A July 11, 2008 Columbus Dispatch story asked the above question.

"Tide is changing in Congress as lawmakers feel pressure from constituents to ease gas crisis"

Ohio Sen. Sherrod Brown, who had adamantly opposed such drilling, is among those warming to the idea. He says any exploration would have to be far from the coast and that the oil produced would be used in the United States, not abroad. Less than a month ago in the Senate, the Democrat assailed supporters of offshore drilling, citing a federal study that suggested it would not make any "appreciable difference in the price of gas until 2030."

Sen. George V. Voinovich said yesterday that the combination of $4-per-gallon gas prices and rising voter support for more drilling could pave the way for a compromise that would have been unthinkable a year ago. The Ohio Republican predicted that Congress will pass a comprehensive bill this year to clear the way for drilling off U.S. coasts while providing more money to develop cleaner energy sources.

To win Senate passage, Voinovich said, a bill could not include opening up exploration in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. Voinovich said he favors drilling in the refuge but acknowledged that "it's a lightning-rod issue" with Democrats and environmentalists. Brown, for example, remains opposed to drilling there. Voinovich declined to say whether he is part of a bipartisan group of senators seeking a compromise on oil exploration and federal aid for renewable energies. But it is clear that some Democrats are showing a greater willingness to permit more drilling.

Environmentalists have reacted with alarm to the idea of ending a 1981 federal moratorium on drilling offshore, primarily along the coasts of California and Florida. The ban grew out of a 1969 disaster off Santa Barbara when 3 million gallons of crude oil from an offshore platform covered 35 miles of coastline. They argue that it would take years for new platforms to produce oil and that the U.S. should be working to change its oil-based economy to renewable energies. "The drive to drill is like an obese man saying he is going to lose weight by eating more," said Dan Weiss, director of climate strategy at the Center for American Progress, a research group in Washington.

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tags: energy   oil   

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Comments ... #

The 7.5 billion barrels cited is the total consumed. About half of that is already being produced here. So the supply dependency problem to solve is about half that - 3.7ish billion a year. If the offshore reserves were half of what this graphic says, that would still be 15 years of independence.

posted by babbleman on Jul 11, 2008 at 10:28:41 pm     #

For every drop of oil we extract from our land, Saudi Arabia and other oil producers will cut their production by exactly that same amount. the net effect of ruining our land is zero.

posted by prime3end on Jul 11, 2008 at 11:09:18 pm     #

1) How would they know how much we extract? Would we be stupid enough to tell them?

2). WTF, let's just do fucking NOTHING, like we are now, and the arab bastards will ALWAYS have us by the balls for an energy source that's going to dry up one day.

3). While we've GOT to go to other energy sources eventually, THAT is what's going to take a minimum of a decade. But we've GOT to start the ball rolling. Yet, we have to do SOMETHING-anything-to help ease the pain NOW. Since there are several villains involved and not just one....

I would propose first of all putting the rules on speculators back the way it was before Clinton signed the paper that changed things. If they had to put up more money, rather than a miniscule percentage, they'd think twice. MORE REFINERIES must also be built-the oil companies don't really want that, since it would help increase supply, but it must happen, even if it means giving the scum more tax breaks to build them.

Electric cars are fine with me, but the primary reason most don't want them is, they only go about 50-60 miles before needing recharged. If they'd ever get to the point where they could go say, several hundred miles before recharging, they'd sell.

I've told this story before here, but-Saw a program strictly by accident on PBS once. Guy was making suel out of garbage. For real. He asked the interviewer "what octane do you want?" The guy said "What?" and looked startled. He told him that he could change the octane level depending on what he used, say, coffee grounds or banana peels. I watched him make fuel with his process with my own eyes, and watched him power a V-8 with it that was on a stand. Think of it. our two greatest problems solved simultaneously-what to do with our garbage, plus the energy crisis. I SAW THIS PROGRAM IN THE SEVENTIES!!!!!!! What ever happened to that guy? And his technology?

For all the naysayers that say 'let's sit with our fingers up our ass and do nothing"-that's what we've done for DECADES. Do the words Total global depression mean anything to you? Because that's precisely what's going to happen if we continue to do nothing. Everything works on energy, from stuff brought to stores/warehouses by trucks, to air freight, to trains, you name it. Our grocery bill has literally doubled in the last year, mainly due to the price of oil/gas. Everything's went up, because everything takes oil or energy. I don't profess to have all the answers, but we HAVE GOT to demand our worthless polticos try different things immediately-before it's too late. Radical things if necessary.

posted by Darkseid on Jul 12, 2008 at 12:43:55 am     #

It is only common sense that you should exploit a domestic resource before resorting to foreign commerce. Prime, it boggles the mind that you don't understand that.

Note I freely use the term "exploit". Getting oil and NG out of the ground is never clean. But we still need it, and keeping a domestic supply while being bled cry financially from a foreign supply simply makes no sense.

Also, we should start conserving now. This is a multi-pronged approach to a better future of energy use, and all the prongs have to be used in order for the effort to make sense.

posted by GuestZero on Jul 12, 2008 at 06:29:34 pm     #

Get the oil, explore alternative energy, seek help. Despite America's belief that the oil problem is being caused by our dependence on foreign oil, the true beast behind the oil problem is rising. America's oil problem is not the result of years of sanctions against drilling, America's oil problem is the result of years of believing that the economy continually rises.
America is in for a big hurt. If we drill, then foreign nations will just bid up the price of oil to the point that we are exporting more oil because others are willing to pay a premium.
America's economy is in its death throes. There is no savior, there is no greatest country. There may be a future if we throw out the mess of a government we have. But, we won't.

posted by JJFad on Jul 12, 2008 at 09:58:05 pm     #

Darkseid and Gzero,

I am amazed that you both don't understand that the oil market is completely manipulated.
30% of Texas Crude oil trades are controlled and "regulated" by the govt of Dubai. Anyone who tells you that increasing drilling in this country will save one cent on a gallon of gasoline is lying to you. The U.S. Department of Energy, D.O.E., issued a report that states that drilling in the Artic National Wildlife refuge will save 2 cents on a gallon of gas , in ten years. Most of our brids migrate there and its one of the few remaining unspoiled places remaining in the U.S. It should be kept as it is, as a strategic oil reserve and as a pristine place. If you want to know what our oil companies have done to every place they have drilled in Alaska, just look at an oil sludge pit and thats what they do in Alaska. The oil companies pay off the people, and the governemnt on all levels to be allowed to pollute at will in Alaska. Our salvation is the plug in electric car and then pure battery electrics and alternative electricity generation. Any other attempt at a solution is folly. Bush's hydrogen scam will drive your natural gas bills so high that you will burn your furniture to keep warm instead. He wants to make hydrogen from natural gas, to keep you dependent on his oil buddies who will provide the hydrogen at your local gas station. It will cost you more than what you pay for gasoline now, by a lot. If they make it from nukes, you get to double that price.

The president of OPEC and his buds SET the price of oil via withholding production till the price suits them. The pres of OPEC says $7 per gallon by January. You can drill in every back yard in America and you won't affect the price of oil by a cent. Because once oil is sold on the market, OPEC does indeed know how much we produce Darkseid,, and they produce less accordingly. If they don't , Iran will, or Iraq, or any other oil producing country.

Our own oil pigs , testifying before congress, say that oil should be 30-50 dollars a bbl ($1 per gallon of gas), not 147 dollars a bbl ($4.10 per gallon of gas). The "speculators" are the oil companies themselves, their owned trading companies, as it were, and the profitable tools of the oil producing countries who have bought many banks and brokerage houses. Todays scam oil trading takes place using the same scam exception letter that allowed Enron to scam California out of every buck they could wring out of the people there. The market is fixed, corrupt, and doesn't give a damn about supply and demand, they control the price and no amount of drilling will change that.

posted by prime3end on Jul 13, 2008 at 01:06:44 am     #

Prime, I already said that conservation is an essential part of any attempt to change the status quo in our energy usage profile. But it still remains fallacious to state that leaving domestic oil in the ground makes more economic sense than continuing to import. True, it could be that in trying to exploit the ANWR, some Dubai-based oil company "wins" the contract and then controls the ANWR supply like it does other foreign sources. But again, that's a specious fear. You're STILL insisting that the domestic supply sit untouched. If it truly takes 10 years to exploit it to the level of real output, then continued debate is not solving anything. EXPLOIT IT AND THEN SEE WHAT HAPPENS.

As for the birds, there's always a death rate and I just don't care about them. We have some of the strongest environmental regulations on earth, ever. Why aren't those enough for you?

posted by GuestZero on Jul 13, 2008 at 07:33:26 am     #

It does indeed make more sense to leave it in the ground, both from a strategic reserve perspective and from the persepective that the entire oil industry is built on fraud and robbery, theft through well entrenched market manipulation and wars for oil, as well as the requirement that our president and vice president are oil men, sending our armies out for the interest of the oil companies, to keep costs high. Nothing, but Nothing, will move the price of oil downward like using a total replacement fuel for cars, like electric cars.

posted by prime3end on Jul 13, 2008 at 09:15:28 am     #

and I don't insist that ALL of the domestic oil supply sit untouched, only ANWR and such other offshore places that would devastate the tourist trade in a natural or man caused disaster. We are pumping oil like crazy and it doesn't do ANY good because so much of the oil trades and speculative moves are outside of the jurisidictional control of the enforcement arms of the United States government. The oil companies have millions of acres under lease that they refuse to drill on. Why? Becuase they know that each gallon they leave in the ground adds to the shortage and increases the price of what they do pump out of the ground. However Hunt Oil really wants to pump oil in ANWR, after all he gave bush 16 million dollars for his presidential oil war library, and has illegally secured Iraqi oil contracts from the Kurds, bypassing the government in Iraq that our brave soldiers die to maintain,,, and all the while he one of bush's foreign policy advisors on Iraq. Hunt is acting in full economic benefit for bush , at least that is the apparent hunch that jap-slaps anyone who is paying attention. The oil market is not a market, its so highly fixed by criminals with criminal intent that there is no way to apply legal market terms to it.

We need a strategic oil reserve in the ground and we don't need to drill in ANWR. Why not go for the larger oil reserve at Gull Island Alaska, reported to be as large as the Saudi oil reserves.

posted by prime3end on Jul 13, 2008 at 09:31:17 am     #

we use 7 or 8 billion bbls of oil a year in this country and only have 115 billion bbls in the ground per Jr's graphic. Most of that oil is that expensive and hard to get at kind. After the first rush of oil they close the well rather than do whats required to get at the remaining oil. I don't understand why Gull Island hasn't been included in the graphic though. All, ALL our reserves will be gone at that rate in just a few years, all the low hanging fruit gone. From a military and national security and economic perspective it's folly to start new drilling. What we should be doing is pumping out alternative transportation methods that don' t involve oil , and don't involve ethanol. Alternative power can and will run everything. Its being kept out of the market now by utilities, but they are losing ground. I pray for ever higher oil and coal prices. They will price themselves out of the market. They are already far more expensive when you consider all the poeople they kill when we burn them.

posted by prime3end on Jul 13, 2008 at 10:05:14 am     #

We are talking about offshore oil reserves here. There are additional oil reserves in the Canadian Tar Sands as well as various heavy shale deposits bearing oil rock. There is no need to panic. We need a wakeup call to work today and tomorrow and everyday on achieving national security through energy independence.
There are enough reserves necessary to allow for an orderly transition to an electric economy for people moving mass transit and electric vehicles. Truckers and heavy shipping would continue to use oil as previously with a greater supply allocated. There has been no national energy policy in place and this is due to an extreme lack of leadership to say the least.

The adventure in Iraq may have been to benefit specific oil companies, but at what cost in national blood and treasure? Who gave the leadership the right to expend our nations blood and treasure to benefit a very select few? Where is the mass exploitation and flow of oil from Iraq that would ease price pressures for years to come? They have the reserve capacity to upset the OPEC balance of power and why is this not being used to relieve the price pressures? I believe the Iraq War was done to permanently keep that country from fully utilizing its resources and oil reserves to its maximum capacity while simultaneously ensuring U.S. corporate control of natural resources and in conjunction and agreement with Saudi Arabian Oil interests.

I believe that a good fifty percent of the price increase is due to increased international instability created by aggressive internationalist interventionism by the U.S. The remaining fifty percent of the price increases are due to increased demand internationally and the falling value of the dollar.

I believe oil is being kept off the market purposely.

I believe instability is artificially created in many instances.

I believe the people of the United States are being used and abused by the oil interests and their representatives in Washington D.C.

Off topic, havent they just discovered another massive oil deposit off the coast of Brazil?

posted by Bbcmjeep43 on Jul 13, 2008 at 10:57:12 am     #

A good point raised about a transition to electric vehicles has been -- do we have enough electricity available for such a switch? I've only read a small amount about the problems with switching to electric vehicles because I'm not really interested in the idea, but what I have read seems to insist that we still have to build power plants that would support such a shift.

posted by JJFad on Jul 13, 2008 at 03:08:32 pm     #

every night, when electricity demand drops, the utility companies send the excess electricty into the ground through giant "resistors". It could easily be used to charge the batteries of 75 percent of the vehicle fleet excluding semi trucks, which could and should be replaced by trains. (Wall Street Journal artilce in the last several months, story line is: Plug-in cars, utilities on crash course?) The plug in hybrids would reduce imports of gasoline by 52% per the Journal article, and those plug ins will come a decade before even one drop of oil could come from ANWR.

posted by prime3end on Jul 13, 2008 at 07:59:24 pm     #

Prime, why do you accept that we can't control the oil companies, so that they will attempt maximum exploitation of the public ... yet you assume that utility companies will respond to public needs? The electric utilities have been ramping up their use of natural gas, to run generators during summer peak demands ... which is very profitable for them. They are as bad if not worse than what you purport the oil companies to be.

Electricity generation depends too strongly on petroleum. Converting masses of cars over the electricity will ONLY give the utility companies another excuse to raise the price of a kilowatt.

Along with conservation, we the general public need to go back to controlling the excesses of the public companies. Or they will bleed us dry ... and then give us credit, which will bleed our futures dry.

Conservation at least is within greater control of each individual. It must be the place to start.

Some fraction of demand will eventually convince one of the capitalist scumbags to stop fucking around with money games, and start to invest in alternative energy sources for sale to the public. True, they will only engage in that if they foresee equally great profits in it as opposed to oil -- and if you don't believe that, check out the history and pricing of artificial diamonds. But eventually the ol' Greater Hand of Bankruptcy will arrive and start to push these competitors against each other ... and further on, having made the investments to play in the game, they will just continue to operate at lower profit margins, spitting and cursing at us, the morons buying from them, but sell to us they MUST.

posted by GuestZero on Jul 13, 2008 at 11:19:03 pm     #

I agree , we need to control the excesses of public companies, but they own our leaders, our government. The only reason I have hope for electric cars is that solar panels are coming,, I hope, that are a dollar a watt installed. Every house could be covered with them and we would have a distributed electric grid, no more dependence on the utilities.

conservation is good, and best imposed by high gas and heating and electric prices. I hate to see the money go to the devils its going to, but it will prompt change in energy sources across the board.

posted by prime3end on Jul 14, 2008 at 01:12:39 am     #

I repeat-I (and most people, probably) don't care WHAT powers their vehicle, as long as it's at a reasonable price-but-until you can go at least several hundred miles before recharging, it ain't gonna happen, because the public won't accept anything less.

posted by Darkseid on Jul 14, 2008 at 02:43:35 am     #

July 14, 2008 Toledo Blade story titled Bush to lift executive ban on offshore drilling :

In another push to deal with soaring gas prices, President Bush on Monday will lift an executive ban on offshore drilling that [has] stood since his father was president. But the move, by itself, will do nothing unless Congress acts as well. There are two prohibitions on offshore drilling, one imposed by Congress and another by executive order signed by former President Bush in 1990.

posted by jr on Jul 14, 2008 at 10:04:35 am     #

Darkseid, the electric car we had in the 1990's, GM's "Impact" or EV-1, went 120 miles on a charge with old metal hydride batteries. With lithiums it would go farther than your gas vehicle. People with a brain do car what their car runs on. There are going to be so many drivers that we kill each others children with the exhaust,, ooops, sorry, I forgot, we already are killing our children with exhaust, car and truck exhaust, and coal exhaust, and any chemical anyone wants to exhaust into the air. In between man/man reach arounds, the party of george is killing our planet. Our kids lives just got $990,000 easier and cheaper to END, thanks to this administration. Is your false dogma more important than our childrens' lives and planet? That is the really important point of this debate which should be considered.

posted by prime3end on Jul 14, 2008 at 01:02:32 pm     #

NO....Bush and Cheney DO NOT enter into it.....this horseshit has been going on /building for over THIRTY YEARS. We should have learned during the Carter fiasco / 'energy circus...er....crisis'but we didn't. there's FAR MORE than one or two villains here, and more than enough blame to go around.

posted by Darkseid on Jul 15, 2008 at 03:44:23 pm     #

They are oil men, Bush helped kill the electric car when he hijacked the head of the California Air Resources Board (calif epa), 4 months later he led his board to kill the zero emission vehicle mandate in california, and thus the electric cars were crushed, then shredded. Reagan took the solar panels off the whitehouse roof, the ones Carter put up. He defunded all of Carters alternative energy initiatives. Bush 2 cut the energy effiency and research budgets in every budget cycle. They are oil men, enhancing oil price (higher) is what oil men do. Bush 1 went to war for oil too. Cheney outlawed new wind turbine installations for a while, they tried to do the same thing with new solar installations on govt leased land. They are oil men, thats what they do. The oil crisis is worse than ever, and bush hasn't increased the research budgets that would help us develop new clean energy sources. After you dril in ANWR, ten years later your price per glalon of gas goes down 2 cents per D.O.E. No national mandate to wean us off of oil, instead a hydrogen mandate from natural gas, that will make todays gas prices seem cheap by comparison. Plenty of bad guys to go around, but here we are in this crisis, and bush and cheney are NOT pushing anything to save the country from this crisis. You can't drill out of this shortage, we have to move away from oil.

posted by prime3end on Jul 15, 2008 at 10:35:25 pm     #

Gore is an Oil Man too, what would of changed had he gotten into office? Nothing, with help from Clinton they emptied the national strategic reserve, sold off to his oil company on the cheap.

posted by Linecrosser on Jul 16, 2008 at 01:36:55 pm     #

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