For a brief, shining moment, I overheard John Hinderaker fulminating on The Patriot about the many ways Democrats were plotting to stymie oil exploration and development.
I know how hard it is to be an expert on one thing, so the radio talking heads who act as if they know everything don't get my time. But then Hinderaker claimed that Democrats were preventing oil companies from developing oil shale, as if it were just there for the taking, a point he's also implied in his blog.
In fact, Rocky Mountain shale is believed to contain the equivalent of 2 trillion barrels of oil. Is that a lot? The entire world has used around 1 trillion barrels since oil was discovered in Pennsylvania in 1859. This chart by the Institute for Energy Research shows graphically how America's shale oil reserves compare to other countries' petroleum reserves.
Well, the truth is, no one in America did more for oil shale development and other alternative fuels development than Jimmy Carter and his Synfuels initiaitives. If you want some of the history, and why Carter's investment and tax incentive strategy failed, read here. Basically, Reagan gutted energy research Carter started, including into how to economically convert shale into oil. When the Iranian crisis ended and Saudis flooded the market with cheap oil, Exxon shut down its $5 billion Colony Oil Shale project in western Colorado, and the industry lost interest in oil shale.
I spent two summers (1967-68) working on drilling rigs mapping the oil shale reserves in Utah and Colorado, including the Piceance Creek basin, the same place where Carter put an experimental conversion facility during his term 10 years later. In 2006, Chevron announced an R&D project to do essentially the same thing more than 25 years after Carter.
Most alternative energy research — and oil shale is an alternative source — has been first stimulated by government subsidies and tax breaks, not industry acting on its own. If those public funds weren't available, the industry basically sat back.
It's not access to oil shale reserves that's the problem., it's access to the oil in the formations. Oil shale has to be dug out, or the oil heated out or otherwise forced out, and no company has yet come up with an economical and environmentally acceptable extraction method.
What's really prevented the development of oil shale has been low world prices and an industry and federal administrations that favored easy money now versus addressing an inevitability. The reason for delays in tapping oil shale is not even close to the scenario Hinderaker and others are floating.
And while we're on the subject of GOP misdirection over energy policy, Ollie Ox writes about how much area that itty-bitty 2,000 acres in ANWR actually involves. It's a topic I wrote about back in 2005.
It's sort of like this: If your butt takes a load of birdshot, do you add up the surface area of the pellets or measure the area of the wound?
