"the world had decades' worth of oil to come"

[mora]

Originally posted by Ripsnort
http://news.independent.co.uk/business/news/article315546.ece

According to Saudi's and Exxon. Also, oil reserves are double of what was previously reported. (shrugs)

Or www.lifeaftertheoilcrash.net/

[Toad]

Originally posted by mora
How many barrels does it take to even mine the ton of coal and convert it? Doesn't sound too efficient on the long run.

I don't know the cost to mine the coal but one article said:

Powder River Basin coal typically sells for $5-7 per
ton ($0.30-0.42 per million BTU) FOB mine.

A ton is supposed to make 1.5 barrels of top quality low sulfur diesel.

August 2, 2005
... For F-T, the break even point comes when crude oil is more than $35 a barrel. Friday crude oil futures settled at $60.57 a barrel....

Note that the process Shell is developing doesn't require mining the coal. It's "in situ" extraction from the ground.

[JCLerch]

You Gents to realize that Canada is the NUMBER 1 supplier of crude oil to the United States, with a YTD average of 1,608,000 barrels per day.  

The second largest supplier YTD is Mexico, at 1,558,000 barrels per day.  

Saudi is in third place, followed by Venzuela and Nigeria.  Irag takes the honor of 6th place at just over a 3rd of what Canada supplies.  

SOURCE

[mora]

Powder River Basin coal typically sells for $5-7 per  ton ($0.30-0.42 per million BTU) FOB mine.

If we start mass converting coal into liquid fuel the coal prices are bound to skyrocket. Also the cost of digging and converting it will go up as the cost of oil goes up. All the manufacturing facilities run on oil, and so does the production of machinery. The return from converting coal into liquid fuel is quite small.

Any type of fossil fuel will be extremely expensive in the future, and that will affect all prices as everything runs on oil. I hope it will not be as bad as predicted here.

[mora]

The positive side is that the peak oil might take care of the global warming. Just burn away while you still can.

[Toad]

And as the price of a barrel of oil goes up, the "break even" cost will adjust as well.

It would be profitable right now; it will remain a profitable option until the price of oil drops below ~ $30 barrel.

In other words, it's going to be profitable from now on.

[mora]

"What About Synthetic Oil From Coal?"      Coal can be used to make synthetic oil via a process known as gasification. Unfortunately, synthetic oil will be unable to do all that much to soften the coming energy crash for the following reasons:      I. Insufficiency of Supply/"Peak Coal":      The coal supply is not as great as many assume.  According to a July 2004 article published by the American Institute of Physics:      If demand remains frozen at the current rate of    consumption, the coal reserve will indeed last roughly 250    years. That prediction assumes equal use of all grades of    coal, from anthracite to lignite. Population growth alone    reduces the calculated lifetime to some 90−120 years. Any    new uses of coal would further reduce the supply. . . .The    use of coal for conversion to other fuels would quickly    reduce the lifetime of the US coal base to less than a human    lifespan.      Even a 50-75 year supply of coal is not as much as it sounds because coal production, like oil production, will peak long before the total supply is exhausted. Were we to liquefy a large portion of our coal endowment in order to produce synthetic oil, coal production would likely peak within 2 decades.      II. Falling "Energy Profit Ratio":      As John Gever explains in his book, Beyond Oil: The Threat to Food and Fuel in Coming Decades, the production of coal will be in energy-loser within a few decades:      . . . the energy profit ratio for coal slips to 20 in 1977,    comparable to that of domestic petroleum. While an energy    profit ratio of 20 means that only 5 percent of coal's gross    energy is needed to obtain it, the sharp decline since 1967 is    alarming. If it continues to drop at this rate, the energy    profit ratio of coal will slide to 0.5 by 2040.      In other words, with an EPR of .5, it will take twice as much energy to produce the coal than the coal actually contains. It will thus be of no use to us as an energy source.

http://www.lifeaftertheoilcrash.net/

[Toad]

From your reference:

This means any attempt to replace conventional oil with oil shale will actually make our situation worse as the project will consume more energy than it will produce, regardless of how high the price goes.

As Nash pointed out cost of production for Alberta "tar sand" oil is about $13 a barrel, with a barrel worth ~$65.

For the F-T process, coal to syn oil, the breakeven is $35 a barrel.

It would appear that it does not consume more energy than it produces from these two cases.

In the case of Shell's "in situ" project,

should yield 3.5 units of energy for every 1 unit used in production

So someone is wrong. Can't have it both ways.

[slimm50]

Originally posted by Clifra Jones
This is one of the contributing factors as to why New Orleans and the entire north gulf coast has been sinking for years.

Clifra, that's an interesting theory. Got any links to support that? I wasn't aware that the entire north gulf coast has been sinking for years. I do know that there're some localized subsidance problems, due to the unregulated pumping out of ground water for the last 75 years, or so, before they finally began using some common sense.  And along the outer edges of the continental shelf in the Gulf of Mexico there occurs the slumping of the sediments as sediment load builds up. But subsidance of an entire geographic region due solely to the withdrawal of oil seems improbable, to me.

[john9001]

finland has no oil or coal, but they do have raindeer

[Silat]

Yeah.
Double the oil for double the price:)

[A_Clown]

Originally posted by lasersailor184
HA!  All joking aside, the country that has the largest oil reserves is China.



Yes, we are here for all the oil, and an order of egg rolls....TO GO!

[ASTAC]

Originally posted by Toad

So someone is wrong. Can't have it both ways.

And we'll never know who....Those who support it will write volumes on how good it can be, and those opposed will write volumes on how it won't work. The problem is we won't know until we try on a large scale, and no one has the balls to do it. With Tar sands, Coal, or oil shale.

Then there's the environmental lobby that has been pretty good at killing off any project that might have a slight impact on our environment.

[Nash]

Huh Astac? "Tar" sands (it's called "oil sands" now) produces over a million barrels a day here. Someone obviously had the balls to do it.

It aint coal or shale.

[ASTAC]

Originally posted by Nash
Huh Astac? "Tar" sands (it's called "oil sands" now) produces over a million barrels a day here. Someone obviously had the balls to do it.

It aint coal or shale.

Sorry, Forgot about that, I'm still thinking of a few years ago as far as the "sands" (tar or oil i've heard them called both) go.