Fossil Fuels

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Great article by Michael Lind at Salon:
Everything you've heard about fossil fuels may be wrong
Are we living at the beginning of the Age of Fossil Fuels, not its final decades? The very thought goes against everything that politicians and the educated public have been taught to believe in the past generation. According to the conventional wisdom, the U.S. and other industrial nations must undertake a rapid and expensive transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy for three reasons: The imminent depletion of fossil fuels, national security and the danger of global warming.

What if the conventional wisdom about the energy future of America and the world has been completely wrong?

As everyone who follows news about energy knows by now, in the last decade the technique of hydraulic fracturing or "fracking," long used in the oil industry, has evolved to permit energy companies to access reserves of previously-unrecoverable �shale gas� or unconventional natural gas. According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, these advances mean there is at least six times as much recoverable natural gas today as there was a decade ago.

Natural gas, which emits less carbon dioxide than coal, can be used in both electricity generation and as a fuel for automobiles.

The implications for energy security are startling. Natural gas may be only the beginning. Fracking also permits the extraction of previously-unrecoverable �tight oil,� thereby postponing the day when the world runs out of petroleum. There is enough coal to produce energy for centuries. And governments, universities and corporations in the U.S., Canada, Japan and other countries are studying ways to obtain energy from gas hydrates, which mix methane with ice in high-density formations under the seafloor. The potential energy in gas hydrates may equal that of all other fossils, including other forms of natural gas, combined.

If gas hydrates as well as shale gas, tight oil, oil sands and other unconventional sources can be tapped at reasonable cost, then the global energy picture looks radically different than it did only a few years ago. Suddenly it appears that there may be enough accessible hydrocarbons to power industrial civilization for centuries, if not millennia, to come.
An excellent article and he is very much preaching to the choir here. Considering that we are finding oil reserves at deeper and deeper places, there is a good argument that oil can be produced naturally in the deep mantle of the earth and that a lot of the fields that were 'played out' (Kern Valley in Bakersfield) are now back in production. My fave is nuclear but natural gas would be a perfect replacement for gasoline. Although I would still keep funding these people: EMC2 Fusion Development Corporation and work along the lines of Low Energy Nuclear Reactions is progressing with some very interesting results: Focardi and Rossi LENR (Cold Fusion) Demo today.

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This page contains a single entry by DaveH published on June 2, 2011 8:14 PM.

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