Appraisers' Free Forum

Back to the original post.............

now noted that rising costs are affecting children Lunch programs across the country so fast, it's outstripping the Federal subsidy's provided

Duh, let mom and dad fix little Johnny & Suzie a brown bag lunch. Problem solved.

And let them walk or ride the bus. They don't need to be driven to and from school every day nor do they need to drive themselves to school....

There is a lot of hydrocarbons everywhere. The question is how do you get it out of the ground? You can make synthetic fuel out of pine tar, cow patties, etc....but at what cost? Wanna pay $50 a gallon?

Tar sands cost $10 - 30 a bbl to exploit. We got some in S. Oklahoma that was mined for asphalt to put on roads...To refine it would likely cost $50-80 a bbl... Shale oil, refining the Chattanoga shale by retort would likely cost $150 - 300 a barrel...

The cheap oil is gone in the U. S. The oil in the rest fo the world is mainly dominated by countries who don't like us very much.

We are financing Iran's new Missle program whether we like it or not.

Ter Shields wrote:There is a lot of hydrocarbons everywhere. The question is how do you get it out of the ground?

Apparently there are more in some places than in others.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/24/busin ... ?th&emc=th

Imagine that story coming from the liberal NYT!

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080724/ap_ ... arctic_oil

The assessment, which took four years, found that the Arctic may hold as much as 90 billion barrels of undiscovered oil reserves, and 1,670 trillion cubic feet of natural gas. This would amount to 13 percent of the world’s total undiscovered oil and about 30 percent of the undiscovered natural gas.

At today’s consumption rate of 86 million barrels a day, the potential oil in the Arctic could meet global demand for almost three years. The Arctic’s potential natural gas resources are three times bigger. That equals Russia’s proven gas reserves, which is the world’s largest.

The agency called the Arctic region “the largest unexplored prospective area for petroleum remaining on earth.”

The world currently holds 1.24 trillion barrels of proven oil reserves and 6,263 trillion cubic feet of proven natural gas reserves.

Steve,

I am very confused about this issue, too. Sooner or later someone needs to become credible enough to make citizens feel they are finally getting a true picture.

In the above quote from the NYT it seems to be bragging about how much the US already controls in the Arctic but three years of global supply does not sound like a long term plan to me.

According to some reports the US oil companies already have access rights to (roughly) 75% of the untapped oil in the US but are not drilling for it. So what's the big deal about getting access to the rest of it?

And once we do get it all out of the ground, how long will it last? It does not seem to be an unlimited supply.

===========

As with most hot button issues, I expect we will start feeling some sense of credibility when the two extreme sides start agreeing on some statistics. Maybe T. Boone's effort is a step in that direction.

http://canadafreepress.com/index.php/article/3952

Hopefully, that link will work. The abiotic theory got my attention as an alternative to petroleum from Jurassic Park critters/vegetation, etc theory of the genesis of oil, when we got space probe data from a volcanically active moon of ...was it Neptune? that indicated the presence of hydrocarbons.

Apparently, putting calcium carbonate and iron oxide in some sort of cooking chamber yields petroleum products per quoted experiments. Put me down for 6 quarts of Mobil One The theory of oil genesis via abiotic process predicts that oil forms naturally by the combining of these two abundant materials (calcium carbonate and iron oxide) at roughly 100 Kilometers below the surface. Think of 100K deep as the Earth's armpits and the oil is the equivalent of sweat glands. That way we can drag "the Earth is a living entity" crowd into the abiotic camp and get rid of the oil and global warming hysteria crowd's political base's majority.

And, here we are drilling a mere 4 Kilometers max, except that Russia drilled 13 Kilometers and found oil, probably where no fossils have gone before.

So, the oil is produced down deep, wicks up to the surface, spins up due to spinning of Earth to an area near the surface, closer to peak gravity (I assume). Along the way it picks up enough fossil evidence to hide it's true origins from our greenie scientists. OK, I'm game for another round of curiosity, since I believe our scientists can be quite fallible at times, especially, when they stick their necks out.

Marcia wrote:

The assessment, which took four years, found that the Arctic may hold as much as 90 billion barrels of undiscovered oil reserves, and 1,670 trillion cubic feet of natural gas. This would amount to 13 percent of the world’s total undiscovered oil and about 30 percent of the undiscovered natural gas.

At today’s consumption rate of 86 million barrels a day, the potential oil in the Arctic could meet global demand for almost three years. The Arctic’s potential natural gas resources are three times bigger. That equals Russia’s proven gas reserves, which is the world’s largest.

The agency called the Arctic region “the largest unexplored prospective area for petroleum remaining on earth.”

The world currently holds 1.24 trillion barrels of proven oil reserves and 6,263 trillion cubic feet of proven natural gas reserves.

Steve,

I am very confused about this issue, too. Sooner or later someone needs to become credible enough to make citizens feel they are finally getting a true picture.

In the above quote from the NYT it seems to be bragging about how much the US already controls in the Arctic but three years of global supply does not sound like a long term plan to me.

According to some reports the US oil companies already have access rights to (roughly) 75% of the untapped oil in the US but are not drilling for it. So what's the big deal about getting access to the rest of it?

And once we do get it all out of the ground, how long will it last? It does not seem to be an unlimited supply.

===========

As with most hot button issues, I expect we will start feeling some sense of credibility when the two extreme sides start agreeing on some statistics. Maybe T. Boone's effort is a step in that direction.

Yeah. The math doesn't seem to add up does it?

Roger, I remember a story from the late 1960's about some oil-eating bacteria that they thought they might use to clean up oil spills. Now, recently, I read a story about some scientist who thinks he has found a bacteria that can make oil... without that pesky several million years of waiting thing. I think I posted that article on this forum... I just can't remember where.

Anyway, here's another interesting story that kind of goes a different direction:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/co ... 01558&pos=

The tightening of the oil market reflects decisions made a decade ago, when conditions looked radically different. Regular unleaded gas was less than a dollar a gallon. Oil was little more than $10 a barrel. And the Economist magazine, predicting prices could soon be half that, ran a cover story with the headline: "Drowning in Oil."

Those low prices sent the wrong signals to consumers and oil companies alike.