 | The Bullroarer - Saturday 1 December 2007 | TOD: Australia/New Zealand | The Bullroarer - Monday 3 December 2007 |  |
36 comments on Queensland Shale Oil Billions in The Balance ?
Comments can no longer be added to this story.
User login
Contact
- anz at theoildrum dot com
License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
Archives
GAIA Host Collective
If oil from shale works peak oil is not avoided, just ameliorated for a time, and we are toasted browner by climate change.
If oil from shale does not work peak oil powerdown hits harder, but we are toasted less brown by climate change.
Any prefs?
Well - I'd go for a third option myself.
I'm not in any way a fan of shale oil but there is no point pretending it doesn't exist if it does turn out to be practical.
At some point, if it does get up, it will have to be killed off with carbon taxes otherwise we will be toast - but that will be a hard battle to fight in light of peak (regular crude) oil unless we manage to get some momentum behind a shift to electric transport and renewables (or nuclear).
Yes, I think unless we have some killer carbon tax we'll get fuel from tar sands, shale, gas to liquid, coal to liquid just to keep the motorists happy.
I've resigned from my state Automobile Association because of their outrageous and relentless promotion of the car culture with more travel, more holidays, more roads, lower fuel taxes etc.
They even had ads at bus stops with the theme "Wouldn't you rather be driving?"
I too am open minded about nuclear. If the choice is to be certain toast and complete breakdown of civilisation or risk nuclear I would risk nuclear.
Thousands more people have been killed by hydro accidents than nuclear.
Actually I'm not open minded about nuclear at all - I think building nuclear plants would be a foolish waste of money.
But that doesn't make it any less likely to happen than producing oil from shale...
No, this is the perfect solution, really! Think about. processing the shale in Australia is good for the environment.
The alkaline salts could be dumped on the Great Barrier Reef and would serve to reduce CO2 induced acidity. The left over tailings could be used to as a substrate to grow more reef. Or you could just go out and start dynamiting the whole reef and get the process of destruction over with once and for all and then you wouldn't have to worry about it at all. It might be good to revisit Dr. Bartlett's lecture about Arithmetic, Population and Energy http://globalpublicmedia.com/lectures/461
to get a little perspective about these pie in the sky schemes.
The alkaline salts are made by liberating the CO2 that was present before.
It was Na2CO3 and CH2 as a rock. You liberate the CO2 and the CH2 and are left with Na2O as a remainder or byproduct. So you don't get net basic, but net acid when the CH2 is burned in your car.
Ehem, I was making an obviously poor attempt at being somewhat sarcastic ;-)
It's hard to convey tone of voice in text, but you can do it with capitalization and punctuation if you try. E.g.:
Nobody's going to take that seriously.
Whether it be sarcasm, irony or joke (humour), surely we need only the application of intelligence, not CAPITALS, or emoticons, to work out what is going on? I am reluctant to use stereotypes, but it does seem that that the non-US (I exclude Canadians)respondents on TOD seem to be much more alert to the linguistic nuances in postings on this site.
Imagine how the text of Shakespeare would look if it were deemed necessary to signal irony with capitals or italics!
Other observers have noticed a tendency towards literalism (not to mention its kin, fundamentalism) in American readers, so if this is a congenital defect that contemporay American individuals cannot be held responsible for I apologise.