How Much Offshore Oil/Gas Are We Not Drilling?

[Huerta88]

http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/C/CONGRESS_ENERGY?SITE=AP&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT&CTIME=2006-05-18-20-32-34

Don’t want to argue about the policy decision.

Just wonder how much oil/gas we are talking about, and where. Given the oil wells in L.A., I’d imagine there’s some offshore there too. And if the Chinese are finding it off Cuba, maybe there’s some off Fla.

Also – how did the Western Gulf get to be the only exception to this?

[Jake]

I would like to know this too.
Bump

[Huerta88]

This isn’t fully satisfactory as if I’m reading it right, it is a website which quotes (somewhat critically) a newspaper article’s characterization of what the Minerals Management Service “estimates” as to “undiscovered reserves” (so that’s somewhat less than ironclad), but:

http://mediamatters.org/items/200605090001

Even ANWR’s huge reserves pale compared to oil located throughout the waters of the U.S. Outer Continental Shelf (OCS). The Minerals Management Service (MMS) of the Department of Interior estimates that the OCS contains 76 billion barrels of oil in yet-to-be-discovered fields. That’s three and a half times U.S. proved oil reserves. Offshore oil reserves in the Gulf of Mexico alone are estimated to be more than 40 billion barrels, much of it precluded from exploration by official U.S. policy. Compared to U.S. proved natural-gas reserves of 189 trillion cubic feet, the MMS estimates that the Gulf of Mexico alone holds more than 200 trillion cubic feet of undiscovered technically recoverable natural gas.