I was researching this last night and woke up this morning to hear that oil and fuel stocks are the hot stocks today with a 12% increase overall. What a coincidence!
I was a bit surprised to find out the following on Shale oil!
A headline on an old newspaper reads: Oil Shale Development Imminent,". That edition of the defunct Grand Junction News, was published at the dawn of the 20th century.
More than a hundred years later, instability is roiling world oil markets, and Americans are paying $3 a gallon for gas. And oil shale fever is again rising in the geologic region known as the Piceance Basin, part of the Green River Formation
that stretches across the rugged plains of northwestern Colorado and parts of Wyoming and Utah.
There is no dispute that a thousand feet below the isolated ranch country here on Colorado's western slope lie almost unimaginable oil riches. It's locked in sedimentary rock -- essentially immature oil that given a few million years under heat and pressure would produce pools of oil easy to extract.
The Energy Department and private industry estimate that a trillion barrels are here in Colorado -- about the same amount as the entire world's known reserves of conventional oil. The entire Green River Formation might hold as much as 2 trillion barrels.
supposedly secretly Pushed by the Bush administration and legislation from Congress last year, and spurred by oil prices above $70 a barrel, the energy industry is mobilizing to unlock the secret of oil shale. As it has before, oil shale holds out the hope of a USA no longer dependent on foreign oil. Shell Oil is engaged in a multiyear test of a new technology for extracting the oil. Previous efforts that were uneconomical and environmentally destructive entailed mining the rock, crushing it and heating it above ground to release the oil.
Shell's new process involves sinking heaters deep underground, cooking the rock at 700 degrees and recovering the oil and natural gas with conventional drilling.
For a decade, Shell has been ramping up its research on private property here. It is also one of a handful of companies vying for research and development leases on larger tracts of federal land nearby. That could lead to full-scale development across 1,200 square miles of western Colorado.
Early results are promising, says Terry O'Connor, a vice president in the oil giant's unconventional resource division. But, he admits, "no one has been able to develop oil shale on a commercially sustainable basis. http://www.usatoday.com/....
That is $3 fuel that is here now, then I hear this a while back and more started making sense!
Legendary oilman T Boone Pickens says he doesn't believe that the oil sands are an effective substitute for our fuel needs. Pickens said Tuesday that huge development costs and a tight labor supply will prevent the Alberta oil sands and other unconventional means of production from covering the shortfall in supply. That said, Pickens holds a big stake in both the Canadian Oil Sands Trust [TSX:COS.UN] and Suncor Energy. http://www.resourceinvestor.com/....
When Pickens was in the Alberta oil sand fields in the 60's somebody said this isn't going to work, it isn't possible. It'll all have to be subsidized to a level, said, before they'd make money you'd have to have $5 oil," Pickens says laughing. "We never thought it would happen." http://www.cbsnews.com/....
Two years ago I did a story on shale oil and oil sand but it did not go over well because people felt it would never happen. Knowing all the research and development that has been put into these alternatives!
Knowing that T Boone Pickens has invested multiple millions in this! Knowing that between us and Canada we have the more reserves than the entire world combined!
Knowing that he said refining it would not be profitable until fuel hit $5 per gallon, you have to believe that $5 gas wall be here before you know it!
My question is have the oil companies purposely been driving up the prices in order to justify retrieving this huge reserves at our expense? Also at the expense of the environment and alternative fuel sources!
James Joiner
Gardner, Ma
www.anaveragepatriot.com
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