Archive for the ‘Energy’ Category
Israel: The New Petro Power?
….‘Thus says the Lord GOD, “It will come about on that day, that thoughts will come into your mind and you will devise an evil plan, and you will say, ‘I will go up against the land of unwalled villages. I will go against those who are at rest, that live securely, all of them living without walls and having no bars or gates, to capture spoil and to seize plunder, to turn your hand against the waste places which are now inhabited, and against the people who are gathered from the nations, who have acquired cattle and goods, who live at the center of the world.’ “Sheba and Dedan and the merchants of Tarshish with all its villages will say to you, ‘Have you come to capture spoil? Have you assembled your company to seize plunder, to carry away silver and gold, to take away cattle and goods, to capture great spoil?’”’ …. Ezek 38:10–13 NAS95
The Crisis that Wasn’t: Where’s All the Oil?
Reporters flying over the area Sunday spotted only a few patches of sheen and an occasional streak of thicker oil, and radar images taken since then suggest that these few remaining patches are quickly breaking down in the warm surface waters of the Gulf.
Evaporation, storms, and natural dispersion effects (and human cleanup efforts) are doing what they’ve done in the past: reducing the concentration of the oil, sometimes to microscopic size, where it’s consumed as food by microbes. So, once again, the sky hasn’t fallen.
Yet CBS, the New York Times, and other major media outlets are doing what they can to keep us terrified. (They never let a crisis go to waste, either.) They’re using the well-practiced environmentalist tactic: warning of possible impending doom by relying on uncertainty:
Our National Blind Spot
Maybe what we’re dealing with is mob psychology. Perhaps it’s rationalization. “It’s for a worthy cause,” we tell ourselves, oblivious to the fact that the Eighth Commandment doesn’t say “Thou shalt not steal … except by majority vote or unless it’s for the poor.”
Cheap Natural Gas and Its Democrat Enemies
These alternative energy sources all have problems associated with them. They are vastly more expensive than gas. For example, generating a megawatt-hour of electricity using natural gas costs $80; with wind it would cost $142, and solar would cost $396.
Endless oil
Except in Russia and Ukraine. What is to us a matter of scientific certainty is by no means accepted there. Many Russians and Ukrainians — no slouches in the hard sciences — have since the 1950s held that oil does not come exclusively, or even partly, from dinosaurs but is formed below the Earth’s 25-mile deep crust. This theory — first espoused in 1877 by Dmitri Mendeleev, who also developed the periodic table — was rejected by geologists of the day because he postulated that the Earth’s crust had deep faults, an idea then considered absurd. Mendeleev wouldn’t be vindicated by his countrymen until after the Second World War when the then-Soviet Union, shut out of the Middle East and with scant petroleum reserves of its own, embarked on a crash program to develop a petroleum industry that would allow it to fend off the military and economic challenges posed by the West.
Today, Russians laugh at our peak oil theories as they explore, and find, the bounty in the bowels of the Earth. Russia’s reserves have been climbing steadily — according to BP’s annual survey, they stood at 45 billion barrels in 2001, 69 billion barrels in 2004, and 80 billion barrels of late, making Russia an oil superpower that this year produced more oil than Saudi Arabia. Some oil auditing firms estimate Russia’s reserves at up to 200 billion barrels. Despite Russia’s success in exploration, most of those in the west who have known about the Russian-Ukrainian theories have dismissed them as beyond the Pale. This week, the Russian Pale can be found awfully close to home.
Oil’s Expanding Frontiers
Keith O. Rattie, CEO of Questar Corporation, a natural gas and pipeline company, says that by 2050 there may be 10 billion people demanding energy — a daunting prospect, considering that of today’s 6.2 billion people, nearly 2 billion “don’t even have electricity — never flipped a light switch.” Rattie says energy demand will grow 30 percent to 50 percent in the next 20 years and there are no near-term alternatives to fossil fuels.
Today, wind and solar power combined are just one-sixth of 1 percent of American energy consumption. Nuclear? The United States and other rich nations endorse reducing world carbon emissions 80 percent by 2050. But Oliver Morton, a science writer, says that if nuclear is to supply even just 10 percent of the necessary carbon-free energy, the world must build more than 50 large nuclear power plants a year. Currently five a year are being built. Rattie says that as part of “a worldwide building boom in coal-fired power plants,” about 30 under construction in America “will burn about 70 million tons of coal a year.”
Edward L. Morse, an energy official in Carter’s State Department, writes in Foreign Affairs that the world’s deep-water oil and gas reserves are significantly larger than was thought just a decade ago, and high prices have spurred development of technologies — a drilling vessel can cost $1 billion — for extracting them. The costs of developing oil sands — Canada may contain more oil than Saudi Arabia has — are declining, so projects that last year were not economic with the price of oil under $90 a barrel are now viable with oil at $79 a barrel.
Morse says new technologies are also speeding development of natural gas trapped in U.S. shale rock. The Marcellus Shale, which stretches from West Virginia through Pennsylvania and into New York, “may contain as much natural gas as the North Field in Qatar, the largest field ever discovered.”
Three Forks Raising Oil Optimism
North Dakota sits on one of the largest pools of oil in North America.
The Bakken Shale Formation is estimated to hold nearly four billion barrels of oil that can be extracted.
And now, a new batch of oil just under the Bakken is adding even more interest to oil exploration in the state.
Jim Olson reports on the Three Forks-Sanish Formation.
The Bakken Shale Formation has created excitement in western North Dakota – the kind of excitement that leads to things like bumper stickers. But even as oil companies scramble to tap into the Bakken, there’s a new oil play brewing – it’s called the Three Forks-Sanish Formation.
(Jeff Wirth, Hess ND Manager) “As if the Bakken wasn’t exciting enough, this just adds to it obviously.”
THE US HAS “MORE THAN ALL THE MIDDLE EAST PUT TOGETHER”
The Bakken is the largest domestic oil discovery since Alaska ‘s Prudhoe Bay , and has the potential to eliminate all American dependence on foreign oil. The Energy Information Administration (EIA) estimates it at 503 billion barrels. Even if just 10% of the oil is recoverable… at $107 a barrel, we’re looking at a resource base worth more than $5.3 trillion.
‘When I first briefed legislators on this, you could practically see their jaws hit the floor. They had no idea..’ says Terry Johnson, the Montana Legislature’s financial analyst.
‘This sizable find is now the highest-producing onshore oil field found in the past 56 years’ reports, The Pittsburgh Post Gazette. It’s a formation known as the Williston Basin , but is more commonly referred to as the ‘Bakken.’ And it stretches from Northern Montana, through North Dakota and into Canada . For years, U. S. oil exploration has been considered a dead end. Even the ‘Big Oil’ companies gave up searching for major oil wells decades ago. However, a recent technological breakthrough has opened up the Bakken’s massive reserves…. and we now have access of up to 500 billion barrels. And because this is light, sweet oil, those billions of barrels will cost Americans just $16 PER BARREL! That’s enough crude to fully fuel the American economy for 2041 years straight. 2. And if THAT didn’t throw you on the floor, then this next one should – because it’s from TWO YEARS AGO!
U. S. Oil Discovery- Largest Reserve in the World! Stansberry Report Online – 4/20/2006
Hidden 1,000 feet beneath the surface of the Rocky Mountains lies the largest untapped oil reserve in the world. It is more than 2 TRILLION barrels. On August 8, 2005 President Bush mandated its extraction. In three and a half years of high oil prices none has been extracted. With this motherload of oil why are we still fighting over off-shore drilling?
They reported this stunning news: We have more oil inside our borders, than all the other proven reserves on earth. Here are the official estimates:
- 8-times as much oil as Saudi Arabia
- 18-times as much oil as Iraq
- 21-times as much oil as Kuwait
- 22-times as much oil as Iran
- 500-times as much oil as Yemen
- and it’s all right here in the Western United States .
HOW can this BE? HOW can we NOT BE extracting this? Because the environmentalists and others have blocked all efforts to help America become independent of foreign oil! Again, we are letting a small group of people dictate our lives and our economy…..WHY?
