Chamblee54

Last week, people changed their facebook status symbol in support of gay marriage. During those five business days, the United States imported 44 million barrels of oil. Some of this oil was purchased from dictators who support terrorism. Lots of carbon dioxide was dumped into the atmosphere. Very little progress was made on finding alternative sources of energy. In other words, business as usual.
This feature is a repost from a year ago. The good news is that Willard M. Romney is now the answer to a trivia question. The not so good news is that B. Hussein Obama is the POTUS. The corporations that invested in him want a return on that capital. It will be energy business as usual until 2017. Whether the carbon pollution tipping points will fall over is difficult to determine.
As you may have noticed, the price of gasoline is going up. The intermediates are full of opinions. Today we will focus on two reports. Informed Comment has a bit today, Why Romney is Lying about the Causes of high Prices at the Pump. A few weeks ago, Tom Dispatch published Tomgram: Michael Klare, Why High Gas Prices Are Here to Stay. As with all stories, you can learn a few things by reading the original, and following the links. Pictures today are from The Library of Congress .
It looks like either Mitt Romney or Barack Obama is going to be the next President. Yuck. One of the issues is the price of gasoline. Lips will be moving, and the etch a sketch turned over. The smiling Mormon said recently “In thrall to the environmentalist lobby and its dogmas, the President and the regulatory bodies under his control have taken measures to limit energy exploration and restrict development in ways that sap economic performance, curtail growth, and kill jobs,”
It is copy and paste time. Other people say things better than your slack blogger. “Oil prices are a matter of supply and demand, and Romney only wants to talk about supply. The US imports 8.7 million barrels of petroleum per day (the world produces roughly 87 million barrels a day). If you wanted to put down its price, you could begin by slashing imports by not wasting so much gasoline. If we moved more things by train instead of by trucks; if we gave more tax breaks for buying hybrids and electric vehicles; if we did more to encourage wind and solar energy and integrated it with electric vehicles; if we lowered the speed limits; if we held Detroit’s feet to the fire and required much higher gasoline efficiency much sooner, if we set policies that encouraged people to live in cities near their work– if we did all that we’d put down the price of petroleum. We only have 4% of the world’s population and we use about a fifth of the world’s petroleum, and that is one of the problems….We can’t affect the supply part of the equation. The United States just doesn’t have many petroleum reserves by world standards, and drilling in nature reserves and off pristine beaches is not going to produce enough fuel to lower world prices. We’ve already increased our production of petroleum and liquid fuels by about a million barrels a day since Obama has been president, and Obama isn’t doing anything to stand in the way of that kind of thing.
And, there are currently some international issues affecting supply: 1. the boycotts on Iran (which Romney supports, in fact he wants more! The more you boycott Iran’s oil, the more you put up the price of petroleum; hint: you’ve reduced supply). Talk of war also raises gasoline prices because the futures markets get nervous. 2. Declining production from old fields. China’s domestic production is down 200,000 barrels a day this spring because an old field is being worked out. China’s good economy is also roaring along, so that Chinese demand was up about 18% in February. 3. Political instability and quarrels. The Kurds in northern Iraq say they will stop pumping oil until the central Iraqi government gives them the share of profits it had promised. Syria used to produce 400,000 barrels a day and is now not doing much because of the upheaval there. South Sudan has shut down production as part of its quarrel with Sudan, through which it pipes its oil, over how much Khartoum skims off.” (Does this pipeline run through Darfur?)
The truth is that the earth is running out of oil. There is oil left to be extracted, but it is going to be much tougher to get. The days of Jed Clampett discovering oil with his shotgun are over, if they ever existed in the first place. Many of the remaining oil deposits are in deep water. “Brazil’s offshore fields, considered by some experts the most promising new oil discovery of this century, will prove especially pricey, because they lie beneath one and a half miles of water and two and a half miles of sand, rock, and salt. The world’s most advanced, costly drilling equipment — some of it still being developed — will be needed. Petrobras, the state-controlled energy firm, has already committed $53 billion to the project for 2011-2015, and most analysts believe that will be only a modest down payment on a staggering final price tag.”
The Arctic has lots of oil. Getting it out is going to be tough. “The Arctic physical environment presents special challenges not experienced elsewhere in the world. Several oil and natural gas fields have been discovered on Russia’s Yamal Peninsula but have not been developed because of the daunting physical challenges. As noted in a Cambridge Energy Research Associates report on this matter: “Intermittent permafrost becomes continuous, winds rise to a steady 40 m per second, wind-driven water up to 10 m deep covers the low-lying land several months of the year, and solid ground gives way to friable sand that offers little support to drill pads or to pipelines and other infrastructure. In winter, instead of soil there is a frozen mixture of one part sand to four parts of ice, shot through with salt. At greater depths one encounters cryopegs—liquid saltwater lenses that slide under pressure, further weakening the load-bearing capacity of the soil…. The most difficult part is getting gas and liquids to market as well as getting equipment and materiel in.”
Other sources of oil are the tar sands of Canada, and the “heavy oil” of Venezuela. The tar sands will probably be exploited, with or without a pipeline through the Nebraska aquifer. The oil produced is full of contaminants, and will be environmentally and economically costly.
“Until now, Canada’s tar sands have been obtained through a process akin to strip mining, utilizing monster shovels to pry a mixture of sand and bitumen out of the ground. But most of the near-surface bitumen in the tar-sands-rich province of Alberta has now been exhausted, which means all future extraction will require a far more complex and costly process. Steam will have to be injected into deeper concentrations to melt the bitumen and allow its recovery by massive pumps. This requires a colossal investment of infrastructure and energy, as well as the construction of treatment facilities for all the resulting toxic wastes. According to the Canadian Energy Research Institute, the full development of Alberta’s oil sands would require a minimum investment of $218 billion over the next 25 years, not including the cost of building pipelines to the United States (such as the proposed Keystone XL) for processing in U.S. refineries.
The development of Venezuela’s heavy oil will require investment on a comparable scale. The Orinoco belt, an especially dense concentration of heavy oil adjoining the Orinoco River, is believed to contain recoverable reserves of 513 billion barrels of oil — perhaps the largest source of untapped petroleum on the planet. But converting this molasses-like form of bitumen into a useable liquid fuel far exceeds the technical capacity or financial resources of the state oil company, Petróleos de Venezuela S.A. Accordingly, it is now seeking foreign partners willing to invest the $10-$20 billion needed just to build the necessary facilities.”
These issues do not consider the impact of carbon pollution from burning fossil fuels. Nor does this report factor in the cost of wars to protect the flow of petroleum. It is estimated that the cost of gasoline does not cover much of the true cost of extracting and using oil. This is the future.