One accident will make it explode?  That's just FUD.  I'm not saying there aren't risks, but the gasoline and diesel tanks we have now are also very dangerous.  The benefits of compressed gas (natural gas, propane, hydrogen, etc.) tanks are that if they do rupture catastrophically they can do so without ignition.  They just "pop" and then the gas is gone.  More likely they'd puncture and the gas would spray out.  The chance of ignition there is no more or less than with gasoline.  The big advantage though is that the fuel doesn't end up in a puddle under the damaged vehicle ready to ignite.  It just disperses in the air.  Have you ever seen how difficult a time the Mythbusters had getting propane tanks to explode? 

Methane, as liquefied natural gas or LNG, has to be  refrigerated to be shipped.  LNG is  dangerous.  There was an explosion in Cleveland that killed over 100 people.  Reference: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquefied_natural_gas

http://thehill.com/blogs/e2-wire/e2-wire/212305-obama-accuses-gop-of-playing-politics-with-higher-gas-prices

...excerpt...

“Only in politics do people root for bad news, do they greet bad news so enthusiastically,” Obama said before a crowd of students.

...

“Now, we absolutely need safe, responsible oil production here in America,” Obama said. “That’s why under my administration, America is producing more oil today than at any time in the last eight years.” Republicans argue Obama is taking credit for the accomplishments of past administrations as well as advances in technology and increased drilling on state and private lands. On Thursday, Brendan Buck, a spokesman for House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) said an Obama focused on his reelection wants everyone to forget that “gas prices have doubled over the past three years while he consistently blocked and slowed the production of American-made energy.”

 

“From his drilling moratorium to the denial of the Keystone pipeline, the president has time and again sided with his liberal base over American families,” Buck said.

 

A short time later a Twitter fight ensued on the social media network between Buck and White House press secretary Jay Carney.

 

Carney, who has more than 280,000 followers, took aim at Boehner, saying that the House Speaker endorsed an "all of the above" policy because gas prices "will certainly rise again." In the same message, Carney questioned whether the House Speaker has a memory lapse.

...end...

Alcohol use can impair memory.

After deficit reduction by tax cuts, this is the most factually challenged posturing by the GOP in this election cycle. The whole premise that American oil production will significantly lower gas prices is silly. (Forget anything about sustainability.)

The notion that it will significantly lower gas prices is probably unsupportable, yes.  However, it will slow the rise in gas prices, which has real value in a long-term energy strategy.

 

Renewables are not ready for prime time yet.  However, they are getting there.  There is enough money already being invested in renewable energy technology to pursue basically all of the genuinely promising avenues of research.  The technology is getting better.  The cost-per-Watt of solar power is declining rapidly.

 

Why, then, would we hold back on exploring our domestic fossil fuel reserves now?  They're at their most valuable to us now, before alternatives are ready to shoulder much of the burden.

Wow, I actually agree with Gramarye! ;)

 

And it's time to play the blame games again....

 

Angry About High Gas Prices? Blame Shuttered Oil Refineries

The U.S. has lost nearly 5 percent of its refining capacity in the past three months, as a handful of old refineries have shut down

 

By Matthew Philips

 

The average price of gas is up more than 10 percent since the start of the year, a point repeatedly made during Wednesday’s Republican Presidential debate. Predictably, the four GOP candidates blamed President Barack Obama for the steep increase.

 

Actually, the President doesn’t have that kind of pricing power. The more likely reason behind the price increase, though certainly less compelling as a political argument, is the recent spate of refinery closures in the U.S. Over the past year, refineries have faced a classic margin squeeze. Prices for Brent crude have gone up, but demand for gasoline in the U.S. is at a 15-year low. That means refineries haven’t been able to pass on the higher prices to their customers.

 

As a result, companies have chosen to shut down a handful of large refineries rather than continue to lose money on them. Since December, the U.S. has lost about 4 percent of its refining capacity, says Fadel Gheit, a senior oil and gas analyst for Oppenheimer. That month, two large refineries outside Philadelphia shut down: Sunoco’s plant in Marcus Hook, Pa., and a ConocoPhillips plant in nearby Trainer, Pa. Together they accounted for about 20 percent of all gasoline produced in the Northeast.

 

READ MORE AT:

http://www.businessweek.com/global/angry-about-high-gas-prices-blame-shuttered-oil-refineries-02232012.html

 

 

 

Oil Prices Rise: What Happens Next?

Published: Friday, 24 Feb 2012 | 6:17 AM ET Text Size

By: Catherine Boyle

Staff Writer, CNBC.com

 

Analysts are divided on the immediate future for oil prices after recent rises, but caution that emerging markets and energy stocks could be affected.

 

Prices have been driven higher because of renewed concerns about Iran’s political situation and sanctions imposed on Iran oil by Western governments.

 

At the same time, concerns about the Western economies – particularly Europe – could dampen the cost of oil.

 

“Even if everyone loves each other, oil prices have very little downside potential. The market doesn’t have enough supply and we are running quite tight,” Johannes Benigni, Managing Director, JBC Energy, told CNBC.

 

READ MORE AT:

http://www.cnbc.com/id/46479077

One accident will make it explode?  That's just FUD.  I'm not saying there aren't risks, but the gasoline and diesel tanks we have now are also very dangerous.  The benefits of compressed gas (natural gas, propane, hydrogen, etc.) tanks are that if they do rupture catastrophically they can do so without ignition.  They just "pop" and then the gas is gone.  More likely they'd puncture and the gas would spray out.  The chance of ignition there is no more or less than with gasoline.  The big advantage though is that the fuel doesn't end up in a puddle under the damaged vehicle ready to ignite.  It just disperses in the air.  Have you ever seen how difficult a time the Mythbusters had getting propane tanks to explode? 

 

We shall solve this disagreement with a propane forklift demolition derby.

 

We shall solve this disagreement with a propane forklift demolition derby.

 

I'd go to see it. Use the ticket sales to pay the insurance claims.

Shell's former CEO predicts we’re heading for $7 to $8 gas, rationing by 2015, and rolling blackouts and brownouts.

 

Published Feb 21 2012 by Eugene Renewable Energy Examiner, Archived Feb 25 2012

Gas prices set records, soon to reach new highs

by Zachary Moitoza

 

Mainstream media outlets throughout the country are now reporting on record-breaking gas prices, the highest ever for this time of the year.  Also making the rounds is the commonly cited prediction by former Shell CEO John Hofmeisterthat there is a better than 50 percent chance that gas prices will reach $5 a gallon by this summer in the U.S.  This is in spite of the fact that U.S. oil production is up and oil consumption down, since 2008.  What the media isn’t reporting on is the rest of what Hofmeister said in a recent peak oil themed debate he had with Tad Patzek on Feb. 14.

 

In the debate, Hofmeister said that we’re heading for $7 to $8 gas and rationing by 2015, and rolling blackouts and brownouts.  He also made clear that oil is the lubricant of the world’s economy, and there is no alternative.  He further stated that China, which used 8 million barrels of oil a day last year, uses 9 million now, and is projected to use 15 million by 2015.  India will go from 4 to 7 in the same time frame.  And, that there’s “not enough oil out there to meet that demand.”

 

On CNBC, Hofmeister stated that he expects WTI oil, now at $106 a barrel, to be $120 to $130 over the next six months, and even higher for Brent, which is now at $121.  He further stated that OPEC has no spare capacity, and is maxed out.  This is what the early stages of peak oil looks like.

 

READ MORE AT:

http://www.energybulletin.net/stories/2012-02-22/gas-prices-set-records-soon-reach-new-highs

No way to build enough power plants and electric cars by 2015 if this happens. It will be much worse than the great depression and it will be EVERYWHERE.

No way to build enough power plants and electric cars by 2015 if this happens. It will be much worse than the great depression and it will be EVERYWHERE.

 

Several years ago, I would have agreed with you. But between the oil being produced from the Bakken formation in the Dakotas, the Canadian oil sands, the promise of off-shore drilling (and its threats, but these will probably be forgotten in the fervor to keep the price of gas below $5), as well as the rise of diesel fuel from nat-gas feedstock produced in the new fields of the Northeast US.

 

This is but a short-term fix, as it may benefit the USA for 5-20 years before the decline in our older oil fields can no longer be offset by production in our new oil and natural gas fields. But it could actually be a very good 5-20 years when America is one of the few developed places in the world with a stable economy. Others may be Canada, Brazil, China, Russia, Malaysia and some smaller countries that are able to produce their own energy. This is a brief time of prosperity that we must use as a launching pad for improving the efficiency of non-fossil fuel resources.

I agree with KJP as well (mirror image of the shocking agreement above ...).

 

Remember that both technological progress and commercial development of new technologies are both seldom linear.  The iPhone was basically nowhere until it was basically everywhere.  The technology that went into the iPhone developed over the course of many years, and there needed to be a significant telecommunications infrastructure in place to make the iPhone actually worth anything, which also took years to develop.  However, once the circumstances were right, it was deployed with incredible speed.  Looking back, one could largely say the same for the Internet itself.  ARPAnet was a long, long time ago now--but almost all of the Internet's growth has been in the last 20 years.  Technological growth and commercialization often follow exponential paths, not linear ones.  In any exponential growth curve, the vast majority of the growth occurs on the later end of the curve.

 

In an environment like that, buying time (using our existing conventional energy reserves) is very rational, as long as we don't succumb to the delusion that we can buy another 100 years of conventional energy supplies.

Others may be Canada, Brazil, China, Russia, Malaysia and some smaller countries that are able to produce their own energy.

 

Does Canada have any refineries?  I thought one of the arguments for the Keystone pipeline was that they needed to get the Tar Sands oil to refineries in Texas (where it is expected that it will be exported to the highest bidder on the world market).

>We shall solve this disagreement with a propane forklift demolition derby.

 

I have changed the tank on a fork lift hundreds of times.  The main issue is when there is a bad valve either on the lift's hose or on the tank itself.  The natural gas sprays out dramatically and is cold, so you have to put on a glove to get the hose completely off, then go get a new tank.  It's not a big problem when it happens, but I could see a return of full service gas stations since some people would freak out.

Does Canada have any refineries?  I thought one of the arguments for the Keystone pipeline was that they needed to get the Tar Sands oil to refineries in Texas (where it is expected that it will be exported to the highest bidder on the world market).

 

The Keystone pipeline would have expanded the capacity of mining the Canadian oil sands. I hope you're aware that the oil sands have been in production for some time now. I suspect the Keystone will be approved eventually, even though it will take shipments away from the rail industry.....

 

Technological growth and commercialization often follow exponential paths, not linear ones.  In any exponential growth curve, the vast majority of the growth occurs on the later end of the curve.

 

But depletion of non-renewable resources often follows a bell-shaped curve, where most of the growth occurs in the first half of the curve.

 

Suppose that a new car that gets 100 mpg is developed. Yes, you are correct that the new car will probably follow the exponential curve model, until the market is saturated and everone has one. The trouble is that the 100 mpg car will result in depletion of the petroleum reserves just as fast if not faster than present. It will not make our pertroleum reserves last any longer. Peak oil really isn't about technology; peak oil is about depetion of non-renewable resources.

Peak oil itself may simply be a descriptive phenomenon (describing the depletion of non-renewable resources), but dealing with peak oil is a separate but very closely related conversation, and that discussion really is going to be about technology (unless you're one of those who thinks that it really needs to be about population control, but that's a pretty fringe group).  There is obviously a lot of room for debate as to which technologies will be more essential than others (energy generation, energy efficiency, energy transmission, energy storage, energy conversion [gasoline to nat-gas to electric vehicles], etc.), but it's going to be a fundamentally technology-oriented discussion.

Isn't the actual price of gas (In Gold) low by comparison of historic averages?

 

http://www.businessinsider.com/about-those-high-gasoline-priceslook-again-2012-2?utm_source=readme&utm_medium=rightrail&utm_term=&utm_content=2&utm_campaign=recirc

 

http://pricedingold.com/us-retail-gasoline/

 

 

Not sure about the price in gold, but in inflation-adjusted terms, oil is still cheap. But for many consumers, they have no choice but to use oil because their transportation system, land uses and lifestyles were created when oil was obscenely cheap. And those things cannot change as quickly as the price of oil.

 

As a friend of mine said, if the price of oil went up as fast as college tuition has over the past 20 years, there would be rioting in the streets. Why? Because we can stop going to college for a semester if we have to. We cannot so easily give up driving 30 miles round trip to work everyday, bringing food to our grocery stores from 1,000 miles away, or transoceanic shipping of consumer goods to America.

 

BTW, the price of WTI oil hit $110 today on apparently untrue rumors of a terrorist attack on a Saudi oil pipeline before settling back to $109. But wholesale gasoline prices jumped 9 cents today and stayed there.

Technology is still oil-dependent and not a substitute for energy, it can help ease the transition.  I hope this turns out to be true:

 

The Peak Oil Crisis: A Breakthrough?

by Tom Whipple

 

For many months, U.S. Energy Secretary Chu, the guy with the Nobel Prize in physics, has been running around the country telling audiences that big breakthroughs were coming for electric vehicles. Well, this week the other shoe dropped when an announcement was made of an advance in battery technology that has the potential to change the motor vehicle industry as we know it. The announcement was made at the Department of Energy's Advanced Research Projects-Energy conference by a California startup called Envia that has received funding from DOE, the California Energy Commission, and General Motors among others.

 

The gist of the announcement was that Envia has developed a technology which will allow batteries to store energy at a density of 400 watt-hours per kilogram as compared to the compared to a density of 100-150 w-h/kg in existing electric vehicles such as the Chevrolet Volt or the Nissan Leaf. The best news, however, is that the new batteries are expected to cost less than half ($125/Kwh) that of the batteries currently being used in electric cars. This development means that within a few years, cars with a 300 mile range could come on the market at a price range comparable to current internal combustion cars.

 

http://www.fcnp.com/commentary/national/11273-brekthrough2.html

This development means that within a few years, cars with a 300 mile range could come on the market at a price range comparable to current internal combustion cars.

 

That would be a game-changer -- if our electrical grid could handle the strain.....

 

Recent Blackout Highlights Nation's Aging Electricity Grid

Major power outages have more than doubled in the last decade

By Ariel Wittenberg and ProPublica  | September 19, 2011

 

Experts say the cascading blackout that put millions of Westerners in the dark last week was no surprise: Major power outages have more than doubled in the last decade.

 

"This is just evidence that we need a smarter, better, more secure system," said Massoud Amin, director of the Technological Leadership Institute at the University of Minnesota, who has analyzed federal data on the reliability of the nation's electric grid.

 

Blackouts disrupt power to at least a third of U.S. homes each year, and studies show the number of outages is rising.

 

The grid's shortcomings have been well-documented, but efforts to modernize it haven't kept up with demand. Many electrical transmission lines are outdated, and parts of the grid date back to the time of Thomas Edison.

 

READ MORE AT:

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=recent-blackout-highlights-nations

That would be a game-changer -- if our electrical grid could handle the strain.....

 

Might change the game in the way that highways are funded, too. Ready for taxes on electric cars? Or maybe on batteries? Or electricity? Or maybe highways will be tolled instead?

I would expect high registration fees for electric cars.

A good analysis you won't see in the mainstream media:

 

 

$5 Gas = Long, Hot, Crazy Summer

by Richard Heinberg, Post Carbon Institute

 

Driving dollars cartoonHere in northern California gasoline is now retailing for $4.20 a gallon. Prices haven’t been this high since mid-2008. Forecasts for $5 per gallon gas in the US this summer are now commonplace. What’s driving prices up?

 

Most analysts focus mostly on two factors: worries about Iran and increased demand from a perceived global economic recovery. However, as we will see, there are also often-overlooked systemic factors in the oil industry that almost guarantee us less-affordable oil...

 

Meanwhile oil prices are also tied to shifting assessments of the state of the global economy. On days when the financial news is good, oil prices nudge up; on days when the luster on the latest Greek bailout package fades, oil prices tumble. The ongoing Greek debt crisis promises to plunge the EU into recession this year; on the other hand, the Dow Jones average is flirting with 13000...

 

Let’s not forget (though we wish we could): it’s election season! Republicans are already hammering Obama over the prospect of $5 gas and promising that, if elected, they will drive prices down to half that level. Meanwhile, with the exception of Ron Paul, they’re demanding harsher dealings with Iran, and are thus exacerbating one of the primary factors driving prices up. Altogether, it’s a neat trick...

 

READ MORE AT:

http://www.energybulletin.net/stories/2012-03-01/5-gas-long-hot-crazy-summer

http://www.energybulletin.net/stories/2012-03-01/5-gas-long-hot-crazy-summer

 

Iranians hate the religious fanatics and think Ahmadinejad is a joke.  There has to be a better route out of this mess for Iran and America.  Heinberg had a good insight that America played into their hands by staying  in Afghanistan and becoming Iran's target.

Gildone, don't forget to include links to original articles. I added it for you, but please don't forget to do it in the future. Thanks.

 

EDIT: I just noticed that Boreas added it too with his response!

 

EDIT2: I really liked these paragraphs in Heinberg's piece....

 

The Peak of Peak-Oil Denial

 

Costs of production are rising inexorably—and fairly rapidly—as a result of replacement of conventional crude with oil produced from horizontal drilling and hydro-fracturing, ultra deepwater drilling, and tar sands. Only a decade ago, a world oil price of $20 per barrel evidently provided plenty of incentive for the industry to develop new supply sources, as total global production continued to increase year after year. Today, most new projects look uneconomic if oil prices are anything shy of $85. Ironically, pundits often depict this shift as a miraculous new development that promises oil aplenty till kingdom come.

 

During the past few months, op-eds and talking heads have announced the death of “the peak oil theory” even as actual world crude production rates remain stagnant and oil prices soar. The fallacy in this thinking arises from a confusion of reserves with production rates. With oil prices so high, staggering quantities of low-grade hydrocarbons become theoretically profitable to produce. It is assumed, therefore, that the scarcity problem has been solved. If we extract enough of these low-grade resources, that will bring oil prices down! But of course, if the oil price goes down then these unconventional sources become uneconomic once again and effectively cease to be countable as reserves.

This development means that within a few years, cars with a 300 mile range could come on the market at a price range comparable to current internal combustion cars.

 

That would be a game-changer -- if our electrical grid could handle the strain.....

 

Recent Blackout Highlights Nation's Aging Electricity Grid

Major power outages have more than doubled in the last decade

By Ariel Wittenberg and ProPublica  | September 19, 2011

 

Experts say the cascading blackout that put millions of Westerners in the dark last week was no surprise: Major power outages have more than doubled in the last decade.

 

Ah, but so much of energy planning and development isn't searching for a magic bullet (politicians might talk that way, but it doesn't mean that we have to).  It's really about trading larger problems for smaller problems.

 

I would much rather be dealing with the problems of building out the nation's power grid over the next 50 years to handle an electrified transportation sector than dealing with trying to come up with another 50 years' worth of oil.  I'm well aware that that would substantially increase our coal consumption rate, and that that is a finite resource as well.  Ditto nuclear fuels such as uranium, plutonium, and (if this technology matures) thorium.  And, as you said, I'm well aware that we would need to upgrade our infrastructure in order to handle the load.

 

So what?  Upgrading infrastructure sounds like a much better idea than shipping hundreds of billions of dollars a year to regimes that we have an uneasy relationship with at the best of times.  Not to mention that the costs of that will be partially offset by the ability to cut back on the carrying costs of our existing petroleum infrastructure, which isn't cheap.

 

Also, while blackouts may have been getting more frequent over the past decade, they are still not that frequent.  We still have one of the most reliable grids out there, particularly for how much energy demand that it already handles.  (Gasoline isn't the only energy source that Americans consume more of than Europeans or Japanese.)  I can recall maybe two blackouts at my apartment over the 2+ years I've lived there.

 

And, of course, the ability of electrical grids to be more redundant and less vulnerable in densely developed areas will give a little extra market incentive for both the redevelopment of older, higher-density neighborhoods and the development of new higher-density downtown areas in outlying communities.

 

In other words, there will be transition costs moving from a petroleum-dominated to a largely electrified transportation sector.  However, both the transition costs and the transition itself will be manageable when the technology is mature enough.  The Whipple article that gildone posted is another data point along that growth curve, and those of us who have been watching the development of electric vehicle technology (including the development of the critical parts, such as the batteries) have been seeing those announcements become both larger and more frequent in recent years.  The tipping point is coming.

Understood. I'm just trying to find problems among the solutions. ;-)

"The tipping point is coming."

 

Gramarye, I understand that you think that sometime in the future, electric cars will be less expensive than gasoline cars, on a life cycle cost per mile basis.

 

But that's not what peak oil is about. Peak oil implies that gasoline cars will be more expensive to produce and operate than they are today, and electric cars will also be more expensive to operate than they are today. It's not about comparing the future costs of two different technologies. It's about comparing future costs to today's cost.

 

Just about everything you can buy consumes petroleum in one form or another at some point along it's life cycle. Petroleum accounts for 40% of our total industrial energy, and 90% of our transportation energy. It takes petroleum to manufacture cars, whether they be gasoline cars or electric cars.

People are also going to be less interested in driving anyway, even if the cars cleaned the air and generated their own energy. Having to follow all those rules and be at 100% attention at all times or face death, injury, jail time or even just insurance hassles and spending time at the shop just to get around is wearing people out.

^I think what is really wearing people out is the ~40,000 deaths per year plus countless injuries and untold property damage caused by automobile accidents, highway noise, and acres and acres of parking lots and motorways dividing people from each other.

 

The economics of driving favor the automobile as an individual choice. That's why people do it, and they willingly pay a fortune for it, and tolerate all the drawbacks. However, the economics of society do not favor the automobile, and I think the automobile era is approaching the half way point, but is not near the end just yet.

I'd say "Peak Car" happened in about 2005-2007.

"The tipping point is coming."

 

Gramarye, I understand that you think that sometime in the future, electric cars will be less expensive than gasoline cars, on a life cycle cost per mile basis.

 

But that's not what peak oil is about. Peak oil implies that gasoline cars will be more expensive to produce and operate than they are today, and electric cars will also be more expensive to operate than they are today. It's not about comparing the future costs of two different technologies. It's about comparing future costs to today's cost.

 

People may say that, but they're implicitly arguing more than that if they're using peak oil as a reason not to expand domestic fossil fuel exploration.

 

Just about everything you can buy consumes petroleum in one form or another at some point along it's life cycle. Petroleum accounts for 40% of our total industrial energy, and 90% of our transportation energy. It takes petroleum to manufacture cars, whether they be gasoline cars or electric cars.

 

I understand this, and I never said that we would be able to reduce our petroleum consumption to zero.  We will still need it for many purposes.  However, as you noted, transportation is the dominant one.  Addressing that would solve or at least minimize the severity of many of the other problems.

People may say that, but they're implicitly arguing more than that if they're using peak oil as a reason not to expand domestic fossil fuel exploration.

 

Who is saying that peak oil is a reason not to expand domestic fossil fuel exploration? Not me.

 

Most arguments against more fossil fuel production that I have seen are focused on environmental factors, such as prevent mountaintop removal, protecting wildlife, preventing spills in the Gulf, or just preserving national parks and forests in their natural condition.

People may say that, but they're implicitly arguing more than that if they're using peak oil as a reason not to expand domestic fossil fuel exploration.

 

Who is saying that peak oil is a reason not to expand domestic fossil fuel exploration? Not me.

 

Some do and some don't, obviously.  However, if the entire point of peak oil advocates were just to convince people that petroleum is going to get more expensive, well, they could have declared victory and gone home years ago.  The fact that there's still such a movement around it implies that they want something, even though there may not be universal agreement as to what.

The good news:  US oil production up because of the Bakken and other shales.  The bad news:  not only is it not enough to offset depletion in other US fields for very long because it has a low energy return on investment, they return a low amount of oil per well, and production in them declines 65% after the first year:

 

 

Parsing the Bakken

by Tom Whipple

 

There is a lot of talk recently that "tight oil" as found in North Dakota's Bakken and other shales in the Southwest will save America from stagnant global oil production and increasing gasoline prices. The current glut of natural gas which has brought prices to a 10-year low has forced companies drilling for gas to curtail their activity and move the crews and rigs to North Dakota and Texas where money can still be made in drilling for shale oil. New well completions in North Dakota are expected to surge again this year.

 

A recent pronouncement by a noted analyst says that America's "tight oil" (shale oil) production could reach 3 million barrels a day (b/d) by 2020 which will again put us among the top few global oil producers. On digging a little deeper into the issue, however, many have a problem with all the optimism....

It took the production from 6,617 wells to produce North Dakota's 546,000 b/d in January. Divide the daily production by the number of wells and you get an astoundingly low 82 b/d from each well. I say "astounding" because a good new offshore well can do 50,000 b/d. BP's Macondo well which exploded in the Gulf a couple of years ago was pumping out an estimated 53,000 b/d before it was capped...

 

...As we have seen with the Bakken and the various natural gas bearing shales we have been drilling of late, it takes an awful lot of expensive wells and environmental disruption to get the oil out. One estimate of the Energy Returned on Energy Investment (EROEI) for the Bakken shale suggests that the EROEI is six. This means that it may take one oil barrel's worth of energy to produce six barrels of Bakken shale oil. This is getting very close to the theoretical point at which it really is not worth the effort and all the economic disruption...

 

... fracked wells don't keep producing very long. Although a few newly fracked wells may start out producing in the vicinity of 1,000 barrels a day, this rate usually falls by 65 percent the first year; 35 percent the second; and another 15 percent the third. Within a few years most wells are producing in the vicinity of 100 b/d or less which is why the state average for January is only 82 b/d despite the addition of 1300 new wells in 2011.

 

There is a lot more to the U.S. shale oil story, however, than simply the Bakken shales in the upper Midwest. The Eagle Ford shale in southwestern Texas has been drawing considerable attention as a major source of oil and natural gas. However, it is the Monterey shale in southern California that is likely to become the biggest shale oil resource of all. Whereas the Bakken and Eagle Ford shales are estimated to contain about 3.5 million barrels each of recoverable oil, the Monterey shale with 15 billion barrels is 64 percent of the 24 billion barrels estimated to be trapped in U.S. shale formations.

 

While this 24 billion barrel figure sounds impressive to politicians looking for a talking point, it really is only about 9 months' worth of current global oil consumption....

Tom Whipple is a retired government analyst and has been following the peak oil issue for several years.

 

 

Read more at:  http://www.energybulletin.net/stories/2012-03-21/peak-oil-crisis-parsing-bakken

 

If this takes off, it will boost natgas prices, drilling activities and the economies of Ohio and Pennsylvania....

 

TravelCenters of America, Shell Oil to create natural gas fueling stations along highways

By DAN SHINGLER

9:52 am, June 7, 2012

 

The natural gas car business stands to get some fuel, literally, from a deal struck between Shell Oil Products U.S. and Westlake-based TravelCenters of America to install compressed natural gas filling stations at a minimum of 100 locations.

 

TravelCenters announced that it had entered into an agreement with Shell to build and operate a network of at least 200 compressed natural gas (CNG) fueling stations at 100 or more TravelCenters locations on U.S. interstate highways. Thereafter, expansion will be based upon customer demand for the fuel, TravelCenters said.

 

TravelCenters said it also will train “a significant number” of its approximately 3,000 repair technicians to work on CNG vehicles.

 

READ MORE AT:

http://www.crainscleveland.com/article/20120607/FREE/120609868#

Has that link been updated since you posted it?  I ask because the wording is almost identical, but it now reads slightly differently in one material respect:

 

TravelCenters announced that it had entered into an agreement with Shell to build and operate a network of at least 200 liquified natural gas (LNG) fueling stations at 100 or more TravelCenters locations on U.S. interstate highways. Thereafter, expansion will be based upon customer demand for the fuel, TravelCenters said.

 

TravelCenters said it also will train “a significant number” of its approximately 3,000 repair technicians to work on LNG vehicles.

 

----------

 

Your earlier version said compressed natural gas (CNG) but the wording was otherwise identical.  There are meaningful differences between the two, though perhaps not if one is taking just the 30,000-foot view (i.e., that this infrastructure buildout will increase demand for natural gas and nat-gas vehicles).

 

I'm guessing they changed the release, because it doesn't even look like they successfully changed everything: As I write this, the Crains article also says:

 

The company did not say anything more about where the locations would be, but it has 238 locations, almost all along major interstates across the country. They are especially concentrated in the Midwest and eastern half of the United States, according to the TravelCenters website, which also is where CNG fueling has lagged compared to some areas in the western and southern United States.

 

(Apparently someone's find-and-replace in Word was broken ... ?)

I bet if KJP was writing that article that mistake wouldn't have happened!

Oh yes it would have, because I still don't understand what the problem is with the article.

That's good news... lord knows we need someone to buy all this natural gas we have stored up.

 

 

Natural gas futures are currently at $2.299/MMBTU after dipping below $2 a couple months ago. Yikes. Chesapeake, the big company out in the Utica right now, just announced their trying to unload 1/4 of its holdings there to pay down debt.

I love this paragraph in Gulf News:

 

http://gulfnews.com/business/opinion/alarm-bells-on-the-longevity-of-oil-wells-in-saudi-arabia-1.1082656

 

However, Al Sabban considered these reports as a warning bell and urged that Saudi Arabia reconsiders its domestic pricing policy as a key to conserve energy and reduce consumption. He also advocated a programme for public transport within and between cities. The gas initiative must be expedited and similarly the same for the declared programme of expanding the use of renewable energy.

 

So what are we doing in the U.S.? Sticking our head in Saudi Arabia's ... sand?

AAA: $3 gas 'a thing of the past'

By Zack Colman - 07/16/13 12:10 PM ET

 

Motorists shouldn't expect gasoline prices to ever fall below $3 again, an official with AAA said on Tuesday.

 

“The days of a national pump price below $3 is probably a thing of the past,” Chris Plaushin, director of federal relations with AAA, told the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee at a hearing on fuel prices.

 

Plaushin noted that the national average price of gasoline on Jan. 1 was $3.29 per gallon, the highest-ever starting point for a year.

 

Read more: http://thehill.com/blogs/e2-wire/e2-wire/311319-aaa-3-gas-a-thing-of-the-past#ixzz2ZEpNdD00

^ Best part of that article was at the end where they talked about biofuel.  I think something like 40% of domestic corn production goes into gasoline and that's causing all kinds of horrible ripples up the economic and agricultural systems.

People were eating too much corn anyway.

People were eating too much corn anyway.

 

People were using too much gas anyway.

That too!

A bit more snark than I might have employed if I were writing this, but at least good to see that the alarmist war drums are getting fainter:

 

http://reason.com/blog/2013/07/12/peak-oil-peters-out-neo-malthusian-cult

 

Peak Oil Peters Out: Neo-Malthusian Cult Website The Oil Drum Shuts Down

Ronald Bailey

 

The Oil Drum (TOD) was founded and frequented by believers in the theory of peak oil, the hypothetical point at which the world's oil supplies go into irreversible decline. Peak oil devotees typically predict that apocalyptic economic consequences would follow hard on falling crude supplies. In a note to readers TOD contributor and co-founder and former President of ASPO Netherlands (Association for the Study of Peak Oil and Gas Netherlands) Rembrandt Koppelaar explained:

 

A few weeks ago the ISEOF board (The Institute for Energy and Our Future that facilitates The Oil Drum), Euan, Super G, JoulesBurn, and Myself, met to discuss the future of The Oil Drum. A discussion we have had several times in the last year, due to scarcity of new content caused by a dwindling number of contributors. Despite our best efforts to fill this gap we have not been able to significantly improve the flow of high quality articles.

 

The folks over at Marketwatch at the Wall Street Journal speculate:

 

With news of record-breaking North American oil and gas production seemingly every day, maybe it just got too hard to maintain a site devoted to the notion that the world’s oil production was at or near a peak.

 

You think? As long as people remain free to benefit from their creativity, then Malthusians will always be wrong.

 

Of course, I don't think even a world of relatively more abundant oil is going to save the internal-combustion engine; the electric car is simply superior technology even as of today, and its cost-effectiveness will only increase with maturity.  However, oil has significant other commercial and consumer uses, and for the sake of those other uses and their importance in our economy, I'm glad to see a lot of this hysteria receding, and I'm glad we managed to refrain from precipitous action while the hysteria was at its zenith.

^Thanks for posting that tidbit.  I was going to post that the thread title was out of date due to all the recent reserves being discovered.

 

The Japanse are getting close to being able to harvest methane trapped in ice below the ocean floor as well.  Those reserves are massive.

 

Of course this is not good news for the planet, just good news for humans in the short term.

Perhaps and perhaps not, though in either event, that's a discussion that should be taken over to the Global Warming thread.