What oil shortage?

There is plenty of oil available
http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives2/2008/07/020980.php

You just need to global warming delusionists to stop trying to destroy the economy by stopping the accessing of these massive reserves.

Taswegian, your claim that coal to liquids being years away is as ridiculous as the scaremongering about CO2 sequestration being non viable.

Coal to liquids has been around since the second World War, and has been used in South Africa for decades. Google earth Secunda, South Africa to see the "laboratory" experiment!!

Using the put down, sorry arguement, that "because technology has not yet been developed we should rule it out as a solution" would discard the current battery, mass scale private electric cars, and efficient power station development which offer our best hope of taking out insurance for global warming without either large reductions in living standards or world populations.

Queensland has it all! There is an area of southern Queensland between Dalby and Roma, centred on the town of Chinchilla which is about to become the energy capital of Australia. It has 'clean'coal, gas and underground water. Electric power stations are being built. The people who live there are proud of the contribution their region will make to the ability of Australians to survive the hard times ahead.

Miner what I meant was it would take years to construct a large CTL plant in Australia, not that the technology was unproven. As far as I know there is no large CTL plant with geosequestration that buries the 80% process emissions; that North Dakota plant is tiny compared to South Africa. Then there's still the emissions from tailpipes when the fuel is used in vehicles.

However I quite agree with your remark about unproven technology. We can only bank on what works now. Other technology such as wavepower may be possible but there may never be enough capital to finance it, with or without carbon trading.

Grey: "You just need to global warming delusionists to stop trying to destroy the economy."

That echos the sentiment expressed in the article I guess. For what its worth, the projected costs of oil from shale is about the same as GTL, but CTL/GTL has decades of commercial successes behind it whereas oil from shale is very new.

However, its the sentiment I wanted to address here. After 5-10 years of bedding in, these processes do indeed yield hydrocarbons at around the $50/barrel mark, often less. But at startup the costs are much higher - around the $80/barrel mark [1]. The investment required for CTL is around the $50,000 per barrel per day mark [2]. In round figures Australia consumes 1 million barrels per day, so it would cost Australian around 50 billion dollars to build the infrastructure to produce its current oil needs.

Combine those two figures - $80/barrel and $50 billion, and you see the real reason it hasn't been done on a big scale yet. No one is going to put up any portion of that $50 billion without a guaranteed return. Right now it looks like a pretty good bet that oil prices won't return to the $80/barrel mark, but when you are asking for billions "pretty good" isn't good enough.

When that investment risk hurdle falls money will pour in into these plants quickly given the current returns. AGW has nothing to do with it. The only real threat AGW poses is a carbon tax. The $40/tonne carbon level often bandied around it adds an additional $23 to the cost of each barrel. At oil's current $150 per barrel price its not much of a hurdle.

I imagine the change over will start soon. As CO2 emissions will double when we use CTL oil, we will get to see whether those AGW delusionists are right. Looking forward to it?

miner, CO2 sequestration isn't viable right now, and may never be. This is ridiculously easy to verify with google.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oil_shale_economics
[2] http://www.aph.gov.au/Senate/committee/rrat_ctte/oil_supply/report/report.pdf

Now in the interest of balance,Graham will have to find a AGW zealot to put their case.I looking for a zealot that can explain why the planet has cooled at a time when CO2 levels have accelerated.

So far neither NASA,Ross Garnaut,the Pope,God,or George Pell can explain it.[Placed in asending order of importance]

Has AGW taken a holiday or has Ocean acidification now replaced it?Could it have been cancelled due to World Youth week or has god changed the laws of chemistry and physics?

Now it seems all the cows on the planet have to monitored for flatulance since they put out 25% of GW gases .Now I'm confused.Is yourthane,mythane,or methane that is the problem?Perhaps it not a problem of innuendo,but outuendo!There seems to be a proliferation of the latter coming out of both Canberra and the CSIRO.