to add to what he said , you can liquify coal and make sythetic oil out of it for $80/barrel. With the proper investment in large scale production of such you could lower that cost considerably.

I don't know where they came up with the $80 a barrell. I've heard over and over again that in large scale production they can do for less than $35. Also, the finished product is already refined so they could sell the resulting gas from it for around $1.50 a gallon.

Now all we need is for the energy co's to pony up the billions in investment that it would take to build such plants - oh, and we'd still have to to something about the tree huggers.

I suspect that investors will show up to fund the building of such things if they could be persuaded that the existing oil prices won't drop way back down and bankrupt their investment. The point is that at some price more "oil" becomes available so in the short term (say next 20 - 50 yrs) the supply won't run out and price hikes are somewhat capped.


That's true but the trick is to use oil for what it's good for and where there's no good alternative, as a fuel for moving devices (cars, boats, planes) and less for home heating and electrical production. That and tell the huggers to go screw, errr, "play" in the pumpkin patch.

Also years ago they pursuaded the government with extremely generous donations ($600,000,000 I believe) to their election compaigns to make a law that oil companies have to use a certain amount of ethanol in their gasoline. And so we have ethanol in our gasoline today be government law.

hahahaha, well said!

Former President Carter told us we would be OUT of oil world wide in the 90's "NOT".

They were wrong whenthey predicted they reamining sullpy in the 50's, the 60's, the 70's, the 80's and now they say that we mave more than the total of each decades predictions combined.

Have you heard of the Tas Sands in Canada?

Check this out, there is more oil up there then the Saudi's have!

http://ffden-2.phys.uaf.edu/102sprin...ects/M.Sexton/

I'm not going to worry about it.

So the Earth is getting warmer is it. Sounds like a good thing ! If you read the March (?) issue of Scientific American there was a guy proposing that humans, starting thousands of years ago, via farming and agriculture, caused enough CO2 to be released to stop another impending ice age. Would I rather there be more water to boat in or an endless winter, watching the snow accumulate on the shrinkwrap ? Hmmm ....

Also from 2 years ago ... (talking about same theory)
http://www.futurepundit.com/archives/001838.html

When I worked in the Gulf of Mexico I was told that to be profitable in the ultra deepwater leases. Oil needed to be above 16 dollars per barrel. We are there.