Posted on 02/22/2015 10:55:50 AM PST by Red Badger
Many companies are now involved in the business of obtaining oil and gas from shale. Their expertise and interest is not going to simply disappear. The technology that has contributed to the cost-benefits of obtaining this shale oil is not going to go away. In fact, the technology is continuing to advance and lower the cost per well further. There is continuing effort to do the fracking with air/gas instead of water. If that can be mastered (I probably ought to have used “When” instead of “If”) the cost and political resistance will plummet.
There is no turning back... and we know that there is on the order of 100+ years of shale oil already known available in the US, and even more gas. By the next century, it is likely that other advances will make it unnecessary to worry about getting to all that oil.
In any event, the current technology places a severe cap on the price that any monopoly will be able to demand for oil in the forseeable future.
I hope this makes it into a product one of these days. There’s been thousands of papers like this, and that’s the last we hear of it.
For now, if the Chinese are successful with Thorium then perhaps we’ll have a way to safely retire coal, or use the much cheaper electricity to transform coal to diesel.
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Thorium has been known for decades. I hope somebody is successful with it one of these days, especially China. They are the biggest polluter on the planet.
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