Oil Shale Video

Video

Category:

Education

Tags:

• Oil
• Shale

[Alkabiades]

Shale oil is the fuel of the future, and always will be.

[Deke101]

@Mortonc3 Hess Corp. invests 5 billion. Marathon already producing over 12,000 barrels a day. Exxon Mobile invests 1.8 billion in shale oil land leases. Continental Resources, OEG Resources, Noble Energy, Mariner Energy, SM Energy, Andarko Petroleum, Chesapeake Energy. Saudi Arabia invests 130 billion in shale oil. Mack truck signs on to produce trucks with natural gas engines. Pilot Travel signs on to place natural gas ports in truck stops. List goes on.

[Mortonc3]

@Deke101 can you streamline my search and tell me who some of these several companies are?

[Deke101]

@Mortonc3 New tech? No, the existing tech has been streamlined and SEVERAL companies are jumping on board. Shale oil will become viable very quickly. The trucking industry and mass transit will be among the first to switch to this fuel.

[Mortonc3]

@Deke101 What new technology has come into play since ICP?

[Deke101]

@Mortonc3 The extraction rate has greatly increased lately. Take a look at the companies and countries investing in this new energy source. Even Saudi Arabia has seen the writing on the wall.

[DanPhantom89]

Oil reserves around the world have grown in the past generation. Admittedly, only slightly, but this is in spite of increased demand. We find new sources of oil, we can access reserves that were previously uneconomic, we learn that current sources have more oil than were previously thought or that more of it can be extracted. Unconventional sources of oil are very much in the majority. The biggest roadblock for them in the future will likely be politics.

[DanPhantom89]

nonetheless, some people in the 1970's were predicting that we would be out by now. The Limits to Growth, published in 1972, stated that we would run out of Petroleum by 1992. In 1977, Jimmy Carter stated that: "we could use up all of the proven reserves of oil in the entire world by the end of the next decades." Neither of these scenarios occurred.

[DanPhantom89]

so? 800 billion barrels is nothing to sneeze at. It's still more than Saudi Arabia, which has the greatest oil reserves in the world at the moment. Methods have grown cheaper over the past couple decades through in sito methods, but it's still more expensive than simply importing it. However, as technology changes, it'll allow us to extract it at a lower cost. The biggest obstacle are environmental worries, even more than price.

[Mortonc3]

@DanPhantom89 I forgot to mention that it was said U.S. oil production would hit peak in the 70s, not that we'd run out. Most studies have agreed that we did indeed hit peak oil production in the U.S. in the mid 70s. A few recent studies suggest that we hit world peak oil production in 2005, but its still too early to tell with certainty.