I lived through the oil shale debacle in western Colorado. My ex-husband worked on a rig in Rifle, CO and I spent some time up there. I was living in Grand Junction at the time. There are many drawbacks to the process. It is expensive, it threatens the water supply, and it destroys the land. I would question those figures. It was once the hope of the area. I watched the pullout in the late 70s and early 80s almost destroy the area economically. Now there are many companies coming back to study it again. Shell Oil was the only original investor to stick it out. There were communities built by Exxon to house employees which later turned into retirement communities.



>>>Yeah, there is just one problem, the energy efficiency of corn ethanol is negative.
>>>Also, while sugar ethanol could be produced more efficiently outside USA, there are lots of countries which are not terrorist homes or extremists tiranies that can produce sugar ethanol.
>>>If the goal is to achieve independence of foreign supplies, you better start building more nuclear plants or drill Alaska more intensively.
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>>There's a simpler way: ban SUVs and home trucks, or at least revoke the tax incentives for them and tax them like large cars, which they basically are. Want to have a truck? Prove that you are doing business with it that can't be served by a car, or pay lots of taxes. Want to have a home tank? Prove that you're an army.
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>Less freedom of choice is not a solution, its government control which is the antithesis of freedom.
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>There's something on the order of 1.7 trillion barrels worth of oil shale in the US. It can be profitably extracted when oil is above $70 a barrel and with the advancement of technology it is expected to reduce that margin to $30 a barrel within 10 years. That's an actual solution.