Reacting to voter anger over $4-per-gallon gasoline and growing concerns about U.S. dependency on foreign oil, the Bush administration is floating the idea of extracting petroleum from oil-shale deposits in the Western United States that could eventually yield 800 billion barrels of oil, according to government estimates. At the current consumption rate of roughly 20 million barrels a day, 58 percent of it from outside the United States, 800 billion barrels is enough to satisfy America’s oil addiction for more than 100 years—without importing a single drop. In reality, of course, a new and ready supply of oil would virtually guarantee increased consumption. And any petroleum extracted from domestic oil shale would inevitably be combined with imported oil as well as domestic oil from other sources to meet the growing demand, further extending our dependence on oil.
President Bush has been previewing the notion of squeezing oil from stone in his energy speeches for the past couple of months, and today [July 22, 2008] the U.S. Interior Department is scheduled to propose regulations for a new program to sell leases that would allow oil companies to extract oil from shale on federal lands, primarily in the Green River Basin of Colorado, Wyoming and Utah.
The idea of mining oil shale for petroleum isn’t new, but there are three big problems with using oil shale as a source for petroleum. Namely, oil-shale extraction is: Read more...