Thursday, 24 July 2008
Oil Shale - Bridge Into The Future
« Is Beshear A Leader? | Main | Louisville Arena's Costs Keep Rising »The movement by President Bush and Republicans in congress to begin drilling for more oil has begun to ease pressures on the future markets. The price of oil has dropped $20 a barrel since the news has released. While drilling of the coast could find a wealth of new oil deposits that will continue driving prices down, we need to be thinking to the future and find energy independence.
I believe independence can be found through the processing of oil shale. Why? Because we have a whole bunch of it. The Bureau of Land Management released that we have 800,000,000,000 barrels or recoverable oil from oil shale. Let's put that in perspective. We currently use 20,730,000 barrels a day which comes to 7,566,450,000 barrels of oil a year.
At our current production levels that comes to 106 years of available oil just from shale oil. Even if our oil usage continued to grow by two percent a year, it would still give us more than 57 years worth of oil. If you add in the oil found off the outer continental shelf, we would have no problem supporting ourselves well into the future. That is more than enough time for technology to advance to the point where we can find a marketable form of alternative energy.
The problem is the technology for processing of oil shale is still a few years away. If we press forward and develop the technology, I believe we can be energy independent within 10 years. We just need the will to act.
