all of Alaska (not just ANWAR). Would it be enough oil to make a difference? Also, I noted on a recent trip to Evansville maybe twenty oil wells right here in little old Indiana. This led me to ponder that if there is oil in Indiana of all places then there’s probably lots more in places like Pennsylvania that was missed by the Rockefellars back in the early part of the last century.
Also, while I’m on the subject I seem to recall an article in Popular Science about ten years ago that addressed a “new” oil “producing” technique that promised to give enourmous output from old “tapped out” wells. Seems like it involved putting high pressure water or steam into the ground and getting oil out of the “horizontal areas” of the ground that are somehow missed during normal drilling. Whatever became of this approach?
Finally, it seems like Mexico& Venezuala have a good deal of oil. Couldn’t we offer them some sort of “sweat heart deal” to draw them out of OPEC (thus keeping their oil out of world markets where China could gobble it up).
Well, lotta questions there, but they’re interesting ones, so I’ll give 'em a shot. Short answer just below; details following.
Short answer: no, not for any time frame longer than a couple of years, and no matter what the US does short of, say, banning all gasoline-powered personal transportation, it will have to continue importing a large portion of its energy supply.
Now, what details I could find in about 15 minutes of research:
Offshore California is the most-explored province of the three, so estimated reserves there are likely to be the most accurately-determined. From a Resource Agency of California site:
Little actual drilling has been done off Florida, so any reserves estimates at this time are highly speculative. The only info I could find in a quick check was from anti-drilling sources; those suggest that known reserves off Florida come up to maybe 2 1/2 months of current US oil usage.
Accoring to some DOE figures I found, total estimated reserves for Alaska (onshore and offshore) are about 45% of the total reserves remaining in the lower 48. Thus a major exploitation program likely would significantly reduce US dependency on imported hydrocarbons in the short term (albeit at a high environmental impact cost). Nevertheless, since the US, including Alaska, has only about 2% of world reserves, but consume something like 25% (approx.) of world prouction, it would soon (no more than a decade or two) have to turn back to imports to meet its energy needs.
Steam injection has been used for decades, and is primarily a tool for mobilising heavy, tarry oils at relatively shallow depths. It is a commonly-used technique in older fields onshore California. So far as I know, it is of no benefit in light oil or gas fields, and the generation of the steam and drilling of injection wells, of course, consumes large amounts of energy on its own.
What sort of sweetheart deal could the US offer that would not involve paying higher than market rates for oil and gas from these countries?
One of the problems with drilling for our own oil is that the oil market is completely transparent. We drill for oil, increasing the supply, driving down the price of oil all over the globe. The US then, while paying all of the environmental burden, and losing the value of the oil reserves, which, after all, will almost certainly increase in value faster than inflation, derives only 25% of the benefit, since that is the percentage of the world’s energy supply which we use. The remaining 75% of the benefit goes to the other countries who are net importers of oil.
The time will certainly come when the offshore oil is worth more than the environmental impact of drilling for it, and as the technology to reduce the impact improves that time grows closer, but I don’t think the time is yet.
A lot of those oil wells you saw in Indiana (also southern Illinois and then east to Pennsylvania) can produce only a few barrels per month. Given the cost of running and maintaining the wells and transporting the oil, they simply aren’t cost efficient unless the price of crude oil gets really, really high.
Also, a lot of the oil in those areas is less than prime. In southern Illinois, for example, it has a high level of sulpher. Refiners have to work around that, and they don’t like to. Consequently, oil from those wells sells at less than the price of “sweet” oil.
I’m going to have to search my old Popular Science issues to find the article. I can’t imagine that they would have given such emphasis to a technology that has been in long use. It had a title something like “could this be the technology that gives of energy independence for the next hundred years?”
The Hibernia field(off Newfoundland) is just starting production…it is pretty big. Sable Island has gas under it. And, back in the 1970’s, Shell (I think) drilled a few test wells of New Jersey-some small gas deposits were hit.
Really, the future is off-shore…and we now have the technology to drill in really deep water. So I expect that as oil prices climb, we will be seeing more drilling off our coasts.
About the Santa Barbara Channel-isn’t this shut down because the State of California stopped all new drilling?
You aren’t thinking of shale oil extraction, are you?
There are shale fields in the western U.S. that have oil trapped in the rock, like water in a sponge. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, there was considerable research on extracting that oil from the shale. The only problem was the extraction process caused the shale to expand, like popcorn. That meant that the oil companies had to come up with a way to replace a bigger volume of material than they had originally dug up. The environmental consequences meant the process was not economically feasable, although research continued on a much smaller scale.
Nope. There won’t be any new rigs going up any time in the forseeable future [sub](BTW, that’s my favorite oxymoron)[/sub], but the ones that are already there continue to produce oil and natural gas.
