The same is true of horizontal shale oil production in North Dakota, Wyoming, Colorado, and Oklahoma, uneconomic at less than $60 a barrel. Several shale oil frackers are upside down financially, and the United States continues to import oil from Arabia. Please note that oil and natural gas are not equivalent or interchangeable. Gas is a cost-effective and efficient cooking fuel for commercial and household kitchens, an input for fertilizer production, and grossly misused for electric power generation, all of it supplied by pipelines. There are no natural gas aircraft, locomotives, farm tractors, big rigs, or bulldozers. Aside from subsidized buses, propane converted cars, and delivery vans in urban settings, liquid fuel refined from oil powers 95% of transport in the United States. Without oil, everything grinds to a halt.
It is important to grasp why Middle East oil is vital. Japan and South Korea have no oil, totally dependent on imports of Persian Gulf crude and LNG shipped via supertankers protected by the U.S. 6th and 7th Fleets. Germany has no oil. China, India, and most of the EU-28 are heavy importers of oil and gas from the Middle East, Africa, and Russia. The U.S. military pays $100 a gallon ($4200 a barrel) to transport jet fuel and diesel via armored tank truck convoys through hostile Pakistan and Afghanistan, every drop of it produced in Arabia.
There is no alternative to liquid fuel to power aviation, ground transport, farming, and heavy equipment for construction. Wind and solar produce a puny 2% of energy consumption. If we mandate electric passenger vehicles, it will rapidly outstrip U.S. electric generation and toxic waste disposal of depleted lithium batteries. The entire "green tech" movement is a fraud. It works pragmatically in China, because China is the world's worst polluter, poisoning its land, air, water, and millions of seriously ill, rightless Chinese industrial slaves. Wind power is an egregious fraud that eats mountains of maintenance and capital subsidy. The one and only dependable, efficient electric power fuel is coal, augmented by hydro turbines in those few natural situations where dams and reasonably short transmission lines make sense.
The greatest tragedy of all is Peak Oil, a geological certainty. The world endowment of oil is approximately 3 trillion barrels, of which we have already produced and consumed 1 trillion barrels. The next increment will be more expensive to produce. Much of it is in Siberia. The final trillion barrels are trapped in thin shales, the Arctic, incompetent and corrupt nations, war zones, and ultradeep offshore reservoirs that will never be easy or cheap to exploit.
If we lose Arabian production to seemingly inevitable Middle East war, oil will go to $150 a barrel, instantly crippling Europe, India, and the Far East. It is important to reflect that World War II was a genocidal military struggle to capture oilfields in Romania, Persia, and the Dutch East Indies, none of which are important today. The world consumes 85 million barrels a day and is becoming progressively dependent on Russia for oil and natural gas supplies. U.S. gas production is in long term decline. U.S. horizontal shale gas plays in Texas and Louisiana are already depleted, drilling rigs withdrawn, tens of billions of high yield debt written off, and shareholders screwed. The future of natural gas production inevitably belongs to Russia.
The threat is not global warming. It is economic collapse, freezing to death, starvation, and global conflict for control of oil and natural gas. If you think that's an exaggeration, consider what happened during the Obama-led Arab Spring and creation of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. High oil prices forced Americans to cut consumption, and domestic U.S. gasoline sales crashed an incredible 66 percent, forcing major East Coast refiners into bankruptcy.
In answer to public hand wringing and bureaucratic lies about climate change, it's simple to make as much sea ice as needed to cool the oceans, using offshore oil platforms that "flare" (burn off) associated methane gas that can't be profitably piped to shore. This is especially true of frontier plays, such as offshore Newfoundland, Greenland, Barents, and Brazil. The system deploys scaled-up standard technology used by commercial fishing vessels to make sea ice to chill their catches and a small turbojet engine powered by methane. I'd be glad to see it mandated on all offshore platforms, because I patented it.
It's not necessary to shoot ourselves in the head and abolish internal combustion transport. Industrial innovation has cut U.S. carbon emissions every year for two consecutive decades and offers the potential of ameliorating ocean warming, until the next natural cycle of solar variation tosses Planet Earth into another scary phase of global cooling like the 1970s, during peak gas-guzzling muscle car production and coal-fired electric power generation. It's truly hilarious that East Anglia Climate Centre was founded to study the threat of global cooling, and a prominent Stanford economist predicted mass starvation from over-population. U.S. chemists and farmers implemented the Green Revolution and world population doubled.
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