Oil engineers are using hydraulic fracturing to release oil from underground shale. This is the same method that gas well drillers have recently developed. This could yield as much as 2 million barrels of oil a day. That’s more than the output of the entire Gulf of Mexico. EOG Resources was the first company to use horizontal drilling to obtain shale oil. This info was obtained from AP Energy Writer, Jonathan Fahey, Feb. 10, 2011.
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Hydra asked, “What do we do after the shale gas?”You mean after the next two hundred years?Try again. The US does not have as much shale gas as you have claimed. In 2009 the USGS was hyping shale gas and suggesting 200 years of production. In the case of the Marcellus Shale area, the P95 estimate only represents 2 years of consumption. That is several decades less than the optimistic predictions made just three years ago. Coal. America has the largest supplies of Coal in the world and it is easily converted to Methanol and DiMethyl Ether (to replace Diesel.) All you need is a reliable source of heat.This is not entirely accurate. Fist, many of your deposits are not going to be developed due to safety and environmental concerns. Second, even if you could mine all the coal that is available the net energy return is not all that high due to the high transportation and processing costs. Third, quality counts. Production of the best coal, anthracite, peaked in the US one century ago. Bituminous coal production peaked two decades ago. Increased total production has come from low grade lignite, which has a very high ash content and would be difficult to convert to liquid fuels due to the huge amount of waste product that has to be taken away and sequestered. Transport costs are so high for lignite that it is often used very close to the mining site, usually to create electric power. There is enough Thorium in Wyoming to supply our electrical energy needs for thousand years. Waste heat form Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactors could supply the heat to make synthetic fuels.Nuclear can be the solution but it will not be very cheap compared to liquid fossil fuels. Sadly, there are too many idiot politicians in the US to allow the type of development that is now needed. Instead of allowing the utilities to build nuclear plants they have been subsidizing loser plays like wind and solar.