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Last time it climbed that high, it did it out of pure speculation from traders and Saudi Arabia increased production in an attempt to try and get it to go back down again. It started a whole bunch of investing in aternative energy again, which up until then had fallen dormant.
Alternate energy is crap. And until you realize that the more we can focus on better alternatives and not what nimwits like you are thinking.
Alternative energy isn't crap, its just not feasible right now. Wind, yes, solar, no for the time being that is.
Sooner or later we will have to get our energy from the sun or fusion, which is really the same thing. There just isn't enough fossil fuel or wind potential energy to supply the energy demands of our species.
Remember, without energy we can't plant which means we won't eat, we can't communicate which makes large countries impossible, and we can't defend ourselves from other regions of the world that would have enough energy to overtake us.
Saying you are for alternative energy doesn't make you a loon bat, but saying you want it now does. I want alternative, renewable sources of energy that are environmentally neutral. But I also realize that for the near future, the next decade or two, we are going to have to keep depending on fossil fuels as our primary source of energy.
Alternative energy isn't crap, its just not feasible right now. Wind, yes, solar, no for the time being that is.
Sooner or later we will have to get our energy from the sun or fusion, which is really the same thing. There just isn't enough fossil fuel or wind potential energy to supply the energy demands of our species.
Remember, without energy we can't plant which means we won't eat, we can't communicate which makes large countries impossible, and we can't defend ourselves from other regions of the world that would have enough energy to overtake us.
Saying you are for alternative energy doesn't make you a loon bat, but saying you want it now does. I want alternative, renewable sources of energy that are environmentally neutral. But I also realize that for the near future, the next decade or two, we are going to have to keep depending on fossil fuels as our primary source of energy.
I largely agree with you here. I am not an advocate of pushing us to alternative energy right now. I suspect, once the free market has managed to create efficient and cost effective means of alternative energies, people will go that way. However, I do believe, in order to stave off the OPEC monopoly, we need to increase domestic oil production - or use shales. Either way, we can reduce costs and our foreign oil dependencies by looking to our domestic resources.
I largely agree with you here. I am not an advocate of pushing us to alternative energy right now. I suspect, once the free market has managed to create efficient and cost effective means of alternative energies, people will go that way. However, I do believe, in order to stave off the OPEC monopoly, we need to increase domestic oil production - or use shales. Either way, we can reduce costs and our foreign oil dependencies by looking to our domestic resources.
The problem is that there just isn't enough traditional crude left in this country.
IF we managed to put enough oil rigs in the territorial waters of the United States, and IF they managed to find double the amount of oil that we know exists now, then we would still only approach about 20% of our oil needs. And those are big ifs.
For one, oil companies don't know whats out there, and are speculated to not be near that much. Another problem is that it would take a tremendous amount of time to produce the extra rigs, and then you've got to find people to work them. Then to actually start producing oil will take them about five years. Thats if all of the restrictions were removed from them today.
Crude oil in the United States is over as a energy source, lets just face facts. The drill here, drill now crowd is just not living in the real world, even oil people know this.
Shale is a real answer, and its here now. We've just got to move our oil subsidies away from ocean production to shale production.
Now, as far as alternatives, I feel that we will need government pushing to get there. The free market simply doesn't work fast enough.
Take the airline industry, for example. Without government money, government science, and government production we simply wouldn't have had airlines on the level that we do now. They are largely non profit, and take huge sums of money to get up and going. The government gave us that.
The government can drive us to a new industry, and can get that industry off the ground. It can also make alternative energy feasible in as short as 10 to 20 years. The free market will take much longer to do that.
But you're right, we must end OPEC's stranglehold on us. The problem is that our domestic oil companies like oil being 100 dollars a barrel. They are making record profits, profits that would be cut in half with oil being 60 dollars a barrel from use of shale. We need Republicans to quit living in a dream world of drilling, and we need Democrats to quit living in a dream world of alternative energy.
This is why oil shale doesn't scale up and hence, will never work: Understanding EROEI
Here we go again.
EROEI is Energy inputed vs. the Energy gained from that input.
We've gone over this before in another thread.
Your saying that with all of the energy needed for mining, refining, and to extract the oil from the shale that we would have to expend more energy then we'd get out of the oil produced in the final product.
Here is from a website by an economist on the EROEI of Oil shale and sands
"The average production cost of one barrel of syncrude from the oil sand resources in Canada was approximately 32 USD in the year 2006. The mining process costs about 16 USD2006/barrel of oil equivalent (boe). The InSitu SAGD extraction costs about 14 USD2006/boe, and the upgrading process to syncrude costs about 16.5 USD2006/boe. Figure 2 shows the break down of the total costs that were incorporated in the EROI calculations above (Herweyer 2007). Mining costs appear to be decreasing according to some reports in early 2008.
Syncrude has approximately the same quality as conventional crude oil, and is therefore competitive. So long as the conventional crude oil price stays above 31.5 USD2006/boe (excluding profits) it is profitable to extract oil sands. The conventional crude oil prices in 2006 were 56 and in 2007 as much as $80 USD/boe (BP 2006). However at the same time the price of diesel, natural gas, steel and so forth used in generating the syncrude were increasing. Nevertheless it appears that tar sands will be a competitive source of oil for the indefinite future."
Oil is over 100 dollars a barrel. Thats right, its viable and is enough EROEI positive to be worth the trouble.
The most conservative estimates of large scale Oil shale/sand production is 80 dollars a barrel. Thats still 20 dollars cheaper than we have now, and its domestic. While oil is a world market, it would require that the Saudi's and OPEC lower their price of oil, speculation would lower also, because the United States is much more of a stable country than where we get our oil now.
People that always defend the oil companies and Big Business should have NO problem pay $4 plus a gallon for gas after all it is just business as usual. Enjoy.
Casper
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