redgreenandblue.org — Can anyone tell me how the extraction of oil from solid rock is either efficient or renewable? I was struck by a story in this week?s Department of Energy office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy?s (EERE) weekly newsletter, the EERE Network News, that touted the benefits of oil shale. I was also struck by how clearly political the story was
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kathcomAug 1, 2008
Is this some sort of crap that says one thing but means another, like Clear Skies?
themachine1Aug 2, 2008
Dig to a certain depth and you can achieve near constant temperature due to the good insulative quailty of earth.
jverityAug 2, 2008
I can't believe all of you are so busy looking for government conspiracies that you miss the true (and rather obvious) answer.Here in Louisiana we are FINALLY building plants that use oil shale. Why? Because we get tons of it anyway from drilling. You think all that oil just bubbles out of the ground once you make a pinhole in the earth like on Beverly Hillbillies? No. We dig through tons of oil laden rock to get to a reservoir of the liquid stuff. And up until now, it's all been waste. Toxic waste. That we have to pay extra to get rid of properly, which raises the cost of a barrel of oil, and thus gas prices, or that someone shady gets rid of for the company and ruins the environment somewhere. So what do we do instead? We turn it in to power. Now the oil companies can make money off of a byproduct of drilling. They not only loose the cost of disposing of toxic waste, which brings down gas prices, but we turn that rock in to a commodity that can produce power, something the drilling companies can sell instead of loosing money on, which should further bring down gas prices. And after we are done getting all of the oil out of that rock, it's no longer toxic, so there is no reason for any of those shady people to screw up the environment somewhere.Lets not forget that this also creates a new industry, and tons of jobs. How is this not a win for everyone? More jobs in the south where the economy has been hit hardest. Lower gas prices for everyone in America. And less waste to dispose of in the environment which helps the entire world. All from the trash that gets created while drilling for more oil.I think the government is out to screw us alot of the time too, but maybe some of you should think a little more before you assume that every single thing the government does is a shady deal. Every once in a while they help us out, even if it's on accident.
Closed AccountAug 2, 2008
273 years at the United States current consumption rate.Long enough for me
Closed AccountAug 2, 2008
"If they're going to build a solar or wind tower anyway, why not just use that for power?"Kinda hard to do any meaningful trucking / transportation with solar/wind derived energy.
gn0stikAug 2, 2008
tbhurst: Sadly no, I've read a lot about this, and bookmarked none of it, unfortunately. It was mostly for personal knowledge. As silly as it is to be persuing oil as a main fuel source at this time, at least some development companies are trying to make at least the process carbon neutral, or less carbon positive. Southerner1: I'd like to read the article you read about shale at 10 dollars per barrel, if you happened to save a source article. I've seen prices per barrel on extraction at that price, however I haven't seen the crude equivalent at that price. Shale oil requires an extra stage of refinement just to get the the light sweet crude equivalent stage. DestroyFascism: You have a sligtly ignorant view of what our uses for oil include apparently. We don't just use it for transportation fuel. Unless we stop making roads, using plastics, cosmetics, medicines, and lubricants, we won't be anywhere close to being done using oil in 20 years. It's a misnomer that oil is processed only for fuel. It cannot even be said that a majority of it is used for fuel. We need oil, and will need it for the foreseeable future. We'll get there though. By the way, we've also got massive oil resources in montana in the Rockies. Not shale, but crude. Our ANWR and other off shore oil reserves are nothing compared to what we have yet to tap inland. My gut feeling is we'll be tapping those resources before we start meaningfully tapping shale reserves, which we have done in the past by the way. Entire towns shut down in the 80s when shell shut down processing facilities in colorado. It's all politics folks.
liquid83Aug 4, 2008
And in order to get to those supposed "2 trillion barrels of oil" we'll spend probably half of that trying to extract that very amount due to the amount of effort and technology required to do so... NOT WORTH IT! Why can't we just get over our oil fixation already? Why do we feel that we have to continue the trends of paying an absorbent amount of our monthly incomes towards the politicians and thieves (oh wait, they're mostly the same) that run the oil industry? Oil is a damn dinosaur and electric, solar, wind, and biofuels are on their way and fast!