Yahoo, no more oil crisis

Ah! But America has 27% of the worlds coal deposits, so after they've invaded every country and bled them dry of oil, their still sitting pretty for the next 200 years.. And since Tony has turned us into the United States of Britain, wonder if we'll get a share..

It's a great idea in principle, and it'd be fantastic to see BP, buying the mines and putting people to work, but with this nanny state, it'd be a health and safety nightmare.

I'm sure someone here will know more than me on this, but during the embargo with South Africa, they resorted to this in a big way, but it's wasteful the conversation factor is something silly like 100 tonnes of coal to 50 tonnes of oil. And some dangerous chemicals are created in the process.

Nigel

Hi

Just found this if anyone's interested in more information.

Nigel

Its not a particularly new process - used by Germany in WW2, but the economics have always been pretty dubious - and even at $70 oil I suspect you can only make it work if you make some rather unjustified assumptions about the cost of mining, and I simply don't believe the $30 figure. (this from 45 years in the upstream oil business) JD

And you still have a carbon sequestration problem. Steve

Yes, it is a lot worse from the CO2 emission point of view, but you mostly don't have to go that far - economics kills it except in special circumstances like in South Africa under the embargo or Germany during the war. JD

In message , Bear writes

That's the trouble with the web sites like that and the Internet, yet another quasi expert whose gravitas is only really the hypnotic aplomb of unqualified assertion. Big oil and those other commercial and industrial sectors conjoined in a demonically symbiotic relationship have consistently been shown to be pretty dishonest and without social or moral ethics beyond the pretence of supporting alternative technologies whilst actually suppressing them. Energy is the biggest business on the planet, which together with those other symbiotically involved self interest groups controls over 20% of the entire global economy. No other sector comes anywhere near or is ultimately so beyond the control of mere political authority.

These figures constantly being held up as definitive measures of global oil reserves are easily discredited, just like much of the double talk that's so easily foisted onto an astonishingly ignorant and narrow minded populace, you know the ones whose opinions are entirely based on emotions, wishful thinking, paranoia and parochial knee jerk incognisence. Did you know that even in the easiest oil exploration regions on the planet, Saudi Arabia in particular and the Middle East in general, barely a third of explorable potential has been completed. Or how about the North Sea? How come the governments of UK and Norway have withheld exploration licenses for over half of their potential submarine real estate? It's also generally accepted by experts that the entire offshore eastern seaboard of the Americas, from Newfoundland to the Falklands (Get the picture now about that valuable property), is likely to be sitting on the biggest reserves of all. It seem much more likely that there's so much oil on the planet that the issue is not so much one of running out of it but are we really going to burn it all, considering the ecological danger of releasing so much locked carbon into the atmosphere? Meantime the oil companies and their symbiotically entwined partners are enjoying the biggest profits ever generated in history. Consider the doubling of oil prices when in fact there's not yet been an actual shortage? How's that for daylight robbery? Haven't noticed any rationing going on anywhere due to global supply shortages, and your won't see any either.

Got no arguments with you on that.. Maybe that's why this pipe line card deal is taking so long to set up. Why should any oil company, pay any attention to a discount scheme, when they can make profits which put small countries in the shade.

Nigel

erm...think again about no great trouble re-opening the mines. I can categorically state that Polkemmet Colliery (one of the biggest mines in Scotland at the time) will never be re-opened due to the fact that they dumped many a thousand tonnes of scrap, steel, concrete & mining equipment (BRAND NEW i may add) all down the main shafts, topping it off with flooding the remaining shafts and seams and bulldozing in all the air shafts. For days on end Tilcon and Trumix had fleets on the go pouring concrete and the company i worked for were sending out class c mining transformers in 3's on a flatbed trailer. The drivers reversing up to the shaft opening and pulled the chocks dumping the 3 x £50K ea. transformers down the shaft. The respective flooding will have brought down the ceilings and whatever supports there were will be rust by now and in no state to hold anything up. Maggie did a good job....she wiped out my home town to the extent where approx 2500 men and women were jobless and destitute and the impact on the surrounding communities was devastating. I am sure there will be a few miners out there who could tell a story or two but i'll give them the respect and not comment myself.

Wolfie

On or around Mon, 28 Aug 2006 22:35:21 GMT, snipped-for-privacy@howl.com enlightened us thusly:

well, OK, they can dig a new mine into the same coal seam. It's mostly down to money, though. Most things can be done if it's worth it and coal is only going to increase in value...

That's $30 a barrel from a huge open cast mine, not from deep mines! Plus it involves removing entire mountain ranges.............

Richard

Bloody mountains always spoil the view from the valleys anyway. Steve

Well, true enough, but after the New Orleans fiasco (I see they still haven't even cleared the streets in the poorer parts of town) you'd think that even George might have spotted that Mother Nature isn't a US Citizen ;-)

Richard

what do you think the chances of finding coal under Central Birmingham are ;-)

Si

Probably pretty slim. But I think it's definitely worth looking into.

Eh? Coal is fossil carbon, just like oil and the stuff you don't want to releasing into the atmosphere. Now if you make your diesel from recently growing plants rather than ones that died millions of years ago that is another matter.

There is plenty under central Coventry, get digging.

never mind the oil crisis, my local Morrison's is selling fuel at 89p a litre, last week it was 94p...what's going on here then?

Jock

$10 drop in the price of crude in the last 3 weeks? Brent is now below $70/barrel it was up at $78/barrel. Still fecking expensive, not so long ago it was

Anyone notice the latest announcement tucked away in the back pages? They've discovered a new oil and gas field in the North Sea.

Who'd have thought it eh! NOT

Bet there'll be a few more 'new' discoveries shortly. Strange how these new fields have been hidden in plain sight for so long. NOT

The self centred shallowness of a TV reality generation of pseudo sophisticates allows bullshit to baffles their brains as easily as telling 'em black is actually white !