In case anyone missed it, let me repeat something that is of a magnitude of 10 on the scale of news-quakes for Joe Public USA: America’s combined energy resources are, according to a new report from the Congressional Research Service (CSR), the largest on earth. They eclipse Saudi Arabia (3rd), China (4th) and Canada (6th) combined – and that’s without including America’s shale oil deposits and, in the future, the potentially astronomic impact of methane hydrates.
The energy facts in the CRS report should be making front page news all over America. Mostly it isn’t. Given the devastating news from Japan and New Zealand, it may be right to postpone dancing in the streets. But something else is going on. Even though they are going to dominate global energy supply for decades to come the insidious war on vital fossil fuels continues apace.
Thus it perhaps falls to a friend of the US (i.e. me) to state that if the White House is in any way serious about impacting the economic Black Hole that is the burgeoning national debt, reinvigorating business big-time, creating real jobs and restoring ebbing national wealth, the best shot by a distance if you’re American … well, you’re standing on it, or rather above it.
This fails to compensate for the joy that I expect to feel after a day of schlepping a grocery cart from one Government Food Distribution Point to another, securing sustenance with the new ObamaBucks (you can tell them easily…they have Karl Marx’s face on one side and Saul Alinsky’s on the reverse) when I repair to my pasteboard box under a bridge and wrap myself in a nice tarp against the cold.
After all, Won’t It be NICE To Know that snail darters and spotted owls aren’t getting their fins and feathers ruffled by evil, wicked bipeds like me?
The reason we have the most resources is because the United States is the best country and the best thing to ever grace planet earth with its presence.
It’s important to understand that the graph up above draws on data found in the linked Congressional Research Service report but does not actually appear in the report. It’s a presentation of Table 6–Reserves of Fossil Fuels Plus Technically Recoverable Undiscovered Oil and
Natural Gas. Note that the bulk of the total displayed in Table 6 consists of the bottom-most portion of the pyramids shown in Figures 1 and 2. This portion is sub-economic resources; that is, fossil fuel resources technically recoverable using new technologies, but having recovery costs that are so so high it doesn’t presently pay to produce them.
It could pay to produce them if consumer energy prices became high enough. Keep in mind, though, that as consumer energy prices become high enough, renewable energy technologies start to become competitive. There’s likely a point at which renewables actually become cheaper.
CURT, THANK YOU FOR A SO IMPORTANT NEWS,
yes DRILL BABY DRILL IS A MUST
The technology is here now that makes recovery from shale viable. The product in the shale is the best there is. The shale will actually give off flame if lit. Stop the progressive war on America stop the Kenyan and his thieves.
@Greg:
While your statement is true, you failed to modify it by stating that the point you mentioned is decades down the road.
And it isn’t a static thing either. As fossil-fuel driven prices increase, the cost of manufacturing, installing, and maintaining those renewable energy sources goes up as well. Eventually, some time down the road, it might become cost effective to build more solar and wind plants. Then the problem will be where to put them all.
If renewable energy is the answer to our energy problems… then we should “Drill Baby Drill”…. why? Because it would be a real shame to have all that oil become obsolete and worthless.
To Allen Mullaly… CEO of Ford. Build a gas/natural gas hybrid and then install natural gas filling stations at every Ford dealership in the country. I wouldn’t be able to get there fast enough to buy such a vehicle. We are awash in natural gas… what we need are visionaries that can exploit this by providing an infrastructure for its delivery. Cart and Horse thing!
Problems is Sleuth, is the toxic byproducts of Shale and how to dispose of it if we do traditional mining or the concern of what kind of ground water or top soil damages can be inflicted if Shell or another company attempts to do a heat leeching concept from embedded shale rock and using a siphon. The strip mining operations in Virgina mountains is an example of what kind of byproduct problems that can be expected in water and land damages from the slurry that is dumped after the fuel has been extracted.
Edit, I don’t mean to slam the idea of Shale it’s just in the same scope of mining Coal and how to manage the byproduct materials.
John Cooper, hi, maybe they could rebury that sleut at the same place and debt,
after the processing of the oil, some kind of separator gadget, similar maybe to what
the actor[ don’t have his name now] had create and was at the gulf spill
@Donald Bly, #7:
There’s no danger of oil becoming obsolete and worthless. Certain applications will continue to require the sort of low-weight, concentrated energy that comes from petroleum. Air travel, for example. Petroleum will also remain a primary industrial feedstock. We’re rapidly burning up limited supplies one of the future’s essential raw materials. Any degree to which renewable energy technologies reduce the rate of burn of something essential and irreplacable is a good thing.
In the essay I wrote, regarding this topic, I addressed the issue of land reclamation.
See:
This NOT “a problem.”
Actually, it would be an opportunity.
And opportunity to create yet ANOTHER totally new industry, which would also create thousands of new jobs.
In addition, it would afford American Ingenuity the opportunity to reclaim the land in a more suitable fashion, such as the re-routing of rivers, creating areas suitable for farming or recreation.
It’s not as if we haven’t done this before. (Anyone ever visit Lake Meade or The Hoover Dam?).
And look at what China did! :
http://www.tibetanliberation.org/chinadivertsriver.html
and
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/inatl/longterm/yangtze/yangtze.htm
Greg… I guess you are unaware that there is bacteria that produce oil as a byproduct of their life function. Oil is NOT a finite material. 100 years of supply… plenty of time to find new technologies. Drill Baby Drill…
Or would you, Greg, prefer that we simply fund the Brazilians to drill oil for us so that we can redistribute our wealth to them.