Healthy soil and sustainable growing

["TradingPostPaul" <tradingpost@riseup.net>]

The "oil shale" in Colorado is misnamed; it's just rock that can be ground
and processed to yield kerogen which is only a chemical precursor to
petroleum. Apparently it has some use when refined, but the process uses
more energy than the energy yield from the final product. There isn't any
actual oil that can be pumped out. The holdup isn't the price of petroleum
at all; it's the fact that it's production is a net energy *loss*. A
negative EROEI. The more you produce, the more money you lose. 

Now the shale they're drilling into in TX isn't the same thing at all.
They're able to get gas and oil there. Still, the oil business in TX pretty
much died years ago, and the U.S. oil production peaked about 1970. There
are no new significant discoveries in this country. This is all common
knowledge in the oil industry. Gas drilling got a boost recently from
special tax breaks but without those subsidies there'd be almost no new gas
drilling in this country. 

paul tradingpost@lobo.net

*********** REPLY SEPARATOR  ***********

On 5/13/2007 at 12:03 PM Gloria Baikauskas wrote:

>Then why are they drilling all over the Barnett Shale in Texas where I
>live?  You can't go a block in some areas without finding a new gas
>well.......and I know that isn't oil....but they say after they take the
>gas they are going after the abundance of oil they found there, too.  
>   
>  Gloria
>
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