I always hesitate to write about anything political. Whenever I do, it seems to offend someone, and that is the last thing I want to do. But I was listening to the President’s speech on the oil spill crisis last night and came out of my seat when the president told a real whopper. The comment that startled me with its audacity was this:
“We consume more than 20% of the world’s oil, but have less than 2% of the world’s oil reserve. And that’s part of the reason oil companies are drilling a mile beneath the surface of the ocean — because we’re running out of places to drill on land and in shallow water.”
That statement is patently false! I don’t know if was ignorance on his part. To give him the benefit of the doubt, his advisers may have told him that and he believed them and wrote it into his speech.
But here are the facts and they are easily checked:
The US is sitting on enough oil reserves to run this country for another 200 to 300 years without importing another drop of oil. Consider some of these easily proven statistics:
- An April 2008 study conducted by the United States Geological Survey, stated that “North Dakota and Montana have an estimated 3.0 to 4.3 billion barrels of undiscovered, technically recoverable oil in an area known as the Bakken Formation.”
- The US Geologic survey estimates there are over 4 Billion barrels of easily recoverable oil in protected areas in Utah, Colorado and Wyoming that are now banned from drilling.
- There is a pool of oil in shallow water off the coast of Santa Barbara, CA where oil is so plentiful, it seeps from the ocean floor and ends up on the beaches as tar balls. If drilling were permitted, the pressure would be relieved and the seepage would stop.
- The ANWR range in Alaska has only been 20% explored. Already estimates are that the range contains over 10 Billion barrels of oil and if the rest of the region could be explored, that could only be a partial figure.
- There is oil in several locations in the Bering Sea at depths of less than 500 feet. The field near the end of the Aleutian chain is estimated to contain over 500 million barrels at depths of less than 600 feet.
- There is plenty of oil in the Gulf of Mexico located in shallow waters that have been put off limits for drilling which is why we are drilling in deep waters. The US Coast & Geodetic survey list several proven fields off of the East coast of Florida and Georgia. But these are also off limits to drilling.
- The outer continental shelf: Something in the neighborhood of 90 billion barrels of oil sit beneath the ocean bed 50 to 100 miles off the Atlantic, Pacific and Gulf coasts. Some of these are in very deep waters, but many of the proven fields are in waters less than 1000 feet deep.
- A well researched article in Kiplinger Magazine in 2008 stated: “… untapped reserves are estimated at about 2.3 trillion barrels, nearly three times more than the reserves held by Organization of Petroleum Exporting Counties (OPEC) and sufficient to meet 300 years of demand-at today’s levels-for auto, aircraft, heating and industrial fuel, without importing a single barrel of oil.”
Of course this oil spill is a disaster. It will do billions of dollars of damage to lives and property and the environment. But the real tragedy is that it didn’t have to happen. Drilling in deep waters is inherently risky. I spoke to an oil drilling expert from Transocean and he told me that if this spill had occurred in water less than 1000 feet deep, that there are several technical methods that would work to cap the spill within days –not weeks, that won’t work at the 5000′ depth of this well.
I find it ironic that the worst oil spill in American history was caused by the very same environmentalists who have cordoned off all the easy accessible oil and forced us into taking extreme risks of drilling at depths.
Reading this you might think I am against alternative forms of energy –and you would be wrong. I would love to see electric cars. They make perfect sense. But if even 10% of the current automobiles in service were converted to electricity we would need somewhere between 15 and 20 new power plants. The fastest and cleanest way to do that is with nuclear power, but the environmentalists do every thing they can to delay and block nuclear power construction.
Wind works. There are already producing wind farms in California where the environmental lobbies will not allow construction of power lines to get the power to the grid. They have blocked this construction for the past 3 years.
Solar is great but will never provide a serious amount of electricity. You would have to cover an area the size of the entire state of Nevada just to produce enough solar electricity to run a medium-sized American city.
Natural Gas – The US is the Saudi Arabia of natural gas and we have reserves off of the East coast of the US that could triple the amount of known natural gas reserves. Cars and even the big diesel trucks can be easily modified to run on natural gas. If we were to convert the entire American trucking fleet to natural gas, it would reduce our current oil imports by over 1 million barrels a day. And gas is cleaner and cheaper than oil.
Conservation is the other important priority. Some people laugh at efforts by the government to build more efficient cars, install insulation and energy saving bulbs, but these measures can have dramatic effects on our overall energy consumption. But we don’ t need government edicts to force them. They make sense because energy costs are rising and will continue to rise and people will turn to energy-saving methods to save money. When we liven it New York State back in the 1980s we had an older home that was costing us over $800 a month to heat in the winter. We spent $4000 on new windows and insulation and dropped our energy bill to less than $300 a month in the winter. Rather than forcing people to take these steps, I have long favored tax credits. Just this year I installed an instant-heat hot water heater at a cost of $1600, but got back $700 of that in tax credits and utility company rebates. That is the sort of program that makes sense.
Its correct to blame BP for the spill. But its not correct to criticize them for drilling 40 miles off the coast in mile-deep water. That is the fault of the stranglehold that environmentalists have held on politicians and their resulting energy policies in this country since the Carter administration when all of this started.
It’s high time we got sensible about our energy policy. A good energy policy would use all of our resources and develop alternative energy sources. If we turn science loose, who knows what we can develop. China is already working on miniature nuclear power plants to power trains. Why aren’t we doing this. I once read an article in popular science that said we could even power trucks with tiny nuclear power plants and fuel cell technology is still in its infancy. Us geezers may not live to see it, but we own it to our children and grand children to work on an energy policy that first of all provides for our national security and is economically sound. Its just crazy to send $100 million a day to Saudi Arabia and Venezuela when we have plenty of oil sitting right here in our laps.
