St. Phatty
Active member
The shale reserves the US is sitting on will produce for decades. Add to that a potential employment boom, I pray nightly we will cut the Saudi and Israeli terror states off at the tit by the time I wake up the next day. Pull the boys home n let them kill each other off
I pray that too.
BUT - the cost of oil shale is not factored into the cash cost that production decisions are made on.
If it was MY well or YOUR well that had it's water destroyed, I venture to say, we'd have something to say.
Instead it's somebody in Ohio or Texas or Venezuela or Calgary, or on some Indian reservation in the Dakotas, and we are basically hidden from a lot of the details (well I mean, the details are not widely discussed.)
The US has enough brainpower to have completely abandoned a petro-chemical based economy, and to embrace the lower-energy-content technologies that were promoted by the original Rudolf Diesel (plant-based diesels ONLY.)
I have plants in my yard, Scotch Broom, whose sap is literally like gasoline - and which has been explored as a liquid fuel for automobiles.
Even wet & green & alive, it burns like a Son of a Bitch. When it's dry ... well it's sort of fun to play with, for us Pyro's
To keep it simple, all you need is an old fashioned roll press (like they use to dry clothes), and some fresh cut Scotch Broom.
Roll the green plant material through, capture the juice in a container.
Let it sit in the sun to evaporate the water. At that point, it can provide a lot of entertainment if a spark gets near it. Plus, goats will eat the extracted Scotch Broom fibers/ plant material, and turn it into protein.