I spent almost 30 years in the oil industry, so this is something I know
something about. I started out working in enhanced oil recovery at Amoco
Research, two years after the '73 embargo. You have to realize that oil
does not exist in pools under the ground. It is in porous rocks, sort
of like the oil stain on the garage floor underneath your Triumph. If
you've tried to completely remove one of those stains, you can
appreciate that most fields achieve about 40% recovery by conventional
methods. Enhanced recovery was aimed at getting a portion of the
remaining 60%. These processes are expensive. It was a hot idea that
never really happened because of economics. Americans would rather buy
cheap foreign oil and OPEC could manipulate the market price to make
sure it never happened. There is a lot of oil in the world, but it's
going to cost increasingly more to get it out. For example, the
Athabasca tar sands in Canada are huge, but very expense to produce.
The writing has been on the wall for a long time, but Americans have had
their heads stuck in the sand.
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