> At 2:07 AM -0700 22/9/04, <james at communistbanker.com> wrote:
>
> >I'm all for investigating new energy sources, but they're
> >not available right now.
>
> Sure they are, they just aren't profitable. Whereas rendering the
> Earth uninhabitable for humans is no obstacle to profits now. That's
> a systemic problem, not a technological one.
>
> Bill Bartlett
> Bracknell Tas
------------------------------
An article in today's Financial Times takes up this issue. It's available
only to subscribers, though, but I can post it in full if the moderator
waives the BW limit.
Oil industry faces a stark choice By Carola Hoyos FT September 21, 2004
When Total, the French energy group, began in the 1990s to consider the tricky task of extracting extra-heavy crude oil from central Venezuela's Orinoco belt, the company's technicians would tell their bosses that all they needed to make the venture profitable was an extra $10 a barrel on the international oil price, recounts Thierry Desmarest, the company's chairman and chief executive officer.
That wish has been granted. But it is not just higher oil prices that have made possible Total's venture into what the industry calls "unconventional" oil - difficult to extract and requiring complicated processing. Advances in technology have played a part.
"When we and ConocoPhillips [the US company that also invested around the same time] looked at Venezuela we were convinced we could bring the cost of production very low," Mr Desmarest says of the venture, which began producing oil in August 1998. "New technology really changed the picture."
Some companies are exploring even more difficult locations. In the massive Athabasca oil sands of Canada, companies including ExxonMobil, Royal Dutch/Shell and ChevronTexaco, three of the world's largest energy groups, extract sticky, tar-like bitumen from sand in a mining operation so messy and expensive that some of their competitors still dismiss it as foolish. Roughly two tonnes of the sands must be dug to produce one barrel of oil.
Are such projects the answer to the "capacity crunch" that has sent oil prices soaring this year? The shrinking gap between oil supply and demand is bringing fresh urgency to the question of whether new sources can be located rapidly enough to ensure a balance over the medium and long term.
Full: http://news.ft.com/cms/s/2fc60b80-0bfc-11d9-8318-00000e2511c8.html