Sunday, August 07, 2011
BRITAIN BRACES FOR MORE BLOODSHED
PA Accuses Fatah Official of Assassinating Arafat
Islamist Threat to Spain: Follow the Money
America's Third Party Should be the Energy Party
Syrian Crackdown Continues
Sunday, 7 August 2011
The essay excerpt below--from the February 23 edition of Foreign Confidential™--is reposted as a pubic service.
Memo to the Republicans: Your fiscal responsibility/balance-the-budget message is appreciated, but overblown--by no means the be-all and end-all that you think. Not when an economy hangs by a thread that could be cut by characters like Ahmadinejad and Khadafy. More time spent developing and promoting a truly serious, job-creating plan for energy independence--and long-term prosperity based on unlocking America's hidden-in-plain-view natural resource wealth--might win you the White House in 2012. Contrary to the nonsense that both you and the Democrats love to spout on national TV programs, a great, big country like the United States needs ... demands ... great, big companies. The road to prosperity is not paved by perennially undercapitalized, pathetic little businesses, incapable of providing employees with proper benefits and job security.
Memo to the President: Had you opted for a genuine, truly historic economic stimulus ... creation of a national oil company that would put a vast army of Americans to work developing domestic oil and gas resources that can be profitably produced by presently available and proven methods ... but perhaps not profitably enough to satisfy the shareholders of multinational energy behemoths ... had you done that instead of catering and caving into the Hollywood/Ivy League "save the planet" climate change crowd ... and greedy Wall Street bankers drooling over the prospect of minting billions through the trading and leveraging ofcarbon credits ... you would have by now been hailed as the new FDR, an unbeatable hero.
The world--our entire modern civilization--runs ... depends ... on oil, and will continue to run and depend on oil for at least another generation. Pretending that isn't true is not only foolish; it's downright suicidal. Just ask the Chinese. They may pay lip service to the theory that human activity is causing the planet to warm up--when there is convincing data that shows that the Earth has actually begun to cool. They have to go along with the idiocy, even though they know that, regardless of whether the atmosphere is warming or cooling, the idea that such cycles are caused by industry, and the branding of life-sustaining carbon dioxide (released by instead of causing warmer temperatures) is both absurd and inherently political. China's leaders may talk a good game about wind and solar farms, biofuels and biomass--they have to for diplomatic reasons. But the folks in charge of the world's fastest-growing economy, committed as they are to lifting hundreds of millions of their citizens out of poverty, understand very well the difference between real and phony energy supplies. The Chinese are no more anti-oil than they are anti-air.
On June 12, 2008, we published this:
America's anti-energy development Democrats oppose squeezing new oil from old fields. According to Wikipedia,
Enhanced Oil Recovery (EOR) is a generic term for techniques for increasing the amount of oil that can be extracted from an oil field. Using EOR, 30-60 %, or more, of the reservoir's original oil can be extracted compared with 20-40% using primary and secondary recovery.
Enhanced oil recovery is also called improved oil recovery or tertiary recovery (as opposed to primary and secondary recovery).
This improved extraction is achieved by either gas injection, thermal recovery, or chemical injection.
Other techniques include thermal recovery (which uses heat to improve flow rates), and, more rarely, chemical injection, where polymers are injected to increase the effectiveness of waterfloods, or the use of detergent-like surfactants such as Rhamnolipids to help lower the capillary pressure that often prevents oil droplets from moving through a reservoir.
In United States, the Department of Energy (DOE) has estimated that full use of 'next generation' CO2-EOR could generate an additional 240 billion barrels of recoverable oil resources. Developing this potential would depend on the availability of commercial CO2 in large volumes, which could be made possible by widespread use of carbon capture and storage. For comparison, the total undeveloped US domestic oil resources still in the ground total more than 1 trillion barrels, most of it remaining unrecoverable. The DOE estimates that if the EOR potential were to be fully realized, state and local treasuries would gain $280 billion in revenues from future royalties, severance taxes, and state income taxes on oil production, aside from other economic benefits. For the climate, the CO2 released from the combustion of 240 billion barrels of oil would be on the order of 100 billion tonnes of CO2, equivalent to four times the annual global CO2 emissions.
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