As Oil Prices Rise, Drilling in Difficult Places Becomes Worthwhile.
With prices as of this writing at $126 per barrel, drilling in tar sands and shale becomes worthwhile. New, environmentally-sound drilling techniques are invented in order to get at oil in out-of-the way places. We know that we have large reserves of oil and gas off the east and west coasts of the United States, in the Gulf of Mexico, and in Alaska. When Americans get sufficiently tired of high prices they will allow oil companies to get those resources out of the ground.
OV Social
This post by Diana Furchtgott-Roth looks rtetty silly in retrospect. The Canadian tar sands are massively polluting and harmful. the technology is make them environmentally benign was certainly NOT being deployed whe oil was at $126 per bbl at the time of her original post. Now that oil has gone up to $147, then fallen to the low $30s, and finally recovered sharply to the $70s as of this posting, we can say:
1.The world economy cannot handle indefinitely rising oil prices and $126 was probably above what it can tolerate.
2. The tar sands are probably not economical at prices that the world economy can handle even without the expense of becoming clean.
3. The fact that the tar sands are even being pursued is pretty strong evidence that peak oil is a fact.
Talking about rising oil prices seems to me to be completely missing the point - the fact that oil prices are rising is precisely what peak oil is all about. PO is *not* about running out of oil, but about trying to predict (what will happen) when daily production levels out and starts to decline, most likely with demand still on the rise.
The question is, are prices rising because we have peaked, or because of other factors, like war in the middle east, etc. With all the talk about biofuels, oil shales, deep water reservoirs, etc, I think we're at least very close.
Official forecasts predict a "large" amount of oil and gas in these regions collectively - though probably not enough to ever reverse the long-term decline in U.S. oil production. But exploration and geological assessment which has already occurred argue that those estimates are probably exaggerated: Atlantic shelf - not very prospective; Southern CA Shelf -prospective for oil and gas, Northern CA not; Offshore FL - prospective for gas only; large areas of northern AK opened for drilling (proximate to ANWR) under Clinton and Bush, little oil found (see Roger Blanchard on these topics). The necessary water supplies needed to produce western US oil shale don't exist, and there are no proven techniques to produce oil from the shale (kerogen) without a net loss in energy, despite decades of costly research. As the opposing expert has pointed out, it doesn't matter whether the price is $1 or $1 million per barrel - if it cannot be produced at an energy profit, it won't be produced.