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Sure, there are alternatives. There are huge bitumen deposits fatman wikipedia encyclopedia reference in Venezuela and Alberta, tar sands that combined hold more than twice the current estimated world reserves of liquid crude oil. But bitumen is costly to refine, a potential environmental nightmare to extract, and right now, only a tiny fraction of the crude in either the Athabasca oil sands or the Orinoco Belt can be recovered. There's a lot of shale in North America, and the process to synthesize crude from shale is fairly old and well known. It fatman wikipedia encyclopedia reference is also water intensive, and not terribly economical right now (because most of the shale is buried out West, where there is very little water). The technology is pretty well established to make synthetic crude oil from coal (lots of North American coal too) or natural gas, or even turkey guts or pig manure – if the price is right.
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