Striking Oil

[billroper]

Via Instapundit, this article tells how Shell has found an economical and apparently environmentally friendly way of extracting oil from oil shale and making money at $30 / barrel. And we've got a lot of oil shale.

Comments

[tigertoy.livejournal.com]

I have trouble describing drilling that many holes in the ground as "environmentally friendly" except in comparison to strip mining the stuff out. It does sound like a better way to keep our society running than watching in pretend shock as Saudi Arabia's production peaks and falls off, or worse stops entirely when they have a revolution. But even if there really is as much recoverable oil as the article is claiming -- and I think it would be prudent to assume there isn't, as a matter of principle -- it's all fossil carbon.

Once the people who move the small green pieces of paper are convinced that $50/barrel oil is a long term reality and not just an aberration, several alternatives will start coming on line at economically useful levels, as the applied researchers and engineers get the money and time to do the job. I frankly hope that the oil shale and tar sands don't prove so successful that the biomass methods that look so wonderful at laboratory scale (you may remember discussion on the GT list of the plant that turns turkey offal into crude oil) stay on the freak show circuit for another generation.