Gene needs to read the Drum more; or, at least see that video.
We can't run cars on Utopian bullshit.
When he sez "I'm throwing my car keys away", I'll take him seriously on energy.
Gulf Oil Spill: With so many oil resources, can't we just drill somewhere else?
Posted by Gail the Actuary on May 28, 2010 - 8:29am
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This post is an adaptation of one posted in December 2009, relating to a talk given at that time. A PDF of the talk can be found here.
There is a huge amount of oil which theoretically can be extracted. The question isn't whether it is there--the question is whether the cost to extract the oil will be cheap enough for us to be able to afford the oil. If oil is too expensive, the high prices seem to cause a recession, similar to what we recently have been experiencing.
In many ways, people who say we have lots of oil are correct. All one has to do is include the oil which is extremely expensive and slow to extract. Much of the cheap, easy-to-extract oil has already been removed....
...It would be a lot easier to get politicians to talk about the situation if there were a good solution in sight. There are some partial mitigations, but they likely don't get us back to "business as usual". Voters are likely to be very unreceptive to such news.
We are in the midst of a predicament, even if we continue to ramp up deep water oil from the Gulf of Mexico. If there is less oil from the Gulf of Mexico, it will make our predicament even worse.
The world doesn't really have many more good, cheap places to drill any more. Any place we do drill, requires substantial capital investment and long lead times. Much of the remaining oil is in solid form, like the oil sands, and oil shale. Such resources will be very slow to extract, so it is very difficult to ramp them up, even if we decided we wanted to. There may be other limiting resources as well, such as water, meaning that this obstacle needs to be overcome as well. So there are no easy substitutes for oil from the Gulf of Mexico.
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