The financial markets are short-term; resource discovery and development is a long-term process. Why put speculative dollars into US resource development when you can simply resell Saudi or Venezuelan oil and let them worry about those issues?

The markets don't give a flying fig about US security, not propping up corrupt dictatorships, or other off-balance sheet trivia like human rights. If this issue is studied at all by them, multinational oil companies likely would conclude that US energy independence is not in their best interests because it will result in a significant decrease in domestic fossil fuel consumption, a definite one-way street.

Regardless of their level of motivation, the markets can't exploit what liberal politicians, greenies and zero-growthers won't allow them access to. Any more than the nuclear power industry can.

I don't know about you, but I'm not willing to wait and rely on Morgan Stanley to act in my best interests instead of theirs. Besides, what if they go bankrupt in the interim?

I'd say we agree that renewable energy generation should not be subsidized indefinitely, or at least not any more than any other energy subsidy, such as oil and gas subsidies.

But big technology requires big bucks. Boeing has an airliner business that has been profitable for decades, but it took about 20 years of easy government money in the form of cost-plus Air Force contracts for long-range subsonic bomber development (an airliner is basically a bomber, from a technical standpoint). The money went not just to Boeing but also to engine manufacturers, avionics developers, and a whole constellation of industries.

The Internet is the same, with ARPANET and so on. Personal Computers (technically "microcomputers", meaning microprocessor-based computers) also, as compact computing power was required for missile guidance systems, to lower the CEP.

Yes, stupid old big guvmint gave us the tools of the modern world. Conservatives base their economic theories on plainly ignoring this fact.

Let's spend the big money on renewables, fusion, and even space-based solar. Some investment will bear no fruit, big money means big risk. A lot of concepts developed and tested in the 1950's went nowhere, because in technology it's hard to pre-pick the winners. But those investments that do bear fruit will create whole new industries that will power our economy for decades.

If we don't do it, somebody else will. Do we want to set us up to be importers of tomorrow's big technology? I don't think so.

If the government spends billions and billions of dollars to deploy solar power satellites there would be much embarrassment if a cheaper source of power came on-line just after those satellites did.

Exactly right, IMHO. This analysis applies to ANY form of energy production and I agree it is a powerful concern.

Shell Oil's new technology offers promise but it is NOT carbon neutral (by a wide wide margin) and the "energy in / energy out" equation should be judged by the private sector WITHOUT significant governmental concessions.

That means holding Shell Oil's feet to the fire on adequate safeguards to mitigate the externalities and taking a close hard look to make sure we have identified all of the externalities.

if oil shale is only profitable under circumstances of high oil prices...especially in the developmental phase, it's perfectly normal that they would be wary about investing too much in it with oil prices being dirt cheap over most of that time period.

They know the numbers. If oil needs to be at least $75 per barrel during the 10 year start up window to not lose money, what do think they would do when oil was less than $10 per barrel?

Please. The price of oil drilled in the US is based on price fixing by OPEC. The price does not drop in the US because a little more supply becomes available here.

Which were, to reiterate, that any increased supply from this is decades away and small in size, meanwhile 50 million cars a year are being sold in China, this is a drop in the bucket 20 years from now, environmental concerns are worth considering for the marginal effect this will have.

In addition to those, I mean, I'm taking Hatch with a huuuuuuuge grain of salt, and your blockquote too. These things always come through 200 pages long and the oil companies have a ton of lawyers and lobbyists. If it were the democrats saying this was a good idea, I'd assume that the public would be hosed with an underpriced license to screw up the whole area. The republicans? Heh.

Not at all. The expected increase in production is simply not enough to have an impact on oil prices. To claim that gasoline prices would be lower if we just allowed more drilling in the US is ignorant demagoguery of the kind politicians love to make.

This, BTW, does not mean we should not drill more. I have no opinion on that topic.I am simply pointing out that the title of your diary is simply wrong.

because environmentalists and libs don't like the answer they get.

with taxpayers? Seems only fair, being public land and all. Or, here's a thought, maybe we shouldn't be turning public lands over to foreign companies for highly destructive forms of mineral development in the first place (pdf).

In that case, someone else loses. Big time, in the water poor West.

Until we better know the answer to that question, this is impossible to judge.

Would you mind explaining to me exactly which generation, how far out, we're holding it in "trust" for?

All of them.

Failing that, seven generations is a nice rule of thumb.

But of course there is no such useful pace with hydrocarbons, you might as well burn 'em up right now.

Why? I could just as easily state that if we are going to run out of them anyway, we might as well get it over with and wean ourselves out of oil right now.

And we'd keep more of the planet intact, not to mention the atmosphere, in the bargain.

Fact is, all the free oxygen in the atmosphere was put there by the biosphere; the Earth didn't come with any. If we turn the biosphere back into CO2 (including the fossil biosphere in the form of oil and coal), I suspect that we will run out of fossil fuels just about at the point we are out of oxygen (leaving aside climate impacts).

In other words, we will never run out. Instead, we can either use ever more energy intensive and destructive extraction methods (shale, tar sands, mountaintop removal), or skip directly to what we have to do anyway and go to renewables and fusion, once and for all.

Does "making it pay" require expropriation of that water from someone with less political power?

As for sustainability, I see it being rather like a university endowment. Spending income is fine but do not spend the core capital.

To "reverse mortgage" the Earth would be profoundly immoral.

The last objection is silly; the whole point is to dig up more energy than is consumed. If it doesn't, it is unlikely to be done on the mere grounds that you can't make it pay.

This objection is meaningful because the equation that governs whether the effort is profitable depends on how many costs Shell can externalize.

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