Posted on 09/28/2011 5:50:15 AM PDT by decimon
Prospectors in Israel say hundreds of feet below the ground lies shale rock that can be converted into billions of barrels of oil. But environmentalists say it's a disaster waiting to happen.
"This is the distinct smell I'm talking about when I talk about oil shale."
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In recent years, big natural gas deposits were discovered off the coast, but the country still imports much of its gas from its neighbour to the south, Egypt. That supply is precarious. This year it was interrupted by a string of attacks on gas pipelines running through the Sinai desert. And concerns remain about future relations with Cairo, after the fall of Hosni Mubarak - an early victim of the Arab Spring.
In terms of oil, Israel imports nearly all it uses - about 100 million barrels a year - mainly from Russia and the former Soviet republics. Those imports were curbed in 2006, during the war with Hezbollah, prompting the Wall Street Journal to say Israel was "perilously close to running out of fuel".
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(Excerpt) Read more at bbc.co.uk ...
Ping
Here we go again. Some citizens of Israel, the most beleagured country in the world, determined to prevent their homeland from being secure and “energy independent”.
Today, Israel’s existence means to rely, almost totally, on supplies from countries dedicated to its removal from the very face of the earth.
Virtually the first act of the “Egyptian Spring” is the threat to the gas supply pipelines to Israel. Ya think?
When the vaunted Israeli military must sit idle because of the simple fact it runs on a foreign controlled energy supply, what will these “useful idiots” then say?
Another article about vast shale oil deposits in another nation. Also recent articles from Poland and Great Britain. And haven’t we seen these diagrams where a water table is above the shale rather than below?
Golda Meir looks down and cheers.
“We’re talking about a technology that’s been deployed more than 1.2 million times in more than 25 states over the course of more than 60 years. I think it says an awful lot about fracturing’s record of safety that the best these guys could come up with after studying the issue for an entire year is a single, disputed case from 30 years ago that state regulators at the time believe had nothing to do with fracturing. Three decades later, the technology today is better than it’s ever been, the regulations are broader and more stringent, and the imperative of getting this right, so that we can take full advantage of the historic opportunities made possible by shale, has never been more apparent. Despite the Times’ best efforts, this story does not prove that hydraulic fracturing had anything to do with the contamination of a water well 30 years ago.”(2)
Let’s see, a single “documented” case out of 1.2 million fracked wells? I’ll take those odds any time.
(1) The New York Times (posted Aug 3, 2011) – A Tainted Water Well, and Concern There May Be More
ping
They need to be careful not to contaminate the waters in the mountain aquifers. They get most of their water from those hills. It would be great if they could find billions of barrels of oil, but not at the expense of water is all I say. They would need to develop desal plants, at least, to help compensate before they drill/dig en-bulk.
There are oil in Israel, equal to the amount found in Saudi.
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