I'm always a bit dismayed by the anti-intellectual, specifically anti-scientific, attitude of many conservatives. So many people seem to be willing to believe in conspiracy theories rather than learn basic facts about the world. You see this, in this issue, in people believing in Lindsey Williams. And that's exactly what it is: belief. Belief is when you have no proof of something but still having confidence in it. He's never actually presented facts about an "energy non-crisis". He simply says it's so and people believe it. Really ridiculous.
I'd read his book a few years ago, after coming across peak oil. As a student of science, whenever you come to have confidence in a subject, it's best to read as much as possible, no matter how crazy or asinine, from the "other side". So I did. I read about abiotic oil, Lindsey Williams, all of the other crap. And I concluded that it was crap based off of the facts presented. In Williams' case, it's easy: he presents no facts. It's always: "a man told me blah blah blah". He never names anyone, never provides facts for what he says, etc.
I mean, read what he writes:
All the time I was trying my best to find out what it was in specifics, because after all, I did not know all those terms he was using. I was a layman, and as a layman and a Chaplain, I didn't understand some of the data they were discussing, so I cannot present it here.
He can't present it? Probably because it doesn't exist. You get the feeling, while reading the book, that it's just a novel and not an investigative book about the potential for oil reserves in the US. He claims that he had "executive status" because he was a CHAPLAIN! And that's how he came across this information? If you owned a company that produced a couple of millions of barrels of oil every day (and thus millions in profits everyday), would you be handing out executive status to a ******* chaplain? To someone who, according to his own words, doesn't understand what he's hearing?
It's absurd that so many people are willing to believe this garbage rather than pick up a geology book to learn about how oil is extracted and how production models are. Or dig through the facts to show that even with the 4 mpd of production that Lindsey claims we have in Gull Island, that we'd still need to import 8 million barrels per day. And that that number would increase as US domestic production would decrease and consumption would increase.
North America has billions and billions of barrels worth in tars and rocks etc. But if you've ever seen how destructive it is getting this oil to the environment, it's no different than mining other things.
Oil shale isn't very destructive. At least with in-situ extraction methods. What you do, is put pipes around the rocks which they cook the rocks for a few years. That releases the oil and then you can pump it out. However, it takes a large nuclear power plant (1000 MW) to produce half a million barrels a day, IIRC. The main problem is the extremely high cost of production as well as a low EROEI (energy return on energy investment). But for a system based on liquid fuels where electricity currently can't run much of the US fleet, it's a possibility.
Interesting side note, tar sands and oil shale have the energy density (roughly) of a potato. That's just to show how horrible of an energy source it is. "Normal" petroleum has an energy density hundreds of times greater, I believe. (31,000 calories per gallon in gasoline).
