On Mon, 02 Nov 2009 19:41:32 -0500, "D.Duck" wrote:

Tom Francis - SWSports wrote:
http://epw.senate.gov/public/index.c...5-220d7cf8c519

So as a man who studies this type of thing in much more depth than I,
what do you think of our "significant" number of BOEs as compared to all
other countries with the exception of Russia?

Noted that the vast majority of our reserves are in coal.

Two things come immediately to mind.

One - we need to make more use of the proven coal reserves up to and
including gasification, liquification and burning. We need to work on
clean coal technology and CO2 sequestration by allowing more pilot
plants and research into various techniques. That's where we seem to
be failing miserably.

A recent example is what's happened in Lindon, NJ. I forget the
company, but they wanted to build a 750 megawatt coal fired station,
sequester the CO2 by pumping it offshore into a salt dome where it
woud stay permanently locked up. The technology is available now and
it seems like a good concept. Unfortunetly, the Enviromentalists are
creating havoc with the plan to the point where it probably will be
abandoned thus losing the facility and needed power generation.

Two - we need to start exploring and drilling off on our own to see
what may, or may not, be easily accessible onshore, inshore and
offshore. There are some areas off New Jersey and California that
appear to have the correct geological formations (domes, salt domes
and such) to contain easily recoverable oil - some think the equal of
all that Arabian Peninsula has ever contained, but we aren't allowed
to drill for various reasons - mostly political. And it's not like new
discoveries are impossible - consider Brazil's Guari and Tupi fields
which are recent discoveries - it's out there, we just have to find
it.

Here's a list for you to consider - the amount of fossil fuel needed
to produce 1,000,000 BTUs.

Natural Gas: 1,000 cubic feet

Coal: 83.34 pounds @ 12,000 Btu/pound

Propane: 10.917 gallons @ 91,000 Btu/gallon

Gasoline: 8.0 gallons @125,000 Btu/gallon

Fuel Oil #2: 7.194 gallons @ 139,000 Btu/gallon

Fuel Oil #6: 6.67 gallons @ 150,000 Btu/gallon

You'd need a lot of wind farms and solar panels to produce similar
results to fossil fuels.