A Future for Fossil Fuels?

“Let me tell you something that we Israelis have against Moses. He took us 40 years through the desert in order to bring us to the one spot in the Middle East that has no oil!”
- Golda Meir

Salon.com reports that "Everything you've heard about fossil fuels may be wrong". Yes we may be at or even past Peak Oil, but oil is just one of many fossil fuels.

Hydraulic fracturing or "fracking" is much disputed today as it is rumored to make groundwater flammable in some areas. And yet it has been highly successful with previously-unrecoverable “shale gas”.

According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, these advances mean there is at least six times as much recoverable natural gas today as there was a decade ago.

Also,

• "Fracking also permits the extraction of previously-unrecoverable 'tight oil,' thereby postponing the day when the world runs out of petroleum."
• "There is enough coal to produce energy for centuries."
• Researchers are "studying ways to obtain energy from gas hydrates, which mix methane with ice in high-density formations under the seafloor. The potential energy in gas hydrates may equal that of all other fossils, including other forms of natural gas, combined."

And with oil at $100 a barrel, tar sands and shale oil have become economically viable and competitive.

Bottom Line

"Are we living at the beginning of the Age of Fossil Fuels, not its final decades?"