was the word I was trying to remember. I guess there isn't a verb. Angiogenerate sounds silly.

...some of this has more to do with factors other than supply and demand.  When the U.S. dollar weakens significantly in value (as it has been) many investors will go for oil, since it's seen as a safer bet durin' the dollar's decline.In other words, much of it is speculation.

Coal is dehydroginated biomass, with its entire heating value coming from carbon.  Biomass and coal are very different things although coal may have started from biomass.  To follow a similar path would hold that oil is plastics.

Coal is what is left of biomass after it has already had the byproducts of cO2, methane, and oil cooked out of it by heat and pressure over vast time periods.

Producing all the energy with fossil fuel to make that happen quickly enough to be profitable, raises the GHG release manyfold, over simply burning coal, oil, or natural gas.

Turning the coal back into oil releases 5 times the GHG of just burning the coal.  This is happening right now in Montana on a huge scale thanks to the boosterism of the democratic green governor.

Turning coal into biogas underground with bacteria is different.  No additional energy is needed.  That is the way to use coal and tar sand energy, as relatively clean natural gas.  Leave the coal and tar mess underground where it has been for millenia.

http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog

Both coal and tar sands bitumen are seriously lacking in hydrogen. Assuming you could find bacteria to do this is, where do you get the hydrogen from? If it works, which I very much doubt, why do it underground, surely it would be much more efficient (optimize conditions) on the surface?

I think people are forgetting that coal contains a lot of methane adsorbed into its pore structure which gets released after mining and put into test tubes.

As for the bitumen, there was a report recently that reseachers at the University of Calgary have found bacteria which turn bitumen into methane. Sadly, very little experimental details were released but I very much doubt that such processes are viable.

There may be very low levels of microbially metabolizable compounds in the bitumen which could explain the low levels of methane observed. However, to expect large amounts of methane from such a process is dreaming in technicolour, IMO.

The bacteria have already been developed with selective breeding.  No GMO needed.  Just growing bacterial cultures in high heat and pressure environments.  

I'm not sure exactly the biochemistry involved, but I found the article about this research project on the net.  

http://amazngdrx.blogharbor.com/blog

With an oil price of over100$/barrel the Orinoco (Venezuela) and Athabasca (Canada) tar sands (with technically recoverable oil reserves of some 500 billion barrels assuming a 10% recovery factor) are becoming more and more economically attractive.

The same applies to oil shales (predominantly located in the US: Green River Formation) which are believed to contain double the amount of recoverable oil (some trillion barrels of oil).

So the high oil price has helped to basically more than double the world's economically extractable reserves (from about one trillion barrels to 2.5 trillion barrels, which would represent some 100 years of current production).

If you cannot place me in any box read my Bio.

Unfortunately the problem is not how big the reserves are but how quickly we can produce oil... Oil sands require enormous investment, enormous amounts of water and enormous amounts of gas. Gas that is used as a supply of hydrogen! It would be funny if it wasn't so sad....