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Posted on 07/15/2011 7:15:52 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
Just a year after the BP oil spill, America is on the verge of a new golden era of oil exploration and production -- unless President Obama and his environmentalist friends get their way.
This surge in domestic production would leave Iran, Kuwait and the Arab emirates combined in the rear-view mirror.
The US drilling boom rests on a technique called hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, to open shale-oil reserves. It's why wells are springing up in places like North Dakota, California and Pennsylvania, with thousands of new jobs in their wake.
Fracking has also opened up supplies of natural gas, sending prices plummeting. Now, even New York's regulators have recommended lifting the state's ban on the fossil-fuel gold rush that's pushed North Dakota's unemployment rate to 3.2 percent -- the lowest in the nation.
The irony is that Obama had hoped higher oil prices would make us all drive electric cars and install backyard windmills. Instead, they're making it profitable for US companies to expand the hunt for new reserves and to use fracking to reopen old ones.
Just last month, Exxon-Mobil announced the discovery of a vast field in the Gulf of Mexico, with as many as 700 million barrels waiting to be tapped. Other companies are using fracking to return to the Texas basin, the center of US oil production in the 1930s -- which will mean millions in investment and thousands of jobs for that state. Montana and North Dakota are sitting on a shale-oil formation that could yield nearly 4 billion barrels.
Not many Americans realize we are already the world's No. 3 oil producer, at 7.5 million barrels a day. The coming boom should add another 1.5 million by 2015. That's closing in on Saudi Arabia's daily total.
And oil-shale rich Canada could surpass Iran's barrel-per-day output in a few years -- so we're looking at a major shift in the geopolitics of oil.
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This would be a huge boon to the U.S. economy once the oil gets extracted. The downside is that it’ll take a while for the oil to actually reach us.
Last week, it was announced that the Chinese have purchased a shale oil and gas lease in the Powder River Basin.
I’m just guessing but natural gas is quicker isn’t it?
I don’t believe its the most economical fuel source for cars but its fine for heating which is also killing us.
**The irony is that Obama had hoped higher oil prices would make us all drive electric cars and install backyard windmills.***
Lets see, they can declare all new oil and gas fields to be sacred indian burial grounds used by endangered cumquat lizards and piddle fish. that should put a stop to it!
If I had to sum the whole page up in one observation it would be this: the term "biodiversity" is a code word for "radical reduction in Earth's human population."
Business as usual.
Yes Ted Turner is one of them. I have seen different numbers, six, twenty, and two hundred million, as the correct population for the entire world. The hard core eco-freaks want to murder the rest of us in order to reach those numbers. Goes to show what nice people they are.
“Not many Americans realize we are already the world’s No. 3 oil producer, at 7.5 million barrels a day. “
I thought it was 5 million barrels a day.
I would add that our MASSIVE 1 trillion barrel oil shale deposits in Colorado and Wyoming (Green river etc) are the largest oil shale deposits in the world. We are the Saudi Arabia of oil shale.
We havent gone after that because the cost of extraction is high.
So, in your estimation, we shouldn't even bother developing these shale oil reserves?
What should we do, instead?
Absolutely not. That liquid doesn’t help anyone underground. My objection is to the headline’s almost perverse inaccuracy.
How can you celebrate a golden age when you’re 3 million barrels per day under your peak, and not EVER going to return to that peak? Answer: you should not.
And before you spout liberal kneejerk stuff about “Well, I guess this means you think I should drive a smaller car” try this on for size.
No. You should not. You should not drive a smaller car so some Chinese guy can improve his life because if you’re an American, you want to dominate that Chinese guy, and they way you eventually will have to do it is by depopulating China to the tune of 1 billion people.
That’s your choice. Starve, or kill, because make no mistake about it, the trucks that bring food to your grocery store shelves do not and never will run on propane.
Good to hear it.
Your post was so negative, it suggested we shouldn't even bother to develop those reserves. Or even attempt to become energy independent.
I couldda sworn you were gonna say "We've got to go Green; it's the only way."
Glad I was wrong.
Just so long as you sign onto mass murder, because that’s the only solution. The history books will forget it after a few decades, so no problem. And we will be riding horses to town regardless of what happens.
What about CNG? Compressed nat gas?
North Dakota and California have been producing oil for a long time, and the first US oil well was in Pennsylvania.
Did this author do any research?
Yes, fracking is contributing greatly to the 'boom', mainly because it enables us to produce formations we have only rarely been able to produce economically in the past
Yes, America, there were conventional, vertical wells in both the Bakken and the Three Forks (Sanish) before the advent of horizontal drilling, but in most places, the formation permeability was too low to pay out. The oil was there, but now we can get it without the hit-and-miss of vertical wells.
We are looking at a potential shift in the geopolitics of oil, but in order to keep that going, we have to have access to our own resources. Government hasn't led, it won't follow, and it won't get the hell out of the way.
Where’s that awesome
“Drill GAIA like a drunken prom date”
sticker somebody had up on FR last month?
I lost it.
Sorry, no.
Crude oil is what it is for very powerful reasons that deal with pure physics. It contains 5.8 million BTUs per barrel.
Natural gas at room pressure is 1/1000th of that amount — 5.8 thousand BTUs per barrel.
Yes, compressing that will cut the 1/1000th number, but not by much at all. Have a look at Honda’s Civic that runs on compressed natural gas. No, HAVE A LOOK at it, carefully. Very carefully past the hype.
It has no trunk. They had to use the trunk area for fuel tank. And even after they did that, they still only manage about 1/3 the range of a conventional gasoline Civic on a single tank of fuel.
Another little absurdity in the numbers games played by the industry. There is the always popular “We have XXXXXX years of natural gas!!!”
Well, you have that much if you 1) can hit your hugely optimistic recovery ratios 2) you have that much if you don’t count the extra consumption that would occur if you tried to make CNG a defacto norm of US cars. If you DO count it, you have about 10 years (because of that crushing BTU differential) 3) Compression is dangerous.
Everyone has their own little underlying theory of why things have fallen apart. They want to immerse themselves in the intricacies of quantitative easing and credit default swaps, but they are wrong, in my opinion.
The reason the engine doesn’t run anymore is the fuel supply is choking off. There is absolutely nothing that can be done about this. Billions of people are going to die, and soon. Our role is to try to arrange so most of them are not Americans.
Thank you for your reply. However you are wrong. CHK is committing 1 Billion $$$ to the infrastructure for Nat Gas filling stations. Westport has signed agreements to help GM and Ford develop NG motors. Cummins is already building NG engines for the Big Rigs. NG is much cheaper per mile and burns so much cleaner. In two years you will be able to buy and fuel a NG vehicle. Then the marketplace will decide. Until then we should defund the DOE as useless as teats on a boar hog.
Make that three years. 2014. Off by a year.
BTTT!
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