The more we use, the more we discover.
Just the News (5/12/24) reports: "For years, activists argued for an energy transition away from fossil fuels because, they said, we were hitting 'peak oil,' the point at which we can no longer produce oil because there’s little left in the ground or it’s too expensive to recover. Tom Pyle, president of the Institute for Energy Research (IER), a free market think tank focusing on energy, told Just the News that anti-fossil fuel activists latched onto 'peak oil' to push for alternatives, and with the U.S. leading the world’s production, their rhetoric has evolved... In 2011, IER produced its first North American Energy Inventory. 'It was really for the purpose of shattering this myth of energy scarcity. To my knowledge, prior to that, nobody had taken the effort to compile, using government data the amount of energy that we have in North America,' Pyle said. In that 2011 report, Pyle stated: 'Thanks to new and continuing innovations in exploration and production technology, there’s every reason to believe that today’s estimates of reserves are only a fraction of what will be produced and delivered tomorrow.' The statement turned out to be accurate. The Shale Revolution, which combined technologies in horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing, made available large deposits of previously unrecoverable oil throughout the U.S... If all the oil in North America’s technically recoverable reserves was devoted exclusively to gasoline production, according to the report, the North American transportation sector would have enough energy for 539 years at 2023 usage rates. There are 4.03 quadrillion cubic feet of technically recoverable natural gas reserves, which is a 47% increase in the 2011 estimate. At current rates of consumption, there’s enough gas for 130 years. Proved reserves of coal, arguably the most abundant fossil fuel, can satisfy 485 years of demand at 2022 consumption rates, and the U.S. has 53% more proven coal reserves than Russia, the country with the next largest coal reserves."
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"If climate change means we will face more extreme weather in the years ahead — hotter, colder, and/or more severe temperatures for extended periods — it’s Total Bonkers CrazytownTM to make our electric grid dependent on the weather. But by lavishing staggering amounts of money on wind and solar energy, and in many cases, mandating wind and solar, that’s precisely what we are doing."
– Robert Bryce, Substack
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