In the final analysis, the price of oil has nowhere to go but up. The easiest, most profitable extractions of this precious commodity have already been done. Gone are the days when a little drilling would release a gusher. Take, for example, the tar sands, our latest and perhaps most costly extraction, as I pointed out in a recent post, Frankel and Rapier*.Extracting bitumen will not be easy. In fact, as elsewhere, the easiest extraction may already have occurred. Eighty per cent of all tar...