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Strategies & Market Trends : The Epic American Credit and Bond Bubble Laboratory -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: grusum who wrote (4507)	1/7/2004 9:11:49 AM
From: Wyätt Gwyön	Respond to of 110194

haven't read the book you mentioned about shale and tar sands, but i've heard that it said that extracting the oil uses nearly as much energy as they can get out from the oil. regarding tar sands, the extraction consists of mining. then, to extract the oil, the mined material is boiled in water. this obviously requires water and something to heat it (natural gas). and it results in a huge amount of goo which is greater than the pit from which the material was extracted. the amount of sludge produced in order to fulfill one day's worth of America's petroleum requirement would fill Yankee Stadium 12 times over. but fortunately, all the tar sands are located in Canada, and they don't care about their environment :) there are similar problems with things like methane hydrates and turkey guts and so on. we should be spending more R&D money on things like the solar cells you mention, instead of fighting wars to secure petroleum supplies. obviously some of the new technologies will be helpful and keep us from being reduced to cave-dwellers in the long run, but i think the point to note is that there is no way the new technologies will allow us to maintain the current extremely high level of per capita energy consumption, which makes our lifestyles so comfortable. right now in the US, it is as if each of us has, thanks to fossil fuels, 58 human equivalents (in horsepower) working for us 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. perhaps with renewable energy sources llike windmills and solar cells and so on, if everything goes extremely well, we could have maybe 3 human equivalents. this implies a very different way of life, for which we are not prepared. it certainly does not guarantee that the two cars in every garage will ever travel anywhere for less than a king's ransom. the book i was referring to is called "The Party's Over" by Richard Heinberg. here's his site: museletter.com also, check out globalpublicmedia.com lots more at peakoil.net