Let's nuke the oil out of the ground

Posted by Jan Frel at 4:40 PM on June 30, 2006.

I'm at a loss for words from this post from The Oil Drum:

Well, as Gazprom consolidates its grip on Russian gas it could be that we may need access to all that oil locked up in the oil shale somewhat sooner than the four years that Shell have said it needs before it can even decide if their process is viable (and I'll cover that in a later post). Now before I get into the piece that follows I should explain that I don't hold any particular animus towards the states of Colorado, Utah, Wyoming or Idaho and so when I start talking about disposing of nuclear weapons in those states by making use of them it should be taken as merely a technical discussion (grin).

The need for a relatively rapidly available resource to allow us to continue being able to supply the worlds needs for oil, even as it increases into the future, will require some fairly rapid and agile production of resources, and as I noted in the first post of this series, with some 2 trillion extractable barrels of oil locked up in the oil shales of the above four states, there lies a potential answer to the problem. But conventional means for extraction, particularly the levels of capital required, and other issues that I will discuss later, make it unlikely that these normal means will produce any significant impact on the gap in economic supply that will develop in the near future. The use of nuclear explosives has the potential to solve that problem. And to explain, rather simply how this might be done (as with the other techie talks), I will explain how, conceptually, this might be achieved.

Jan Frel is an AlterNet staff writer.