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Re: buying gasoline

To: fot@autox.team.net
Subject: Re: buying gasoline
From: Larry Young <cartravel@pobox.com>
Date: Mon, 04 Apr 2005 19:24:46 -0500
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.

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