And GM claims their cars are the best ever made. And Enron is making money hand over fist. Really, it's all true.

This is no more believable than any other marketing hype. It needs to be verified, and the Saudis refuse to let any independent agency verify their claims.

Chris: They are the best cars GM has every made. They are not very good, but that is testimony to how bad their cars have been for the past 40 years.

"Saudi Arabia ... yesterday declared that the world had decades' worth of oil to come"

And you believed them.

At these prices we have oil shale. We won't need the Saudis if we develop the technology, along with nukes, etc.,

It seems to me that shale will keep an oil shock from happening - till then, reasonable gas prices around the next election would be nice.

Disbelieving the Saudis doesn't establish as true the opposite of what they say.

There is oil/natural gas out there for decades to come. The only question is the cost of extracting it from the ground. Most of the easily accessible locations have been harvested, and new ones don't come on line until the cost of getting the stuff out of the ground is justified by market prices. No one's going to drill four miles down and risk a dry hole or rip up half a plateau looking for oil shale or tar sands if they don't expect to at least earn their costs back.

If extracting oil from oil shale and sands ever becomes economically viable we will not have to look very hard for it, there are hundreds of thousands of acres in just Utah and Nevada alone where deposits are right on the surface. It is an interesting experience to build a campfire and have a sputtering and distinct refinery smell come up from the rocks.

I was talking to a landowner from Carbon County, Utah (interesting name, that) this afternoon who has half a billion barrels of oil in sands and shale on his property (considerably less recoverable - though that is an elastic number given technology). There is still an old drag line on his property that was used years ago to strip off oil sands and dump them into rail cars. The oil sands were used as asphalt to pave roads in Salt Lake City.

Needless to say, his property values have risen somewhat this year.

Extracting oil from oil shale has just become economically viable: Since 1981, Shell researchers at the company's division of "unconventional resources" have been trying to figure out how to get usable energy out of oil shale.

Shell's method, which it calls "in situ conversion," is simplicity itself in concept but exquisitely ingenious in execution: Drill shafts into the oil-bearing rock. Drop heaters down the shaft. Cook the rock until the hydrocarbons boil off, the lightest and most desirable first. Collect them.
The product is about one-third natural gas, two-thirds light crude.

The process releases upwards of a million barrels an acre, a billion barrels a square mile. And the oil shale formation in the Green River Basin, most of which is in Colorado, covers more than a thousand square miles - the largest fossil fuel deposits in the world.
Potentially, one TRILLION barrels of crude.

The process should be commercially feasible with world oil prices at $30 a barrel.

(A heavily edited and paraphrased version of the article by Linda Seebach, Rocky Mountain News).

Posted by: Michael Herdegen at September 29, 2005 2:43 AM

Michael:
I read that too. I'll believe it when I see it. In any case, the environmental costs of punching all those holes will be significant. Look for SUWA to call all hands on deck when Shell actually decides to try it commercially.

Doubtless they will try it on a private landholding first - or on the Uintah-Ouray reservation and tell the environmentalists to pound sand (oil sand prefferably).

I rather hope we come up with a good renewable/green energy solution before we have to tap into this resource much. (though lord knows it would be hard to make parts of the Uintah basin much uglier than they naturally are)