Belly of the Beast

The beast has awakened once more with a fresh set of posts relating his perspective as an oil industry insider:

• The Common Misconceptions About Peak Oil
• Scared $hitless
• Oil Combat
• The Imminent Recession

Excerpt from Bubba:

I worked with a major oil company for 2 years trying to develop a way to commercialize oil shale. Trust me on this, it ain’t going to happen. Most oil companies know this. The few (one??) that don’t are totally deluded.
Oil shale is not oil. Oil shale is rock that has a relatively high concentration of organic carbon compounds in it. Geologists call this a source rock. If you heat this shale to 700 degrees F you will turn this organic carbon (kerogen) into the nastiest, stinkiest, gooiest, pile of oil-like crap that you can imagine. Then if you send it through the gnarliest oil refinery on the planet you can make this shit into transportation fuel. In the mean time you have created all kinds of nasty by products, have polluted the air and groundwater of where ever you have extracted it. You have also created an enormous pile of superheated rock that will take hundreds to thousands of years to cool off.