Posted on 05/17/2008 8:29:12 PM PDT by Cannonphoder
Crude Mistake
By INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY Posted Friday, May 16, 2008
Energy: With the price of oil spiking above $127 a barrel, the search for scapegoats has begun. Some point to the Saudis, OPEC's No. 1 producer. Others blame the oil companies. We have a better candidate: Congress.
As President Bush traveled to Saudi Arabia to ask the House of Saud to open the oil spigots a bit wider, Congress showed once again how clueless it is when it comes to energy policy.
Underscoring its failure to grasp the nature of our current problems, the Senate Appropriations Committee on Friday refused to end its moratorium on oil shale development in Colorado.
"If we are really serious about reducing pain at the pump," Colorado's senior senator, Republican Wayne Allard, said, "this is a vote that would make a difference in people's lives." He's right.
But the shale proposal went down to defeat with Allard and 13 other Republican members in favor and 15 Democrats opposed. Once again, Democrats were on the wrong side, opting to keep oil in the ground and punish you with higher prices as a result.
This was no minor thing. Estimates put the amount of oil locked in shale in both Canada and the U.S. at more than 1 trillion barrels. Pulling out even a tenth of that would quadruple our current reserves.
This is the same Congress that refuses to allow drilling in Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, which holds up to 20 billion barrels of crude, or offshore, where another 30 billion await.
(Excerpt) Read more at ibdeditorials.com ...
Petro Plumber
I guess we are planning to lock up our reserves so the Muslims and Chinese can eventually develop them with our slave labor.
We import 12 million barrels a day, and at current prices send out of the country more than $1.5 billion.
ANWR would cut that by 150 million a day. Colorado could cut that another 150 million and offshore drilling on both coasts another 300 million. That’s $600 million in trade deficit wiped out each day, or $18 billion a month.
Of course, if we actually provided another 4 million barrels a day, oil would be under 50 bucks, which would mean we’d only be spending 8*50=400 millon a day instead of 1.5 billion.
But as you say, it’s like the democrats are paid by Hugo Chavez to keep us dependent on him for oil.
The democrats will do anything if it has the potential to harm our economy. It’s a major part of their pathetic 08 election campaign.
That’s why they want oil to stay in the ground—so gas prices will go even higher.
Come on you idiot democrats, how obvious can you get?
If you like $4/gal Thank Congress in Nov.
Pray for W and Our Freedom Fighters
They're just doing what the people back home tell them to do.
Wayne Allard is one of the true heros in the U.S. Senate. Unfortunately, he’s had enought and is retiring. A veternarian by profession, he’s seen a lot of horse’s asses in his lifetime, but never more than during his senate career.
btt
I think you are a lot closer to the truth than people would care to admit.
OPEC shrugs its shoulders: So Americans pays $4 a gallon for gas? So the world pays $130 a barrel for what? So what? After all, it's not like any one's forcing American politicians to take this money...
Think the news media would pay attention to some Drill Now! signs at this point?
Not to mention the thousands of high paying jobs that would be created.
Talk about "settled science!" - the basic economic realities of supply, demand, price, money supply and currency value all get contorted and turned upside down/inside out in the headlong pursuit of a socialist, fascist, populist power-grab.
One would think that the lessons of history (such as, for example, the failed Nixon price freeze, the Jimmy Carter wacko fiscal policies, South American inflations, and the numerous failed socialist/centrally controlled economies) would have stuck with at least a few people who still have a voice. But alas, idiots and fools now blissfully rule; sure to blame yet someone else for the inescapable future dour consequences of their current willful myopathy.
Check out North Dakota oil development. Evidently there could be 500 billion barrels of oil there. Because of the cost of drilling there, they’ve just started to tap into the fields.
Gritty, that’s a poignant statement — if you don’t mind, I’m going to start using that line in arguments with anti-oil idiots.
Oil has not been missing.
The will to get out there and produce either crude oil, or a reliable and relatively easily available substitute for petroleum, is what is lacking. We could have an adequate number of coal-to-liquid fuel plants up and running, as well as a number of new-generation nuclear power generation plants. In fact, the nuclear “waste” we now have in storage in various places around the US would be an important resource in fueling these nuclear plants. We have the technology to separate out the radioactive isotopes that was not available back in 1960 and 1970, so what once was untouchable now becomes just another raw material for industrial use.
There are waste-to-power plants that consume solid-waste trash and rubbish, by a method known as Plasma Arc Trash Reduction, that both eliminates landfills, and produces electrical power generation as well, far in excess of the power consumed to start up the operation. There is carbon dioxide produced by this process, but it is carbon dioxide that would be produced anyway over time, plus no methane or leaching into the groundwater of various contaminants.
Carbon dioxide is plant food. In fact, to get a greener world, we may have to step up the proportions of CO2 in the atmosphere, or dissolved in the oceans of the world, just to boost the photosythesis activity of plant life, so we are assured of sufficient free oxygen in the atmosphere.
The watchword is actually to produce more and more of our energy in the form of electricity, by fueling the generators with compressed natural gas, drawn from the depths of the ocean as Methane Hydrate (just LYING there, people!), or from using the Fischer-Tropsch process to convert any of a number of carbon compounds to syngas, and using that to drive power plants. Syngas is made up of equal quantities of free hydrogen, which may be used directly in a fuel cell, and carbon monoxide, a deadly poison to almost all forms of animal life, but an excellent fuel in its own right.
The total number of alternative energy delivery systems is staggering. It is something of a puzzle why we continue to place so much of our reliance on a substance like petroleum. It is great stuff to make plastics with, and goodness knows, it can be transformed into any number of useful products, so its value is probably far greater than just as a means to generate heat.
If we NEED petroleum, we can manufacture it out of otherwise waste organic material, by a process called Thermal Depolymerization, which converts a slurry of organic wastes and water into a grade of kerogen with the application of heat, pressure, and a couple hours of time.
This could be used to reduce the effluent in wastewater plants, sending all the wastewater through this system, and letting the steam produced in the process cool and condense as distilled water, free of minerals, contaminants and pathogens. The heat could be supplied as a by-product of the operation of a nuclear power generation plant. This is essentially how clean water is supplied to the crew on a nuclear-powered warship at sea.
And you didn’t even include the new discovery of som 600 billion barrels of oil under North Dakota...
And you didn’t even include the new discovery of some 600 billion barrels of oil under North Dakota...
Oh-—and Cuba is slant drilling into US oil.... but we are not allowed to drill it.
Mark for later.
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