Oil shale in Australia has failed on both pollution and cost. Ironically the Rundle project was close the Gladstone Qld LNG export terminal which aimed to export 70% of eastern Australia's gas production. Now that is on notice to conserve so hydrocarbons are proving to be a curse.

Some say that synfuel can be made from electricity, air and water for $US2 per gallon. Believe it when you see it. The US may produce more oil in 2018 than Saudi Arabia but that is expected to nosedive after 2020.
https://srsroccoreport.com/future-u-s-production-will-collapse-just-quickly-increased/
When petrol hits $2/L in Australia before 2020 I reckon then the rush will be on for electric cars, probably charged by coal fired power. The bad news is that aviation and farming then food prices will be hit hard.

Yup and thank goodness! The oil sands in edmonton are reported to contain some 1.8 trillion barrels? The problem has been the bitumen like viscosity. And to be overcome by heating from the lowest point in the reserve with NG? Not a good strategy given the lead time before this reserve can be pumped and the ever upward trajectory of gas prices?

However another solution beckons and that's walk away safe, molten salt, thorium. And heat of at least 700C being available at the bottom of the reserve and for as long as it takes to filter ever upward and turn the entire deposit into something as thin as kero?

In the interim. nobody in the west will be harmed by energy prices as low as 2 cnts PKH. Or downward pressure on fuel prices.

For mine the electric car could replace combustion engines inside a decade and any fuel/oil company with a spare thorium reactor or two, will be well placed!
Alan B.

So Alan B, for a very long time now you've been quoting this "2 cents PKH". I'd love to now what "cents PKH" is.

Now, a long time ago I was taught that there is a unit of energy called the kilowatt-hour, with symbol kWh, where 1 kWh is the amount of energy supplied/produced* if you use/produce 1 kW of power for a whole hour (obviously). But over my near half century of existence I've never seen the unit "PKH" except here from you.

However, since we're talking about the cost of energy, the unit would be $/kWh or cents/kWh. I'm guessing this is what you mean?

Should be noted of course that kWh is not the official SI unit, which for energy is joules (J), but rather is a convenient one for measuring energy, especially electricity, in domestic/industrial settings. It is useful because since many appliances power requirements (eg: an electric heater) or production (eg: a car motor) are rated in kW it makes it very easy to calculate how much energy is involved when run for a given number of hours.

(PS: to be pedantic you aren't consuming nor producing the energy just converting it from one form to another

"With shale production likely to peak shortly after 2020" oil prices are likely to rise around 2022.

Lucky I've just bought a light-small car in an Australia that is increasingly buying much larger SUVs and 5 seat pickups http://www.ford.com.au/commercial/ranger/special-editions/?intcmp=hp-new-brand-gallery

Car companies are now advertising calculated obsolescence, that is they are pusing buy-big-cars-that-will-soon-become-uneconomical. Meaning current big "car" owners will need to sell at a loss after 2022 in order to buy $100pb light-small cars. Thereby pleasing car companies.

But what if the large scale fracking phenomenon is essentially an environmentally destructive Snake Oil project, or even scam.
See the book Snake Oil by Richard Heinberg.

Who for instance is going to clean up the environmental and human disease creating mess created by the millions of (abandoned) fracking wells?

Quite obviously the long suffering tax payer!

The imminent demise of shale oil is always just around the corner. For the past decade we've been told by the 'experts' that things can't go on like this, the wells will run dry six months from next Tuesday week, that OPEC's depression of the oil price will wipe out fracking. And yet somehow it continues.

The article says "With shale production likely to peak shortly after 2020...". But if you follow the link that's not at all what's being said. The article is headed "U.S.Shale’s Most Productive Play May Peak By 2021". May peak. That's just Permian. And 2021 is based on everything going wrong AND no further innovations. But we know that the frackers are constantly innovating.

There's an incentive for the oil industry to talk up the short-term risks for fracking and to talk up the oil price. But the demise of the industry is unlikely to happen for decades to come.

Meanwhile in Australia? On the basis that we always do the right thing...after we've tried everything else first, we'll eventually unleash our own fracking industry, or invite the USians in to help. Give it 10-15 years.

" that's walk away safe, molten salt, thorium."

Given the problems and enormous time scale (40 years) involved in cleaning up after the only thorium reactor to have been built, I wouldn't call it walk-away safe. Perhaps run-away. Quickly.

" any fuel/oil company with a spare thorium reactor or two, will be well placed!"

Yes they will be well placed....because they'll be the only one's with such a device. They don't exist and a commercial reactor won't exist until at least 2035, if at all.

Well the alleged difficulties with cleaning up the (alleged) only thorium reactor were caused, it would seem, by folk from big nuclear who hadn't a clue about a very different reaction. And tried to treat it as a solid fueled reactor? (their alleged expertise) And because this walk away safe reactor threatened to shut down a very lucrative business model, i.e., solid fuel fabrication?

Highly credentialed NASA scientist and nuclear technologist, Kirk Sorensen was given unfettered access to the total sum of the operating scientist's notes and a couple of those scientists; and is on the public record refuting some of those same claims? See for yourself.

PKH is a term I've borrowed from Ivy league Professor (ret) economist, Robert Hargreaves, as he gave a short summary of his book, Thorium cheaper than coal And means, as far as I understand, Per kilowatt Hour?

Thorium, Super fuel, subtitled, green energy by prize winning investigative Journalist, Richard Martin, is also an informative read which debunks some of the negative claims created by big nuclear enthusiasts trying, it would seem, by fair or foul means to protect a very lucrative income stream.

We don't yet have a nuclear powered industry! And would be well served if we followed the lead of dozens of other countries trying to get out from under the yoke of OPEC and big nuclear and like them chart our own course as a nuclear/thorium powered nation! Simply put, nothing else is either possible or available!
Alan B.

WE are in the ridiculous position of selling our gas to offshore users and after being ripped off by foreign price gouging, tax avoiding foreigners, for our own gas!

Forced the national government to threaten them with a regulated market to restore sanity?

Why we even export silica sand to Korea, where they use our gas to turn it into glass, Ten ship it back as glass, with a two way transport component included! All while we bury mountains of recyclable glass in landfill!

Moreover we sell our coal at bargain basement prices as fast as we can dig out of our ground. Even as we pay premium prices, with the assistance of our government? For fully refined, fully imported diesel and petrol.

And at last reports for an annual expenditure in scare export dollars, somewhere north of 26 billion PA.

Ever since the second world war we have known how to make either from coal. The only drawback was the exorbitant cost of the required energy! Walkaway safe, molten salt thorium, completely changes that! And should we choose to do so again, pocket the 26 plus billions we are now forking out to foreign fuel suppliers!

Taswegian, the technology you reference, is proven rather than hypothetical. Moreover, the $32.00 a (150 litre) barrel was for the finished alternative fuel product! What's that? Around 20 cents a litre?
Alan B.

AB synfuel could solve all our problems and to hell with oil. It doesn't inspire confidence that it will power jumbo jets when it's only demonstrated on model aeroplanes
http://www.businessinsider.com/the-navy-turns-seawater-into-fuel-2015-5?IR=T

the world was running out of oil 50 years ago when the Great Barrier Reef was to be no more!

Considering the source of tis article it has to be taken seriously.
However it is not the full picture.

http://tinyurl.com/y7gkqnqy

It seems that development costs and returns are going the wrong way.
They are plagued with short lifetimes which have been bypassed
by multiple drilling from each platform.
Never the less falling ERoEI is always haunting the industry.
The oil sands will die on the cost of natural gas as it is used to
melt the bitumen so it can be pumped to the treatment plant.
That is a major cost and an increase in the cost of gas will kill it again.

While all that puffing has been going on about tight shale oil behind
the scenes conventional, the great bulk of the industry has been
declining, although recently there was a bit of a lift.
Look at the rest of the world, that is not as happy faced.

So Alan.B is this 2 c/kWh the wholesale or retail price?