Monday, December 8, 2008

Saudi Oil: 60 Minutes

60 Minutes had a nice two-piece on the Saudis effort to extract oil from the desert. It will allow them to produce an extra two million barrels of oil a day for the next 50 years. They will be using sea-water to push the oil to the surface.

Fleeting thought: Will this offset the amount of sea-rise due to global warming? Will the water and salt/oil separate over time, eventually providing a massive oasis in the desert?

2 comments:

MsAnthrope said...

Soil has millions of pores which hold and store nutrients, water, and oxygen so it can distribute it throughout out the plant. Sand has too much ventilation which will not be able to hold anything well.

Anonymous said...

The extended Saudi royal family have put in place an extremely repressive government and police state, millions of workers are imported to work as slaves, tens of thousands have been tortured and put in prison for resistance, women are severely oppressed, children are used as sex slaves and some even murdered after use, hatred of western values like democracy, freedom, equality under the law for all classes and races are promulgated by religious extremism, they finance terrorism against the west, etc AND all this is quietly sanctioned by American and British big oil and the politicians they buy,... we should completely stop buying their oil if only out of protest for their grave crimes against humanity and their support of terrorism, we should pressure our political leaders to impose economic sanctions on Saudi Arabia and encourage other democracies with free societies to do the same to do the same, the Saudi Human Rights record is far worse than Iran's (which is also not good but far better than the Saudi's) .... yet instead we sell them fighter jets and build their palaces and buy their oil cause we like driving big cars and SUVs! We've had the technology for 30 years to weed ourselves off Saudi oil, Carter tried, he showed leadership in this direction, Reagan Bush and even Clinton undid all Carter's efforts in this regard.

We don't need their oil we have many completely viable alternative energy technologies..all we need is political will and a new grid.