Need some help factchecking this video about Oil

[Reason]

Friend sent me this video saying

"whether you like newt or not you have to admit he has some good points..."

Taking the fact that our focus should be on alternative energy not oil out of the conversation does anyone have some thoughts on how factual this video's claims are?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UOpcPfAarjY

[Zippyjuan]

Do we need to lower the price of oil further right now?

But Newt is wrong on several things here. First, if you dump a third of the US petroleum reserve at once, it will not cause a $50 drop in the price (OK- since oil right now is below $50 that is impossible anyways) but secondly, that is only a short term deal. You cannot dump the petroleum reserve repeatedly. Once you empty it you are done and have to rebuild it. As of October, 2008, the US Strategic Oil Reserve had enough to last us for about 33 days, according to Wiki. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_Petroleum_Reserve and this is crude oil- it still would need to be refined into usable forms like gasoline. We don't have the refinery capacity to process that much oil at once. Most of our refineries run pretty close to capicity already.

What about the Rocky Mountain oil shale "three times the oil of Saudi Arabia in proven reserves". The oil is indeed there but there are problems with it. That oil is very expensive to dig out and also requires a large amount of energy to extract the oil from the shale. These are basically oil soaked rocks. You do not just drill a well down and pump up the oil like you do in Saudi Arabia. The standard method is to dig out tons of rocks, heat them to high temperature to seperate the oil from the rocks and them you have to process the oil and get rid of the tons of rocks. This can mean massive areas of huge strip mines. For the heat you need to build dozens if not hundreds of new power plants (probably coal fired). You also need lots of water which is in limited supply in the area. You cannot produce this oil at a price of $50 a barrel. It costs way more than that to get it. Two barrels of oil require one barrel's worth of energy to produce them.

They are experimenting with other techniques. One is to try to drill a lot of holes, pump freezing liquid in some (to try to form a barrier to keep the oil from running where you do not want it) and a bunch more holes where they pump heat down into them to try to heat the rocks where they are. Again you are looking at using a lot of energy since each area they estimate two years of heating per area before you might be able to get enough to start pumping anything. http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2006/09/04/MNGIEKV0D41.DTL


"In many areas, the oil-shale formations are near the surface, so getting at them would be by mining rather than in situ," said Udall, the Aspen environmentalist. "That would mean we could again see widespread strip-mining, with the most environmentally destructive, wasteful and inefficient form of energy production on the planet."

A report prepared last year for the U.S. Energy Department by the Rand think tank said that about 20 percent of all oil-shale deposits are shallow enough that they may be extracted by strip-mining. However, it said the cost of strip-mining production would be much higher than with in situ, requiring world oil prices of at least $70 to $95 per barrel.
The report also noted that all forms of oil-shale production could cause a big shift toward burning the region's abundant supplies of coal.

Under in situ methods, the report said, each 100,000 barrels produced daily would require about 1.2 gigawatts of electric-generating capacity -- the size of Colorado's largest power plant, a coal-fired facility in nearby Craig. The Energy Department has forecast oil-shale production of 2 million barrels a day by 2020 and eventually 10 million barrels a day.



At the production level estimated for 2020 of 10 million barrels a day, that is still less than half our daily consumption at 2008 levels. We would not be energy independent based on shale oil. Not to mention the potential environmental costs.


Next topic for Gingrich: Brazil increasing their proven reserves from 14 billion barrels to 90 billion. As of April, 2008, the official proven reserves of Brazil were 11.8 billion barrels. http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2008/04/14/world/main4013564.shtml By comparison, the US had 21.8 billion in proven reserves. They announced that month that they had found a new field at great depth- about five miles down. Two miles of ocean and three miles of rock to drill through. Deep oil wells are much more expensive than other wells. Just a test hole can cost $1 billion- even if it comes up empty. Preliminary estimates (not confirmed nor is it known if that is the total amount of oil in the field or the amount which can be economically extracted) but even with that, Brazil is still a very long ways from having 90 billion barrels of proven reserves. This field will take time to be developed and will be at least a few years before it starts to enter the global oil market. But his point here was that we should be looking for more oil here and that is not necessarily a bad thing. It is just that globally, the rates of discovery have not kept up with the decline in production of existing sites combinied with the (until recently) rising global demand. Exploration and development does take many year or even decades before they are available for the market.

Newt adds that it is "illegal to look for oil in the Atlantic, the Pacific, and the Gulf". Well, you can look for oil in the Gulf of Mexico. There are a lor of oil leases down there. Northern Alaska- leases there as well so it is legal there too.

His third major point is the development of alternative fuels and reduce energy consumption. I do agree with him here. He says we need more nuclear and I agree again. Not that I necessarily LIKE nuclear power but it is the best candidate we have to be able to replace our fossile fuel consumption.

[Reason]

Thank You for the very detailed reply!

Also, anyone have any opinions/info on newt that I should see?

I really don't know a whole lot about him overall.

[Zippyjuan]

In VERY rough terms, Newt was speaker of the House of Representatives when Clinton was president. Eightyfour different ethics charges were leveled at him during his term and he resigned in 1999. In 1980 he was having an affair and told his wife he wanted a divorce while she was in the hospital undergoing cancer treatments. He got remairied within six months.

Despite this, he is still a very smart man and cannot be dismissed. He was best known for his "Contract With America"- an effort to get more conservative ideals (not Bush conservative) into US government. It offered specific proposals he wanted to achieve. This was issued about six months before he became Speaker. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contract_with_America