Drilling is wasted effort

B_talltpaguy

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you haven't read what i post, but feel qualified to call it crap.

reading is fundamental.
The hallmark of weakness... Level personal attacks when you have exhausted your ability to respond intellectually.

Have a nice day fellating yourself. I made my point and see no reason to repeat it to a wall.
 

thadjock

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The hallmark of weakness... Level personal attacks when you have exhausted your ability to respond intellectually.

Have a nice day fellating yourself. I made my point and see no reason to repeat it to a wall.

.

you're too funny dude,

you define the hallmark of weakness as levelling personal attacks, and then you level personal attacks,....in the same post.
 
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B_VinylBoy

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you define the hallmark of weakness as levelling personal attacks, and then you level personal attacks,....in the same post.

So sayeth the person who came blaring into the thread referring to people as being uneducated and a bunch of hypocrites. Discussion in this thread was fine before you came around. But I guess since you were generalizing a whole bunch of people at once, your name calling and attacking was warranted? :rolleyes:
 

kit_kat

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I think you'd be pretty hard pressed to connect buying oil form the Middle East to terrorism, unless you're trying to say that all Muslim's are terrorists, and that's pretty offensive.

Buying oil from the Middle East is directly related to terrorism because Al Queda says so.

The US would not need military bases in the Middle East if it weren't for the US's interests in the Middle East which is oil. US bases in the Middle East is one of Al Queda's complaints against the US.

Aside: Does any other country have military bases in the US? How would Americans feel if say Saudi Arabia which is a friend of the US opens a military base in the US? I have to concede to Al Queda on the military bases issue.


The fact that something may be offensive to hear, does not make it untrue. Example child marriage is today practiced and defended by a number of cultures including those influenced by the major religions Christianity, Islam, Sikhism, Hinduism, and others not influenced by those religions. I am offended when someone defends this practice, but I am not going to try to shut down the dialogue over it, because then it will never end.

All Muslims are terrorists. All Muslims who do no protest acts of terrorism carried out in the name of Islam when they become aware of them are giving tacit approval of terrorism in the name of Islam and are therefore terrorists. The fact is more Muslims will come out to protest my saying they are terrorists than will come out to protest acts of terrorism. They just come up with excuses where terrorism is concerned. That makes them terrorists. It is the responsibility of Muslims who are against terrorism to take back their religion, if they do nothing then they are terrorists themselves.
 
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D_Gunther Snotpole

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Aside: Does any other country have military bases in the US? How would Americans feel if say Saudi Arabia which is a friend of the US opens a military base in the US? I have to concede to Al Queda on the military bases issue.
Americans would probably not be enamored of the idea ... but their acceptance would be enhanced if the Saudis had been invited by the American government to establish a base.
Which, in reverse, is what happened when the U.S. set up bases in Saudi Arabia, during the First Gulf War, if memory serves.
That, of course, didn't mean that every Saudi had to like the fact.
BTW, aren't virtually all American military peeps out of Saudi Arabia now?

All Muslims are terrorists. All Muslims who do no protest acts of terrorism carried out in the name of Islam when they become aware of them are giving tacit approval of terrorism in the name of Islam and are therefore terrorists. The fact is more Muslims will come out to protest my saying they are terrorists than will come out to protest acts of terrorism. They just come up with excuses where terrorism is concerned. That makes them terrorists.
It's foolish to say that every Muslim who doesn't protest terrorism is a terrorist.
And they would quite rightly protest your statement.
There are many reasons why a Muslim might not put opposition to terrorism on the record, depending on where they live. They may wish to live relatively unpolitical lives and not risk retribution, for example. They may simply wish to live and let live.
But many Muslims have protested terrorism and the use of terrorism to advance the cause of Islam is getting a worse and worse press in the Muslim world.
Some of the ideologues of terrorism ... Dr. Fadl (Sayyed Imam Al-Sharif), for example, at one point perhaps Al-Qaeda's leading theoretician ... have reversed earlier views and now describe terrorism as self-defeating and unIslamic.
I think you need to get a bit more up to speed here.
 
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B_VinylBoy

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All Muslims are terrorists. All Muslims who do no protest acts of terrorism carried out in the name of Islam when they become aware of them are giving tacit approval of terrorism in the name of Islam and are therefore terrorists. The fact is more Muslims will come out to protest my saying they are terrorists than will come out to protest acts of terrorism. They just come up with excuses where terrorism is concerned. That makes them terrorists. It is the responsibility of Muslims who are against terrorism to take back their religion, if they do nothing then they are terrorists themselves.

Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa...
What constitutes a viable means of protest in order to prove to you that a Muslim is not a terrorist? Why is it that unless someone is verbally condemning terrorists the way you'd want them to, then these people are terrorists as well? And what do we say about the non-Muslim, domestic terrorists on our soil who aim to take out abortion clinics and federal buildings for their own religious beliefs?

BTW... I'm not a Muslim. But I'm very familiar with generalizations being applied to me for no reason beyond physical appearance and a misguided perception of action (or lack of).
 

B_talltpaguy

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you define the hallmark of weakness as levelling personal attacks, and then you level personal attacks,....in the same post.
More word games... Ok... Let's try again... Weakness is resorting to personal attacks when you can't substantively refute the facts someone has posted. I'm not the one who cannot or will not produce facts that back my assertion, that's you.

Furthermore, suggesting that your day would be better spent fellating yourself, rather than wasting more of your time embarrassing yourself here wasn't an attack, it was literally an suggestion on how you could make your day more enjoyable. If you can't reach, sorry for your luck. Just use a hand.
 

D_Gunther Snotpole

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... suggesting that your day would be better spent fellating yourself, rather than wasting more of your time embarrassing yourself here wasn't an attack, it was literally an suggestion on how you could make your day more enjoyable. If you can't reach, sorry for your luck. Just use a hand.

Come on now, tpg.
No dawg in this fight but that's clearly an attack.
 

TurkeyWithaSunburn

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Anyway back to oil, particularly oil drilling in the US.

There have been more oil wells drilled in the USA than any other country. The probabilities of finding Giant and Super-Giant fields amount to near zero in the USA. Fields of that size are rare. The recent ones are usually offshore in deep and ultra deep water, such as Brazil's Tupi Field. Only some giant oil field would seriously curtail US imports, ok a few 'em.

Oh and something is fucked up when you can follow the EIA on twitter. <The Picard facepalm would be good about now.>
 
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FRE

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Biodiesel made from algae. They can DOUBLE in just one day, and some species are up to 50% oil. Too bad the Aquatic Species Program was ended in 1996. The good news is that the DOE has $80M in new funding for oil from algae research and Valero, a large oil refining company, has signed a joint development agreement with an algae oil company. :cool: It's not too hard to get the oil from algae either. Just has to be scaled up to industrial quantities.

But the algae cannot manufacture energy. All they can do is capture part of the sun's energy and transfer it to oil. We need to know the land area required to know whether that is practical, and it should be possible to determine that.

Lord Kelvin, a 19th century scientist, did much of the work that made the first transatlantic telegraph cable possible. He also did considerable work on heat flow, etc. It was after him that the Kelvin temperature scale was named. He said that knowledge that cannot be expressed in numbers is not knowledge; it maybe the beginning of knowledge, but it is of a meagre and unsatisfactory sort. PLEASE KEEP THIS IN MIND!!!

It should be an easy matter to determine how much land area is required to produce a certain amount of oil over a period of time using algae. From that, it should be possible to calculate how much land area would be required to produce a specified percentage of the oil we use each year. I have not seen those figures. Until there figures are calculated, we can make no firm statements on whether oil from algae is practical. Repeating over and over that it works is not good enough. WE NEED ACCURATE NUMBERS INSTEAD OF GUESSWORK!!

The problem with too many environmentalists is that they continually make statements without having the facts to back them up. Please do not make the same mistake!!
 

FRE

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All Muslims are terrorists. All Muslims who do no protest acts of terrorism carried out in the name of Islam when they become aware of them are giving tacit approval of terrorism in the name of Islam and are therefore terrorists. The fact is more Muslims will come out to protest my saying they are terrorists than will come out to protest acts of terrorism. They just come up with excuses where terrorism is concerned. That makes them terrorists. It is the responsibility of Muslims who are against terrorism to take back their religion, if they do nothing then they are terrorists themselves.

NOT TRUE!!

Yes, there are Muslims who are terrorists, but most Muslims are not.

Have you read the Koran? I have.

How many Muslims have you known personally? I have known many and even been a house guest in Muslim families. When I lived overseas from 1994 to 2004, I had Muslim house guests from time to time. When I broke my arm, a Muslim family was a great help to me.

Although it is impossible to get accurate statistics, the majority of Muslims are not terrorists. Muslims have over and over again condemned terrorism, but their statements receive little publicity in the U.S.

You may recall the Muslim man who was arrested in 25 December for attempting to blow up an airplane. His father had warned American officials that that might happen, and was ignored. Obviously, then, that proves that at least one Muslim is not a terrorist and has made an effort to prevent terrorism. That one person alone proves that your belief that all Muslims are terrorists is wrong.
 

FRE

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x704,

I agree with much of your latest post about oil fields, etc.

The evidence suggests that we cannot drill our way out of dependence on imported oil. Also, we cannot even be sure how much oil Saudi Arabia has available; there are many people who believe that they have exaggerated the amount. As oil becomes harder and harder to find, and as the demand keeps increasing, the price will rise (although probably not in a linear fashion) and will cripple the global economy unless we find ways to reduce and eventually eliminate our dependence on it.

Electric cars, charged with electricity generated by nuclear reactors, look like a promising solution, but there are other possibilities also. It is essential for us to transition to a more economical nuclear technology than what we are now using and generate most of our electricity nuclearly (is that a word?). That will expedite finding ways to power vehicles without oil.

I suggest that everyone who hasn't already done so visit the following web site and spend considerable time studying LFTRs:

Energy from Thorium

From that web site, one will learn that there are many different types of nuclear reactors, a fact that one might never encounter by relying only on the mass media. LFTRs, which use thorium instead of uranium, eliminate most of the common objections to nuclear power.

People may not relish the idea of spending a lot of time studying technical issues, but there is no other way to become able to make intelligent comments and decisions on energy issues. The mass media do a very poor job of educating the public, and those environmentalists who get the most publicity provide much disinformation.

One of the original founders of Greenpiece was excommunicated from Greenpiece when he decided to support nuclear power. People have left the Sierra Club and other environmental organizations for the same reason.
 
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TurkeyWithaSunburn

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It should be an easy matter to determine how much land area is required to produce a certain amount of oil over a period of time using algae. From that, it should be possible to calculate how much land area would be required to produce a specified percentage of the oil we use each year. I have not seen those figures. Until there figures are calculated, we can make no firm statements on whether oil from algae is practical. Repeating over and over that it works is not good enough. WE NEED ACCURATE NUMBERS INSTEAD OF GUESSWORK!!

The problem with too many environmentalists is that they continually make statements without having the facts to back them up. Please do not make the same mistake!!

True. But when Exxon invests $600M into something, there might be something true about it.:cool: There is a different company researching things and even if 75% wrong, 100,000 gallons per acre (sounds too optimistic to me) it should be looked at compared to 30 gallons for corn ethanol and 50 gallons for soybean biodiesel. It DOES work but at what cost? You can get oil from the tar sands (Canada has more reserves by that calculation than Saudi Arabia) you can get oil from oil shale (all over the place in UT, WY, CO). The problem is can you get it extracted and processed cheap enough for mass consumption. "Peak Oil" is a kind of bad label, it really should be Peak Cheap Oil. And cheap oil is the kind you drill a hole and there's a gusher that pops up by it's own pressure. Oil will be here for a looong time, although there might be heads exploding looking at the prices.

The problem with oil's value today is that OPEC is a cartel that bases a countries output on their reserves. In 1986 all the countries started doubling their "proven reserves" even though there weren't major discoveries of oil fields or advances in extraction. Those reserves haven't been independently audited and never will be, it's about politics. The more reserves, the more that countries allocation. In 2006 a report surfaced that Kuwait only had half the stated reserves. Which puts them back to pre-86 levels. It has been denied. But why would a trade magazine around for decades make shit like that up? Here's a simple exercise in how to prove something is fishy. A country has X proven reserves and a country pumps X amount per year, therefore if no major discoveries, reserves should drop. Fact, look at official state estimates of reserves for the OPEC major producers. They don't drop, ever!:eek: So if 300Billion barrels of oil are "missing", according to a World Bank consultant, then we are underpaying A LOT for oil. And everything that depends on cheap oil is over valued.

There was one study that said plug-in hybrid vehicles using overnight off-peak energy could supply 75% of all transportation needs. Wonderful! Now just need to come up with a battery capable of 30-50mile range that doesn't cost $10-15k. The US only has 30-50years of coal at current growth rates so coal wouldn't be a good candidate for making that electricity. So that leaves solar, wind, waves, nuke, etc. And based on power density and least amount of resources to extract it, nuclear is the way to go. Err Green nuke, LFTR, not standard nuke plants. And can burn up current waste from 10,000 yr down to 300year half life. An American's lifetime of waste would take up the space of about 1/4th of a computer mouse (or less). Acceptable tradeoff to use current junk to make treasure.

As of now though oil runs nearly all transportation, and to me drilling in the USA doesn't make a lot of sense unless you like drilling in swiss cheese.

At some pricepoint nearly anything is possible.
 

FRE

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True. But when Exxon invests $600M into something, there might be something true about it.:cool: There is a different company researching things and even if 75% wrong, 100,000 gallons per acre (sounds too optimistic to me) it should be looked at compared to 30 gallons for corn ethanol and 50 gallons for soybean biodiesel. It DOES work but at what cost? You can get oil from the tar sands (Canada has more reserves by that calculation than Saudi Arabia) you can get oil from oil shale (all over the place in UT, WY, CO). The problem is can you get it extracted and processed cheap enough for mass consumption. "Peak Oil" is a kind of bad label, it really should be Peak Cheap Oil. And cheap oil is the kind you drill a hole and there's a gusher that pops up by it's own pressure. Oil will be here for a looong time, although there might be heads exploding looking at the prices.

The problem with oil's value today is that OPEC is a cartel that bases a countries output on their reserves. In 1986 all the countries started doubling their "proven reserves" even though there weren't major discoveries of oil fields or advances in extraction. Those reserves haven't been independently audited and never will be, it's about politics. The more reserves, the more that countries allocation. In 2006 a report surfaced that Kuwait only had half the stated reserves. Which puts them back to pre-86 levels. It has been denied. But why would a trade magazine around for decades make shit like that up? Here's a simple exercise in how to prove something is fishy. A country has X proven reserves and a country pumps X amount per year, therefore if no major discoveries, reserves should drop. Fact, look at official state estimates of reserves for the OPEC major producers. They don't drop, ever!:eek: So if 300Billion barrels of oil are "missing", according to a World Bank consultant, then we are underpaying A LOT for oil. And everything that depends on cheap oil is over valued.

There was one study that said plug-in hybrid vehicles using overnight off-peak energy could supply 75% of all transportation needs. Wonderful! Now just need to come up with a battery capable of 30-50mile range that doesn't cost $10-15k. The US only has 30-50years of coal at current growth rates so coal wouldn't be a good candidate for making that electricity. So that leaves solar, wind, waves, nuke, etc. And based on power density and least amount of resources to extract it, nuclear is the way to go. Err Green nuke, LFTR, not standard nuke plants. And can burn up current waste from 10,000 yr down to 300year half life. An American's lifetime of waste would take up the space of about 1/4th of a computer mouse (or less). Acceptable tradeoff to use current junk to make treasure.

As of now though oil runs nearly all transportation, and to me drilling in the USA doesn't make a lot of sense unless you like drilling in swiss cheese.

At some pricepoint nearly anything is possible.

Exxon has no shortage of $$. Their investing into bio fuels could be mainly for public relations, although I cannot be certain of that. But the land mass to produce enough bio fuels to make a dent would almost certainly be too great to be practical. I don't have that data, but we could get enough data to make a reasonable ball park estimate. If we assume that the energy conversion from sunlight to oil is, say 20%, and we know how much sun energy per acre there is, and how much energy we need from the oil, we could do the math. That fact that Exxon has not published the numbers makes me very suspicious. However, it might be practical in some countries.

Bio ethanol just doesn't make sense in the U.S., but it might in Brazil. Sugar cane grows well in Brazil and requires far less land area than growing corn for ethanol in the U.S.

For many years, battery technology was stagnant. How it seems to be advancing, so there is reason to believe that batteries having a higher energy density and lower price will eventually become available and make electric and hybrid cars more practical. But with cheap electricity available from thorium, it might be more practical to make synthetic fuels that can be used by fairly conventional engines.

Tests were done to see whether an engine could be run on ammonia. The problems were twofold: 1) Ignition was unreliable, and 2) combustion was slow. However, the did the tests on a modified standard engine. I believe that if an engine were designed specifically for NH3, the problems could be overcome.

The slow combustion problem could be solved by having a smaller combustion chamber so that the flame travel would be shorter, and running the engine more slowly. That could be done by having a long stroke engine. That alone would mean less power for the displacement, but that problem could be overcome with a high pressure turbocharger since knock is not a problem with NH3. The unreliable ignition problem could probably be solved by using special spark plugs with a very large gap and having a long duration spark. Incidentally, I once worked for a manufacturer of engines and generators.

But NH3 is not the only synthetic fuel that could be made. In any case, I think that our dependence on oil could be eliminated one way or another. But I'd hate to depend on shale or tar sands; both are expensive and not environmentally friendly.

I can see that you do know something about nuclear power. Until LFTRs can be put into production, perhaps the CANDU reactor should be considered.

There are solutions available for all of our energy problems. I just hope that we will get to work and implement them before we have a serious crisis.
 

thadjock

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True. But when Exxon invests $600M into something, there might be something true about it..

this ^ statement illustrates concisely why we'll never "free" ourselves from "big oil" and a critical flaw in the argument for renewables becoming our saviour.

can anyone honestly believe that if algae (or whatever "alternative" energy source you wish) becomes the next great financially viable energy of the future, that there won't be giant corporations controlling it and manipulating the market for it, and lobbying washington to subsidize it?

oil companies are already directly positioning themselves to "own" the alternatives to oil. sure it won't be "big oil" anymore but there will be "big solar" or "big algae" or "big nukes" and cartels to decide what the price should be.
 

FRE

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this ^ statement illustrates concisely why we'll never "free" ourselves from "big oil" and a critical flaw in the argument for renewables becoming our saviour.

can anyone honestly believe that if algae (or whatever "alternative" energy source you wish) becomes the next great financially viable energy of the future, that there won't be giant corporations controlling it and manipulating the market for it, and lobbying washington to subsidize it?

oil companies are already directly positioning themselves to "own" the alternatives to oil. sure it won't be "big oil" anymore but there will be "big solar" or "big algae" or "big nukes" and cartels to decide what the price should be.

That could happen and probably will UNLESS the antitrust laws are enforced.

The first antitrust law, the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890, was passed in an attempt to end monopolies that fixed prices to maximize profits to the detriment of the public. Over time, additional antitrust laws were enacted. AT&T was broken up to eliminate its near-monopoly power. Unfortunately, that kind of action has not been taken in recent years.

Action is required to prevent monopoly power. The existing laws are probably adequate to take action if the government takes the initiative. It is a big if.