I can say this til I am blue in the face, I understand.

[Joe for Clark]

But I will -

We can say sayonora to the middle east - and then it is up to us.

Cause god knows congress will be debating this til our kids die of old age.

And Bush will still be playing checkers.

I know i am right - we can convert to shale - now -

May not be the long term solution - but it gets us over the hump.

Right now.

And that is better than a third world war.

Jesus Christ - there is no other solution.

Joe

[AndyTiedye]

1. Solar Panels Are Getting Better and Better, and LEDs have Doubled in Efficiency in the Past Year

[Joe for Clark]

2. Tell me how your car runs on that.

What do you really think oil is for??

Joe

[AndyTiedye]

3. I Know Someone Who Charged His EV-1 Off Of Solar Panels

[eridani]

4. By processing it with ginormous amounts of water

Shale we have; water we don't.

[Joe for Clark]

5. So you can put water in your car and run it??

Right??

[eridani]

6. No, you run it with the gas produced by processing shale with water n/t

[Joe for Clark]

7. I know - I am an opnionated asshole - I admit it freely.

I know no process that uses water in oil shale production.

There is in coal liquification - I am not a very big coal fan -

Maybe I am wrong -

Joe

[eridani]

8. Wikipedia

Didn't know that there were so many possibilities. Some employ water for extraction, but others don't. Even if we can get some of the latter to work, there is still not a lot of net energy gain, meaning really expensive gas.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oil_shale_extraction

Main problems of Kiviter process are related with environmental concerns like extensive use and pollution of water in the process, as also solid residue continues to leach toxic substances.

A variety of true in-situ processes were tried prior to the oil shale crash in the 1980s. Most notable are the Equity Oil process, which injected superheated steam in the permeable leached zone of Colorado’s Piceance Basin.

EGL Resources proposes a method that combines horizontal wells, through which steam is passed, and vertical wells, which provide both vertical heat transfer through refluxing of generated oil and a means to collect and produce the oil.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oil_shale

Water is also needed to add hydrogen to the oil-shale oil before it can be shipped to a conventional oil refinery. The largest deposit of oil shale in the United States is in western Colorado (the Green River Shale deposits), a dry region with no surplus water. The oil shale can be ground into a slurry and transported via pipeline to a more suitable pre-refining location.[

[Joe for Clark]

9. There are a lot of ways to do this -

In almost every way I understood about the process - it is not so green. We will basically take one energy source and transform it into another. We would take a rock and squeeze the oil out of it -basically. TO do oil shale - it is really just heat and pressure.

Make no mistake though, the problem is creating enough gasoline and diesel to keep our vehicles moving. That is where the money is in a barrel of oil. It is the "prime rib" of the refining process.
The heavy and light leftover - they are really by-products.

The oil shale beds - they exist in almost every state in the union. It was looked at so carefully by the oil companies - like their life depended on it -and it appeared it did once. The commercial attempts were so lame - and so late it the day - I think they are meaningless.

But we don't have to reinvent the wheel either. The usable research - target locations - it exists. In the oil company records - certainly - but also in this entity called the US Synthetic Fuels Corporation - it is actually a government operation - formed in 1979 and terminated in 1981. The have big chunks of the information we need.

We know what the plants would look like too - well, a 1945 version. Type Zeitz and 1945 into a search engine - (that spelling is from memory) - that is pretty much what it would look like - (after its blown up it is) -

Joe

[MadHound]

10. Oil shale is a chimera, an mirage that we would do best not to follow

Especially considering that we can easily fulfill our energy needs completly with biodiesel, wind and solar.

A physics prof at the University of New Hampshire named Michael Briggs figured out that we would need fifteen thousand square miles of water surface to grow enough oil bearing algae as biodiesel feedstock to fulfill all of our fuel needs. This would be an easy proposition, for not only do a lot of cities use algae as part of their wastewater treatment, but most farms have ponds, thus adding another crop to their cycle. Biodiesel is also much much less polluting than gas or dino diesel.

Wind is also plentifully available, enough so that the DOE found in 1991 that there is enough harvestable wind energy to fill all of our electrical needs, including growth, through the year 2030 in three states, North Dakota, Kansas and Texas. We are awash in large quantities of wind, so much that we are referred to in some circles as the Saudi Arabia of wind energy. Supplement this with solar and we need never build another coal, gas or nuclear facility again.

We are dying under an excessive load of hydrocarbons and petro chemicals. Adding to that load won't help us any. Rather at this critical junture we are presented with two paths. One is the path of more of the same, using up finite resources, strangling ourselves and our planet with the pollution of petroleum. The other is the path of renewables, clean, depnendable, abundant and much less polluting. To preserve our country and world, it is best that we take the renewable choice. Anything else is madness.