Barack Obama's Offshore Oil Drilling Follies

Written By: theFinancialSkinny
http//anthonylandaeta.blogspot.com/

You just have to love the Democrats. If they're good at anything it's finding a scapegoat for their failed policies. For more than two decades they've banned drilling for oil in 80% of the U.S. Outer Continental Shelf (OCS) on the alleged grounds that they're trying to protect the environment. More recently, and on the same grounds, they've prohibited oil shale leasing on Federal lands.
There hasn't been a new oil refinery built in this country in thirty years because the Democrats at all levels of government have made the approval process a nightmare. As a result, we now import not only crude oil, but fully refined, much more expensive gasoline as well.
They won't consider the thought of clean-coal technology.
They won't allow the building of nuclear power plants.
They won't permit the construction of a windmill farm in Nantucket Sound because, in the words of Ted Kennedy: "Don't they understand that that's where I sail?" (That notwithstanding, we wish the Senator many more years of sailing there.)
And now that China and India are emerging from the dark ages, their demand for oil has pushed the outer bounds of the world's current ability to produce it.
And whom do the Democrats blame? Why the evil speculators of course.
Are Democrats willfully ignorant of the laws of supply and demand?
What they don't tell you while they're professing their love for the environment is that Cuba, which lies just 90 miles off the coast of Florida, is negotiating with Chinese companies to drill for oil in Cuban waters. Seismic mapping (you know, the kind that drives the whales mad) has already commenced. So Cuba soon will be producing (and probably exporting) oil from waters just south of the Florida Keys, while the United States will be importing petroleum from our good friends in OPEC.
Barack Obama and the Democrats think it's fine for two Communist countries to drill in waters 90 miles off our coast, but not for American companies to drill in our OCS. That puts the lie to their concern for our beaches, don't you think?
It should also tell you just how far out on the loony fringe these people are.
For those of you who are wondering, the U.S. Government's Minerals Management Service (MMS) defines the OCS as consisting "of the submerged lands, subsoil, and seabed, lying between the seaward extent of the States' jurisdiction and the seaward extent of Federal jurisdiction. The continental shelf is the gently sloping undersea plain between a continent and the deep ocean". Generally speaking the OCS extends about 200 miles out to sea.
We love the beach and have spent many vacations in Florida and would hate to see that pristine sand fouled. Consider these facts:
· In August 2005, Hurricane Katrina's top wind speeds reached 175 mph as it moved across the Gulf of Mexico, where there were 4,000 structures, 130 drilling rigs, and 34,000 miles of pipeline on the seafloor.
· Although there were 100 spills from Katrina and 260 from Rita, most of which the U.S. Coast Guard classified as minor, the MMS reports that "there were no accounts of Federal OCS spills that reached the shoreline or oiled birds or mammals. In addition, there were no large volumes of oil discovered offshore to be collected or cleaned up".
· In November 2000 the MMS reported that fish densities in the Gulf around active platforms (which serve as de facto reefs) were 20-50 times higher than in nearby open water.
· As of that date, at the encouragement of the states and the MMS, 151 obsolete platforms had been converted to artificial reefs.
All of that sounds like a pretty good balance between the need to develop energy from the OCS and the importance of protecting the coastal environments. In fact, we've seen college students on spring break make more of a mess at the beach than the petroleum industry did during the hurricanes of 2005.
It's estimated that there are 18 billion barrels of recoverable oil and 77 trillion cubic feet of natural gas in our OCS, or about two years' worth of oil and ten years' worth of natural gas.
We now have the technology to extract oil from shale in an environmentally sound way, and at current prices it would be feasible economically. The Green River Basin of Colorado, Utah, and Wyoming has an estimated 800 billion barrels of recoverable oil, which is roughly equivalent to 100 years of imports at current levels.
Obama says that wouldn't be enough to lower the price. The man must have been absent from economics class on the day they taught economics.
The market is made on the margin, Senator. Get a clue.
As for the alternative sources of energy mantra, the new Honda FCX Clarity has great promise, but it's likely to be 8-10 more years before it goes into mass production.