February 06, 2006

WHAT'S GOING ON INSIDE THE MOSQUES? One piece of evidence that U.S. mosques are centers of terrorist and jihadist sympathy and activity, is that they won't let us in. Anybody can go into any church and listen, but you can't go into a mosque. What are they hiding?

Action on U.S. Energy Independence: Oil Shale

MOVEMENT ON OIL-SHALE DEVELOPMENT IN COLORADO. I've posted recently on how the U.S. can be energy-independent via oil shale.

The Denver Post reports on movements by the government there to consider developing an oil shale industry:

The U.S. Bureau of Land Management is soliciting public comments until Jan. 31 on its effort to open to commercial extraction oil-shale deposits in Colorado, Utah and Wyoming within two years. Two meetings in Golden on Thursday followed meetings in Rifle on Wednesday. The BLM is rushing to complete its environmental-impact statement by summer 2007.

There's action on this in Utah as well:

      VERNAL — Byron Merrell said his emotions were "somewhere between excitement and terror" recently when he learned his company's proposal for oil shale research and development had been chosen by the Bureau of Land Management as part of a landmark federal government program.
      Merrell, a longtime inventor and former Uintah County commissioner, and Romit Bhattacharya said they were overwhelmed with joy by the announcement that their company, Oil-Tech Inc., was one of eight applicants whose plans to produce oil from shale is now eligible for "continued consideration" for coveted BLM leases.
      That puts obscure Oil-Tech's name in the same breath as Chevron, Exxon and Shell. Pretty heady stuff for the man who owns a retort — a facility where oil shale is ground up and then heated to the point of vaporization to produce liquid oil — several miles southeast of Vernal. He has been struggling for years to unlock vast oil shale resources buried in the Green River formation of eastern Utah.
      "Of course we have known we could do this and no one paid attention to it," Merrell said about his extraction process, which he says can produce oil at a cost of about $10 a barrel. "We're kind of like a cocklebur on a cow's tail — more of an annoyance rather than something to take interest in. Then when we show up in the same group as Chevron and Exxon, it causes you to pause a little bit."
      Oil-Tech was selected from among a field of nominations the BLM received in response to a June 2005 call for proposals for 160-acre research and development leases on public lands in Colorado, Utah and Wyoming. The companies that win approval for experimental works will get first rights to lease close to 5,000 additional acres surrounding their 160-acre parcels.
      The financial rewards of the lease are substantial. Official estimates put the amount of recoverable oil in the Green River formation in these three states at 2.6 trillion barrels. That's roughly 60 percent of the world's known deposits, and it surpasses Saudi Arabia's proven reserves of 261 billion barrels.  

(Hat tip to commenter Loren.)

"IT'S IN THE KORAN" -- a hilarious song. The site describes it as:

Radical Islam, or Islamism, or Islamic Fundamentalism, as it might be described by an honest adherent.