In the future, we’ll be beholden to oil powers, even moreso than today.
Today, oil and gas experts around the world are growing alarmed not just at future scarcity the idea that the world may have hit peak oil seems to be taking hold but at who’s in control of the precious stuff. As demand for energy explodes worldwide, there is less of it available and less exploration for it. That is partly because of a dropoff in investment created by the decline in oil prices in the ’90s. But it is also because multinational corporations like ExxonMobil (despite its record profits) now own just 6 percent of supplies, versus a whopping 77 percent that’s now owned by state-owned entities, according to the Petroleum Finance Corp., a Washington-based consulting group. State control guarantees less efficiency in the exploration for oil, and in the extraction and refinement of fuel. Further, these state-owned companies do not divulge how much they really own, or what the production and exploration numbers are. These have become the new state secrets.
The future of America ought not be subject to the whims of Vladmir Putin, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the Saudis and others – but if we insist on looking no further than oil we will be.
In 2003 Kerry said:
“I want to develop alternative fuels and more efficient cars. We’ll create five hundred thousand new jobs, and we’ll never have to send young Americans to war for Mideast oil.”
Then, like any other good idea or line he had during the campaign, he forgot about it. The next Democratic president will be the one who makes Energy Freedom the centerpiece of their campaign. We’ve got to draw a line – literally – in the sand marking the day we were enslaved by oil and the day we began liberating ourselves from it.
A superpower can’t be a superpower if its beholden to others.
An Inconvenient Truth
Let’s face it, as for the next 2.5 years, oil will rule the land from the White House on down to Exxon, Chevron, etc. Nothing dramatic is going to happen to transform our energy needs. It’s like living in a new dimension where the insane are being the “deciders” on our most vital interests.
The USGS estimates the known oil reserves to be 1 trillion barrels. Luckily, the US is estimated to hold 60-70% of the world’s oil shale (equivalent to 1 trillion barrels), so we currently have as much potential oil resting in shale as the entire Earth has in traditional oil. Fear of oil dependancy is not a logical reason to push for alternate energy sources.
Um, JWG, you know how expensive it would be to extract that shale and how much water is needed to process it? I believe that the energy needed to extract the shale is close to equal to the amount of energy the shale will provide. So we’ll need a barrel of oil to extract a barrel of shale (this isn’t exact, but it’s illustrative).
Maybe not.
Shell’s engineers devised a gentler method that’s no shorter on technological derring-do. They bake the rock with deep-set heating elements while ringing the site with underground refrigeration pipes so newly mobile hydrocarbons don’t leak away. This technique takes a lot of energy (though no more than conventional oil drilling, Shell says; roughly 3.5 times as much energy comes out as goes in).
But the yield is what really grabs attention: a projected 1 million barrels per surface acre, 10 times more than the conventional dig-crush-cook method. With multiples like that, Shell executives think they might be able to make the process economical at $25 to $30 a barrel – less than half the price of traditional extraction.
A superpower can t be a superpower if its beholden to others.
No, why not? Is that a rule?
What happened to global interdependence (Democratic, liberal = good) vs. Isolationism (Republican, conservative = bad)?
Are back to “Whatever it is that Republicans are for, we’re against it”, again?
Let s face it, as for the next 2.5 years, oil will rule the land from the White House on down to Exxon, Chevron, etc.
I suppose that you’re saying that the Democrats will be in power in 2 and one – half years.
Even if this occurs, you couldn’t possibly believe that this hypothetical Democratic President can change the “cars run on gasoline, and if you interfere with our profits, there will be less of it, and then the price will go up, and the American people will hate you” paradigm, could you?