Tuesday, June 10, 2008

Joe American

This guy has some good ideas.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Doesn't show up on the blog, for whatever reason. . . but I'm glad you posted it!

C.L.J. said...

The only problem is that he doesn't know what he's talking about. Kind of like Ronald Reagan, or George W. Bush.

The US currently uses 20 million barrels of oil each day. If we magically managed to access all the oil in our soil at full production capacity, we'd decrease our dependency on imported fuel by 3.5%, and we'd use it all up in three years, assuming our current rate of consumption.

BTW, since 40% of that oil is locked up in shale and oilsand, it can't be accessed by drilling: you have to mine it. We still can't get oil out of shale, but we can get it out of oilsand; it simply requires burning through two barrels of oil to extract one barrel of oil.

So his solution has three glaring flaws: 1. Sucking up our own oil as fast as we can will not appreciably reduce our need to import foreign oil. 2. While we're busy still importing almost all of our oil, we'll completely use up our reserves long before we've put a viable replacement fuel infrastructure in place, putting us completely at the mercy of our foreign suppliers. 3. getting that oil consumes twice as much energy as it supplies.

"Joe American" really does know as much about oil as your average Joe - unfortunately.