WhiteH2O

Very true. I wish the country as a whole would understand that nuclear power is the future and just get on with it.

Bad idea for airplanes, though. That would make a nice bomb for a terrorist, wouldn't it?

atpcliff

Hi!

Nuclear is badly needed TODAY! We have to get going on that front.

More oil in the US than the Mideast? Yeah, and the earth is flat.

Supply problems? Let's just drill more wells!

Well, drilling more wells into the same oil fields we already have, if anything, reduces the supply available by destroying the oil fields.

There is NO more, easy to find, easy to produce, oil.

The Gulf of Mexico is promising, by drilling miles and miles down to get at the oil, which makes it, SURPRISE, EXPENSIVE!

Cheap oil is gone. If we want to survive, we have to adjust.

cliff
ABQ

mulcher

"More oil in the US than the Mideast? Yeah, and the earth is flat."

Actually there is a ton of oil shale in the WY, UT and CO region and Canada. Time to say start digging.

Some light reading...
http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/...il-shale_x.htm

HercDriver130

I agree the oil shale in the western US and Canada dwarfs the ME reserves, at at 80 bucks a barrel is probably worth digging.

satchip

Mea Culpa, i misspoke when I said Mid East. What I should have said to be more precise is Saudi Arabia. According to the US Geolical Survey there are 374.2 billion barrels of recoverable reserves in SA and there are 397 billion in North America. These numbers are from 2000 and don't even account for the new reserves discovered in the Gulf of Mexico. Which by the way, the Chinese and Cubans and Mexicans are starting to develop! Add the shale oil and coal in the west and we have plenty of energy to be self sufficient.

The price of oil has nothing to do with a long term shortage or an exhaustion of supply. It has everything to do with short term shortages due to barriers to the marketplace like OPEC, enviromentalists, and political action.

What I would like to know is why jet fuel costs so much as compared to gasoline. Its cheaper to refine (i think, not sure). My guess is that we demand way more gas and thus refinie much more creating a limited supply of jet a. I will ask my Valero golf buddies.

Wouldn't it be cool if the airline industry and Valero got together and built a jet a refinery?

http://www.runet.edu/~wkovarik/oil/2...l.mideast.html

RogAir

Am I nitpicking or wrong (been a long time since High School science class)? Humans spew carbon dioxide, which plants breathe, plants spew oxygen, which humans breathe, and Fuel spits out carbon monoxide, which nothing breathes, and thus the problem...

schwanm

How do you know how much forest land there was when people thought the earth was flat? Sounds like a load of **** to me.

There's certainly not more forest land now days, you only have to look at the rate that trees are being chopped down in South America and Asia.

That's why they invented catalytic converters, to convert the carbon monoxide to carbon dioxide. But that's not really the issue, the problem is more carbon dioxide is being produced than can be absorbed by the oceans/plant life/what ever else absorbs it.

ewrbasedpilot

The oil companies are rolling in profits and with all the oil friendly speculators running up the prices, this next quarters profits are going to be obscene. Yet the american consumer will sit back and take it just like the airline employees have done. When smokers were told cigarettes were going to cost a $1 a pack, they said they'd quit................and now they're selling them as high as $7.50 a pack in NYC, and they're still smoking. We have hundreds, if not thousands of capped wells in the Gulf of Mexico that are waiting to be used. The oil company's say it is too expensive to uncap them (they were saying the same thing when oil was $20 a bbl back in the early 90's when I flew for Petroleum Helicopters out in the Gulf) and they WON'T uncap these wells till prices go a lot higher. Funny how we can have oil shipped 10,000 miles and it is STILL cheaper than oil 2 miles off our coast!!) I think the government has to be sitting back and laughing their collective @sses off as we sit in lines 40 airplanes deep and burn Jet A for hours on end with no result other than moving 50 feet every few minutes. I've been observing our fuelburns on the B737 and it's running around 800 lbs of fuel just to get to the runway for takeoff and that's with one engine/APU running. Pretty pathetic considering I've gotten out fairly quickly lately (20-30 minute taxi). Fuel costs are killing the airlines, and showering the oil companies with ungodly profits. The problem is that we have spineless leaders who think this is all OUR fault, meanwhile they continue to let more carriers enter the airspace in the northeastern USA and then blame US for the backlog and congestion. Go figure.................

Slice

Al, is that you?

mulcher

From the article I posted above.

The Energy Department and private industry estimate that a trillion barrels are here in Colorado — about the same amount as the entire world's known reserves of conventional oil. The entire Green River Formation might hold as much as 2 trillion barrels.

I also read from another study not the USA today that at $25pbl it is a money maker.