Word: barrel
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...what's the hold-up? The main obstacle has always been economics. From the mid-80s until 2003, oil prices-ever volatile--averaged out to about $25 a barrel. Making gasoline synthetically was way too expensive in comparison-$40-$46 per barrel. But with oil in the $60 range, liquefied coal is looking better than ever. "If one were assured of some stability in that base price, then they'd say, 'Oh, I guess I will invest the $6.5 billion it takes to build a coal liquification plant," David Garman, Under Secretary of Energy, told TIME...
...years ago, most people outside France would have scoffed at such claims. The accident at Pennsylvania's Three Mile Island plant in 1979 and the disaster at Chernobyl seven years later turned an already skeptical world public against nuclear energy. Moreover, oil as cheap as $10 per barrel in the 1990s destroyed its economic rationale. But times have changed. Lessening energy dependence on unstable Middle Eastern and other countries is now a government priority in many countries. And with worldwide demand for energy rising sharply, oil prices spiking at more than $60/bbl and fears growing among the public at large...
...petroleum geologists, including me, have been predicting peak oil before 2007, but in an era of cheap oil, few people listened. Lately, several major oil companies seem to have got the message. One of Chevron's ads says the world is currently burning 2 bbl. of oil for every barrel of new oil discovered. ExxonMobil says 1987 was the last year that we found more oil worldwide than we burned. Shell reports that it will expand its Canadian oil-sands operations but elsewhere will focus on finding natural gas and not oil. It sounds as though Shell is kissing...
...consistently avoiding any semblance of a clash of ideas, the Bush administration has evacuated the content from their claims to conservatism, leaving only an empty husk of special interests, a coalition of hungry lobbyists looking for corporate handouts and Senators at the trough of pork-barrel politics. Most conservatives never liked Bush’s hallmark “compassionate conservatism” catchphrase—does it mean that real conservatism is heartless?—but there was always hope that somewhere, buried beneath the steel tariffs and bloated highway bills, there was a core of actual philosophy...
...home. As the increasingly high winds of Hurricane Rita tore through the Gulf of Mexico Tuesday, petroleum prices soared in expectation that America's already battered oil sector could take another direct hit. The rise was tempered by an offer by OPEC to release an extra 2 million barrels a day on world markets, which helped prices to ease slightly on the New York Mercantile Exchange-where the cost of a barrel of light crude had risen by more than $4 Monday, the biggest one-day increase in history...