We Should Start Drilling Now

It has become less and less understandable to me why the US is not developing the vast energy wealth that lies off our coasts and under the very ground that is America. There have been a number of opinion pieces expounding why we should or should not make use of our own energy resources. I've even had lunchtime discussions with a co-worker about this topic. He's a firm believer we should drill for our own oil because it will merely delay the time it will take us to move beyond an oil economy. I countered that we can ill afford to leave our supply of needed energy in the hands of foreign powers not friendly to the US.

Let's face it, folks. There are a lot of people in the US doing their darnedest to make sure we remain dependent upon foreign sources of oil even though we have very large domestic sources rivaling those of all of the oil exporting nations combined. So what's keeping us from actually developing our petroleum resources?

Our Congress and some of our former presidents.

At this point in time, is there another country on the face of the earth that would possess the oil and gas reserves held by the United States and refuse to exploit them? Only technical incompetence, as in Mexico, would hold anyone back.

But not us. We won't drill.

California won't drill for the estimated 1.3 billion barrels of recoverable oil off its coast because of bad memories of the Santa Barbara oil spill – in 1969.

We won't drill for the estimated 5.6 billion to 16 billion barrels of oil in the moonscape known as the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) because of – the caribou.

In 1990, George H.W. Bush, calling himself "the environmental president," signed an order putting virtually all the U.S. outer continental shelf's oil and gas reserves in the deep freeze. Bill Clinton extended that lockup until 2013. A Clinton veto also threw away the key to ANWR's oil 13 years ago.

Our waters may hold 60 trillion untapped cubic feet of natural gas.

And that's barely scratching the surface of what we have sitting under our own soil. But we can't touch it. Not a single drop, not a therm, not a cubic foot, not one bit of it will be used because Congress has decided it would be bad for us and our economy if we were to achieve the ability to tell the Middle Eastern oil klepto-theocracies and Venezuelan dictator-in-waiting Hugo Chavez to eat their oil. The logic of this escapes me. No has been able to explain to me how putting our economic safety into the hands of countries that have no love for us in any shape or form is the right thing to do. Oh, I've heard the platitudes and the uneducated economic theories why this self-imposed economic threat is supposed to be good for us, but not one of them rings true and almost all of them I've heard have been disproven time and time again. Yet here we are. It's madness.

Even if we were to start drilling and exploring today, the first barrels of oil from our own wells wouldn't be available for at least 5 years, and more likely 10 years. This time lag makes it crucial for us to get started now, while foreign oil supplies are still available. Waiting until they are cut off, either from changes in hostile governments policies, or worse, due to war, is foolish. No, not foolish, but stupid.

Maybe it's time to tell Congress to stop being so obstructionist and allow us to develop our own petroleum resources, relinquishing the hold foreign sources of much needed oil presently have on us.

Oil - Back To The Future

Leland Teschler reminds us it's deja vu all over again, to quote Yogi Berra. In this case our struggle with rising energy prices, or more specifically, rising oil and gas prices is not new. As he writes, it's Back To The Future Of The 1970's. It starts off with an old joke that's new again.

For our anniversary my wife wanted to go someplace expensive, so we went to a gas station.

There are a lot of things about the 1970's besides jokes that would have a familiar ring. For instance, take the well-known straits of the US automakers. It's nothing new.

During the Arab Oil Embargo after the 1973 Yom Kippur War, oil prices spiked and supplies became tight. Many gas stations ran out of gas, partly because of hoarding and partly because there wasn't enough gas to go around. Gas lines were long and an impromptu gas rationing system sprang up in many states to help alleviate the shortages and the gas lines. The price of regular gas back then was as high, if not higher, than it is now, taking into account 35 years of inflation.

A lot of the proposed solutions to the problems back then never came to fruition, either due to fear, shortsightedness, or plain stupidity on the part of our leaders and the interference of special interests. If we had taken action back then many of our energy problems wouldn't exist today. We wouldn't have to scramble in order to squeeze every bit of useful energy out of our existing supply. Our vehicles would be more fuel efficient, and many of them wouldn't be running on fossil fuels. Few, if any, of our powerplants would use oil, natural gas, or coal.

My question: Will we learn the lessons of the 1970's or will we make the same mistakes again and miss yet another opportunity to move past fossil fuels that presently power our civilization? If history is any indicator, the answer is probably not. Never mind the still unproven and ever more questioned theories of anthropogenic global warming. It's not the environment that will drive the change over to less carbon intensive means of generating power. It will be the economic forces that will do so. That is, of course, unless the cost of oil plummets and those forces slacken, weakening the incentives to do so.

Frankly, oil has much better uses than burning it to make electricity or to use as a fuel for our cars, trucks, boats, planes, etc. It's time to move away from the fossil fuel era, regardless of how much oil there is still out there waiting to be discovered.

Climate And Oil

This is a two-fer tonight.

First, it appears it was quite cool in the month of May, one of the cooler ones on record. As Instapundit reminds us “ [T]hat's just weather, not climate.” Indeed. But there's also a growing consensus among solar scientists the Sun is entering a quiet period, with longer sunspot cycles, lower maximum sunspot numbers, and the cooler temperatures on Earth that go along with it.

The last time we saw something like this was during the Little Ice Ages, which occurred during the Maunder and Dalton Minimums (circa 1300 AD to 1750 AD), periods when the 11-year sunspot cycles were longer and the maximum number of sunspots were at their lowest point.

It could be the increased CO2 levels might help mitigate the colder temps, preventing us from reliving the disruptions suffered by our ancestors during the last round of solar minimums.

Second, speaking of higher CO2 levels, there's more activity coming to the Bakken oil field in Montana and North Dakota.

While in the past the recoverable reserves were estimated at 3.6 billion barrels, but that was based upon the drilling and oil recovery technologies in existence in 1995. Since then, newer technologies could make almost all the oil recoverable, estimated at 413 billion barrels. That's almost twice that of Saudi Arabia.

Should it come to pass we would then be able to tell oil exporting nations in the Middle East, as well as Venezuela, to keep their oil.

All of this is assuming the Democrats and their friends, the Watermelon Environmentalists, don't find some way of making it illegal to drill for oil anywhere on the continental US. I figure they'll try, keeping us in thrall to unfriendly foreign governments while telling us it's for our own good.