US Has Three Times The Oil of Saudi Arabia, Locked In Shale

Might be time for a shale-oil Manhattan Project.

The trouble is politics. The left makes noises about our dependency on foreign sources of oil, but what they're really against is oil, period, no matter what its source. Indeed, they seem to hate domestic producers more than foreign ones.

After all, domestic producers kill buffalos and use their horns for drill-bits (or something) and also donate to Republicans.

There's also the libertarian strain in economics which says, dogmatically I think sometimes, that we can never favor an industry with government support.

But right now there's an anti-competitive cartel selling us most of our oil, and for the market to truly work, there needs to be some viable competition. And that competition really can't come into being with the cartel willing and able to lower prices to drive them into bankruptcy if there should ever be serious investment in this technology. And then raise those prices, once again, after the competitive threat has been eliminated.

posted by Ace at 10:37 AM

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