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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?


To: i-node who wrote (392117)6/18/2008 8:13:22 PM
From: combjelly  Read Replies (3) | Respond to of 1578144
 
"which is expensive to mine, but may well be economically feasible at this point."

It has only recently become viable. That requires about $100 a barrel. Before anyone is going to make the kind of investment required, they have to be pretty certain that oil remains about about $100 a barrel.

Now, Shell claims that they can produce at around $30 a barrel in Colorado using in situ methods. However, all in situ methods are experimental and it will take some time to bring them into production. in situ is desirable for a number of reasons. Primarily, it reduces the waste disposal problem. Mining and retorting on the surface has two problems. One, the waste created had greater volume than what was mined. Two, it consumes a lot of water. In Estonia, which has been exploiting their oil shales for a while, 91% of the water consumed in the country is for the oil shale industry.

The best bet seems to be to get in situ methods off the ground.



To: i-node who wrote (392117)6/19/2008 12:52:19 AM
From: tejek  Read Replies (1) | Respond to of 1578144
 
There have been two major discoveries of oil fields in the past ten years.....one is in the mid Gulf of Mexico, and the other is the Bakkon field in ND. With the mid Gulf find, peak production is expected to be about 1.5 million barrels per day. With the Bakkon find, I've read anywhere from 1-3 million barrels per day. To put this all in the proper perspective, we import 10 million barrels per day. And when these wells come on line in the the next ten years, there will offsets to their production as current producing wells 'dry' up.

In other words, we are not about to drill our way out of this crisis no matter how much your little mind hopes we will.

"Cambridge Energy forecasts that the deep-water area of the Gulf of Mexico will produce 800,000 barrels of oil a day within seven years and account for 11 percent of U.S. oil production. That would not solve the world's energy problem or eliminate U.S. reliance on oil imports, but it would help stabilize U.S. oil production, which has been declining, and cover some of the world's rising demand for petroleum. Prudhoe Bay, in northern Alaska, produced about 1.5 million barrels a day at its peak."

washingtonpost.com

"It was not until 2007, when EOG Resources of Texas started a frenzy when they drilled a single well in Parshal N.D. that is expected to yield 700,000 barrels of oil that real excitement and money started to flow in North Dakota. Marathon Oil is investing $1.5 billion and drilling 300 new wells in what is expected to be one of the greatest booms in Oil discovery since Oil was discovered in Saudi Arabia in 1938."

nextenergynews.com



To: i-node who wrote (392117)6/19/2008 7:21:58 AM
From: Road Walker  Read Replies (2) | Respond to of 1578144
 
It is a matter of getting the government out of the way and allowing it to be produced.

How is the government "in the way" of producing oil from shale? Outside of giving the oil companies subsidies.

That's the only significant 'reserve' you mentioned... and it's technically not feasible at this point.