Lawrence Solomon: A world awash in oil

[MindMover]

Middle East will go back to being an obscure backwater

Today, the Middle East is in the news daily — we hear of strife in Syria, in Iran, in Israel and Palestine. Ten or 20 years from now, conflicts in the Middle East will count for less in the world’s scheme of things, just as the daily conflicts that now occur in Africa get short shrift, despite Africa’s far greater loss of life. Twenty years from now, the Middle East could be about as important as it was at the turn of the previous century — before its oil was discovered — which was not very important at all.

The Middle East will attract scant attention in future, not because the region will have run out of oil — it will have found much more — but because the rest of the world will also be awash in oil. As supplies increase, oil depreciates in price, as does the political value of its purveyors.

To see the future of oil, consider the present of natural gas. Until recently, many thought the West was running out of gas — most of the easily accessible natural gas finds were being depleted, making the West reliant on ever more distant, ever more difficult reserves to exploit. The U.S., the world’s biggest natural gas importer, began to build ports to receive liquefied natural gas from distant continents in the expectation that it couldn’t import enough from Canada and Mexico.

Then everything flipped. New technologies emerged to extract gas from shale and other rock formations. Because these so-called unconventional technologies — fracking is the best known among them — proved cheaper than obtaining gas from the harder-to-find “conventional” sources, and because shale gas is plentiful, the unconventional became the norm. Thanks to fracking, the U.S. has suddenly become the world’s largest producer of natural gas, creating a massive glut that has more than halved the price of natural gas. Those liquefied natural gas ports that the U.S. was building to import gas will now be used to export gas.

http://opinion.financialpost.com/2012/03/30/lawrence-solomon-a-world-awash-in-oil/

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Now, does anyone know how much it costs to convert gasoline engine to natural gas......

[earthside]

1. You mean I shouldn't have sold my Hummer?

What a crock.

Here's a little reading not from the big rock candy mountain.

How the Big Energy Companies Plan to Turn the United States into a Third-World Petro-State by Michael T. Klare; AlterNet.org

Unthinkable by James Howard Kunstler

The Big Fracking Bubble: The Scam Behind the Gas Boom by Jeff Goodell;Rolling Stone

[MindMover]

2. Are you saying this is koolaid that the other side listens tooo....