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May 7, 2008

Is The Gasoline Shortage Politically Contrived?

Topics: Political News and commentaries

The short answer is yes!

Via InsiderOnline:

[...} The earth is hardly exhausting the resources to make abundant, affordable gasoline. The technology to make gasoline, even when oil wells run dry, already exists. Rising gasoline prices will automatically set the stage, so that synthesizing gasoline from a wide variety of source materials will become increasingly profitable. However, the enjoyment of plentiful gasoline may not be in our future in spite of its feasibility. Political interference with the construction and operation of refineries and synthesizing plants places the world at the mercy of those who believe they must deprive humankind of cheap fossil fuels. Their persistent obstruction of the construction and expansion of petroleum refineries has already proved capable of contriving a mild energy crisis.

[...} A more serious potential economic crisis caused by rising motor-fuel prices, in
contrast, does not spring from pollution or resource exhaustion, but from the catastrophists' mistaken belief in what has become their almost self-fulfilling prophecy
(see Marxsen 2003).

Through the political system, they have promoted regulatory actions that are discouraging the investment that would otherwise have prevented today's worsening refining bottleneck. Obstruction of investments in gasoline refineries, achieved by regulatory interventions, is probably a more significant threat to the affordability of gasoline than any approaching exhaustion of gasoline's fossil sources.

Reestablishment of refiners' reasonable property rights and adoption of strict liability as the major instrument for controlling carbon dioxide and refinery pollution might end what otherwise may become an ever-worsening, regulatory-induced "energy crisis."

[...] A great deal of fossil-fuel material remains buried in accessible places. In the U.S. Department of Energy's International Energy Outlook 2006, world energy use is
projected to rise from 421 quadrillion Btus, or "quads," in 2003 to 722 quads in 2030 (2006b, 1). Paul Holtberg, director of the Demand and Integration Division of the U. S. Department of Energy, and Robert Hirsch, a senior energy program advisor at Science Applications International Corporation, estimate that 13,400 quads of conventional crude oil and 14,000 quads of conventional natural gas remain exploitable.

At least another 15,000 quads are available from unconventional sources of crude oil, such as tar sands and oil shale. In the lower forty-eight states of the UnitedStates, geopressured brine and gas hydrates may offer as much as 335,000 quads,.according to Holtberg and Hirsch (2003). Bob Williams (2003a), former executive editor of the Oil and Gas Journal, reports a global methane hydrate endowment more than 190 times the amount in the United States. Worldwide coal resources exceed 135,000 quads, according to Holtberg and Hirsch. At the 2003 rate of global energy use, and not counting the geopressured brine and methane hydrate endowment outside the lower forty-eight states, such fossil-fuel reserves would apparently last
more than 1,200 years, and they would last more than 700 years at the projected 2030
rate of consumption. Moreover, Holtberg and Hirsch's estimates seem to be conservative
ones. David L. Greene, Janet L. Hopson, and Jia Li estimate in a report prepared for the U.S. Department of Energy by Oak Ridge National Laboratory that the world's remaining supply of exploitable oil (including that from shale and tar sands) is about 106,572.2 quads, with about 32,885.6 quads recoverable under technologies and prices expected to prevail before 2050 (2003, 9). Thus, fossil hydrocarbons for making gasoline and other liquid fuels will almost certainly be adequate for centuries to come. The real obstacle is the world's political systems.

Continue reading Politically Contrived Gasoline Shortage by Craig S. Marxsen (pdf)

If you're not pissed off at the "catastrophists" (read as "environmentalists and the politicians - mainly Democrats - that push their crap through Congress) already, oil prices today hit record peaks above 123 dollars.

Posted by Richard at May 7, 2008 8:20 PM

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