Darren said:
“Cheaper oil is not going to happen. … We really haven’t started getting into the Marcellus and Haynesville shales, much less the full range of our coal and oil shale deposits.”

Our extensive coal deposits should be used to produce artificial petroleum as we convert from foreign petroleum over to nuclear power as a primary energy source. Unfortunately the shale deposits are a nonstarter. It’s my understanding that shale produces almost as much energy as required to extract the shale and dispose of the tailings.

Energy Return on Investment (ERoI) dictates the usefulness of an energy resource.

Many “green” energy concepts are bogus if you examine the entire process that is driving them, e.g. manufacturing and waste disposal energy costs. Natural petroleum such as exploited in the 1930s is a very difficult act to follow because the ERoI of that era’s natural petroleum was huge. We dug ourselves into a very deep hole after creating a world economy and population based upon the EroI of (formerly) abundant natural petroleum.