Peak Oil – real or manufactured?

Good news. The problem of US energy dependency on foreign sources is solved

Colorado and Utah have as much oil as Saudi Arabia, Iran, Iraq, Venezuela, Nigeria, Kuwait, Libya, Angola, Algeria, Indonesia, Qatar and United Arab Emirates combined. Trapped in limestone up to 200 feet thick in the two Rocky Mountain states is enough so-called shale oil to rival OPEC and supply the United States for a century.

Exxon Mobil and Chevron, the two biggest U.S. energy companies, and Royal Dutch Shell Plc are spending $100 million a year testing methods to separate the oil from the stone for as little as $30 a barrel. A growing number of industry executives and analysts say new technology and persistently high prices make the idea feasible.

“The breakthrough is that now the oil companies have a way of getting this oil out of the ground without the massive energy and manpower costs that killed these projects in the 1970s,” said Pete Stark, analyst at IHS Inc., an Englewood, Colo., research firm. “All the shale rocks in the world are going to be revisited now to see how much oil they contain.”

One would assume that the implications of this are enormous. Apart from freeing the US from its reliance on Middle Eastern oil supplies, it could potentially deliver a financial boom for the country.

Due to the fact is that this is not a new discovery, one has to quesrion whether Peak Oil is real or a creation of big oil to manufacture scarcity. When we hear about oil scarcity, we must remember that scarcity is variable upon the current price of oil.

Given the modest annual investment made by the oil giants in perfecting these extraction techniques, one has to wonder if controlling the world’s oil (and therefore controlling potential rivals to US power) is more important to the ruling elite than establishing America’s energy independence.

Text and images ©2024 Antony Loewenstein. All rights reserved.

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