Just FYI, here is a map showing the approximate extent of the Chattanooga shale. Not too surpiringly, it goes right through Chattanooga.



There are also several companies starting to poke some holes into this shale for its gas potential. I stumbled across this article when I was looking for any recent info on the gas results there.

Goodness!! Hubberts blob was bigger. Your blob might only contain 10,000 years of global oil energy supply!

OH NOES!!

+1

Well I think it's time to put all this energy shortage silliness to rest. Here is our Bold, High-tech, Abundant future (sans the flying cars - but hey, you never know!). Powered by natural gas and nuclear (and even some oil, too, just for the heck of it). The sky is the limit!

It is important to remember that the nuclear power industry stalled because of political reasons, not economic ones.

Countries that created policy environments favoring nuclear power (France), have thriving nuclear power industries.

Countries that panicked after Three Mile Island (US), have stunted nuclear power industries.

If the US were serious about allowing nuclear power to flourish, dozens of plants would be built and economies of scale would drag down the costs of construction.

That's not to say that there aren't legitimate concerns over nuclear power (waste, safety, nuclear proliferation, etc.) but I think we need to realize that the problems with nuclear power are not about economics or EROEI.

Well it certainly looks like this shale oil discovery really is the "Find of the Century". This is bigger than cold fusion.

Hunh. And to think that ORNL is in the middle of this. Who'd'ha' thunk?

And one of the biggest US uranium deposits sits under Loudon County VA ($$$$ horse country)

MST3k, funny stuff.

Hubbert in later life was an advocate of solar power instead of nukes.

Radon adds to danger in many local homes | theleafchronicle.com | The Leaf Chronicle

Count me in with Hubbert, solar or nukes.

To be fair, solar photovoltaic wasn't discovered to be viable until after Hubbert wrote his landmark report on Peak Oil.

Viable smiable.

PV technology came along before Drake found oil....everything since then has simply been a waiting game for us big picture thinkers. Long term, PV is where its at!!! Throw in some nukes for baseload, maybe some solar towers, and I gotta ask....how do peakers BEAT this stuff?

I'm betting oil becomes obsolete before we run out....heck...it may be obsolete already and just doesn't KNOW it yet.

70ppm is very low grade for a uranium mine. If the grade were 5-10 times higher, people might look at it seriously for an In Situ Leach (ISL) operation. I think it's one of those projects that looks great at first acquaintance, but gets uglier the longer you look at it!

Don't overrun yourself, son. Let's not forget all of the other product streams that we enjoy from harvesting fossil fuels. We'll be scraping the stuff out of the ground and cooking out plastics, fertilizers, asphalt, and other goodies with solar power thousands of years from now...if we're still here that is.

Plus you need to cancel the dismissive posture regarding ERoEI. It's certainly not as critical as some make it out to be, but it is completely relevant to economic cycles and changing energy mix. You just can't claim that in the absence of cheap sweet light, that the way we use energy will continue as usual. It will have to change, and ERoEI lives right at the heart of that change.

Really now, if there was an abundance of sweet light pressure domes ready to pop and produce all over the world would we be screwing around working on producing all of the expensive stuff?

Try and find some balance. You occasionally make some valid points, but you take too many extreme and unfounded positions to get any more credibility from me than I give to the extremist whackos in the other corner.

Now there is a bold prediction!

Sorry, but no way, no how. I tend to be a literal kind of guy, and certainly no measure of ENERGY returned on ENERGY invested has anything to do with economic cycles without converting all those ENERGIES into value at which point....it has not much to do with energy anymore. I understand why it might have a vaguely academic/scientificy appeal about it, and therefore is of interest to those who would rather stick with a hard science measure rather than a "dirty" one, but taken at face value its a nonsensical form of measure in any economic system.

You, as the author of the famous "energy isn't money" quote, should know this better than nearly all others in this place. If you were to replace your "EROEI" word with "efficiency" or something similar, well, THEN we could talk. But as long as people insist on a strict energy measure...sorry...it just doesn't work.



EROEI is irrelevant. The rate at which we dig deeper into the resource pyramid and the economic efficiency with which we do so matters....EROEI does not.

If the cost for me to convert 2 units of resource energy into 1 of usable energy unit is $50/net unit, or I can convert 3 units of resource energy into 1 usable energy unit at $100/net unit, which one do you think I will concentrate on?



I am a huge fan of bending but not breaking. With EROEI however, because of the way it is designed, there is simply no compromise with the definition. Until someone can modify it to incorporate the value of the energy form, there is simply no way I can retreat from using the actual definition without a valid reason, and in nearly 2 years of looking now, no such reason has been provided.

As far as other valid points, well, testing thought experiments along the line of "what will peak oil cause" can be extreme, but I'm not sure I have ever ventured an unfounded position, I am a thoroughly grounded kind of guy. But thanks for the hint.

EROEI only matters when you're talking about using X amount of oil to get less than X amount of oil.

If you are using one energy source (solar electricity) to get another source of energy (coal), the calculations breaks down.

The relative values of each energy source determine what the market will decide to do with each resource.

There was a time when refineries threw away the gasoline they produced and were required to pay to have to removed. Refiners would joke with each other at parties about their various schemes for avoiding the waste disposal fees. Natural gas used to be burned off as a dangerous and worthless waste product of oil production.

It will cost about a TRILLION dollars to build 45 nuclear plants which will barely cover the ones that will be decommissioned by 2030.

The energy used by the US vehicle fleet in one day is enough energy to power 2 million homes for a YEAR.

Maybe we should build 500 nuclear plants for about 10 trillion dollars. LOL!

That will ensure we have transporter beams and replicators and escalators and moving sidewalks in all the cities in the future right?

Maybe Bill Gates should check in his seat cushions. I'm sure he has 10 trillion sitting somewhere.

Speculation in the future is tricky...want to bet some of those plants are already past the point where they were supposed to have been decommissioned already? And I wonder...when I see articles like this.....

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142 ... 82176.html

if the big, centralized power unit is really the solution for a world which can cover the roof's of all new residential construction with PV's?



Wow. And some small fraction of the planets surface collects enough energy to power all of mankinds needs for a year. Interesting factoids both.

Good thing this isn't peakenergy.com but rather a place which claims that lack of oil will cause a global meltdown and dieoff, otherwise we can't even use such interesting factoids very well.



Maybe we won't need to. LOL!

Certainly no one has recently claimed that we need many nuclear plants at all, considering all the natural gas we have available to use instead. LOL!

For some reason you're estimating over 20 billion per power plant. Some might cost that much with cost overruns, but its unlikely if you commit to building 45 that they will cost anything close to that much, as France's experience has shown.

Of course we still have zero idea where all the
Holocene Era lasting waste will be going.

How about we use it to frack wells. Anything toxic
seems to work just fine: