David (Dave) Summers is a Curators' Professor Emeritus of Mining Engineering at Missouri University of Science and Technology (he retired in 2010). He directed the Rock Mechanics and Explosives Research Center at MO S&T off and on from 1976 to 2008, leading research teams that developed new mining and extraction technologies, mainly developing the use of high-pressure waterjets into a broad range of industrial uses. While one of the founders of The Oil Drum, back in 2005, he now also writes separately at Bit Tooth Energy.
While it may be way too early to declare a final winner in the race to find replacement renewable liquid fuels to replace the jet…
One of the relevant facets of the current Republican debates at the start of this Presidential Race has been the Energy Plan that Governor Perry…
If one examines the forecast future supply of liquid fuels that the EIA projects in their most recent International Energy Outlook, that for 2011, the…
It would seem, despite the inability of the cellulosic ethanol industry to produce an economically viable product to date, that it remains this Administration’s answer…
Before it was American, Russian visitors had already noted the presence of oil seeps in Alaska, although they had not done anything about it by…
The summer brings back Hurricane season, with the threat that such storms bring to the oil and gas well operations in the Gulf of Mexico.…
The natural gas industry in the United States has undergone significant changes in the last twenty years. As I noted last time, until 1993 the…
I doubt that this will ever reach the levels of public interest that has led earlier exposures of information to acquire a “gate” appendage, but…
The people of the world are going to continue to use energy. The fundamental question that this future reality poses relates to the sources from…
OPEC Ministers, meeting in Vienna last week, apparently had one of their more divisive discussions of recent times over the question of raising pumped volumes.…
The development of oil in Texas produced, in its time, the four richest men in the world (H.L. Hunt, Sid Richardson, Roy Cullen and Clint…
I don’t expect that there will be many tsunamis in Germany over the next century, nor, apart from the occasional man-made earthquakes that can come…
The Total (oil company) discussion on Enhanced Oil Recovery has an illustrative graph to explain why there is a growing need to get as much…
The recent publication of the EIA review of Shale Gas has caught the world’s attention, and led to the perception that the coming decades may…
If you read many of the pieces I write here you will soon notice that I am convinced that this country, and most of the…
There are a number of different ways of getting oil from a reservoir, and, to radically oversimplify, the harder that you try to maximize the…
One of the problems in trying to project future demand and supply of oil and the other fossil fuels is that the decisions on their…
I thought it worthwhile spending a post looking at the global prospects for gas shale. I am indebted to Art Berman for first bringing some…
I paid $50 to fill my tank at a gas station in Maine this morning, at a cost of almost $4 a gallon. When the…
The popular protests among the countries of the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) are continuing to roil, and so, rather than the review of…