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Oil Shale: Will Congress Cross The Jordan?
Investor's Business Daily
Energy: While members of Congress take vacations their constituents can no longer afford, a country prepares to end its dependence on foreign oil by extracting supplies from shale rock. It's not the U.S. It's in the Middle East. Jordan imports 95 percent of its oil. Unlike the U.S., the desert kingdom plans on doing something about it. It does not, however, plan to cover its flat open spaces with solar panels or wind farms. It's going to do something the Democratic Congress has refused to do — get oil from its abundant shale rock.
On Sunday, Maher Hjazin, head of the Jordanian National Resources Authority, announced that negotiations with the Anglo-Dutch group Royal Dutch Shell to extract oil from the kingdom's shale reserves "are nearing an end." Hjazin made the announcement before the Jordan Engineers Association and told the Jordan Times that Shell will survey and develop 22,000 square meters of land, one quarter of the country, in the central and southern regions.
He also told the JEA that other parties are itching to develop Jordanian shale rock. Estonia's state-owned energy company, Eesti Energia, has completed a study to produce 36,000 barrels a day from just one of the kingdom's 20 locations rich in oil shale. Estonia produces all its energy from oil shale reserves in the Baltic state. Under separate agreements with the Brazilian firm Petrobras, Jordanian-British Jordan Energy & Mining Ltd. (JEML) and a Saudi firm are examining separate blocks for oil shale extraction. Yes, even the Saudis, a charter member of OPEC, want to get oil from shale. One day we may be importing it.
Jordan has the world's fourth largest reserves of oil shale. Wael Saqqa, president of the JEA, said exploiting the 40 billion tons of shale in 26 areas of Jordan "would provide the kingdom with oil for the coming 700 years." Jordan even fancies itself a net oil exporter within a decade. Meanwhile, we sit on enough oil to make OPEC look like a mom-and-pop operation. In the West we may have what could be called a Persia on the Plains. A Rand Corp. study says the Green River Formation, which covers parts of Colorado, Utah and Wyoming, has the largest known oil shale deposits in the world.
"The United States has 2 trillion barrels of oil shale," according to the Institute for Energy Research. "This is more than seven times the amount of crude oil reserves found in Saudi Arabia and is enough to meet current U.S. demand for over 250 years." Consider that the entire world has used around 1 trillion barrels since oil was discovered in Titusville, Pa., in 1859. "If full-scale production begins within five years," reckons Nick Loris of the Heritage Foundation, "the U.S. could completely end its dependence on OPEC by 2020." There's enough North American petroleum trapped in oil sands and shale rock to form our own OPEC.
A report from the Energy Department's Argonne National Laboratory states that "even a moderate estimate of 800 billion barrels of recoverable oil from oil shale in the Green River Formation is three times greater than the proven oil reserves of Saudi Arabia." "Present U.S. demand for petroleum products is about 20 million barrels per day," the Argonne report notes. "If oil shale could be used to meet a quarter of that demand, the estimated 800 billion barrels of (currently) recoverable oil from the Green River Formation could last for more than 400 years."
Production from domestic oil shale deposits could reach 10 million barrels a day — virtually tripling our current domestic production — according to a report by the Energy Department. Jordan has shown us the way to end independence from foreign oil — become dependent on your own.
BrookesNews.Com
Monday 18 August 2008
