Reply To: Injection of fuel and pulsing

[JimmyT]

The world is NOT running out of oil! Not anywhere close. But it is running out of cheap oil. In the past oil has been available at a lift price ( the price to pump it out of the ground) of 50 cents a barrel (in Saudi-Arabia) to $15 a barrel for north sea crude. Much oil is available at somewhat higher prices. Proof of this is the recent “discovery” of deposits in North and South Dakota and of an oil field off the coast of Brazil. Both of these deposits have been know about for some time (in the case of the Dakota fields about 30 years). But both the technology to exploit them, as well as the economics of exploiting them has been abscent.

Synthetic oil can also be produced from coal as the Germans did in WWII and the South Africans have been doing for decades. The process is called the Fischer-Tropsch process and oil can be thus produced for around $20 to $30 a barrel. Feedstock can be anything from coal to organic matter.

Focus fusion can dramatically reduce our use of this more expensive oil, and thus both reduce its cost (from a supply and demand perspective) and render its higher cost much less relevant to our economy.