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>>More peak oil nonsense.<<

All the easy to get to stuff has been tapped in the free world. Over time we will have to rely on more and more on expensive sources of fuel like what we are doing in the Gulf of Mexico. But there will be a limit to how high oil prices will go imho. And that is because there is a ton of coal available, which can be turned into a liquid like gasoline. It takes a ton of money to set up a plant and investors are hesitant because if the price of oil were to return to levels from 10 years ago, the whole thing falls apart.

It would be nice if the feds would come in and offer a guaranteed minimum price from these plants so they could at least break even if the price of oil plummets. This way dozens of these plants could go up. The result of this is that OPEC makes less money, more supply pushes down the price of oil, ppl in our country have jobs. And if prices did collapse, it would be a boon to our economy to have cheap oil. So the Feds would more than make up for the lost revenue as the economy expands. The CEO of Jet Blue outlined this type of proposal around five years ago. I think he wanted around 100 large scale coal to liquid plants. IIRC the point isn’t to replace drilling with coal, but simply to add to the existing supply. He noted that because of tight supply vs. demand oil price is high. And further, you didn’t need all that much additional supply to significantly push down the price. I believe his plan was to use coal to add the equivalent of 5 million barrels of oil per day. And of course all this money stays in our country instead of going over seas.