Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
So what IS the cost, per barrel, of pulling it out of the ground?
It's literally pennies to pull it out in Kuwait. But Oil is trading for over $100/barrel now. So if the costs are anything up to about $50/barrel to recover, there's still some profit motive left to go after it.
I've read all sorts of numbers, but I'm wondering at what point it becomes desirable, not just feasable, to go after that oil and start exploiting those fields.
And then there's the conspiracy theorist in me who wonders if they aren't purposely driving hte price of oil up in order to make exploiting domestic oil that much more realistic, and thus wean us off the foreign teat...
- Spryguy
There are three kinds of people in this world: those that can count and those that can't
Here's an interesting geothermal/nuclear tie in. Proposed expansion of the Olympic Dam uranium mine in the state of South Australia is going to require electicity equivalent to 75% of South Australia's current electricity production. There are currently experiments in geothermal electricity production being conducted a few hundred kilometres away from the mine which could possibly power it. People tend to forget that nuclear power comes from rock that you have to get out of the ground with effort and not some magic bean.
To complete the circle the hot wet rock was found during exploration of a nearby oilfield. The rock is actually hot due to natural nuclear activity but that is another story.
Oil demand in the US is pretty inelastic in the short term. This means that people will pay whatever they have to keep the heat running in their homes or to drive to work/school. If oil prices rise 50%, demand might fall 5% or 10% (as people lower the thermostat or skip driving to the gym).
As a result, if oil supply dropped by even 25% (as it did during the Yom Kippur War embargo in 1973), it would take drastic measures to reduce consumption by 25%. Like shutting factories, gas rationing at the pumps, closing schools in the winter, massive inflation (as transportation costs skyrocket), all kinds of bad stuff. In the long term, people buy more efficient cars or heat-proof their houses, but in the short term, only the most painful of measures can reduce consumption.
National Energy Independence means avoiding this. If multinational corporations threatened to reduce US oil output by 25% if their demands weren't met, we'd have troops nationalizing the oil fields within 72 hours.
One of the more intriguing ideas I've heard is to seed the deep ocean with iron.
Iron is a limiting factor in the growth of plankton, especially in the resource poor areas of the ocean.
Add iron, plankton grows. Plankton absorbs CO2, then dies, sinking.
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!
Well, technically we have already mined enough uranium that if we would just quit this retarded scheme where we use 1% of it and then throw it away we'd be set for centuries. Uranium mining continues because it is presently cheaper than reprocessing spent fuel, not out of necessity. Take my home country, Sweden, as an example. Over the lifetime of the present generation of nuclear reactors ( 60 years ) we will have built up some 12.000 metric tonnes of spent fuel rods. 96% of that spent fuel is still Uranium and actinides, which if recovered and fissioned would release enough energy to keep the reactors running for a millennium and a half. Of course, this is before we take into consideration that for each unit of enriched uranium fuel there will be several units of depleted uranium ( which can also be fissioned in fast reactors ) thus extending the resource further. Simply put, existing technology could supply our present energy demand for thousands of years without any mining. You would have to construct a waste repository, which over a few thousand years would accumulate the enormous amount of waste equal to about the amount of milk we consume in a single month.
/rant
Now, obviously this is a quantity which is far larger than what we could possibly figure out a way to safely store given 40 - 50 centuries of scientific development, so instead our energy plan is based on the idea that if we subsidize wind power for sufficiently long, they can indefinitely continue to increase in efficiency at the same rate as they have done historically (never mind that pesky theorem of fluid dynamics which sets a theoretical limit at about twice of present achievements ).
Gasoline taxes are a horrible way to decrease carbon emissions. Most CO2 emissions come from coal plants and industrial processes, so leaving them untaxed will not have much of an effect. For actual solutions to global warming, do some reading on Carbon credits or Carbon taxes.
Nice joke. But the real joke is the fact that people think our gasoline consumption has some huge effect on our oil usage. Actually our automobile fuel usage only accounts for 10% of our overall oil consumption. All those plastics that our cars are made of, and almost everything else we buy for cheap is made up come from petroleum :) So the next time you are asked paper or plastic? You might want to give paper another look. (after all, last year saw the first INCREASE in forest coverage from a previous year in quite a long time...so tress are on the rebound and reproduce much quicker than oil)
We actually have plenty of refining capacity. Production is up and consumption is down. In recent weeks, gasoline reserves have been as much as 10% higher than historical averages.
The reason the price of oil and gasoline are so high right now is the flood of speculative investors into the oil market. That adds a lot of demand, but it's not consumer demand. Production continues, and that oil will have to end up on the market eventually... Whoever the next president is, they will get credit for "solving" the problem, even though the important bits have already played out.
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
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.
Valero 13.1%
Conoco Phillips 11.7%
ExxonMobil 11.2%
BP 8.3%
Chevron 5.6%
Marathon 5.4%
Citgo 4.5%
Sunoco 4.5%
Shell 4.5%
Motiva 4.5%
None of these companies could be considered to be in a market dominating position, and 3, including Valero which has the largest market share, were never even part of Standard Oil. Additionally, there are some 50 other companies that control the remaining 27% of oil refining capacity in the US. People like to think of the oil industry as one unanimous big bad wolf, but that just isn't the reality of the situation.