Friday, September 01, 2006

 

Just In Case You Didn't Notice

Which you probably didn't, because this story has been kept quiet. Not by some government conspiracy either, though given the circumstances, that might just be the case. Brace yourselves, this could come as a shock to you:

The United States (specifically Colorado, Utah, and Wyoming) has several large oil shale deposits situated under the Rocky Mountains which stand to produce over two trillion barrels of oil! When you break it down, it works out to about two million barrels per acre. (Link -- via Fark)

Yes, that's greater than all of the countries in the Middle East combined, whom we rely on so heavily to keep us on the road. Turns out that, back in 1930, the government declared this reserve off limits, mostly because extracting the crude from oil shale was so expensive, so they tagged it for a "rainy day." Well, I'd say that $3.00 a gallon is a pretty good downpour (though prices have dropped slightly below that recently).

At the extraction rate of two million barrels a day, it would take roughly 2740 years to deplete this reserve. Of course, with everyone driving around in those absurd SUVs, you can probably drop that down to about 30 years. At any rate, this might be the excuse we need to finally ignore the Middle East, just like they seem to want us to...

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