidder.
I don't disagree that oil should be on the way out, but at the moment we still need and use it, and due to the current political issues with oil, I'd much rather be depleting a cheap domestic supply than the alternative. If we don't use this one, we'll simply use another one. The way I see it we should drill there and get the oil, but still focus on the development of alternate fuels. Hopefully, by the time this supply's running low, there will be a viable substitute. Then again, if oil's cheap it might take some of the pressure off alternate fuel research, but I'd hope people aren't that short-sighted.
As prices rise, it encourages people to conserve.
No, it doesn't. You're assuming a perfect "free market" with perfect competition. The oil market is nothing like that. There will always be a need for oil at ANY price. Just like some people will smoke at ANY price/cigarette.
This isn't happening very much yet
QED
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
So there's a good explanation for all that stuff under the north pole? This is a serious question. I'm not arguing - I want to know.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
1) We can get the fsck out of Iraq
2) We can be more critical of the human rights record of oil rich countries like Saudi Arabia, Iran, Russia
3) John Hoeven will be reelected
4) The price of gas will go down
5) ???
6) Profit! (For the Oil companies)
Canada has supplied most of the oil the US uses for as long as I can remember.
... that means that will stop invading countries with the weak excuse that is for the good of their population?
Even if it's there, does nobody ever question the wisdom of continuing the oil economy?
The environmental impact is pretty clear these days.
Save that deposit for making plastics or something, burning it would be a really stupid thing to do.
No sig today...
Yeah, all the SUVs being replaced with Priuses are just a figment of a diseased mind.
Not a typewriter
Now that we have oil, does this mean we have to wage war on ourselves?
Unless, of course, our usage keeps going up (as recently as 1990, it was around 6 billion barrels per year).
All in all, it would be optimistic to assume we'd get a decade out of each 100 billion barrels we get to the surface. A decade is a long time, but I wouldn't call it "energy independence." I could easily live long enough to see these reserves disappear, even if we do have 500 billion barrels, and my kids certainly will.
True independence will need something renewable.
GO Bush!
Competition in the oil market is not relevant to my statement. Conservation comes from the buyers. And yes, people will buy less as prices rise, no matter how much they need it. People do not have infinite amounts of money, and they will be forced to spend less once the price rises to make their current purchasing unsustainable. In reality, people will start buying less before this happens. Yes, not everybody will conserve, but that's irrelevant. All that matters is that global consumption decreases. The actions of individuals don't matter except in that they contribute to the global changes.
You state that some people will continue to smoke at any price for cigarettes. Try making them cost $100 each. I guarantee you that they will smoke less no matter how addicted they may be now. The same principle applies to oil consumption.
For some reason no one ever publishes an article a year later noting that the field didn't actually result in any meaningful increase in overall production rates. This kind of announcement happens all the time but none have resulted in a reversal of the continuous decline of US (lower 48) oil production since 1971. See www.theoildrum.com
This new petroleum deposit is actually formed from the remains of ancient long, thin reptiles known to slither on the ground.
If I have seen further it is by stealing the Intellectual Property of giants.
Is there really someone who believes this news? The current biggest oil field is Ghawar in Saudi Arabia with 75 - 80 billions barrel of oil. And you really believe that there is a much bigger field than Ghawar and it is conveniently located within the border of the US? Oh, come on...
(1 billion barrels recoverable oil is OK. However, this is not much as the world uses 30 billion annually.)
Government cannot make man richer, but it can make him poorer. - Ludwig von Mises
And in China they say "The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step."
So it takes decades to convert our society to renewable energy. That means we start TODAY. In earnest.
The conversion of America to alternative, clean, renewable energy (and not the Ethanol Scam) is an engineering and collective will issue, not a scientific issue.
If I were President, my plan would be to take a manual transmission approach to the issue.
Here's how my "Manhattan Project" would go:
Gear 1 - the quick, short term stuff. Corporate tax breaks and subsidies for electric car production. Electric cars have existed - even electric SUV's (the old RAV-4, anyone? Don't tell me I'm wrong, I NOW HAVE ONE - they're just not being made anymore).
Tax breaks and rebates for solar energy panels on houses and apartments. BIG breaks and rebates, proportional to the kilowatt/hour rating of the installed system. We fund this tax break by stimulating the economy - solar energy purchases and then the resulting rise in consumer spending as energy prices decrease ESPECIALLY DURING THE BOILING HOT SUMMER.
Start funding and constructing pebble bed nuclear power plants. Go bare knuckle with the environmentalists. James Lovelock, the founder of the Gaia Theory, supports this as an intermediate step towards cleaner, more renewable energy in the future. This should take 20-30 years to realize the benefits. Best to start now.
Gear 2 - Incentives for solar powered electric chargers for gas stations to power up electric cars. Make use of the existing infrastructure to change the infrastructure.
Start construction on a 500 sq mile solar farm in a sunny, remote location. Or break up said solar farm into several sunny locations around the country. This is enough power for the entire world during the day.
Slowly phase out coal power plants when exceeded by its solar cousins, but leave enough to take care of night time/bad weather issues.
Government contracts to research higher miles-per-charge for cars.
Gear 3 - A nationwide "give back to the power grid" incentive for homes. Basically, people who generate solar power on their rooftops while they are at work and nothing's going on in their house, profit when they're using no power and their solar panels are pumping energy back into the grid. They get 100% MARKET VALUE for that energy - exactly 1 for 1 versus what they would pay if they used it. Adjusted daily, weekly or monthly, however it goes.
Bigger Government contracts to research higher miles-per-charge for cars. Performance based. Now we start pushing for conversions of the big haulers (big rigs), as well as pushing them to bio diesel with emphasis on converting used veggie oil, etc.
Gear 4 - the first pebble bed nuclear plants go online. Drastic "as immediate as possible" cutbacks in coal and oil powered plants but not enough to completely offset the new nuclear plants.
More Government contracts to research higher miles-per-charge for electric and biodiesel-powered big rigs. Performance based.
Gear 5 - shutdown of all remaining polluting (Coal/Oil) power plants as all planned nuclear reactors go online and the solar farms are up, and over 50% of all US homes are solar powered.
Hopefully at this point we won't need Government contracts for high miles-per-charge cars; the market should reach critical mass. Research for electric and biodiesel powered big rigs continues until every new rig produced runs on one or the other.
Manhattan project complete. The big mushroom cloud you see is the giant earth-shattering KABOOM that is OPEC corporate heads exploding along with their profits.
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
Synopsis: the perimeter around a plot of "oil shale land" is deep drilled, the holes are filled with water, and then frozen, to form a vertical ice dam surrounding the plot.
The center area is also drilled, and the deep rock there is then heated over the course of a year or two. At some point the hydrocarbons literally boil up to the surface and can be recovered (the land is drilled, but not mined). The ice dam keeps the hydrocarbons from contaminating the ground water.
Shell has been working on this for a while, and I believe they have now proven this technology on a test plot or two located on the oil shale lands in western Colorado. At some point the cost of "pumped oil" will rise high enough that this option then becomes competitive on even on a small scale. After that, it should take off as the economies of scale increasingly kick in.
This article suggests it might already be commercially viable (at a price of $30/barrel):
http://www.rockymountainnews.com/drmn/news_columnists/article/0,1299,DRMN_86_4051709,00.html
The US should be in the catbird seat if it works--I believe the worlds largest deposits of oil shale lie entirely within US borders. We'll benefit the most too by making a general shift over to diesel engines (rather than gasoline engines), because of the nature of those oil shale hydrocarbons, but I don't see that as much of an issue. People are still buying new cars as their old ones wear out.
Oilfields will get annexed to china. You can't hold out like that.
That's great news...
Now, humans have not only 10 times more nukes than required to wipe out life on Earth, now we have 10 times more oil than required to put us well into a runaway greenhouse effect.
As for the nukes, well, at least we don't drive them to work.
http://www.dieblinkenlights.com
Are ye daft?!? South Dakota is viking territory, not even a cooperative force of pirates and ninjas could take it. Even the hicks of wyoming fear a raid of viking longtrucks comming down I-90.
I don't suffer from insanity, I enjoy every minute of it!
A little of the subject of your original post, but isn't one of the problems with petroleum recovery efforts in the US a bottleneck of refining capability?
It's hard to tell the cool to chill, my favorite hotel room has a view to an ill.
I think you mean we use more oil than coal?
There is a place to look at Leigh Price's unfinished work: http://www.undeerc.org/Price/
It is heavy going though so don't click unless you want to read geology.
Wonderful, now gas prices will drop down to 80 cents a gallon and I can give up my hybrid green fairy car. Dream....
http://www.bizfunnel.com/
1) Get a drinking straw.
2) Go to a pool.
3) Start sucking the water out of the pool as fast as you can with that straw. (You probably should not swallow the water)
4) Go to the ocean.
5) Start sucking the water out of the ocean as fast as you can with the same straw. (You definitely should not swallow the water)
6) Now explain to us all how the amount of water that you sucked through the straw was dictated by reserve you are pulling from. Or try this experiment:
1) Get a drinking straw.
2) Get a really big sponge really soaking wet.
3) Start sucking the water out of the sponge as fast as you can with that straw.
4) If you start getting less water, try a different spot on the sponge.
5) Marvel at how thought experiments can prove anything you want if they are divorced enough from the phenomenon of interest, but note that mine is probably closer to the reality of oil extraction than yours is.
ok then, i'll bite. It's not anything like drinking from a pool vs drinking from the ocean, it's more like an easter egg hunt. hide a thousand eggs in your back yard, i can guarantee the rate at which your kids (or a bunch of hobos if you have no kids) find eggs slows down as they find more of them and reduce the remaining population. it doesn't prove anything but it seems pretty bloody likely to me that in almost every case Harder to find == less things to find.
This is a joke. I am joking. Joke joke joke.
I'm glad that the oil sands reign as the most environmentally devastating source of oil will be coming to an end!
I stole this Sig
Good info.
Put this into the future file, I suppose, as the technology to extract it is yet-to-be developed and looks to be expensive in today's terms.
As you suggest, once the cost of drilling goes ballistic (and it seems inevitible it will) shale oil will be tapped.
Time was educated people were predicting widespread food shortages back when the world's population was 2 or 2 1/2 billion souls; that hasn't happened, by and large, and neither will we necessarily run out of oil as long as technology moves forward so to extract what poor reserves may be left in the future.
Don't get me wrong, I am not a fan of petroleum. But the expense of changing over to sustainable energy sources, coupled with the fall of the dollar and its expected effect on standards of living in the US may prevent their adoption soon.
Old news. Wired magazine already covered the abundance of oil shale in the US.. Funny that they mention this as a viable source of oil once the price per barrel hits $70.
Quoth Farnsworth, "Oil reserves ran dry in 2038." In 30 years, we'll be able to test the accuracy of this prediction. At our rate of consumption, I wouldn't be surprised if it didn't last quite that long...
Absolutely ridiculous. >.>
A geologist who began surveying the field, before dying in 2000, believed it may hold as much as 1 billion barrels of recoverable oil.
That outta fuel (pun) yet another hundred oil conspiracies.
Table-ized A.I.
It is called the price elasticity of demand. Oil is fairly inelastic in this case. As prices rise the demand does not change significantly. Together with a very elastic price elasticity of supply, any tax burden for oil will be mostly taken by the consumer. This is why even with exorbitant tax rates on oil, the oil companies are still making record profits.
Last time I checked, nobody had actually ever recovered a single freakin' barrel of oil from shale in even a break-even fashion.
However, I only did a half-ass job of checking. Surely to god somebody on slashdot can correct me if I'm wrong on this point?
The plural form of "anecdote" is "anecdotes", not "evidence".
sitting in the field.
100 billion barrels of oil,
sitting in the field.
And if one barrel of oil,
should be extracted from the earth.
There'd be 999,999,999 million barrels of oil,
sitting in the field.
You can guess where the song ends...what happens then?
When all is said and done, nothing changes...
US has found yet another massive oil deposit! I think we should bring you democracy you've been waiting for and free you from your dictators and oil and terrorists! Oh.. Wait...
following this announcement, GWB declared USA have plans to develop WMD and there is a need to spread democracy into that part of the world.
Assuming that a reasonable investment of public funds were made into the infrastructure, I imagine we could convert nearly all of our hydrocarbon power plants to fission in under ten years. "Reasonable" here is defined as "less than what we've wasted in Iraq".
Problem solved forever!
True energy independence will only come from a virtually inexhaustible (100+ generations) energy source that can supply virtually unlimited (scales with increasing energy demands) power. Oil deposits (or fossil fuels in general), in any form, completely miss both points. Nuclear fission probably fails both, too. Solar (in its many forms - biomass, water/wind, etc) might do, but we'll eventually have to collect it in space when we run out of space on Earth, and get much, much better at harvesting it. Fusion would be nice, but as always, is about 50 years in the future. Geothermal and tidal might be virtually inexhaustible, but don't scale all the well.
"the process of converting our society to the alternatives will take decades"
So let's get seriously started on it TODAY. The sooner we start, the sooner we'll be in shape for tomorrow.
No sig today...
If this is true/accurate... then all those lives lost in Iraq really were for naught. Not even the people who cynically sent them in for the oil will gain a benefit from it, now.
Too bad it won't do us any good . The environmental whack jobs will ties this up in the courts for centuries.
Nuclear explosives though are actually poor tools to fracture a well with since the intense heat "glasses" the rock and prevents flow.
"NUKE THE OIL FIELDS!!" That was a joke I made in high school, ~18 years ago, never has it seemed more frightfully appropriate...War as we knew it was obsolete
Nothing could beat complete denial
- Emily Haines
How exactly does oil in Saskatchewan increase US reserves?
... which means giving up our tasty tasty oil. You don't think we'll let you have cheap oil in any re-negotiated NAFTA do you?
Last I checked, you americans were talking about shredding NAFTA
What will it be? Cheap oil from your northern friends, or will you finally retrain the people who's manufacturing jobs went to Mexico and stop blaming Canada for it?
George Bush + Linux = "I will not let information get in the way of the fight against Windows"
The last big stock market scam before the US economy completely collapses?
Does it go on forever?
http://www.canada.com/topics/news/story.html?id=7534c4de-0c21-4653-a06b-112bc96b2708&k=6345
And it looks like some ppl may have a way to get at it now.
400 billion barrels to be exact.
http://www.deepwater.com/fw/main/Discoverer_Enterprise-141.html
google "32 trillion offshore needs IRS attention"
I drink your milkshake! I drink it up!
"The wise man proportions his belief to the evidence." -- David Hume
The Iraq war was needed regardless by the Bush administration, mainly because Saddam had started to trade oil in Euros. Given the economic state of the US, the dollar could not afford a spread of that idea in the Middle East or the whole house of cards would collapse around Bush's ears (it still is, it has just taken longer).
See Dollar against Euro, the war on Iraq. It was written in 2003.
I'd kind of rather we didn't have all this oil. I'd prefer that we just get on with it already.
"Taboo, like anything else, goes in and out of style."
Such a reserve would go a long way toward securing US energy independence
I see Nazi nationalist ideas are still going strong in the 21st century!
I fully understand that you can and we should shift away from fossil fuels as fast as possible and I strongly agree with all of your notes. However, I wouldn't restrict to just pebble bed reactors as a number of other reactors are passively safe and even just standard issue WPR are quite safe and quite effective. However, my main objection is that it just might be too little too late. I think there needs to be another Gear to research and implement some way to remove the heat-trapping pollution already in the atmosphere. Even if we stop as fast as you suggest we're still going to have 400 PPM of CO2 and it's still going to wreck havoc.
Also, for the solar power plant we need to make a lot more solar cell plants probably with the ability to mass produce like that printing solar panel tech which has started to kick into high gear.
It is no longer uncommon to be uncommon.
People always view the oil issue in terms of fuel, what about plastic? We still pretty much rely on Oil for that and we don't seem to be doing a whole lot of rsearch on new materials for when the oil and thus plastics run out
I want a list of atrocities done in your name - Recoil
(erm, we're China, right?)
Nice rant. But you forgot to mention that the American taxpayer will subsidize exploration and drilling but doesn't have a shot in hell at getting a return on his investment.
Just callin' it like I see it.
Horray! More oil to sell to Japan!
GO Canada go suck that well dry :-p
"No, it doesn't. You're assuming a perfect "free market" with perfect competition. The oil market is nothing like that. There will always be a need for oil at ANY price. Just like some people will smoke at ANY price/cigarette."
Bul*cough*hit. There is people that will buy the same amount of oil at 50% higher prices and there is always someone who will still smoke at 50% higher prices, but the average consumption is society clearly goes down.
Europe has far higher petrol prices than the US and consequently "fuel economy" is one of the first things people ask about with regards to purchasing a car. We have grown so accustomed to high fuel prices that many would consider the US prices to be ludicrously cheap (3-3.5 USD per US gallon compared to ~ 8 USD per US gallon in the UK).
The European miles per gallon average for cars is consequently far, far higher than the US. The typical numbers given are 37 mpg for the EU and 25 mpg for the US.
Typically it costs more to make a car more efficient (4-6% price increase for 40-70% increase in MPG), but as the fuel prices increase, it becomes sensible to spend more on making the car more efficient.
Also, people clearly drive less on average with higher prices. Lots of people commute over 60 miles per day currently in Britain.
I personally commute about 70 miles per day in total. This costs me about £7 per day in diesel alone. At about 200 working days per year this costs me about £1400 per year in petrol alone (not to mention insurance, maintenance and car depreciation).
This takes a large chunk out of my wages, so I decided to look for car sharing, and consequently I save about £600 per year in fuel alone. If the diesel prices had been half of what they are, I probably wouldn't have bothered.
On the other hand, if the prices increase by 50% I would still keep my car, but overall I would change jobs to live closer to home. The extra money I would get after deducting travelling expenses simply wouldn't be worth spending 1.5 hours per day travelling for. I actually think we are approaching this stage now. Consequently I would drive considerably less.
Do I bitch about the fuel prices sometimes? Yes, now and then.
Do I curse the government for "stealing my hard earned money"? No. I think higher fuel prices are inevitable given the situation we have put ourselves in with regards to the environment.
As always, life's like a Frank Herbert novel. I see plans within plans. Isn't most of this land part of the Republic of Lakotah, the Native American dominated land that recently (December 2007) declared itself independent and wants to secede from the USA? I haven't heard much of it stateside, but in Europe (at least the part of Europe I live in) it was headline news. In the wake of Kosovo, which the United States government accepted as a nation at the drop of a hat, many countries are being forced to look at the Lakotah peoples claims. Indeed, according to international law they have the full right to withdraw from all treaties with the United States. It just seems a little odd to me that with elections pending and a referendum a real possibility this massive "carrot on a stick" (economic prosperity etc) incentive to play ball turns up. I could just be exceedingly paranoid, but governments have done worse things for oil.
eye gas that's what that would mean, butt, i wouldn't bet my dog (or anything else) on it. looking at the wolfowitz plan, we're still plotting to invade/colonize/crusade into, even more countries. as far as we can see the nazis have not strayed from the plan despite demands by millions of US citizens to do so. what was that term attached to taxation without representation?
Right now, nuclear is the only viable alternative to coal that we have. Based upon the proposals for new plants to be constructed, it looks like Nuclear is quickly becoming the preferred source for new construction. It won't happen overnight, but I'm confident that we're moving in the right direction. No it can't... and it won't ever be the one and only magic bullet to solve the climate crisis but it can be a part of the solution if you use it sensibly. For example, in Florida during the boiling hot summer a huge proportion of the power consumption is due to air conditioning systems. So how about this: Instead of powering your air conditioning system with energy from a coal fired power plant, power it in stead (completely or partially) with the solar cells on the roof of your house and better yet, make it possible to write the costs of installation off as a tax deduction to encourage adoption. I have seen the same solution employed successfully in Germany (except perhaps for the tax breaks) where the inhabitants of whole apartment buildings have banded together, upgraded the insulation on their building and used the ample roof space for solar cells to reduce their reliance on grid electricity for heating.
If you really are serious about decreasing your nation's carbon footprint it is going to require a multi faceted solution that includes promoting energy efficiency. It also involves using wind, solar, geothermal, hydroelectric power-plants or generally any renewable energy source you can think of and failing that nuclear energy, before resorting to coal or oil. It would also help a lot to get the masses of commuters to buy more energy efficient electric or pluggable hybrids cars and most of all to motivate industry to make them available to the consumer. And keep in mind that this list has hardly scratched the surface
Only to idiots, are orders laws.
-- Henning von Tresckow
Just to make sure that this is a legitimate scientific experiment, repeat it a hundred times, and see if you get the same results.
If repetition is all you think that an experiment needs to be "scientific", you've got a long way to go.
As long as we're still dependent on oil, I'd pump as much of it as possible locally, using local labor. This way we don't send all our money to a bunch of countries who would just as soon see us wiped off the map.
At the same time, I think there is a need for increased fuel economy standards to make it last a while. If you're going wipe out all the savings I've achieved in my economical car with a trip to the store in your Hummer, then I might as well drive a Hummer too. Maybe I'll leave it running when I'm not using it to save time.
In most of western North Dakota, I think that the spacing is 2 sections (square miles). And I think 3-5 surface acres might be a bit high after they frac and move on. But even so, let's go with 4 acres. That's 1 acre in 320 taken up by wellheads. Trust me, we North Dakotans don't mind them all that much. We just want those wells to finally tap oil we hold a share of the royalties to, especially those of us who missed out in the 50's or the 70's booms. :)
And, of course, when an oil well stops producing, it is far easier to return the surface to pristine condition than it is for a coal mine. Incidentally, North Dakota also has large coal mines, all of which are strip-mined, and the environmental recovery policy of those actually works well - the surface actually is returned to as good or better conditions than the mining companies started with.
I would add that any discussion on oil prices that does not account for inflation due to our depressed currency (US) is pointless.
I live in Ohio, a land of extremist motoring.
On the upside, there is no property tax on motor vehicles, and insurance is relatively cheap. Fuel prices are below the national average. Hell, the supermarket sells discounted gasoline if you eat enough. Thank goodness my kids are little eating machines. Every so often, I can fill my BMW with premium for free.
On the downside, there is hyperactive speed enforcement, low speed limits, and the ultimate speed enforcer -- poorly maintained roads.
This place was made for Hummers and I see quite a few on the road every day. If anyone offers an SUV larger than Godzilla, we will set it first in Ohio.
I Drink Your MILKSHAKE! I Drink It Up!
I'm talking about commodities... take a look. And if you think the fact that a the value of a dollar is now about .6 Euros, while oil is priced in dollars, does not affect what we are paying, I have some beautful beachfront property in Nogales, Arizona that you may be interested in.
Is that 10% profit is not normal in a competitive market... Unless there are high barriers to entry (like in petroleum). 3-4% is usually considered 'normal'. It's called an oligopoly, and that extra 6% profits is coming out of our collective hides every time we fill up at the pumps, heat our homes, etc.
Refineries are built nearby. Oil companies collude to state that recovering the oil is very difficult, must recoup refinery construction costs, etc, and price of oil will simply remain at $100 per barrel, because the profits are just regoddamndiculous and they are already addicted to the windfalls.
Watch and see. 500 billion barrels does not equal price drop, it equals another 50 years of burning oil instead of making better plastics, investing in solar/ nuclear, shying away from massive CO2 emissions...
To me this is old news. I grew up in western North Dakota. My family still farms there, and every time I go back there's a whole lot more oil derricks drilling for oil over the last 3 years or so. They're all quite excited about it, because now there's an influx of people into an area where people have been leaving for quite some time. Businesses have a chance, and schools are getting more money. Most rural schools are having troubles keeping the lights on.
Now for the other matter of the environment. Hopefully we can make use of our local oil to reduce dependency on foreign oil while we're working on a way to shift our energy source to a more environmentally friendly one. Amory Lovins has some great ideas.
Yes it is. Some states/cities just have one refinery that supports the whole state/city, because they have specific blends that the state/city requires. Remember when that one went down in Phoenix a couple years ago, 8 hr lines for one tank of gas. The restriction on how many refineries can be built is ridiculous.
"If you like Battlestar Galactica, you're probably a huge nerd." -Stephen Colbert
Too bad the Prius gets less miles per gallon than cars that were being built in the 70's, as well as the fact that the battery is a HUGE environmental hazard and has to be replaced every ~7 years.
Big deal, we've got a huge, untapped reserve under the northern Midwest. Too bad we haven't built any new refineries in the past 30 years.
There is simply too much glass..
A new investment sector providing clean air to breath and non-carcinogenic water to drink is under intense study by investment capital firms and many major investment brokers. Oil is over invested in and prices will be falling back from the highs of today to $0.25/Liter. GM has plans for a new five-ton SUV automated/robotics factory that will eliminate all outsourcing/union problems. Environmental illnesses and deaths will significantly increase for the aging population and save social security for the future funding of WWIII.
... a few other nations will have more millionaires a/o billionaires than possible ever before . Religions are always helpfully supporting the PTB creating delusional dogma distractions. Anyway, no need for an anti-god/creation space program now that overpopulation will be a problem of the past shortly (20 to 40 years) and social security will be saved for future corporate welfare programs, government bailouts, and genocidal wars (much like it has always been used for in the USA.
Greater population control in nations that have rabbit breeding problems/programs can be done by proxy wars to support our defense industry better. The future looks bleak for many, but US, EU,
Unaccountable leaders are masters, and unrepresented people are slaves. How do US and EU fare?
Please please please please let this be true
Of course actually reading the article seems like too much work. Someone reply so I get an ezmode email!
- x - x - - z - z - z - q - q - q
Gawd Bwess Awmwaka !! Sinc wen is skatchawen Awmwaka ?? Owz twel thowz awabs to swuck my duck
- l - a - - m - o - a - s - h - l
But like any quantum problem, paying attention has an effect upon what the probability wave collapses into. Hopefully, by keeping one's eyes peeled, the world can avoid unwarranted disasters. Good job!
-FL
You guys just don't get it, do you. Nonrenewable resources must be left where they are. The only hope we had was to finally run out of fossil fuel, since human nature shows no sign of solving the planetary-scale problems it has created by irresponsibly using cheap fuel.
you had me at #!
..if most of the money was being put back into the US economy. The problem is the 'big bad oil companies' make an extremely slim profit margin compared to how much money the members of OPEC pull in.
If every penny spent on oil in this country could go into the pockets of the American working man drilling, refining, and delivering the fuel we would be in excellent shape.
Recently, three guards (two pensioners with pointed walking sticks, and a boy with a slingshot), have been added.
Reports are in that the troops are under-supplied though, with only limited ammunition available for the slingshot.
(yes I'm Canadian, so I can laugh at these sort of things).
Ok, if these numbers are right, then there is twice the amount of oil sitting in North Dakota as there is in Iraq.... so, maybe, the next time we decide to spend a half a trillion dollars and 4000 lives to go grab someone else's oil instead, maybe we might just spend a billion dollars and hire a few geologists instead.
This is my sig.
Dude,
There have been wars upon wars in the Mid-East, with the Ottomans and the British just one recent phase in a series of vast wars. That one involved T. E. Lawrence (of Arabia) who helped the local tribes learn to be more efficient guerilla fighters. Good idea!
So we've known the Mid-East is a violent and volatile area for about 4000 years...like in the Bible, for cryin out loud!
Think of the Irony!
It doesn't mean anything to be under the ground.
It means everything to be able to get it OUT of the ground.
How much energy needs to be put in to get out a gallon of refinable oil in these tar sands/oil shale fields?
I am the Lorvax, I speak for the machines.
Yay... strip mining for oil. This will go over well.
Prius also doesn't run on leaded gas, is restricted by a cat, and is much heavier than the equivalent 70s car due to safety systems. However, you're right to point out that the Prius isn't as good as it should be. Not when diesel cars of comparable size are getting the same or better millage.
In any case, the prevalence of the Prius and other hybrids on the road shows that people really are looking to conserve due to the effects of a free market, even if they're not going about it in the best way.
Not a typewriter
We did that here in colorado back in late 50's or early 60's. Turned out that residual radiation contaminated the oil.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
We're talking midwest, not northeast. Trust me, there will be no trouble getting oil from there. This is "Flyover country" not "undisturbed wilderness" The buffalo have been long domesticated, and the native grass grows so fast that it has to be burned off each year to prevent REAL prarie fires. No real disruption of anything. I doubt it will be any more dificult than doing oil exploration in Oklahoma, and the Native Americans don't seem to have any issues with exploitation of the petrolium resources there. Now, getting the refineries built to deal with our new found wealth, that could be a problem, but just getting it, not so much.
That which is done from love exists beyond good and evil
Alot of people like to rip on the U.S. for its longtime foreign oil dependence. But let's think about this. It is a well known fact that there are huge reserves yet to be truly tapped in both Texas and Alaska, and now this new one in Montana/Dakotas. Yet the United States continues to import its oil (most oil in the U.S. is imported) instead of drilling for it ourselves. Why? The answer is simple: you have countries who are desperate to sell their oil (because without it, they'd be poorer than dirt...or sand, I guess), and the United States willingly accepts their oil and even pays out the nose for it. But we also know that oil is finite and will run out one day. When these other countries finally run dry, guess who still has massive oil reserves? Yup, the U.S. To me, it seems completely logical. Why run ourselves dry when others are willing to do it to themselves?
Wow, is it an election year again already?
More oil = More supply. More supply = lower prices.
Tell me why my gas prices have been going up since Iraq?
Enh. We could already be energy independent. We have all the uranium we need. It's not a lack of oil that's preventing us from being energy independent, it's a lack of will.
We've known for years that Colorado has more oil (shale oil) than the reserves in Saudi Arabia (and the Federal Gvt bought these lands in the 1920s). Also only 15% of the Continental shelf can be drilled because the indicidual States will not allow it (Florida is a classic example). So increasing the numbers of the known oil reserves in the USA is NOT the big issue. The BIG issue is getting the Federal Gvt to seriously fund the development of new technologies which make the mining of such reserves and turning it efficiently into "oil" for refineries. And by the way building a few more refineries on US soil as well. Wake me up when the USGvt gets serious about such investment plans. Right now independent oil companies are still mostly going for the low hanging fruits of tradtional drilling into fields and pumping. Sure they are quiety and slowing advance technology for shale oil production, but it's not in their short/medium term interests to spend the time and money on shale oil production techniques. It raises important questions on the use of tax monies going forward. Do you want, for example, universal healthcare in the USA, or a c;ear path towardss a reversal of the Trade deficit within 10 years or so? All IMHO of course!
Really, climate change is a more pressing issue than adequacy of the oil supply, and a bigger reason to get off of it. But the supply concern, such as it is, isn't so much running out of oil, its the increasing cost to extract oil. Part of the reason this field is potentially viable at all is, of course, that technology to extract oil has gotten better, but part of it is that the cost of extracting oil from existing fields has gone up. The supply constraint is about absolutely exhausting the oil supply, its about a long-term escalation in what has to be sacrificed for each barrel of oil extracted. If you look at a long-term graph of oil prices (adjusted for inflation) reaching back into the 1800's, you see that it is phenomenally expensive in the late 1800's when lots of uses for it were being discovered and exploration and extraction hadn't caught up, then it fairly quickly comes down to a fairly low prices, has a lot of fluctuations, and then recently shoots up to prices not seen since the initial high price period before there was much knowledge of where oil could be found and how it could be extracted effectively, and there is no evidence that that trend isn't going to continue.
According to this cute chart:
http://www.energy.ca.gov/gasoline/whats_in_barrel_oil.html
A little more than 50% of a barrel of oil becomes gasoline.
And this little tidbit from the plastics industry:
Less than
oil goes into making all the plastic bags used in the US while 93% - 95% of every barrel of
crude oil is burned for fuel and heating purposes. Although they are made from natural gas or
oil, plastic bags actually consume less fossil fuels during their lifetime than do compostable
plastic and paper bags.
http://www.plasticsindustry.org/about/fbf/myths+facts_grocerybags.pdf
--
Seriously, how many pounds of plastic bags could you possibly be using in a year? How many pounds of plastic on in your car? A weekly 15 gallon fill-up is about 90 pounds of fuel, or a little less than 2.5 tons a year. My whole car doesn't weight that much, and most of it is steel.
Save your bags if it makes you feel good, but it ain't gonna make any real difference.
Because they're going...
Up--up--up--
Can only go up from here
Up--up--up--up
Where the clouds gonna clear
Up--up--up--
There's no way but up from here
I suggest that anyone who is interested in oil reserves, production, and refinary information go to The Oil Drum.
http://www.theoildrum.com/
Half-wit nerds who THINK they know something are welcome to LURK, anybody else who thinks they know something are welcome to LURK, and those who ACTUALLY know something are welcome to think about posting.
Assuming there is no economic downterm, then, consumers can switch to more fuel efficient living in:
a) the payoff time of a car - about 5 years. I'm reversed on my truck and station wagon, and soon as those get paid off, I'm switching to a more fuel efficient vehicle.
b) the payoff of a house - this is a tough call for many people, but living in a smaller house makes a good deal of sense. My wife and I have a McMansion townhouse, which was a total ego thing to buy, and, after a few years of paying $400 a month to heat and cool what consists of 50% unihabited space, we've sold and are getting something smaller.
This is my sig.
neither, thank you. i carry my own hempen (canvas) bag. why/by whom, rather. FOR whom, do youse think hemp was banned? answer: Dupont/nylon/petroleum. meanwhile ppl (we) die. the challenge: http://www.konformist.com/2002/herer-challenge.htm the initiative: http://www.jackherer.com/initiative.html
Canada has hockey sticks.
Additionally, Canada's wondrous winters would be the equivalent of Iraq's wonderful summers.
If you can't figure out that there is obviously a hypothesis, and a prediction, as well as a defined experiment with predefined expectations, you really are not a good judge of how far people need to go to know what 'scientific' is.
Democracy is like everything else: good in moderation.
The United States has capped gas and oil wells all over Kansas, Oklahoma and other states. Those of us with gas and oil leases want to sell our fuels but the government says we cannot. The government pays us a small pittance to keep our wells capped. The US already has enough domestic fuel to provide for a significant part of our requirements.
The problem is refineries. We haven't built a new refinery in America in decades. We will probably never build another. The population keeps increasing. Our demand for diesel and gasoline keeps increasing but we cannot and will probably never build another refinery in America.
The reason: Ecological Impact.
So, we will pollute other countries and send billions of US dollars to the middle east rather than do anything domestically. If you want lower gas prices and heating costs, then we need to uncap all those wells across America and build some inland refineries to process those fuels.
FYI, the reason we import so much coal is because of sulfer content. US coal has more sulfer than that imported. We export as much coal as we import for that reason. We send our dirty coal for other countries to burn and we burn their cleaner coal.
Banjo - The more I know about Windoze, the more I love *nix
One can say the same thing about almost any inhabited region of the world. It's not a useful observation.
Some will smoke less sure. Some will also pull out a gun and shoot people to get what they can no longer afford.
If we think the wars today are bad, imagine when nuclear armed states start getting testy about access to oil...
People in cars cause accidents....accidents in cars cause people
Keep in mind that it's not just the plastic in the bags which are made from oil. Once you get your groceries home those bags just go into the trash since you'll never find enough reasons to re-use all of the bags you take home. Those thin bags ball up in trees and animals and hang around pretty much forever.
The problem with plastic bags is not the oil they use in their production -- it is the composition of the bag that makes it impossible to break down. There is a litany of information on this subject. The great garbage patches in the Pacific are largely plastic, and no matter how much plastic may get broken into tiny pieces over time, every core component will not break down in any meaningful way. We are talking on the order of hundreds of thousands or millions of years before Earth figures out a way to break this crap down.
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Most of them aren't looking to conserve at all. They just want to be seen as 'cool' or 'hip' or yes, 'caring', by owning a hybrid.
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It's increasingly pissing me off the degree of naivete that everybody approaches the oil situation these days. Oooh, 1 billion barrels, that's a WHOLE LOT, right? Yeah, might want to consider that the U.S. alone uses over 20 million barrels a day. That's a whole whopping 50 days out of that one billion barrels. Tell me again about this energy independence nonsense? Not as long as we're depending on crude oil for it friends. Even assuming that's a HUNDRED billion barrels in there that can actually be extracted (and I'm going to say I kinda doubt it), that's a bit over ten years at current rates of consumption, less if you consider growth. Still not even approaching anything resembling meaningful independence.
As long as the US allows exporting of oil by greedy speculators, it doesn't matter how much we have within our borders, how much we have in our reserves, or how much we can refine.
Besides, nearly all of this region is already home to oilfield activity. The Bakken formation is just at a different depth than the existing oilfields, which have been in production for decades now.
Drilling at different depths in existing oilfields has been happening for a long time. The only thing different about Bakken is the immense amount of oil that might be in the formation. It has been there under our noses the whole time, but we just didn't know to drill for it. But even without this formation, we've still been finding many new pockets of oil in this fairly old region. Just nothing quite like Bakken is rumoured to be.
Here in Seattle, there are many many tall condo type buildings going up. As we live on the coast, and next to a mountain range, there's a fair amount of wind most of the time, day and night. No, it's not as "100% On" as Nuclear would be, but it's an energy source and we should take advantage of it.
I'd love to see every tall building around with a few Vertical Axis Turbines on them, and I wouldn't mind a subsidy to put one in my backyard. The wife has already signed off on it, and I'm more than willing to strongarm, er, convince my neighbors to let us erect one.
http://www.marijuanalibrary.org/USDA_Bulletin_404.html USDA 1916 Bulletin 404: Dewey and Merrill, U.S.D.A. Bulletin No. 404, Washington, D.C., October 14, 1916 Hemp Hurds As Paper-Making Material excerpt [From the "Conclusions" section:] There appears to be little doubt that under the present system of forest use and consumption the present supply cannot withstand the demands placed upon it. By the time improved methods of forestry have established an equilibrium between production and consumption, the price of pulp wood may be such that a knowledge of other available raw materials may be imperative. Semicommercial paper-making tests were conducted, therefore, on hemp hurds, in cooperation with a paper manufacturer. After several trials, under conditions of treatment and manufacture which are regarded as favorable in comparison with those used with pulp wood, paper was produced which received very favorable comment both from investigators and from the trade which according to official test would be classed as a No. 1 machine finished printing paper. (p. 25)
Yes it is a useful observation. Besides the thousands of years of almost endless wars the region was actually AT WAR 50 years ago.
the challenge (used to be $10,000., now at $100,000.): http://www.konformist.com/2002/herer-challenge.htm the initiative: http://www.jackherer.com/initiative.html bring your own hempen bag (canvas = cannabis). when will you ppl get smart? ;)
How about Europe or China? Both have a similar history.
Any state which in nuclear armed also has the potential to be nuclear powered. This won't necessarily happen, but hopefully they will realize that the best way forward is to build out nuclear power plants rather than fighting over diminishing reserves. Imagine if your hypothetical smoker could build an everlasting cigarette for the same amount of effort it took to acquire a gun.
I live about 25km from downtown Washington DC in a city of ~60K people. You assert that I should be able to get by solely on public transport? You can see *no* reason for me to own a car?
Let's throw out the idea that I need a car to get to work. I'll even pretend that if I was taking efficient public transport that my commute would not QUADRUPLE! I'll pretend that, but I don't believe that.
I am the father of six. There are eight of us in the household currently. Buying groceries for my family means one and a half trips per week to the store. One to the "regular" grocery store to buy what's not available at the "club" store, and one to the club store. Each trip requires that I move four gallons of milk and a lesser but substantial volume of apple juice and apple sauce, fresh fruit, and bread, in addition to the large boxes containing diapers and wipes. What if my wife wants bottled water to drink?
Is it reasonable to expect that I will load all of these items onto public transport and lug them from the nearest bus top to my house? What about when I need to buy materials for home improvement, for car maintenance, to buy large/heavy tools, etc.
What about when my family wants to visit someone? Should I really load six kids onto the bus when they have a play date? What if I have a sick kid who needs to go the pediatrician? Do you want my kid sitting near you?
Public transport is not always the answer.
But Herr Heisenberg, how does the electron know when I'm looking?
How's this for a conspiracy theory. We are deliberately using up Middle eastern oil while at the same time deliberately destabilizing the region. We do this for several reasons. One is so we can get much of the money we spend on oil back in the form of arms sales. Another is so the Middle eastern countries will have nothing to show for their oil riches once the wells dry up. We don't want them investing their money on education and technology so they can become real trade competitors when the oil runs out.
It's just a conspiracy theory but it's mine and I like to play with it on occasion.
Great...now you've done it.
The sheep are scared.
I use as many as possible and immediately release them into the environment. Seagull's piss me off.
I need to get at that Hummer H1 again. They found oil in the US!!! This means I can afford to drive the Hummer again!!! Yea. 8mi to the gallon. Gas suddenly drops to under $1 per gallon US. Wow. I can hardly stand it...
Yea right. (Pessimistic look on face)
All content in this message is copyright (c) 2008. All rights reserved. RIAA is prohibited here.
Regarding those links- if all the ways hemp is better than cotton and petroleum is true, that is great. However, I don't think many serious minded people will believe much of them since the guy behind those sites is obviously a big pothead. Anybody have some more authoritative links on the conspiracy between outlawing hemp and giving money to the oil lords?
being all creative and all. Seriously, thanks for pointing out the doomsday angle, that more often than not, is accepted as normative discourse by intelligent and usually creative people.
Can you provide a source for your statistic? According to the DOE, transportation consumes 68% (2006 report) of the oil we use: http://www.eia.doe.gov/neic/quickfacts/quickoil.html See "Share of US Oil Consumption for Transportation" about 3/4 of the way down.
You're an idiot if you think your anecdote involving bodies of water and straws has anything to do with the issue at hand.
Taking the Iraqi oil fields does NOT increase supply. It would be like if Target took over a Walmart warehouse and started selling their products. The supply did NOT increase; it was always there. It's a different person selling a stolen item.
.com bubble before it). More speculation = artificially higher prices = record-breaking profits for the oil companies for several years in a row. It's true, you can go look up their quarterly reports for yourself.
Our prices are increasing due largely to oil speculation, which has become the new popular way for rich people to become more rich (much like the housing bubble and the
One word is enough to put a dent in your logic:
EROEI
To be, or not to be: isn't that quite logical, Slashdot Beta?
Before everyone starts revving up their Hummers, consider how they reach the estimate of "one billion" or even "one hundred billion" barrels of oil. (yes, IAAPE):
Geologic surveys are conducted using seismic waves to identify rock formations that could contain oil or gas.
Or "we see something that looks like a piñata."
Next, somebody spends several million dollars to actually drill into the unknown formation to see if there is oil. Hopefully they find oil, sometimes they don't. As technology improves this risk decreases, but it is still much more rare to wildcat then drill known oil-bearing formations.
Or "we have hit the piñata and there was at least some candy in it."
Now the drilling "steps out" to define the full area which geology suggested contained oil. Much more often then not, faulting, stratigraphic pinch-outs, water legs (etc, etc...) will break a massive hydrocarbon-bearing formation into much smaller segments. Only very rarely is the area actually produced as large as geology suggested.
Or "we continued pummeling the piñata. there wasn't as much candy in the arms as in the legs. There's a piece stuck in the neck that's just not worth going after. Let's just eat all the candy that was easy to get."
Although it is interesting news, let's see if it's still as exciting after a few years of production. Oil fields are like recessions... we get really excited about them up front, but the really great ones can only be identified over time.
I have been saying the very same thing and also used the term Manhatten Project with reference to the level of effort required. Can you drop me a line using our company contact form at owonder.com/contact. We can start a dialog and try to bring about change before it is too late. Alex
O'WONDERWe're working on it.
Are you really trying to say that pumping oil from the ground is nothing like putting a pipe into a body of liquid and sucking it out? Are you insane? Last I heard, oil was a liquid, and they used pipes to bring it up. Maybe you should look up the word idiot before you start throwing it around. Maybe you can look up irony while your at it.
One bag of groceries produces some amount less than a bag of trash. Using those -- especially the nice large WalMart, Whole Foods, and Target ones -- as trash can liners for the small rectangular trash cans means I don't have to separately buy trash can bags, reuses the bags, and reduces the amount of space I need to store the empty ones in the house.
The actual "waste" part of nuclear waste is pretty small. If we reprocessed all the fuel used by the entier US, the annual unusable portion would fit in a small closet.
Now an interesting thing is that if you hit atoms with neutrons they tend to turn into different atoms that tend to have shorter half-lives....
Interesting thing #2, current nuclear reactors must be sheilded against the excess neutrons they produce...
So we line fast breeder reactors with the waste and it gets converted into stuff with 50 year half lives instead of 100,000 year halflives...
Saying that "Earth can't break this crap down" is another way of saying "Man has removed this crap from the carbon cycle".
If indeed we are killing the planet by pumping too much carbon into the atmosphere, this is exactly the sort of permanent carbon fixation that will be required if it is ever to be set right. We need to get busy with it.
What modifications have you made to your Hummer to get it to sip fuel like that? What hypermiling techniques do you use?
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
"It doesn't do the Government's case any favours if you've got statements being made that aren't supported by the scientific literature that's out there. With larger mammals it's fishing gear that's the big problem. On a global basis plastic bags aren't an issue. It would be great if statements like these weren't made."
He didn't say you have no reason to own a car; he said you should have no need to own a car. In other words, you should have the (practical) option not to.
That is often the case for existing transit. It's why there's a need to invest in better transit, combined with good walkable transit-oriented development.
Your big mistake is to assume that everything will stay pretty much the same, except you won't have a car. That's not how it works. Roads and parking lots take a huge amount of space (many stores have parking lots several times the size of the building itself). With fewer cars, distances decrease significantly. When walking, biking, and taking transit are practical, many people choose to live more centrally, often forgoing the exorbitant $6,000-$7,000+ annual expense of keeping a car (or second car). Businesses respond by providing goods and services that make sense for people who don't have a vehicle to take things home (e.g., IKEA's $50 delivery service is peanuts beside the cost of car ownership).
Then there is no need to lug groceries on transit, or to use transit to trek off to the doctor. Shopping, medical services, and so on are within reasonable walking distance. Shopping doesn't have to be a weekly event - you can do most of it by buying a few things on your way home from work. You have six kids? Send some of them. My mother regularly sent me to buy groceries when I was a kid. Better still, you don't have to schedule play dates when you drive them to their friends' houses - they can make the trip themselves on foot or on transit. Occasional needs to carry large or heavy things are easily met by delivery services whose quality is bound to increase with demand.
I know this because I'm in my mid-30s; since my teens I have always lived within walking distance (no more than 15 minutes, usually less than 10) of most of these things: in Ottawa, in Toronto, in Calgary, in Switzerland, and in a suburb of Vancouver. The town I was in in Switzerland is about the size of your town: 70,000 people. The quality of life there was very high (I would rate it much higher than Canada), but I rarely had to step inside a vehicle of any kind due to local shops, services, and employment. Where I live now is still car oriented, but that's changing. From my suburban house I can walk to most shops and services within 5-10 minutes. My wife's commute by transit takes her twice as long as driving in light traffic (which it seldom is), but she is able to read or relax on the train. The local Safeway has a parking space reserved for a co-op vehicle (join the co-op for a few hundred dollars, then reserve it and pay for usage on those rare occasions when you need a car).
Frankly, Metro Vancouver is not that progressive despite its claims. But downtown, which has densified dramatically over the past 15 years, has experienced a drop in traffic as the number of people has increased, yet it is extremely trendy (to the point where it's too expensive). No-one is saying you shouldn't have the choice to own a car - only that you should also have the choice to not own one. The evidence is that given that choice, many people would take it.
It could be used if there was an efficient method of storing excess solar energy. They do an interesting thing in France with their nuclear/hydroelectric grid setup, where excess nuclear power is used to pump water from a downstream dam to an upstream one. In effect, the two dams are a large battery, releasing water from the upper to the lower to release the energy, and pumping it back upstream to recharge it. Other alternatives would be storing excess energy as hydrogen through water electrolysis, and recombining in a fuel cell to release the energy, though the economics of fuel cell catalytic membranes are not quite ready for this. Add to these solutions the superconducting "Supergrid" planned for the US, and you can load balance across the continent as different areas have different levels of solar exposure and usage requirements. These problems are solvable, and solar really could replace coal as the principle source of power for the US grid, with some ingenuity. It's just a question of how badly we want it.
"I like systems, their application excepted", George Sand (French)
Resource, my burning asshole. They have to say billions of barrels. Who the hell would buy in if they said thirty-eight barrels? Grandiose estimates like this are nothing more than the modern equivalent of salting the mine. That's a more complicated way of saying "pure horseshit".
The larger the "estimates", the more pressure on and from the politicians, especially the those in the involved states. Those whores will, of course, attempt to push the development as "a valuable tool in securing energy independence."
And who gives a rusty fuck how much oil we "harvest" domestically? You know fucking well that we won't see lower prices from it. Hell, we won't even see a drop of the oil. All China and India have to do is hold out their hands with more dollars per barrel than we hold out and the vicious grasping bastards who run our oil companies will say, "Stand aside, American cheapskates -- we found a better price." Then you can be damned sure our domestic prices will be forced up to meet the price the rest of the fuckers holding our national debt are willing to pay. And still, not a drop will show up in your gas tank. Suckers.
Admit it -- oil is co-fungible with money and America hasn't got enough money left to avoid pimping itself out to the highest bidder.
Water evaporates as it is used and returns to its reservoir in the form of rain. The supply is theoretically infinite. However, oil is consumed when it is used, and parts of it stay in the atmosphere, creating the harmful greenhouse effect.
Aside from the fact that water is fundamentally different from oil, you haven't analyzed the size of the oil reserves whatsoever. How do you know that comparing this oil reserve to that oil reserve is the same as comparing a swimming pool to the ocean? Is that exactly how large they are relative to one another? What if using the oil was more like sipping out of a tall glass as opposed to a plastic dixie cup? Then, even if we could only "suck" so much, we'd still exhaust the reserve quickly.
In summary, you're ironically idiotic. Just because you're sucking a liquid through something "hundreds of times" does not make that "a legitimate scientific experiment." It has nothing to do with the issue at all, you're just running your mouth like a backwater yokel.
That's right, the real reason we're all still dependent on foreign oil is because of environmentalists. Do you even listen to yourself speak?
Free Hans!
Just because folks *LIVE* within 10-20km of a major city doesn't mean they might not need or want to travel ELSEWHERE BEYOND where public transportation will take them! /4-wheelin'!
According to statistics, Saudi Arabia is planning to produce 12 million barrels of oil a day by 2009. So doing quick math, that would mean 4.2 billion barrels a year. If we had about 100 billion barrels, that would set us for about 23.4 years. Given how other technologies are advancing, that should be enough time for us to progress to a point where we wouldn't need oil at all.
will it be enough for my Canyonero?
"You are only young once, but you can be immature forever." -www.animemusicvideos.org
The dolemite acts as the resevoir , the bottom shale acts as the source rock, and the top shale acts as the cap rock. link
The oil generated in the source rock rises up (because it is less dense than surrounding materials) concentrates in the resevoir rock (because of the resevoir rock's highter porosity) and is trapped by further migration by a less permeable cap rock.
Just a quick guide to petroleum geology. Please don't get me into multi-phasic fluid flow :-)
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I'm right and it isn't a tin foil hat conspiracy! It is true that once Ohio drivers venture out past their confines they become the assholes we have all come to dread on the highways.
Now if could just get them to admit that the Cincinnati airport is the first part of their plan to invade and take over Kentucky.
I'll give the other points, but where do you get that the battery has to be replaced every 7 (ish) years? I don't have the link handy, but I recall reading that of all the 2001 Prius'es (Prii?) sold in North America, there have only been something like 15-25 batteries replaced yet.
Baby trees get caught underneath discarded plastic bags. Then they grow through the handle loops, and start to choke. It's so sad.
That is not quite as absurd as it seems on its face. 'Environmentalists' are a huge group whose goals range from 'be more efficient for the benefit to humanity in the long-term' to 'exterminate humans because they are inherently evil'. There are environmentalists who want to move away from petroleum dependency while others fight nuclear, wind, solar, and hydro due to possible or inevitable impacts on wildlife through operation or manufacture.
So no, it is not unreasonable to assert that environmentalists may, in the end, prolong petroleum dependency. It is one thing to identify a problem, and another to successfully identify and execute a plan to solve the problem. While both are important, environmentalists by and large begin and end at the former without real consideration for the latter.
Because the left wing elitists in the US, while complaining about energy independence out of one side of their mouths, won't allow us to drill it for 'environmental' reasons. Remember ANWR?
All they really want is for the US to go back to the stone age as payback for two centuries of oppressing minorities and stealing their land.
Yay liberalism..
Now that the US is found to have oil, I wonder who is going to liberate our people?
So, um, you have a buffalo flap in your back door? Awesome.
You clearly did not look up the word ironic, as you misused it.
Perhaps you should read up on what the Scientific Method is. Making a hypothesis, designing experiments that can disprove that hypothesis, performing the test repeatedly, and make a conclusion from those tests, IS the Scientific Method. The Peak Oil Theory is fundamentally based on the idea that you can determine the quantity of a liquid in a container by measuring the flow rate of the liquid through a pipe when there is still flow. My experiment tests this Theory. It is repeatable. This is the very definition of a legitimate scientific experiment.
Using a tall glass or a plastic dixie cup would work just fine too. Any container that can hold enough liquid to suck water out of without running dry before the experiment is over will work just fine. The fact that water evaporates is irrelevant to the experiment, as the hypothesis is NOT whether the liquid will ever run out or not. Pollution and and greenhouse effects are irrelevant to the experiment that disproves the Peak Oil Myth, as the Peak Oil Hypothesis is not that oil will pollute. It is the absurd belief that you can tell the amount of liquid in a non-empty container by measuring it's flow rate.
Your simply being aggressively ignorant. You clearly don't know what the words you are using mean. Really. Go look up "ironic", "scientific experiment", and "idiot". They don't mean what you think they mean.
that's asking way 2 much from the public:-( reminds me of the last time record oil company profits were in the news: unka walter cronkite (krankheit: german for disease;-) blathering about obscene profits, totally without perspective: ~2-4%, while @ the time cbs was making 50% profit, and unka disease was "earning" $1e6/yr for sitting on his fat ass reading from a teleprompter:-( perspective, indeed:-(
for most people it's the only time they have to themselves...and i know i don't want to have to smell other people;-}
to effectively defend canada, the first thing you need to do is get that chip off your shoulder. talk about an inferiority complex
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
No, but I can drive by several buffalo farms when I go to visit my parents. So, I'd say that they have been domesticated. Oh, and I don't have a sheep flap in my back door either, and those were the second animals humans domesticated. Thanks for trying, but your snark has missed base. Please understand that domesticated doesn't mean pet.
That which is done from love exists beyond good and evil
There goes all that beautiful wilderness. All because America won't accept the futile inevitability of fossil fuel scarcity and find a serious, permanent alternative.
The USGS is reporting 3 to 4.3 billion barrels are technically recoverable: http://www.usgs.gov/newsroom/article.asp?ID=1911&from=rss_home
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