Not entirely correct. The middle eastern oil is also of a very good quality and easily extracted because of its low viscus nature. For example is has a low sulfur content and other kinds of advantagious qualities.

There are very large other reserves of oil in the world like the Canadian schale oil but these are of much lower quality and often need elaborate processes to extract (boiling it out of the rock) and purification before we can dump it into our common refineries. We must also not forget that alot of these resources are spread thin over relatively large resevoirs unlike our current oil bubbles that only need to have a tap struck into to them and will empty under their own internal pressure. **** the rocks (schale oil) in order to liquify the tar like oil both adds alot of extraction cost and wasted extration energy that will cut directly into the net energy output of such resources. There are also often hugely poluting over wide area's. And what do you do with the unwanted elements like sulfur that you extract ?

The fact that some element is present somewhere doesn't may that it can easily be exploited. Iran has ample supplies of Uranium ore itself, their bad luck is that it is largely "poluted" by a isotope that kills the fission reaction. This is called "Uranium possioning". It needs to be extracted before it can be used as as fuel. For them it is easier to get good quality uranium from other nations.

Similar things are present in the often touted HUGE oil reserves. Yes, indeed there are 10 birds in the sky but at the end of the day it all comes down to the single one you can succesfully lure to your hand. The other 9 as nice to look at and dream about but other then that not of any practical use.

With respect to coal. That resource is often high in sulfur and as such highly problematic with respect to acid rain. When burned the sulfur reacts to sulfur oxide and when mixed with moisture in the air reacts to sulferic acid that eventually rains down on furtile land and pretty much "salts" it. We need much better smoke treatment processes to solve that issue and processes that can indeed be scale to process tons of smoke per minute. That is quite an engineering operation.

Problem with acid rain during the 70's and 90's in Europe were "solved" by transitioning from burning coal to burning natural gas and high grade oil. What will we win by transitioning back ?

Again, the problems are alot more complex then just finding stuff to burn.

Sorry.

Wouter