re: marc faber predicts oil-4 daver Back in the 1960/70/80's...

re: marc faber predicts oil-4 daver Back in the 1960/70/80's companies including BHP(in Australia), Esso,Mobil, Shell all spent a large amount of time and money on Coal/tar sand/shale/natural gas/etc to oil. (With a lot of govt. support). The Japanese even had a brown coal to liquid demonstration plant using brown coal in the Latrobe valley in the 1980's.

In the early 1980's when oil reached $40/bbl it was expected that some of these projects could become viable. (Un)fortunately oil prices fell and these technologies became uneconomic.

New Zealand in the 1980's made a large commitment to Natural gas to methanol to gasoline which became a white elephant when oil prices fell and the cost of producing gasoline from natural gas far exceeded the cost of gasoline from Oil. This plant now produces methanol.

The technologies to produce liquid fuels from coal/shale currently exist. Also, there are enormous reserves of low grade coal and shale oil in may parts of the world. The processes are just uneconomic. Remember both the Germans during WW2 and the South Africans during the Boycott both produced a large proprtion of their liquid fuels from coal.