Horace Heffner wrote:
On Jul 30, 2008, at 5:25 AM, Stephen A. Lawrence wrote:
Thank you, Horace!
Now, I wonder where Devoir got that 412 gBBL number? Sure doesn't
seem to be in the report. Seems like they must have conflated the oil
and gas numbers using some kind of conversion factor to turn cubic
feet of natural gas into barrels of petroleum.
http://tinyurl.com/5qrpta
Well, 1 boe (barrel of oil equivalent) = 5.8x10^6 Btu, and 1 cf of gas
is 1000 Btu, so 1 boe roughly equates to 5800 cf of gas. The 1,670 Tcf
of gas is thus equivalent to 287 billion barrels of oil. We thus have
in billion barrels equivalents:
90 undiscovered oil
44 natural gas liquids
287 natural gas equivalent barrels
===
421 total billion barrels equivalent
Strange, the transposition of the last two digits. It's all a very
rough guess anyway.
None of this strikes me as terribly relevant to todays problems. Even if
it is actually there, an extreme expenditure is required to get to most
of this stuff and actually make it deliverable. Most everyone,
including congress, seems to be ignoring the fact that fast delivery of
oil is only likely to come from ANWR, because the pipelines and other
facilities are practically in place already. The already available
natural gas in Alaska will likely take 10 years or more to start
delivery to the central US by pipeline, mostly due to delays in Canada.
It could be delivered as LNG to the west coast much quicker, but there
is a problem obtaining sufficient unloading capacity there. I think the
better solutions are conservation (now already having a price effect in
the form of reduced gasoline consumption), wind, solar, geothermal,
nuclear and increased drilling in unused lease areas. The many unused
lease areas within the continental US could be opened up to small
drilling companies, but that also ignores the problems of equipment
shortages, product delivery, and comparatively low expectations of finds.
I think a major problem will be maintaining a commitment to see through
the conversion to renewable energy when the price of gasoline falls back
to lower levels. The best way to maintain the commitment is to apply a
tax to gasoline that supports some minimum price, say $3/gallon, and
directly and only applies the tax revenue to renewable energy
development and to transportation infrastructure.
** YEAH!! **
But all efforts by Congress and the Pres in the past have been directed
at reducing the price of gasoline. The notion that the govt might
actually work to *raise* the price is utterly alien, sad to say.
Best regards,
Horace Heffner
http://www.mtaonline.net/~hheffner/
