Re: buying gasoline

["BFEKen@copper.net" <bfeken@copper.net>]

On highway 101 about 20 miles north of Santa Barbara ca & just before the 
Gaviota
pass on the side of the road away from the ocean is a very large refinery to 
refine
the oil from the offshore rigs in the area. However, the refinery is closed 
without ever
refining any petroleum as the governor (Brown) caved in to GOO & stopped the
pumping in the Santa Barbara Channel. Maybe we should have the tree huggers 
pay
double or triple for their fuel.

Ken
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Larry Young" <cartravel@pobox.com>
Cc: <fot@autox.team.net>
Sent: Monday, April 04, 2005 5:24 PM
Subject: Re: buying gasoline


> 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.