Let's play a Game!!! Who has the most Oil in the world?
it's a simple game.
guess which country has the most oil reserves in the entire world.
most common answer? Saudia Arabia with 261 Billion barrels.
#2 would be our friend Iraq, with an additional 115 Billion barrels.
(numbers taken from here
the entire middle east weighs in at a whopping 666 Billion barrels!!!
holy smokes, that's a LOT of oil.
however, the entire middle east is over shadowed by one nation's natural oil reserves.
the good 'ol U S A.
we weigh in with an estimated 2 TRILLION barrels of oil. i guess we won't be running out any time in the near future.
link
the US'es reserves are over 300% of what the entire middle east has.
guess which country has the most oil reserves in the entire world.
most common answer? Saudia Arabia with 261 Billion barrels.
#2 would be our friend Iraq, with an additional 115 Billion barrels.
(numbers taken from here
the entire middle east weighs in at a whopping 666 Billion barrels!!!
holy smokes, that's a LOT of oil.
however, the entire middle east is over shadowed by one nation's natural oil reserves.
the good 'ol U S A.
we weigh in with an estimated 2 TRILLION barrels of oil. i guess we won't be running out any time in the near future.
link
the US'es reserves are over 300% of what the entire middle east has.
Comments
Or something else? I kinda don't understand the meaning for this post...
you always hear everyone talk about the oil reserves in Saudia Arabia and Iraq, and the entire middle east, but i don't think i've ever heard the reserves here mentioned once.
it's just weird to me. we have 3x what anyone else does, but not a peep about it. doesn't that seem strange? dunno did to me so i thought i'd share the wealth of information.
i think all the oil talk lately just brought it back to the forefront of my mind.
The better question is not how much oil does USA produce, but how much does it consume? It is the more informative question when examining world politics. (I seem to recall a stat that America consumes more oil than the entire rest of the world, sorry, no links). The actual numbers, something like tens of millions of barrels a day is pretty alarming.
ciao.
edit: oops, have some arbitrary googled liks:
http://www.nrdc.org/breakthechain/chained.asp
Originally posted by alcimedes
it's a simple game.
guess which country has the most oil reserves in the entire world.
most common answer? Saudia Arabia with 261 Billion barrels.
#2 would be our friend Iraq, with an additional 115 Billion barrels.
(numbers taken from here
the entire middle east weighs in at a whopping 666 Billion barrels!!!
holy smokes, that's a LOT of oil.
however, the entire middle east is over shadowed by one nation's natural oil reserves.
the good 'ol U S A.
we weigh in with an estimated 2 TRILLION barrels of oil. i guess we won't be running out any time in the near future.
link
the US'es reserves are over 300% of what the entire middle east has.
NOt suprising, unfortunately we can't get at most of them due to "environmental concerns". So for the most part they are going to remain untapped. Oh well, back to Iraq then...
see here for a paper on oil shale and why it won't be recovered in the foreseeable future:
http://hubbert.mines.edu/news/v98n4/Youngquist.html
Your use of the word 'reserves' is also wrong as demonstrated in the above article.
Resources versus reserves. With these astounding estimates of world oil shale resources, why is it that so little oil has so far been produced? The answer in part lies in word definitions, the difference between "resources" and "reserves." Resources are the total amount of a given material in the Earth--copper, lead, gold, or organic material such as that in oil shale. Reserves are those resources which can now be economically recovered, and therein, as Shakespeare said, "ay, there's the rub." The resources of the organic material in oil shales are huge, but getting them out economically is another matter. There is an analogy in the gold "resources" in the ocean. There are thousands of tons of gold in sea water--huge resources. But the gold is in such dilute quantities that it probably can never be recovered economically--a resource which will never be a reserve. There seem to be oceans of oil shale resources around the world, but how much of all these deposits are oil reserves?
I hope this wasn't intended as a feeble political attack.
About 25 Billion barrels is all we appear to be admitting to...In liquid oil reserves....
Originally posted by giant
You post is extremely misleading. Oil shale is dramatically harder to recover. It has been explored and found in many cases to be prohibitively expensive.
see here for a paper on oil shale and why it won't be recovered in the foreseeable future:
http://hubbert.mines.edu/news/v98n4/Youngquist.html
Your use of the word 'reserves' is also wrong as demonstrated in the above article.
I hope this wasn't intended as a feeble political attack.
I doubt that was his intent. However given our huge dependance on oinl, it seems that we should look into ways to more economically extract this resource. I doubt it will happen though since we can more easily not do that and buy it from OPEC.
Originally posted by giant
Maybe you should actually read that paper, NoahJ. It explains why we aren't going to do that any time soon, and it is a little more complicated than just because it is 'easily not do that and buy it from OPEC.' The real world (as opposed to the world constructed of assumptions) tends to be like that. What would be 100m times better would be to work towards a hydrogen based society, especially considering that's 1000m times more likely to happen than oil shale.
Sheesh, a guy can't even agree with you without getting his butt chewed.
Originally posted by giant
I hope this wasn't intended as a feeble political attack.
As you can see from reading alcimedes' previous posts, he was merely reporting some information that he found that he didn't know about earlier.
I said:
So your point is... that the US isn't invading Iraq for the oil?
Or something else? I kinda don't understand the meaning for this post...
And he said:
there's really no meaning other than to be informative. i had no idea the US had that much oil, i always thought we didn't have any which is why we import so much.
you always hear everyone talk about the oil reserves in Saudia Arabia and Iraq, and the entire middle east, but i don't think i've ever heard the reserves here mentioned once.
it's just weird to me. we have 3x what anyone else does, but not a peep about it. doesn't that seem strange? dunno did to me so i thought i'd share the wealth of information.
i think all the oil talk lately just brought it back to the forefront of my mind.
So I don't think this is an attempt at arguing something.
Originally posted by alcimedes
there's really no meaning other than to be informative.
Threads with no original content will not be allowed. Example: posting a link or quoting and article while contributing little to nothing of your own.
Angry rants will not be allowed. The purpose of AppleOutsider is to foster discussion between forum members, not to vent anger or to push an agenda.
Evangelizing viewpoints with no attempt to foster discussion will not be allowed. All threads in AppleOutsider must be open to comment and the topic starter must start the discussion.
Maybe you should actually read that paper, NoahJ. It explains why we aren't going to do that any time soon, and it is a little more complicated than just because it is 'easily not do that and buy it from OPEC.' The real world (as opposed to the world constructed of assumptions) tends to be like that. What would be 100m times better would be to work towards a hydrogen based society, especially considering that's 1000m times more likely to happen than oil shale.
Honestly, Giant always argues with people over whether or not they read his links... Get over it. And more often than not, people do read his links, but just draw different conclusions, and Giant interpret's this as not reading the article.
Besides, the author seems to say that the most difficult part of getting oil from shale oil is converting Kerogen into a more oil like substance by adding hydrogen.
If we are successful in slowly switching our economy to hydrogen, I do not see why Kerogen could not be an excellent source of hydrogen. SO perhaps this IS the answer to the energy questions of the future.
In other news, Alcimedes has the coolest signature!
Originally posted by chweave1
Honestly, Giant always argues with people over whether or not they read his links... Get over it. And more often than not, people do read his links, but just draw different conclusions, and Giant interpret's this as not reading the article.
Besides, the author seems to say that the most difficult part of getting oil from shale oil is converting Kerogen into a more oil like substance by adding hydrogen.
If we are successful in slowly switching our economy to hydrogen, I do not see why Kerogen could not be an excellent source of hydrogen. SO perhaps this IS the answer to the energy questions of the future.
Am I reading this right? Are you seriously claiming that oil shale is a good source of hydrogen? Are you also not paying attention to sentence you wrote immediately prior to that? Are you completely mental?
You know what, if your brain can't handle multiple disciplines, just stick to the ones you know about. I can't spell for shit, and I don't pretend to be able to.
As for reading the paper, it looks like you just skimmed it, and that just doesn't count. Maybe you didn't read the sentences and papragraphs surrounding the section where you learned that fancy new science word 'kerogen.' You know, the sections describing MASSIVE amounts of waste and mining problems (not to mention the huge environmental problems resulting from such large-scale mining). Maybe you also missed the part where the paper talked about using nuclear explosions to help with the mining, but that the process was prohibitively expensive.
Apparently, what you mean by "draw different conclusions" is "chweave1 ignores half of the paper so he can promote the insane idea that we should use oil shale to power a hydrogen society, thus negatting any benefits of moving to such a society, even though the amount of hydrogen in oil shale is very small and quite possibly the least economically recoverable when compared to any other object that contains hydrogen."
from another site:
The production of oil from oil shale has been attempted at various times for nearly 100 years. So far, no venture has proved successful. One problem is that there is no oil in oil shale. It is a material called kerogen. The shale has to be mined, transported, heated to about 900 degrees F, and have hydrogen added to the kerogen to make it flow. The shale pops like popcorn when heated so the resulting volume of shale after the kerogen is taken out is larger than when it was first mined. The disposal problem is large. Net energy recovery would be low at best. It also takes several barrels of water to produce one barrel of oil. The largest shale oil deposits in the world are in the Colorado Plateau, a markedly water poor region. So far shale oil is, as the saying goes: "The fuel of the future and always will be." Fleay (1995) states: "Shale oil is like a mirage that retreats as it is approached." Shale oil will not replace oil.
Airplanes, cars, internal combustion, nuclear power, hydrogen powered cars, fuel cells, fission, fusion, cold fusion, walking on the moon, shuttles to space, landing on Mars....
Just because it is hard does not mean it is impossible with a proper amount of engineering. It may never be feasible to mine shale oil using todays tech and mindset, but I believe that someone could figure out a better way to do it and make it feasible.
Here's a clue: oil shale is not going to happen. Period. Arguing about it is like arguing whether humans can live on the sun.
if you think that the technology of today will be the only means available in the future it seems a bit blind.
the raw material is there, they just need to figure out how to extract it. someone will find a way. hell, they'll probably just bio engineer a bacteria that does the work for them.
Giant, I am not for or against getting oil from shale. My point is, if enough people put enough meny into figuring it out, it could become a feasible energy source. I am not saying that it should replace future sources. Fuel Cells, hydrogen power, solar power and such are truly some very interesting and compelling options. However, right now the world runs on oil. The switch is not going to happen overnight, no matter how good the idea is and no matter how ba dyou want it to. So you would be really short-sighted to believe that nobody will spend effort and time trying to figure out how to get Oil from Oil shale economically.
Not that it is inherantly smart or stupid for them to do it. It is just going to happen. Meanwhile, other companies will figure out how to make a more efficient fuel cell, or solar cell to make the need for fossil fuels much smaller. Why do you have to be such a jerk about it?