Re: Why no (new) drilling in the US?

Paul Ciszek wrote:
In article <37jk7458kn1cfogagjkif83ie0agg9r4tp@xxxxxxx>,
Anthony Ferrante <ferrante276-ngspam@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

I have been told by friends that the USA has vast amounts of oil
underground but the government keeps blocking all attempts to get at
it. Is this true and if so, why the opposition to getting it?

There are two great political pandering operations going on. One is to
pander to the corn belt by subsidizing ethanol. The other is to pander to
the coastal states by blocking oil exploration on either the Pacific or
the Atlantic seaboard. ANWR is a special case, but is banned for similar
reasons to the coastal bans.

If you want to be elected in this country, you do what is politically
necessary.

You have just heard, with a single exception, the massive political
chorus that has just been orchestrated to preserve the status quo:
no drilling.

The reality is this: from a U.S. perspective, there is a _lot_ of oil
in those two places. ANWR in itself is a certain percentage of U.S.
production. California would further increase production. Florida's
eastern seaboard would increase production. And so on.

I recently corrected someone's math in another group in which he claimed
there were a mere 68 billion barrels in those locations and that was only
a few weeks of U.S. consumption. He had confused billions with millions
and was off by three orders of magnitude. The 68 billion barrels - his
number - would be good for up to 10 years of U.S. consumption.

Now those who consider it criminal to open up coastal exploration are in
a panic mode and want to win the argument at all costs. So they divide
up the issue into little parcels and argue that each parcel is small.

But the entirety is significant.

And my calculation, if the 68 billion barrel estimate is correct, is that that
is an amount of oil at current prices that is roughly equal to the national
debt.

Wouldn't it be something to have the U.S. benefit from that massive cash infusion,
with perhaps much of the income from it going into federal and state government,
instead of having it flow out to countries who care little for us and to whom
we are becoming increasingly beholden?

I will not argue that we will add 10 years to the world's supply. But if we
are able to provide our own needs for a few years, that's that much less 'fuel'
feeding the speculative frenzy, that much more of a bargaining position when
times are tight, and of course money flowing into local economies on a massive
scale instead of a hemorraging of funds to OPEC and others.

Plenty of new drilling taking place in Colorado.

Sure, there's plenty of drilling in all the places we have looked for it
before. We are in declining production in all the known on-shore oil
fields, but we'll reopen them and use increasingly expensive methods
of retrieval for less and less benefit, eventually shifting to extraction
from tar sands and oil shale. But the coastal areas are expected to
contain very significant oil resources that can be used at much lower cost.
ANWR is separate, but if it is 10-15% of the total, not something to sneeze
at either.

So, here's the issue: do you feed the local economy, or do you continue at
full speed hemorraging cash to the Chavez's, the Ahmadinizad's, the Bin Laden
family, and thousands of others equally as friendly?

And if you think it is a giveaway to oil companies, then let's focus on
negotiating what the terms for the leases will be, and accept or reject
the deals on the merits instead of mere theories about some vast
conspiracy.

By the way, the massive anti-drilling PR compaign always assumes that
current consumption levels will continue unabated.

Of course they won't. We all have vehicles, except in a very few isolated pockets
such as New York City. We won't just send them to the crusher - that would be
pointless, even with prices double what they are now. But we will use vastly
less oil. We will skip many of the long trips; commute via bicycles and public
transportation; and eventually shift to high mileage vehicles, including
electric cars. The high prices, at long last, will do what no amount of lecturing
to the population to conserve was able to do - cause us to recognize that we do,
in fact, have a scarce resource that is going to do nothing but increase in price,
and cause us to act accordingly.

Enviro's, you have your wish: high prices are driving down consumption. But we
can't cut it off instantaneously without committing economic suicide; so let's let
the price rise in a bit more moderate fashion by exploiting what we have (yes,
I used the _exploit_ word), provide a cash rebate or two - _not_ tied to oil
consumption - to those at the bottom of the economic scale and therefore hardest
hit by high prices, and move on to the task of eliminating our dependence on oil,
not to mention the other fossil fuels.

George Cornelius

.

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