Comments | son_of

son_of_hob

Oil

Oct 27, 2005 01:07

Investor's Business Daily writes of a Rand Corp. report about extraction of oil from shale. Per-barrel oil prices currently are in the low $60s. At prices between $70 and $95, available technology renders shale-oil extraction profitable; developing technology would make it profitable at about $25 per barrel of crude (in today's dollars ( Read more... )

Comments 4

killedradiostar October 27 2005, 07:16:40 UTC

i hate to retort with hearsay, but i heard a rather convincing talk from dr. david goodstein of caltech arguing the infeasibility of both oil extracted from coal and oil extracted from shale.

actually, i don't need to. here's an article written by dr. goodstein that very closely mirrors the talk he gave: http://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg/Essay2.pdf

squid314 October 27 2005, 14:18:39 UTC

I don't have the geological knowledge to say whether this is right or wrong, but imagine how great it would be if it were right. For one thing, it would completely vindicate everyone who stood up to the scaremongers who told us our country would immediately run out of oil and be taken over by terrorists unless we turned the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge into an industrial park right this moment. The amount of oil in ANWR isn't even a drop compared to what we could get from shale. It's good to know that a cause you stood up for turned out to be right in the end ( ... )

squid314 October 27 2005, 18:15:14 UTC

Also, fun fact - after reading the article on how liberals are unjustifiedly claiming that oil companies have huge profits when in fact they're suffering terribly because of government regulation that makes it tough for them to get by and discourages growth, I pulled up CNN to get my daily news and their front page article was that Exxon just reported yesterday earning the largest quarterly profit of any corporation in history. Second place: Shell. If the liberals are trying exploit anti-corporate fanaticism to destroy the oil market, they're certainly doing an incredibly bad job of it ( ... )

son_of_hob October 27 2005, 22:05:12 UTC

Profits are high because the governmental regulation basically gives the few oil companies there are a virtual monopoly on the refining of oil. If it were not for the regulations on the building of oil refineries then some hot shot new company would start up with better teachniques and more efficient methods and create competition to lower the oil prices. All monopolies that last longer than 10-20 years are government created through regulations.