An article at CNN notes that new evidence suggests Alaska’s oil reserves are 90% smaller than previously thought.
Does this change anything for US energy policy or is it merely a hiccup that means little in the larger scheme of things?
Just want to say that the construction “90% less” is rather innumerate. I think it might be meant to mean “reserves are but 10% of previous estimates” but there is no telling.
No, it changes nothing. This is just propaganda from some scientists with a liberal agenda, why should it change anything?
Before you flame me, please note I am only joking…
Obviously we need to drill now before even more of the oil disappears.
No. The people who say drill baby drill are not the kind of people to let facts get in their way.
It can be spun that it is now even more important to develop the off shore reserves, and that the BP disaster should not deter from drill-baby-drill in the Gulf. We will need that oil now more than before … unless we can wean ourselves off of oil some, somehow.
It cannot be properly protected unless it is in barrels!
We need to drill them over there, so they don’t drill us here.
On a serious note, and I’m not really in either camp on this issue, is there a significance that the article talks about “conventional” oil? What about unconventional oil?
We collectively agreed to a massive pipeline project and then some politicians drew an arbitrary line in the sand that negated the full utility that infrastructure. What will happen is that the Russians or Canadians will drill in the Arctic and laugh as the tankers sail past the mosquito invested lump of nothing that is the North slope tip of ANWR. We could be slant drilling into a very small section of this area with the stroke of a pen. And by very small I’m talking about fractions of a fraction of land.
It has its charms, but is rarely welcome in polite company.
If I’m reading the article right, it turns out that what was previously thought to be areas oil is actually has natural gas instead. Yet the same report also says there is less natural gas than was previously predicted. So, basically, there’s a lot more natural gas than we thought but also it’s less than we thought. Huh? I know it’s possible the previous estimates for both oil and gas were just that wrong, but this article really makes me go ‘WTF?’
Anyway, this won’t have too much effect on drill baby drill. Oil is still there, just not as much as we thought, but still more than enough that some will want to drill it. Personally, I think we should go ahead and use up other nations oil while they still have it and are willing to sell it. If the world transfers to green energy, then fine, we still got oil for the stuff there is no replacement/the replacement is very expensive. If the world doesn’t transfer to green energy, then we got a supply of oil available once it becomes so rare other nations refuse to sell what little they have left. Either way, reserves should be held in reserve until needed, and right now it’s not really needed.
Here it is from the horse’s mouth (slightly less dumbed down than CNN), if anyone’s interested: http://www.usgs.gov/newsroom/article.asp?ID=2622&from=rss_home
The fact sheet and little powerpoint show on this page is also a little more technical: http://energy.usgs.gov/alaska/npra.html
Are you saying the Russians and the Canadians are going to drink our milkshake?
Somebody else drilled first! Probably Russia! They’re right next door!
I don’t believe you! Can you see it from there?
No! That proves how sneaky they are!
They are not and never were talking about reserves. This is entirely about the amount of undiscovered resources. Huge difference. Massive difference. It’s the difference between your current income and your projected future lifetime earnings. One of those figures is important in keeping you alive you right now. The other is really important in helping banks decide how much to lend you but won’t keep you alive today unless you are prepared to risk borrowing against it.
The volume of oil reserves in the area continues to increase of reserves, unsurprisingly, since they only become reserves when someone test drills, and the decrease in undiscovered resource estimates results from a massive increase in test drilling.
Estimates of undiscovered resources are always tricky because, well, they are undiscovered. It’s a lot of guesswork. Oil often turns up where it wasn’t predicted to be, and it often isn’t where it looked likely to have been, as in this case.
“gas that was dissolved in oil came out of solution, forming gas caps and displacing oil downward into poorer quality reservoir rocks.”
IOW the oil is still there, it’s just trapped in, presumably, shales.
Gas volume is dependent on pressure. “gas present in the subsurface expanded so much that it completely displaced oil from reservoirs”. So, greater areas of gas, less volume at any given pressure.
Define “need”. The economy has tanked, there’s a massively high deficit and a serious balance of payments problem. If things can be brought under control faster by reducing oil imports and stimulating home-grown jobs then its needed.
The problem with waiting until the uttermost dire need is that you will never use it until it’s too late because things can always imaginably get worse.
Well, yes, but as I understand it the so-called “drill baby drill” argument is that we could meet our oil needs for some long length of time using domestic supply, and so our long-term energy policy should focus on encouraging more domestic production. That it now appears that a significant amount of the oil we assumed to be in the ground in our biggest domestic oil source isn’t there and/or is not economically recoverable, the prospect of expanding domestic reserves and production becomes more difficult. For that argument, the undiscovered figure is the more important one.
Of course, a usual corollary to the “drill baby drill” is that we should be drilling in ANWR as well, and this report does not address those resources (although since the problem with earlier estimates was failing to account for a particular tectonic episode in the rocks’ thermal maturation history, maybe some of that might apply to ANWR). If anything, the fact that the NPR-A fields are going to play out sooner might cause the “DBD” contingent to redouble their efforts towards ANWR.
There’s one reason to drill the oil – because it’s there and we can use it. This reason you reference has always been off because the U.S. burns through over 6 billion barrels of oil a year. That’s over 20 million a day. 15 or 20 billion barrels sounds like a lot, but it wouldn’t do much for the long term unless we dramatically cut down consumption.
Well, yeah, that’s kind of what I’m saying. Clearly our current proven reserves won’t last particularly long given our consumption, so the “DBD” argument almost by definition relies on unproved resources.