The geopolitics of oil prices are interesting... Shale oil is only economically feasible at around $80/bl. The Opec nations (Lead by the saudis) have ramped up production ahead of demand to artificially depress the oil price and drive their competitors out of business. To do that they are taking at least a US$40B hit on their budget this year alone (just for Saudi).
So yes, shape oil is feasible but only at high prices. Which interestingly is exactly what they peak oil folks were predicting as a really good indicator of the peak being well and truly hit - previously non feasible sources become feasible because the price is sustainable high. Apart from this recent blip which is more politics than markets (and is not sustainable beyond a year or so), the peak predictions are spot on.
The peak can last a long time before the decline depending on how desperate we are and how many unconventional sources we tap as the price rises. Trouble is, the linger the peak, the sharper the decline.
Copper is a really good example. As the supply has dwindled, the price has gone up which has made poorer quality ore bodies feasible for extraction. But poor quality pores produce more expensive copper so the price stays high regardless of how much extra supply there is. Just ask a plumber about the cost of copper.
Uranium from seawater - yes. Can be done. Has been done. But not in a way that will get more energy pout than you put in to do the extraction.Energy return on investment (EROI) is the key thing to consider for all these schemes. Uranium from seawater has a negative EROI due to basic electrochemistry. The concentration ios so low you would have to process 20,200,000,000,000 litres of water each year to match current production. That's a lot of water.
Consider that
the present worldwide production of nuclear energy is about 2.5 × 103
TWh (terawatt-hour) per year
[7] and that we need to process 2 × 1013 tons of water per year (see Table 2) to produce a sufficient
amount of uranium. Therefore, the “energy density” of seawater in terms of energy that can be
produced by the present nuclear technology is about 0.1 kWh/ton. If we need 2.5 kWh/ton for
extraction then the EROEI is less than 0.1 and the process has no practical interest as a source of fuel
for fission plants. This result agrees with previous estimations based on different considerations that
led to the same conclusion
My source -
http://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/2/4/980/pdf&hl=en&sa=X&scisig=AAGBfm39tjUH9yrZ_DiR5iiChLe_9G4MOg&nossl=1&oi=scholarr&ei=QA7QVPqVCIbd8AXtmYKYCg&ved=0CBsQgAMoADAA
(apologies for the crap URL). Its a paper by Bardi published in the Sustainability journal in 2010.
