Oil Deposit Could Increase US Reserves 10x 869
HighWizard notes the upcoming release, on Thursday, of a report by the US Geological Survey on the Bakken Formation. This is an oil field covering 200,000 square miles and underlying parts of North and South Dakota, Montana, and Saskatchewan. A geologist who began surveying the field, before dying in 2000, believed it may hold as much as 1 billion barrels of recoverable oil. Later estimates have ranged to the hundreds of billions of barrels. Such a reserve would go a long way toward securing US energy independence.
The $100+ Million Question (Score:1, Interesting)
Moreover, with the oligopoly control of oil production, we may still never see such sources utilized because the companies that control the flow are more than happy to benefit from high oil and gas prices.
100 Billion Barrels of Greenhouse Gases (Score:1, Interesting)
If there's really that much oil, then some of the energy in it could be used to suck the CO2 and other emissions into liquid or solid byproducts, sunk into plastics or other materials we'd use to make things out of, instead of just letting all that pollution spew into the air. It might seem more energy efficient to let the byproducts just fly out, but the energy required to clean it up (if that's even possible) is like the energy required to put the smoke back into a match after lighting it.
More info needed (Score:4, Interesting)
Last I heard -- a long, long time ago -- extraction of shale oil deposits required abundant water, as the technology then used steam to liquify the oil and release it from the shale.
Last I heard, there was not abundant water in the area of the deposits. If a /. reader with recent expertise in the extraction of oil from shale would post a reply on the most recent technologies and the free or cheap water requirement, I would be, as they say in the Western Movies, "beholden."
Otherwise, like those in California's Central Valley, the extent and practical worth of such deposits is debatable.
Of course, we can hope.
Re:At what cost? (Score:4, Interesting)
It's literally pennies to pull it out in Kuwait. But Oil is trading for over $100/barrel now. So if the costs are anything up to about $50/barrel to recover, there's still some profit motive left to go after it.
I've read all sorts of numbers, but I'm wondering at what point it becomes desirable, not just feasable, to go after that oil and start exploiting those fields.
And then there's the conspiracy theorist in me who wonders if they aren't purposely driving hte price of oil up in order to make exploiting domestic oil that much more realistic, and thus wean us off the foreign teat...
Re:Securing energy independece...until it's gone (Score:3, Interesting)
The automatic shade of "It's not really as good as it seems" is interesting. Anyway, of course it's not an absolute solution, but is there any reason not to use it?
We still use paper, even though we have digital stuff, too. I don't see why we should make paper insanely expensive simply to push towards going entirely digital (or something like that).
If there's a huge deposit of oil in US... well, hopefully there is no endangered snail that has to live on that huge plot of land. :)
Also, regarding your subject line, I am not sure anyone is quite as stupid as you would make them out to be, that we have found an infinite supply of oil that will make us independence forever. Is your point that since it's not a renewable resource, we shouldn't pursue it at all, or use it to get partially energy independent while working on securing energy independence in other ways?
Re:Nice (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Securing energy independece...until it's gone (Score:2, Interesting)
1 billion barrels / 85 million bpd
http://www.eia.doe.gov/neic/quickfacts/quickoil.html [doe.gov]
Re:We have more oil? (Score:5, Interesting)
Here's an interesting geothermal/nuclear tie in. Proposed expansion of the Olympic Dam uranium mine in the state of South Australia is going to require electicity equivalent to 75% of South Australia's current electricity production. There are currently experiments in geothermal electricity production being conducted a few hundred kilometres away from the mine which could possibly power it. People tend to forget that nuclear power comes from rock that you have to get out of the ground with effort and not some magic bean.
To complete the circle the hot wet rock was found during exploration of a nearby oilfield. The rock is actually hot due to natural nuclear activity but that is another story.
Re:We have more oil? (Score:1, Interesting)
I think Oil should be nationalized, like roads and bridges. Antitrust laws should give our government the ability to break up the Big Oil Co.s, and allow real competition to drive product quality up and prices back down to allow for $.89/gallon gas where it should be.
Re:Uhhh, What? (Score:4, Interesting)
As a result, if oil supply dropped by even 25% (as it did during the Yom Kippur War embargo in 1973), it would take drastic measures to reduce consumption by 25%. Like shutting factories, gas rationing at the pumps, closing schools in the winter, massive inflation (as transportation costs skyrocket), all kinds of bad stuff. In the long term, people buy more efficient cars or heat-proof their houses, but in the short term, only the most painful of measures can reduce consumption.
National Energy Independence means avoiding this. If multinational corporations threatened to reduce US oil output by 25% if their demands weren't met, we'd have troops nationalizing the oil fields within 72 hours.
Re:100 Billion Barrels of Greenhouse Gases (Score:4, Interesting)
One of the more intriguing ideas I've heard is to seed the deep ocean with iron.
Iron is a limiting factor in the growth of plankton, especially in the resource poor areas of the ocean.
Add iron, plankton grows. Plankton absorbs CO2, then dies, sinking.
I am not a petrol engineer but I know Chinese (Score:5, Interesting)
So it takes decades to convert our society to renewable energy. That means we start TODAY. In earnest.
The conversion of America to alternative, clean, renewable energy (and not the Ethanol Scam) is an engineering and collective will issue, not a scientific issue.
If I were President, my plan would be to take a manual transmission approach to the issue.
Here's how my "Manhattan Project" would go:
Gear 1 - the quick, short term stuff. Corporate tax breaks and subsidies for electric car production. Electric cars have existed - even electric SUV's (the old RAV-4, anyone? Don't tell me I'm wrong, I NOW HAVE ONE - they're just not being made anymore).
Tax breaks and rebates for solar energy panels on houses and apartments. BIG breaks and rebates, proportional to the kilowatt/hour rating of the installed system. We fund this tax break by stimulating the economy - solar energy purchases and then the resulting rise in consumer spending as energy prices decrease ESPECIALLY DURING THE BOILING HOT SUMMER.
Start funding and constructing pebble bed nuclear power plants. Go bare knuckle with the environmentalists. James Lovelock, the founder of the Gaia Theory, supports this as an intermediate step towards cleaner, more renewable energy in the future. This should take 20-30 years to realize the benefits. Best to start now.
Gear 2 - Incentives for solar powered electric chargers for gas stations to power up electric cars. Make use of the existing infrastructure to change the infrastructure.
Start construction on a 500 sq mile solar farm in a sunny, remote location. Or break up said solar farm into several sunny locations around the country. This is enough power for the entire world during the day.
Slowly phase out coal power plants when exceeded by its solar cousins, but leave enough to take care of night time/bad weather issues.
Government contracts to research higher miles-per-charge for cars.
Gear 3 - A nationwide "give back to the power grid" incentive for homes. Basically, people who generate solar power on their rooftops while they are at work and nothing's going on in their house, profit when they're using no power and their solar panels are pumping energy back into the grid. They get 100% MARKET VALUE for that energy - exactly 1 for 1 versus what they would pay if they used it. Adjusted daily, weekly or monthly, however it goes.
Bigger Government contracts to research higher miles-per-charge for cars. Performance based. Now we start pushing for conversions of the big haulers (big rigs), as well as pushing them to bio diesel with emphasis on converting used veggie oil, etc.
Gear 4 - the first pebble bed nuclear plants go online. Drastic "as immediate as possible" cutbacks in coal and oil powered plants but not enough to completely offset the new nuclear plants.
More Government contracts to research higher miles-per-charge for electric and biodiesel-powered big rigs. Performance based.
Gear 5 - shutdown of all remaining polluting (Coal/Oil) power plants as all planned nuclear reactors go online and the solar farms are up, and over 50% of all US homes are solar powered.
Hopefully at this point we won't need Government contracts for high miles-per-charge cars; the market should reach critical mass. Research for electric and biodiesel powered big rigs continues until every new rig produced runs on one or the other.
Manhattan project complete. The big mushroom cloud you see is the giant earth-shattering KABOOM that is OPEC corporate heads exploding along with their profits.
Re:Fungible (Score:3, Interesting)
And therein lies the fundamental error. First off, you're not using "oil"; you're using gasoline or diesel or any number of refined products. You pull up light sweet crude, and it's pretty close to what you want out; you don't have to refine it much. You pull up sour crude, heavy crude, ultra-heavy crude, or even bitumen, and you've got a big refining task ahead of you. You cook oil out of keragenous rock like shale, and you're doing even more organic chemistry. Ultimately, you can make oil simply from CO or CO2, plus water for the H2, plus energy, via Fisher-Tropsch or Sabatier synthesis. In short, for oil to be able to *physically* run out, you need "peak energy" to occur.
Of course, the doomers make lots of other arguments. They're easily taken down [daughtersoftiresias.org], though. And I do mean "doomers". The more extreme ones are sort of a death cult [blogspot.com].
No NAFTA - No Saskachewan Oil (Score:3, Interesting)
Last I checked, you americans were talking about shredding NAFTA
What will it be? Cheap oil from your northern friends, or will you finally retrain the people who's manufacturing jobs went to Mexico and stop blaming Canada for it?
Re:I am not a petrol engineer but I know Chinese (Score:5, Interesting)
Right now, nuclear is the only viable alternative to coal that we have. Based upon the proposals for new plants to be constructed, it looks like Nuclear is quickly becoming the preferred source for new construction. It won't happen overnight, but I'm confident that we're moving in the right direction.
I don't think you go far enough. (Score:3, Interesting)
Also, for the solar power plant we need to make a lot more solar cell plants probably with the ability to mass produce like that printing solar panel tech which has started to kick into high gear.
Re:We have more oil? (Score:5, Interesting)
Now, obviously this is a quantity which is far larger than what we could possibly figure out a way to safely store given 40 - 50 centuries of scientific development, so instead our energy plan is based on the idea that if we subsidize wind power for sufficiently long, they can indefinitely continue to increase in efficiency at the same rate as they have done historically (never mind that pesky theorem of fluid dynamics which sets a theoretical limit at about twice of present achievements ).
Re:I am not a petrol engineer but I know Chinese (Score:2, Interesting)
I also agree on the tax breaks and incentives for the "green" power ideas. All of this together would work and in less than 10 years we COULD be energy independent. Without oil to fund radical Islam terrorists the world would be a safer place also.
China is way ahead of us on the pebble bed reactor and if we do not start an energy program soon (and no sticking your head in the sand is NOT an energy program) we will be a 2nd rate nation that relies on the good will of other nations instead of leading the world like we do know.
Re:We have more oil? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:6000SUX (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:We have more oil? (Score:4, Interesting)
The reason the price of oil and gasoline are so high right now is the flood of speculative investors into the oil market. That adds a lot of demand, but it's not consumer demand. Production continues, and that oil will have to end up on the market eventually... Whoever the next president is, they will get credit for "solving" the problem, even though the important bits have already played out.
Re:We have more oil? (Score:2, Interesting)
Nuke is out (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Environmentalist nutjobs (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:6000SUX (Score:1, Interesting)
So yes, while there are plenty of trees, paper bags likely account for a very small portion of tree usage, and you aren't actually saving oil.
And just to be an annoying, pedantic bastard: plastic bags are made from polyethylene, which is usually made from natural gas, not petroleum.
Re:I am not a petrol engineer but I know Chinese (Score:3, Interesting)
And rail lines are vastly easier to electrify that big rigs.
*(Sure a lot of that infrastructure is also for cars, but they can certainly add taxes or road fees specifically to trucks to reduce the economic incentive to use them without reducing the infrastructure for personal cars)
Re:6000SUX (Score:3, Interesting)
The people who ask for paper and plastic do so, because these days the store plastic bags are so thin and cheap. No one wants to be the one who's bag fall apart in the parking lot. Most stores also don't carry paper bags with handles, and the adhesive that holds the bottom of the bag is prone to failure when bagged normally.
Re:I am not a petrol engineer but I know Chinese (Score:3, Interesting)
"Solar cannot replace Coal. It's completely unsuitable for supplying base-load power because it only works half the time (at best)."
Solar thermal power is perfectly capable of supplying base load, i.e. continuous, power and it is also the most attractive technology for large commercial solar power plants. See Solar Thermal Energy [wikipedia.org] for a convenient introduction.
Solar thermal power uses concentrated solar light to heat a heat transfer fluid. The heat can be stored in a large insulated tank or other thermal mass very cheaply, with negligible energy loss. Averaging power output over the day-night cycle is fairly easy, and averaging over several days is also feasible.
Note also that all base load plants (coal, hydro, nuclear) are down part of the time for maintenance.
Naive (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:We have more oil? (Score:3, Interesting)
But over one third of it does already. A sizeable chunk of the Athabasca fields in Alberta are not yet developed, and the vast majority of Saskatchewan's potentially recoverable oil reserves remain untapped. Billions of dollars are being spent on upgrader and enhanced-recovery facilities in Alberta, and Saskatchewan has recently voted out a long-in-the-tooth socialist government and replaced it with a more business-friendly regime that has vowed to be more aggressive in developing its natural resources.
It is possible (and in fact, in the long term, probable) that in the future over 50% of foreign oil imports into the US will be from Canada and Mexico. Middle eastern foreign policy is less and less about maintaining the power of US-friendly sheiks in return for cheap oil and more about keeping nukes out of the hands of twisted "Islamic" madmen with deluded thoughts of blowing up us "infidels" so they can spend eternity in Allah's kingdom with a harem of 1000 forever-youthful wives.
Thirdly, there is no oil monopoly. Oil companies do not calude[sic] with each other, they compete.
There is not a monopoly in E&P, however there is an oligopoly of large, vertically-integrated energy companies (you know, the ones that pull oil out of the ground, refine it themselves and ship it to their own chains of service stations). They've always colluded to some extent, but just like a mafia Don they manage to stay just on the right side of the legal line. Many of these companies share their origin as parts of the former Standard Oil trust. And guess what? They've almost completely re-merged, and the re-constituted corporations are huge in comparison to Standard Oil (Exxon+Mobil, Chevron+Texaco, BP+Amoco...so the huge, top-tier playing field is cut in half and the players themselves are twice as big).
There might be thousands of companies looking for and collecting the crude, but only a handful refine it into fuel and fewer yet sell that fuel to us. Fat lot of good having lots of competition in the crude arena is when they all have just a few significant customers (refiners and marketers). The market can be controlled from both the supply and demand side you know.
Re:We have more oil? (Score:5, Interesting)
Valero 13.1%
Conoco Phillips 11.7%
ExxonMobil 11.2%
BP 8.3%
Chevron 5.6%
Marathon 5.4%
Citgo 4.5%
Sunoco 4.5%
Shell 4.5%
Motiva 4.5%
None of these companies could be considered to be in a market dominating position, and 3, including Valero which has the largest market share, were never even part of Standard Oil. Additionally, there are some 50 other companies that control the remaining 27% of oil refining capacity in the US. People like to think of the oil industry as one unanimous big bad wolf, but that just isn't the reality of the situation.
Re:I am not a petrol engineer but I know Chinese (Score:3, Interesting)
And even worse, it takes your RAV4 5 hours to charge. So what you're proposing is that I drive for 1 hour only to stop at a gas station for 5 hours.
And yes, I'm sure newer cars are better at this, but not good enough. That's why purely electric cars don't work.
How far do you drive to work? Most people don't have a 40 mile one way commute. Those that do should move, as that's wasteful by any means of getting there, and who wants to spend 2 hours a day in the car? For a short while I had a 20 mile one way commute, and I thought that was crazy enough.
Besides, that's missing the point. An electric vehicle like the RAV4 electric is a poor only car, but it's a great secondary car for a family. Most families have 2 vehicles nowadays, and they tend to have a larger "family" vehicle for the trips and family excursions, and a smaller "commuter" that one of the parents uses to get to work. An electric, even one with a modest range like the electric RAV4, would make a perfect commuter (except for those few that have the insane 80+ mile commutes) and there's a huge market for that. We can start there, and use what we learn to build the 400 mile electric minivan later.