Spanning some 17,000 square miles across parts of Colorado, Utah and Wyoming, this underground lakebed holds at least 800 billion barrels of recoverable oil. That’s triple the reserves of Saudi Arabia.
Vinegar has developed a cutting-edge technology that, according to Shell, will produce large quantities of high-quality oil without ravaging the local environment - and be profitable with prices around $30 a barrel. Now that oil is approaching $90, the odds on Shell’s speculative bet are beginning to look awfully good.
And that my friends is why a free market capitalist system is the greatest system in the world. Give people the opportunity to get rich and they’ll find the answers to any problem.
Good info, Jay but my only beef is it will push back better alternative energy research if oil in these quantities become available. I don’t think oil should be in the near future of any nation.
these shit isnt in the short term of happeneing. this would take years before this happend. i dont know about you but id rather not pay $3-4 a gallon for the next 10 years and then have the price drop to $1 a gallon.
Regardless of how much oil we find from this point forward I don’t think you’ll see alternative energy research get moved to the back burner. There’s too much money to be made for the first company that comes up with the next huge alternative energy advancement. If people are willing to buy up hybrids, that don’t really save you any money or help the environment, imagine the money you could make selling them something that really did help. That will drive the innovation, even if gas falls below $3.
In the mean time though you can’t ignore the fact that the world economy runs on oil, and we’ll need any new oil sources we can get until a real alternative is found.
Timeframes will be greatly influenced by profit. At $100 a barrel if Shell has found a good way to get oil from oil shale I can pretty much guarantee it won’t be 10 years. Too much potential profit slipping away.
I don’t see why the free market capitalist system has anything to do with this really. It would be the same issues and solutions regardless of system.
It’s like saying you met a hot chick at the gym and banged her later on so as a result the gym is great. You could have met a hot girl at a bar, walking down the street, wherever really…
It has everything to do with it because some people in this country/government want to move away from a capitalist system and institute a “windfall profits tax”. Taxing a company because they’ve had record profits is not free market capitalism, and it is the very thing that would prevent oil companies from investing in R&D which leads to breakthroughs like this.
In that proposed system private industry would no longer push R&D, leaving the government, aka the taxpayer, to fund it. And living in NY we all know how efficiently government spends money.
For a successful move to a new energy source, I do think the goverment needs to give some incentives and help to potential research firms. Tax breaks, cuts, etc for those involved in renewable energy sources.
Agreed. Read the 2005 Energy Bill. Or better yet, read the Wiki cliff notes.
$4.3 billion for nuclear power[4]
$2.8 billion for fossil fuel production
$2.7 billion to extend the renewable electricity production credit
$1.6 billion in tax incentives for investments in clean coal facilities
$1.3 billion for conservation and energy efficiency
$1.3 billion for alternative motor vehicles and fuels (ethanol, methane, liquified natural gas, propane)
We aren’t going to quit oil cold turkey, nor is there a reason to suffer the economic catastrophe doing that would cause. Despite the doom and gloom we have enough oil for many many years to come. Think about where technology was 20 years ago and think about what 20 years of serious R&D in the fields of alternative energy will get us. Sure, in the first 15 of those last 20 years not a lot was done, but in the last 5 years energy R&D has been a priority. No oil shale breakthrough is going to change that priority.
The price of oil is going up because it’s a future demand market. The demand/supply of oil hasn’t really changed. Say company X wants a garunteed 1 billion barrels of oil, and company Y wants the same amount, well now they are competing for the same product. So say company X offers $90 a barrel for the oil, and company Y then offers $91/barrel. The more they spend to secure their supply, the more it comes back to the consumer.
^ Partly true. A lot of it has to do with the fact that the dollar is so weak right now. The price in euroes per barrel shows that oil isn’t really that high, at least historically.
In terms of national economics the weak purchasing power of the dollar gets offset by the increase in companies wanting to buy US products, since their dollar goes farther.