Like the illusion of Wall Street, with its vast and powerful investment banks, now shuttered, China too is an illusion perpetuated by the Globalists that gave us the 15,000 mile Caesar salad, poisoned cat food and lead based paint on babies' pacifiers. Like the illusion that money would come from thin air to always push housing prices higher, China has spent a generation pursuing its illusion. Pursuing an unattainable dream to be like the West, while 6000 years of its carefully shepherded top soil blows into the sea.
Posted: Sun Jan 08, 2006 1:00 am Post subject: Shale saves the day, shut down the board, it's all over
Shell came up with a process that will extract enough oil out of the shale in the midwest to provide us with enough oil to replace that which is lost for at least 75 years, maybe more.
The leases on the land have been signed, it's time to continue the party. Mr DJ, spin me another one! Dancing Queen by ABBA is a good one!
Tell your grandkids about TSHTF cause it's not going to happen in the US in our lifetimes. Unless you're about four years old today.
So that's it! It's been nice knowing you guys, say thanks to the evil corporate overlords at Shell, easy motoring is here to stay.
Best of luck to our European counterparts, you guys are great, after the electricity grid goes down there I'll remember you. Good luck with the cannibalism, I hear that Heinz 57 is pretty good with long pig.
Posted: Sun Jan 08, 2006 1:05 am Post subject: Re: Shale saves the day, shut down the board, it's all over
Theres so much supporting evidence and links to articles on this new technology.
Thank you! _________________ "Battle not with monsters, lest ye become a monster, and if you gaze into the
Abyss, the Abyss gazes also into you."
Ammo at a gunfight is like bubblegum in grade school: If you havent brought enough for everyone, you're in trouble
Joined: Jun 28, 2005 Posts: 523 Location: The Netherlands
Posted: Sun Jan 08, 2006 4:03 am Post subject: Re: Shale saves the day, shut down the board, it's all over
Ayoob wrote:
Shell came up with a process that will extract enough oil out of the shale in the midwest to provide us with enough oil to replace that which is lost for at least 75 years, maybe more.
<snap>
Best of luck to our European counterparts, you guys are great, after the electricity grid goes down there I'll remember you. Good luck with the cannibalism, I hear that Heinz 57 is pretty good with long pig.
Joined: Dec 04, 2005 Posts: 186 Location: UK (Kent)
Posted: Sun Jan 08, 2006 5:43 am Post subject: Re: Shale saves the day, shut down the board, it's all over
Ayoob wrote:
Shell came up with a process that will extract enough oil out of the shale in the midwest to provide us with enough oil to replace that which is lost for at least 75 years, maybe more..
Hurrah!
Just read some more about it with a hoped for EROI of 3.5 from the best quality oil shale deposits, some dodgy sounding practices like heating areas for years and freezing around them all paid for by cheap coal and conventional oil and a long wait to even see if it works, but I'm still so optimistic that I've decided to finally put down that deposit on a new import Hummer just to celibrate!
Just wondering what to do with this message board now ? Maybe we could change it to measure "peak denial" of reality from our leaders to the obvious.
Anyway I'm off to the free market news network to find out where best to invest my money in this never ending world of growth.
PS : thanks for the tip on Heinz 57, that'll greatly cut down on my need for stocking up on food supplies
Posted: Sun Jan 08, 2006 9:15 am Post subject: Re: Shale saves the day, shut down the board, it's all over
Technically even if there was an infinite supply of cheap oil infinite growth is dependant on natural resourses which are rapidly being depleted. I think its been said that by 2050 we would have depleted so may trees etc that we would see a major die off anyway. Can't eat oil.
A Colorado parcel may bring forth next energy boom
Shell to squeeze oil from its rocks
By Julie Cart, Los Angeles Times | January 8, 2006
MAHOGANY TEST SITE, Colo. -- Tucked into a ravine, and hidden behind ridges standing like stony sentinels, is the site of Shell Oil Co.'s experimental, highly anticipated 30-year project to unlock oil from vast underground beds of rock.
Here, on this sweeping plateau in western Colorado, the Bush administration has fixed its hopes for a long-mentioned energy boom: oil shale, which the US Department of the Interior praises as an ''energy resource with staggering potential." Members of Congress have described the region as the Saudi Arabia of oil shale.
Legislation recently signed by President Bush instructs the Interior Department to lease 35 percent of the federal government's oil shale lands within the next year, provides tax breaks to the industry, reduces the ability of local communities to influence where projects are located, and compresses lengthy environmental assessments into a single analysis that would serve for 10 years.
Oil shale is rock that, left alone, would require millions of years of natural heating to produce oil. Modern techniques accelerate that process by cooking underground rock.
But some specialists warn that the process could use more energy than it yields. And conservationists, and many local residents point to the massive amounts of water it will consume and to the disturbances to land, wildlife habitat and the lives of rural people.
Oil shale may be fool's gold
Extraction hurdles are high
By Randy Udall and Steve Andrews
DenverPost.com
Buried underground in western Colorado are a trillion tons of oil shale. For a century, men have tried and tried again to unlock this energy source. But the rocks have proved stubborn, promising much, delivering little.
Recently, the U.S. Department of Energy published a new report on oil shale. It claimed that the nation could wring "200,000 barrels a day from oil shale by 2011, 2 million barrels a day by 2020, and ultimately 10 million barrels a day" from fields in Colorado, Utah and Wyoming. These predictions - both the production targets and their timing - are preposterous, as some industry experts admit.
But hyping oil shale is nothing new. As geologist Walter Youngquist once wrote, "Bankers won't invest a dime in 'organic marlstone,' the shale's proper name, but 'oil shale' is another matter."
California Rep. Richard Pombo and Utah Sen. Orrin Hatch are spearheading efforts to jumpstart the industry. "I find it disturbing that Utah imports oil from Canadian tar sands, even though our oil shale resource remains undeveloped," says Hatch.
In truth, oil shale presents a paradox. If these rocks are, as some claim, the richest fossil fuel resource on Earth, why has it been so difficult to unlock them?
The primary explanation is that oil shale is a lousy fuel. Compared to the coal that launched the Industrial Revolution or the oil that sustains the world today, oil shale is the dregs. Coal seams a few feet thick are worth mining because coal contains lots of energy. If coal is good, oil is even better. And oil shale? Per pound, it contains one-tenth the energy of crude oil, one-sixth that of coal.
Searching for appropriate analogies, we enter the realm of Weight Watchers. Oil shale is said to be "rich" when a ton yields 30 gallons of oil. An equal weight of granola contains three times more energy. America's "vast," "immense" deposits of shale have the energy density of a baked potato. Oil shale has one-third the energy density of Cap'n Crunch, but no one is counting on the Quaker Oats Company to become a major energy producer soon.
Historically, oil shale has been mined, crushed and roasted in large kilns, or "retorts." The slag, swollen in volume and contaminated with arsenic, must then be disposed. The process is so costly, laborious and polluting that global output has never exceeded 25,000 barrels a day, compared to 84 million barrels of conventional oil production.
In the last 150 years, humans have used 1 trillion barrels of conventional oil. The second trillion will be consumed in the next 30 years. Given projected demand for fuel, Royal/ Dutch Shell has been experimenting with a new way to produce shale oil, a way that is, at first glance, more promising.
Humor columnist Dave Barry once demonstrated that if you put a "strawberry Pop-Tart in a toaster for five minutes and 50 seconds, it will turn into a snack-pastry blowtorch, shooting flames up to 30 inches high." Putting a chunk of oil shale into your toaster would not offer similar excitement, but in a strange way, Shell's fascinating experiments near Rangely resemble something Barry might attempt if he had the money to build the world's largest underground toaster oven.
The plan is audacious. Shell proposes to heat a 1,000-foot-thick section of shale to 700 degrees, then keep it that hot for three years. Beam me up, Scotty, but first share some details. Imagine a 100-acre production plot. Inside that area, the company would drill as many as 1,000 wells. Next, long electric heaters would be inserted in preparation for a multi-year bake. It's a high-stakes gamble, but if it works, a 6-mile-by- 6-mile area could, over the coming century, produce 20 billion barrels, roughly equal to remaining reserves in the lower 48 states.
Although Shell's method avoids the need to mine shale, it requires a mind-boggling amount of electricity. To produce 100,000 barrels per day, the company would need to construct the largest power plant in Colorado history. Costing about $3 billion, it would consume 5 million tons of coal each year, producing 10 million tons of greenhouse gases. (The company's annual electric bill would be about $500 million.) To double production, you'd need two power plants. One million barrels a day would require 10 new power plants, five new coal mines. And 10 million barrels a day, as proposed by some, would necessitate 100 power plants.
How soon will we know whether Shell's technology is economic? The company plans to do more experiments, before making a final decision by 2010. If it pulls the trigger, it would be at least three or four years before the first oil would flow, perhaps at a rate of 10,000 barrels a day. That's less than one-tenth of 1 percent of current U.S. consumption. But if it turns out that Shell needs more energy to produce a barrel of oil than a barrel contains, bets are off. That's the equivalent of burning the furniture to keep the house warm. Energy is the original currency; electricity its most valuable form. Using coal-fired electricity to wring oil out of rocks is like feeding steak to the dog and eating his Alpo.
Posted: Sun Jan 08, 2006 9:48 am Post subject: Re: Shale saves the day, shut down the board, it's all over
Wanna good laugh?
This article by Steve Andrews excoriates "shale" "oil" in no uncertain terms.
Quote:
Using coal-fired electricity to wring oil out of rocks is like feeding steak to the dog and eating his Alpo.
Someone on this very board quipped, "it's more like feeding your dog steak and then eating the dog." _________________ "By the time individuals discover that remaining resources will not be adequate for the next generation, the next generation has already been born. " David Price
Posted: Sun Jan 08, 2006 10:37 am Post subject: Re: Shale saves the day, shut down the board, it's all over
The Shell people are claiming a 3 to 1 energy return on their process, so why all the negativity? Economic viability still looks like an issue...but thats an entirely different problem than acting like 5 units of energy have to go in to create 3, which is the implication of some of the people around here who don't appear to be familiar with the process.
Joined: Jan 29, 2005 Posts: 363 Location: New Zealand
Posted: Sun Jan 08, 2006 11:20 am Post subject: Re: Shale saves the day, shut down the board, it's all over
ReserveGrowthRulz wrote:
The Shell people are claiming a 3 to 1 energy return on their process, so why all the negativity?
Cuz even if you dumped another 820 billion barrels of oil somewhere on earth to use for another few more years the problem will come back again.
It doesn't solve the problem. The problem will not go away. The problem will be worse resulting in a even bigger crash.
With whatever we had for the past 30-50 years of oil, what did we, collectively or in small cells worth (e.g. smaller oil producing countries) do for sustainability out of rare common sense? We raise temperatures and ocean levels through the years, created peak everything (here in PO we concentrated mostly on Oil but scratched everything else), etc.
Without a population decrease and change in the human living habits, finding alternatives to feed current consumption only delays the inevitable die-off/crash. Shale, tar sands, new discoveries involving drops in the bucket. Try 820 billion barrels. It's not much different.
That's the core of negativity. Peak Oil is the symptom (sp?) -- the root cause is ourselves. _________________ regards,
Rostov
"Some {} are more equal than others"
Joined: Oct 23, 2005 Posts: 1850 Location: East of Eden
Posted: Sun Jan 08, 2006 12:09 pm Post subject: Re: Shale saves the day, shut down the board, it's all over
Eddie_lomax wrote:
Just read some more about it with a hoped for EROI of 3.5 from the best quality oil shale deposits, some dodgy sounding practices like heating areas for years and freezing around them all paid for by cheap coal and conventional oil and a long wait to even see if it works, but I'm still so optimistic that I've decided to finally put down that deposit on a new import Hummer just to celibrate!
Just wondering what to do with this message board now ? Maybe we could change it to measure "peak denial" of reality from our leaders to the obvious...
You guys crack me up... remember the Tater Tot article? _________________ "If a path to the better there be, it begins with a full look at the worst." — Thomas Hardy
Posted: Sun Jan 08, 2006 12:56 pm Post subject: Re: Shale saves the day, shut down the board, it's all over
I just did the math. It would take 1 billion tons of coal per year, burned in 40 power plants, to produce 23 million barrels per day. We have 265 billion tons of coal, so we have enough coal to pull this off for quite some time. There are 600 billion barrels of oil in the shale, so this is enough to go for 76 years.
It's over folks, go back to your day jobs, it's going to be fine, peak oil is no longer a concern.
No bullshit.
We have been wasting our time, gas will just be a couple bucks a gallon and we will continue to drive to walmart, you may return to your regularly scheduled programming.
Alert your children or grandchildren, there will be no dieoff for many years to come, goodbye and good luck! Enjoy many decades of prosperity and peace!
Joined: Nov 02, 2005 Posts: 49 Location: The Netherlands
Posted: Sun Jan 08, 2006 2:32 pm Post subject: Re: Shale saves the day, shut down the board, it's all over
Ayoob wrote:
I just did the math. It would take 1 billion tons of coal per year, burned in 40 power plants, to produce 23 million barrels per day. We have 265 billion tons of coal, so we have enough coal to pull this off for quite some time. There are 600 billion barrels of oil in the shale, so this is enough to go for 76 years.
When is this going to be implemented? When is it going to produce 23 mbd?
Can you show us your math and/or assumptions? _________________ The Sokath Project:
Posted: Sun Jan 08, 2006 2:54 pm Post subject: Re: Shale saves the day, shut down the board, it's all over
Comp_Lex wrote:
Ayoob wrote:
I just did the math. It would take 1 billion tons of coal per year, burned in 40 power plants, to produce 23 million barrels per day. We have 265 billion tons of coal, so we have enough coal to pull this off for quite some time. There are 600 billion barrels of oil in the shale, so this is enough to go for 76 years.
When is this going to be implemented? When is it going to produce 23 mbd?
Can you show us your math and/or assumptions?
Try google. Worked for me. Good luck in Europe, this is basically just going to save our bacon here in the US.
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