Posted by
B.N. Sharpe on Monday, August 27, 2007 11:46:51 PM
And we are meant to use it to its fullest capacity. Oil is a naturally produced product of great versatility and therefore, value. Not only can it serve in some form or another as a myriad of fuels, it's the primary source of mechanical lubricants, and a major ingredient in plastics and building materials and an essential part of many manufacturing processes.
And contrary to popular belief, oil is a renewable quantity. Maybe not to the degree that we're using it in the 21st century, but the planet continues to create new oil, continuously, however slowly, even as you read this. The geological forces that have created the vast reservoirs of oil within the planet over the course of millions of years did not cease to function when man discovered its usefulness and began extracting it from the ground. Granted, we probably are depleting tapped fields immeasurably faster than the planet can replenish them. The good news is that there are fields that have never been tapped and others that were tapped, but capped long before they dried out. Many of those capped wells and virgin fields are right here in the U.S.A. Throughout the interior of the country, there are probably thousands of positively producing wells that have been capped by or on behalf of corrupt politicians and commercialists corrupting capitalism. Beware the government/industrial complex. There are the known, but presently forbidden fields off of various sections of US coastline, like the Carolinas, Florida, the Gulf coast, California, and of course Alaska. There's ANWR, which is temperately another planet to which no one goes and about which no one knows. Then there's the Rocky Mountains of Colorado, Wyoming, and Utah, which may hold the planet's largest oil depository. When shale oil was discussed in the seventies, it was not, at that time, economically feasible to try to bring it to market, as it would have had to be sold at about forty dollars a barrel in a market that had turned topsy turvy by the more than doubling of the per barrel price...from approximately nine dollars to nineteen dollars. Now, with OPEC oil at a minimum of sixty dollars a barrel, Rocky Mountain shale oil has a whole new sheen to it, especially if it is true that with technological advancements over the past thirty years, it could be brought to market for perhaps twenty-five, or maybe even ten dollars a barrel. The first and fastest step to energy independence is to immediately start to utilize the oil we have in America by uncapping those mid-western and western wells, drilling in all of those other aforementioned locales and building a new refinery or ten, perhaps on some of our abandoned military bases. After that, we can seriously pursue viable alternatives, like constructing some new nuclear power plants, building better batteries, and seeking the secrets of solar power.
Feel good, but brain dead ideas like ethynol and bio diesel are nothing more than Ma Chalmers' soybean farm. Wind power is not viable in any real sense, in that the wind farm to power New York City would have to be the size of Connecticut. Of course, coal remains an important alternative to oil. But the anti-capitalist communists posing as environmentalists like coal less than they like oil as a source of American energy. Both of those sources are fine for China and the like, all conveniently exempted from the great grand Kyoto Protocols. And though America does more than any nation on Earth to minimize pollution from the burning of such fossil fuels, we're the bad guys for opting out of that ridiculous renunciation of western civilization.
At this critical juncture in American and world history, to keep our and our allies' economies and societies safe, we must bust the trusts of the government/(oil) industrial complex to get existing wells flowing again and we must tell the anti-capitalist socialists posing as environmentalists that we are going to increase American refining capacity as much as necessary and extract as much American oil as we need from new American sources and that they can all go to hell, or to China, or to Cuba, or to Venezuela, where I hope that Hugo Chavez drowns in his excess of unsellable supplies of Citgo that we won't need or want any longer.