Asymmetrical Information

There aren't any easy fixes on the horizon. I am, however, doing what I can.

I'm in the process of converting one of my vehicles into a dual-fuel burning truck. It will use propane or gasoline at the flick of a switch. Propane has many advantages over gasoline. It's much cleaner burning, less poluting and easier on the car. Plus it's cheap!

This isn't a solution for everyone, but I'm going to give it a go.

Pretty cantankerous piece there, and just barely mentions the new type of in-ground procedure Shell is attempting. That Shell thinks it can be viable at $30/barrel is reason to be at least cautiously optimistic.

The doom of past attempts was the incredible amount of environmental destruction required to obtain the shale (strip mining, basically) and the associated incredible cost per barrel of oil; if the inground procedure proves commercially feasible, it answers both of those problems.

The article seems to focus on arguing that, 20-30 years ago, extraction technology was inefficient and highly toxic. Nowhere does it explain why this must necessarily remain true in the future. No physical law I'm aware of mandates that oil-shale processing must be energy inefficient.

Oh WHERE is Ellis Wyatt when we need him?

Hiding beneath an optical illusion, of course. Try a radar search.

We have been running out of Oil since the Mid Seventies.
but as with every single gloom and doom prediction of the so-called environmentalists(sp?) this one has proven incorrect.
We now have more proven reserves of oil then we knew about in the seventies.
The earth continues to create hydrocarbon energy resources faster than we can consume them. The only thing holding anyone back from discovering them and exploiting them are the so called environmentalists.
Kill the enviros as well as the lawyers and we would all be getting some where.

Seriously, I have been hearing this same nonsense for almost 40 years. Think of it this way.
When I first started to drive in NYC in 1960 gasoline cost between 25.9 and 30.9¢ a gallon, today it costs in the Hudson Valley of NYS between 2.85 and 2.99 a gallon an increase of 10 fold in 45 years. Movies cost then about 25¢ for Kids and 75¢ for adults ( and you saw 2 movies , the MovieTone News and a cartoon or two with no advertising except for about 10 minutes of coming attractions) try that today for only 10X. I and my buddies went to Ebbetts Field IN Brooklyn to see the Dodgers, we sat in reserved seats to watch the game for $1.25 (this was in the 1953 to 56 time frame.The subway ride was 10¢.
I worked in the lumber business, 2X4's at full retail were 9¢ a foot for Douglas Fir. We sold pre-Hung interior door units for about 16.00 with the trim. My first new car was a 1963 Dodge Polara 500 convertable with leather seats and no seat belts which cost the princley sum of $2800.00.
My point for all this is that the prices for all the above mentioned items have increased more than the 10X that the price of gas has risen to (it was only about 3X a few years ago) and you don't hear the usual politicians bleating about price controls for movie tickets or ballgame tickets doors or automobiles or wonder if we are going to run out of any of these items. Go try to buy a pre-hung door at your local lumber dealer and see how close you can get to the 10X multiplier or a car or go to a ball game and have a full day out with transportation and refreshments and an officila score card for less than 10X the 3 or 4 dollars it cost me then.

The bottom line is we are not running out of oil or anything else for that matter. Human ingenuity will, if allowed, be able to overcome any adversity -- it has until now and will continue to into the unending future.

What is missing in all these discussions is perspective.

The only thing that has improved in the equation is that then I earned between 75¢ to 90¢ per hour today I earn way more than 10x that amount as do most other folks.

thedaddy

Mr. theDaddy seems to not understand that its not about "running out of oil" it's about running out of cheap oil. And oil has two costs which impact the practicality of oil shale recovery significantly.

One is the cost in dollars and the resultant loss of productivity when you have to use cheaper, less directed forms of transportation (trains vs trucks) to maintain profits.

But the bigger cost is the energy used to yield ratio the Energy Return to Energy Investment. If we go from a 1 to 100 ratio down to 1 to 3 then the cost of recovering the oil in dollars is almost irrelevant, at 1 to 1 it’s pointless and at 1 to (anything over) 1 it’s insane.

What's so cantankerous about this piece? There are indeed physical laws that place limits around the process of extraction from oil shale, and chemical processes have not changed in the last 25 years. It still takes a certain amount of heat to get the glop out of the rock; using Al Gore's Internet in the process and calling in a dotcom won't change that physical reality.

It still takes water to extract. People who live in water-rich places do not appreciate what that means in an area like the Western Slope of the Rockies where every single drop of water in a river has been allocated to someone (in some cases, such as the Colorado, overallocated). The city of Denver already went on a major water rights buying spree decades ago all over Colorado, and thus in order to make the oil shale lands around Grand Junction into oil fields, someone in that area is going to have to give up their water.

It is fashionable to knock down the zero-sum game strawman, but in the case of basin and range lands, water really is in a zero sum condition: the total number of users is equal to or in excess of the total amount of water available, and so new users will have to retire some existing water rights.

Finally, Rick DeMent's comment is quite relevent and pithy. Absent some nonpetro energy source, be it huge solar mirror, nuclear power plant or what have you, "1 for 3" is a very pricey way to go about business. The Germans knew all about extracting diesel from coal and other sources, especially after the loss of the Ploesti oil fields, and it was only the huge press of World War II that made the projects feasible. Even so there were many tanks lost in action after they ran out of fuel; it wasn't a high-production enterprise.

The article in question concludes that it is worth going ahead with these projects essentially as a "backstop", and I agree with that, just as I think working to extract petro from the Athabasca sands is a good idea. But let's not kid ourselves that there's some huge, Ghawar-scale oil field out there just waiting to be discovered; it is possible, but not that likely.

Even so there were many tanks lost in action after they ran out of fuel; it wasn't a high-production enterprise.

Not according to Daniel Yergin's The Prize, which actually has numerical figures. The amount of synfuel created by Germany during the Second was absolutely incredible, both in total volume and as a proportion of net oil consumption.

However the plants were very complex facilities and very large (like any refinery would be); and once the allies began using them for bombing practice the production capacity fell more quickly than the Germans could rebuild. Since the Germans failed to capture the Baku fields in Russia due to Hitler's tactical error in opting to press for Moscow, Germany very quickly became fuel starved in the timespace thereafter.

I meandered:
Even so there were many tanks lost in action after they ran out of fuel; it wasn't a high-production enterprise.

anony-mouse revealed:

Not according to Daniel Yergin's The Prize, which actually has numerical figures. The amount of synfuel created by Germany during the Second was absolutely incredible, both in total volume and as a proportion of net oil consumption.

Yet another book to find, although I admit to being suspicious of anything that joins the Walter Duranty club ("Pulitzer") and gets made into a Pee Bee Ess series. Call me prejudiced, but I've been conned enough times to be skeptical when I see some of the same shills at work...however, if it actually has accurate production figures for the Nazi synfuels it would be worth having for that alone.

However the plants were very complex facilities and very large (like any refinery would be); and once the allies began using them for bombing practice the production capacity fell more quickly than the Germans could rebuild.

Does this book describe the full cycle? Even using slave labor to mine the raw material and coal (if needed) for process heat IIRC it wasn't a very efficient way to produce war-grade POL, especially the high-octane stuff that the fighter aircraft used.

Since the Germans failed to capture the Baku fields in Russia due to Hitler's tactical error in opting to press for Moscow, Germany very quickly became fuel starved in the timespace thereafter.

This isn't the place for "How Did Hitler Lose The War", but even without Baku the Ploesti fields would have been significant for years.

Someone up thread mentioned the RSA synfuels plants built during the embargo on that country, and opined that when needed, such things get built. Again, though, what's the full cost? If it's "1 for 3" then it's eventually a losing proposition.

It's been observed for years that a modern industrial civilization needs electricity and some kind of portable chemical energy to function; at least I've been saying since the 1970's crises, and I ain't that smart so surely a whole lot of other people have noted it. Nuclear fission reactors can supply the electricity and hydrogen in some form or another (besides the current form of hydrocarbons) the portable fuel.

One way to tote that hydrogen around to places where it is needed, interestingly, could be in the form of
Zinc.

Okay, it looks like the new process can turn a body of oil shale plus a large amount of heat into light oil plus gas plus nasty, salty gook mostly left underground.  The heat could come from nuclear, wind, or partial combustion of the product.

If the rock has to be dewatered to be processed, it's part of the aquifers.  Any toxics created by the pyrolysis process are going to wind up in the water that re-infiltrates afterward.  Bioremediation is a possibility for any organic toxins, but not always feasible.

If the product which flows from the wells is light enough to flow through pipelines, the water issue would be moot.  Ergo, it must not be.

Yet another book to find, although I admit to being suspicious of anything that joins the Walter Duranty club ("Pulitzer") and gets made into a Pee Bee Ess series.

It is exceedingly good; it basically rewrites world history from the 1800s to just beyond Gulf 1 as it has been shaped by oil and those who had it or sought it. The style is a combination of history, biography, and epic adventure.

It's also the kind of book you would normally select to pass the time during an overseas international flight (both ways). Be prepared to lose a substantial portion of your life ;-)

however, if it actually has accurate production figures for the Nazi synfuels it would be worth having for that alone.

I don't remember all of the info he gives regarding Nazi synfuel production, but (a) it is extensive and (b) note that I didn't make any reference to the cost. Obviously, war and strategic access to fuel (i.e., not much native oil in Germany or its early WWII conquests) drove the synfuel industry and the cost was no doubt high.

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