America, the Saudi Arabia of tomorrow

 

Is Fracking safe though?

 

America, the Saudi Arabia of tomorrow: The days when Mideast oil-producing dictatorships and their friends at OPEC could so easily wave their power over a trembling, oil-thirsty West are on their way to becoming a relic of the past.America still needs imported oil. But growing production and shrinking consumption have created a most promising trend. 

 

According to the International Energy Agency, the United States will become the world's leading oil producer in just a few years. Imagine that. The United States could produce more oil than Saudi Arabia as early as 2017 and become a net oil exporter by 2030. And if you count other petroleum products, the future is already here. In 2011, the United States exported more petroleum products -- including gasoline, diesel and other fuels -- than it imported. That had not happened in more than half a century.   Enter Fracking:

 

US to be top oil producer by 2017, report says, America will be self-sufficient by 2030, study finds:   The consequences are ‘‘potentially far reaching’’ for global energy markets and trade, the report said. Birol noted, for example, that Middle Eastern oil once bound for the United States would probably be rerouted to China. US-mined coal, facing declining demand in its home market, is already heading to Europe and China instead. 

There are several components of the sudden shift in the world’s energy supply, but the prime mover is a resurgence of US oil and gas production, particularly the unlocking of new reserves of oil and gas found in shale rock. The widespread adoption of techniques such as hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling has made those reserves much more accessible, and, in the case of natural gas, resulted in a vast glut that has sent prices plunging. The report predicted that the United States would overtake Russia as the leading producer of natural gas in 2015.

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 $3.50 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 , and spurred by oil prices above $70 a barrel, the energy industry is mobilized to unlock the secret of oil shale. Now Obama has made retrieving shale oil a priority.

As it has before,  shale oil 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.

That is $3.50 to $4 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  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.

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."
 

Six 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 or an equitable way has been discovered to capture it and bring it to the pump.

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
http://anaverageamericanpatriot.blogspot.com