Word: billions
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Heavy demand for coal would wipe out the present glut of the fuel and help lift production from its current level of only about 650 million tons last year to the 1.2 billion-ton 1985 goal that Carter set for the industry in his first energy address two years ago. In the semiarid reaches of the intermountain West, where treasure troves of coal lie almost on the surface just waiting to be scraped up and hauled away, whole new towns would have to be built to house the workers employed at mines and synfuel plants. Residents of the region regard...
...towns also would surge. For example, the population of Alliance, Neb., has jumped from 7,000 to 12,000 since 1976 because of increased traffic on the Burlington Northern. All across the country, railroads would need to upgrade their aging roadbeds, at a cost of as much as $10 billion, to handle the huge new volumes of coal and other freight. The entire construction effort, says Economist Alan Greenspan, would be rather like building a new Saudi Arabia in the middle...
...huge rail and mining jobs to get under way. Actually building a synfuel plant could require five years or more, and environmental objections and court protests might drag out projects even longer. The size of the spending appears smaller when reckoned at an average $14 billion a year, spread out over ten years. That is a relatively small part of an economy that now produces $2.3 trillion worth of goods and services annually...
Though the U.S. has some oil-saturated tar sands, they are not large or accessible enough to justify expensive exploitation by the Government. But some 76 billion bbl. in oil, about three times the nation's proven reserves of conventional crude, are known to be recoverable from the shale rock concentrated in western Colorado and stretching into Utah and Wyoming. No plants are in operation at present, but at least five companies are running experimental digs in the area. To produce a barrel of oil, about 1½ tons of rock must be mined and heated...
Because of inflation and increasing costs of environmental controls, price predictions for building synfuel plants have been rising steadily. The new range is from $1 billion to $3 billion for an oil shale or coal liquefaction plant that would produce 50,000 to 100,000 bbl. a day. A coal gasification plant would run some $1.5 billion. Ever climbing costs have kept estimated prices of producing synfuels persistently dancing ahead of world crude prices. In 1973, when oil was $3.50 a bbl., oil from shale was figured at $4.50. Just before OPEC'S latest price rise, when crude...