[Rhodes22-list] Opinion on the Pickens Plan - non sailing, non political, educational

[Brad Haslett]

Mike,

Since you were/are kinda/sorta in the neighborhood, were any of your EOR
projects in the Illinois Basin Field, specifically the Salem-Louden
anticline?  I grew up at the edge of that field and have watched it go
through several price and research cycles (it was a former Exxon research
project for water flood).  The dumbest investment move I ever made was
walking away from a lease in late 2003 because the seller and I couldn't
negotiate the last $6000.  He still owns the lease and must be having a good
laugh at my expense every month the check arrives!

You are 100% correct on the political angle, that's how we got corn based
ethanol.  Whether we open E&D for shale oil or coal for a Fischer-Tropsch
conversion process (including the 1.7 million acres of high-yield coal in
Utah taken off the market), we'll need energy to produce energy, ie, nukes.

Four dollars a gallon gasoline seems to be the psychological and economic
tipping point for US citizens - or perhaps a world conflict that makes
transportation fuel unavailable at any price.  Let's hope it doesn't go that
far.

Brad

On Wed, Aug 13, 2008 at 10:47 PM, Mike Cheung <mikecheung at att.net> wrote:

>
> Let us not make the same mistake(s) again ....
>
> The last "oil crisis" kicked off a huge surge of effort to conserve energy,
> find "alternative" energy sources, and recover more oil from the ground.
> Naturally it also spurred a huge effort to find more oil.  The latter won
> out and the former were starved for funding.
>
> While the situation is not identical, the rise of the Asian economies is
> one
> huge difference, it is similar enough to cause concern.  As a engineering
> graduate student in a field related to oil recovery at that time, I met
> many
> of the researchers working on enhanced oil recovery; most of them are long
> gone.  The funding dried up and either they moved on or no one took up
> their
> work as they passed.  In fact only one of the "old gang" of EOR researchers
> is still plugging away and he's now approaching or into his eighties.
>
> So, what do we do?  If we say, let the market decide ... well, if a couple
> of decent oil reservoirs are found oil will drop to "reasonable" levels,
> say
> $100/barrel, and we'll be "happy".  If we say, let the government solve
> this, then there will be enormous sums spend on bad ideas in politically
> correct districts.
>
> So what do we do?  From the political standpoint, damned if I know; from
> the
> technical standpoint my gut says: design a nuclear power plant that can
> operate on top of the San Andreas fault and built thousands of them ...
> this
> is a variation on the French approach, push hard on "darn near anything" to
> liquid transportation fuels (probably via Fischer-Tropsch chemistry) since
> we're pretty much addicted to "pumpable" transportation fuels, find some
> way
> to reward efforts in wind and solar.  But remember gang, we're fighting a
> tough battle between fossil fuels and "renewable" fuels.  The fossil fuels
> have a huge advantage, they're the result of the solar energy the earth
> received stored up over millions of years, beating them with just this
> years
> solar energy is not easy, maybe not even possible.
>
> Mike C. s/v Muireann and a Professor of Chemical and Biomolecular
> Engineering, The University of Akron, Akron, OH
> --
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>
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