Posted on 01/09/2009 3:09:49 PM PST by decimon
The large scale cost of getting a lot more oil is currently $200-400 billion to get each 100 billion bbl. 100 billion barrels is about a 14 year supply of oil for the United States. It is about a 3.5 year supply of oil for the world. The Oil industry's 2008 -pre-crash global exploration and development spending was $260 billion/year.
Recently there have been several major announcements in regards to coal liquification and coal gasification. Coal is getting cost competitive with oil from the oilsands and as way to produce more natural gas. Natural gas is already generated from coal.
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This site does not like that 3 million people die each year from fossil fuel pollution . This site would dislike the collapse of modern technological civilization even more as it would result in even more deaths.
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(Excerpt) Read more at nextbigfuture.com ...
Gas pang ping.
Don’t you just love it when some twit writes something like that on his blog with out reference to any authority for such an alarmist statement?
I have never seen any reputable study that published such drivel.
How could anyone possibly prove such a statement? There are only a few cities in the world where one could arguably say that people were dying from fossil fuel pollution. Two that I can think of are Mexico City and Beijing, China. The total deaths of all causes in cities that one could say people may be dying of fossil fuel pollution would not add up to 3 million per year.
And there is no where in the USA that I would say people were provably dying of fossil fuel pollution. Some people in the US may have underlying health conditions that are aggravated by fossil fuel pollution but one could only say that fossil fuel pollution was a contributing factor in those deaths.
I really hate it when conservatives bow to liberals facetious arguments to try to sound caring and reasonable.
Indonesia is going to build a million barrel a day coal-to-liquid plant.
China is in the planning stages with Sasol to do the same thing.
The difference is that they take energy seriously. I want to see us take our energy independence at least as seriously as they do. We should be building a coal-to-liquid plant in every coal producing state. At the scale Indonesia is planning, it would only take two of them to replace Persian Gulf oil.
Just two.
The problem is economic. Truly replacing Persian Gulf oil with more expensive oil would place us at an economic disadvantage to those nations using the cheaper oil. And the cheaper oil would be quite cheap minus the US market.
Let projects like this go through and the oil market will adjust to find some good-as-it-gets equilibrium.
That's how I see it, anyway.
Indonesia is one of the OPEC members and a major oil producer. But they look ahead and see oil production dropping, so they aren’t going to wait for it.
China is going where ever they can to buy oil, but they’ve made a judgement that making their own at $35 a barrel is better than paying $40 or $50 or $200.
Sasol has been doing it in South Africa since the ‘60s and was also heavily involved through licensing of the “Fischer-Tropsch Synthesis” process at PetroSA (previously Mossgas).
Sasol (Google the name) started out and still is converting coal into petrol - aka gasoline - and other petro chemical products.
Natural gas conversion using a similar process started at Mossel Bay in South Africa in the late ‘80s,early ‘90s. Runour has it that their offshore gas fields are drying and will be out of natural gas soon.
The process has been in operation for decades and is nothing new.
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