"Grimly Curmudgeon" wrote in message
...
We were somewhere around Barstow, on the edge of the desert, when the
drugs began to take hold. I remember Chris Bacon
saying something like:

Grimly Curmudgeon wrote:
I'd be surprised if extraction technology doesn't improve greatly, with
the spur of rising prices. I find it scandalous that many fields are
abandoned with substantial quantities of oil still in them. Cost, I
suppose.

Nothing to stop 'em drilling another hole later on...

True enough, but istr that previous extraction methods left some fields
unusable for the remaining oil. Something to do with the peculiar
geology of oil reservoirs.

Unusable in relation to oil almost always needs to be modified by the words
'at economic cost', which is a variable concept. Some capped wells could be
revitalised by pumping gas down them and that is exactly where it is now
proposed to pump excess CO2. It would probably be uneconomic to do it just
to get the oil, but there is political mileage to be gained by doing
something that people think will help prevent global warming. Of course,
even if the 'CO2 is the culprit' pundits are right, the best that can be
done is to delay the onset by a few years and the money being spent on
'prevention' would be much better spent on getting the world ready for an
increase in temperature.

Colin Bignell