I don’t see how enriching a few landowners (for the drilling on privately owned land) and the federal government (for the drilling in national parks and offshore) does anything for energy independence.
What oil? You know, there’s different kinds? These different kinds sell at different prices. These benchmarks like “Texas Light Sweet Crude” are based on sulfur content and specific gravity derived from samples taken from wells decades ago, many of which are no longer in production.
Are you sure?
(Hint: You’re quite mistaken. An oil company is under no compulsion to “dump” its oil into “the global commodity bucket.” It might have a hard time, if it tried.
At least in US markets delivery of the actual commodity is rare Typically it is cancelled out with a matching contract prior to expiration, having served its primary purpose as a price hedge rather than as an actual inventory order)
Well, if you’re looking at an arbitrary ten-year timeframe, you’re probably right. Then again, the same can be said of clean coal technology, more nuclear power plants, much natural gas exploration, and virtually any truly new idea that someone may come up with in the next few years.
Of course, if we had been doing those things for the last ten years, they’d be right around the corner. And what is so magical about ten years? If some great idea were to pay off big in year 11 or 12, is it not worth doing?
But drilling for oil now wouldn’t preclude us from doing those other things now, as well. Why must it be one oe the other?
Well, you see, if the Gov’mint or the landowners reserved the right to the oil than it would have to stay here instead of gettin’ dumped in yer bucket. We could, as a nation, have our own bucket, kind of like independent from everybody else.
Ain’t that a great idea? I better hurry up and get to it before somebody else beats me…
Aww shucks! Seems like lots of countries and landowners reserve the rights. I’ll be damned if Schlumberger doesn’t do this with countries like Russia that don’t want to give up their oil, or be forced to pay market price for the fruits of their own land.
Schlumberger? I thought that they made mattresses.
There ya go! Problem solved. All we got to do is tell the lessees we want leases like the kind Schlumberger has the Russkies.
The beauty of it is even on the other kind of leases already in place, we can use something called “Force Majeure” which says stuff about leases being subject to change and alteration by governing state or federal laws!
Sumbitch!
I don’t reckon so. If you want to seperate the wheat from the chaff you gotta pound it with a brick a few times.
I dunno Scylla, you can be funny when you tell a story, but this parody, satire (?) stuff you’re attempting in this thread is really lame.
I’m not sure I follow. You’re advocating that any oil the companies obtain from governmental leases be sold for use only in the US?
Then you would just cry about big government interfering with the free market and whining about how the government has no right to tell poor downtrodden oil companies where they can sell their oil. Somehow you would find a way to blame liberals…
I tend to agree with the OP. Mainly for the global market argument, but it is interesting to see it assaulted. Keep it up. Thanks.
In the big picture, I just don’t see more oil as any actual solution. More oil is trying to hold onto the past. A hopeful bandaid. It’s like people 2-3 years ago going, “Yeah we’ll just refinance the house again next year for some more dough!” Conservation and alternative sources are obviously the future. *More oil *discourages conservation. Humanity has a real habit of running things dry though, even when the problems become painfully obvious. So part of me wants to say, “Fuck It! Drill it all yesterday so we can move on already.” I feel like nothing will really change until the oil is finally gone, or everything starts falling apart. It’s not so much about the environmental impact of the drilling, as it is the backwardness the principle.
It seems odd to me as well, but that’s what the experts say. Bear in mind that drilling is, at best, a long, expensive, laborious process, and rough terrain and long supply lines for equipment and such makes that worse.
True, but I put it to you that investing in solar and wind, for example, would be better at creating jobs and generating energy.
And as a separate opinion… I wouldn’t mind the govt nationalizing the oil! I want my CA Permanent Fund dividend checks. 
The magical thing about ten years is that it’s a long damned time and thus not something that’s useful for short-term ameliorations for the current problems.
It doesn’t, of course, but a. there is a finite amount of money that can be spent in this area, and b. I don’t want people to focus on oil as the Wonder Fuel[super]tm[/super] that is the only thing we should research.
Scylla, I gotta say, your sarcasm/irony/playacting/whatever is hopelessly opaque.
SPEAK AMERICAN! 
Is your dropping of the term “Force Majeure” an indication that you advocate having the govt. forbid oil companies from selling their oil outside of the US? If so, please tell how on earth we could accomplish such a feat of rank socialism. (Isn’t that what has drawn the US’s ire vs. Chavez?) If not, please stop the posturing and just explain your point. Or go play-act in some other thread. MPSIMS, perhaps?
Actually, a flail is preferred. Anyone want to volunteer to thrash some sense into Scylla?
Why better? How better? Oil is a valuable commodity after all, so it’s worth a lot…so, the taxes on it will be worth more. Solar? It’s not ready for large scale deployment, so that taxes generated on it will be less for the foreseeable future.
Again, I don’t see why we can’t have both. Oil now (well, in a few years) AND solar, wind, geo-thermal, etc. The thing is, the OP’s argument is that drilling for oil does ‘NOTHING’ for US energy independence…which isn’t true. It has a non-zero effect because we DO benefit from it economically…which provides capital and taxes to explore alternatives. Since right now alternatives are, by and large, NOT economically competitive with existing forms of energy at the scales we actually need that energy for, it’s going to need to be subsidized and capitalized until it is competitive. That will be done through taxes and through private investment of capital.
How does your statement make it irrelevant? Oil is a valuable commodity…it’s worth a lot of money. Alternative energy has future potential, perhaps, depending on technical development…but oil is valuable TODAY and will be so in the short term future (say, next 50 years). Again, how ‘better’? Why ‘better’? Based on what?
This is sort of like saying that we shouldn’t mine our gold deposits because we may be able to get mithril 20 years down the pike, and mithril is obviously better than gold…
The keen observer would note that there is no reason we can’t mine gold today (or in the next 5 years) AND mine mithril 20 years or so from now. In fact…seems like a good plan from an economic perspective to maximize our resources, especially if we think that once mithril comes on stream that gold may become worthless…or worth less.
-XT
The oil would be drilled by an international corporation and sold to whoever they wanted to. We have a small amount of the world supply and use huge amounts. The pipeline does not exist and it may never exist. The argument is a red herring. It simply distracts us from the real issue. We have to cut back on oil use and build alternative energy systems.
That’s exactly why you seek energy or manufacturing independence: so that the U.S. can keep going if things like oil and military technology can no longer be imported reliably.
It is valuable to stockholders, but drilling HERE!, drilling NOW! is of little value to the consumer with regard to either reducing prices or reducing dependence on foreign oil.
Conflating solar and wind power with a mythical substace is rather overstating the rarity of the former, don’t you think? There are no insurmountable technical issues to exploiting solar and wind power; unlike mithril which is, well, totally fictional.
The keen observer would note that chasing cheap oil by exploiting the environment does nothing to bring about independence, and only postpones the changeover from fossil fuel to renewable energy sources by a very few years.
Oil may be fungible, but it is also subject to control through cartels like OPEC, or control militarily, such as by shutting down the Straits of Hormuz.
Look, the whole ‘energy independence’ thing that both sides are peddling is a charade. It’s true that drilling for more won’t fundamentally change the equation, and it’s also true that drilling today won’t be converted to gas in the tank for maybe 5-10 years or more.
But you know what? Neither will nuclear plants started today. Or wind farms or solar plants started today. The fact is, everyone who’s serious and understands the energy markets knows that oil and natural gas are going to be a big part of the energy equation for decades to come. So you might as well start drilling for it now.
Obama’s energy plan is incoherent. It amounts to little more than repeating the buzz word ‘invest’, and promising that if we just try really hard and spend more money, this problem will go away. It’s laughable. Anybody who understands energy knows that wind and solar and other renewable forms of energy are simply not up to the task of solving the problem.
McCain’s is better, but still not sufficient. He’s right about drilling - one little thing the ‘what does it matter?’ crowd forget is that it brings in MONEY. Money that’s currently flowing out of the U.S. stays in the U.S. 700 billion a year flows out - if you can make that 600 billion a year, that $100 billion pays for a hell of a lot of stuff.
And yes, the oil companies will profit. But their profit will only be a few percentage points. Why? Because first, the government will take a cut. Then they will have to absorb the cost of drilling and exploration. And why does that cost money? Because they need to hire people to do it. Because they need ships, and drilling rigs, and head offices, and all the other infrastructure bits that go along with it. That creates jobs. Jobs mostly in the United States, rather than jobs in Saudi Arabia.
If you want to see whether drilling for oil helps the people as a whole, drop by Alberta sometime. We have the strongest economy in North America. And why? because we’re producing energy.
‘Energy Indepdendence’ isn’t the only issue here. The U.S. is facing huge structural problems economically. Not just the current financial crunch, but the impending retirement of the Baby Boomers is going to devastate Medicare and to a lesser extent Social Security.
There are estimated to be about 120 billion barrels of recoverable oil remaining to be exploited in the U.S, and on the outer continental shelf. ANWR alone could have as much as 16 billion barrels of oil.
Think about that - let’s say in 10 years oil is $200/bbl. ANWR represents a financial winfall then of 3.2 trillion dollars. That’s more than 5 times what the Iraq war has cost. That’s four times bigger than the financial bailout that was just passed. For all the screaming the left has done about financial cost of the Iraq war, they seem awfully cavalier about leaving far more money than that in the ground for the sake of preserving 2000 acres of tundra.
The outer continental shelf is estimated to have perhaps 80-90 billion barrels of oil in it. This is not an insignificant amount of oil At current consumption, the U.S. could survive for more than 10 years on that oil alone. That would be 7 trillion dollars that stayed mostly in the U.S. and did not go to the middle east. Do you think the U.S. might be a little better off with 7 trillion extra dollars to spend in the next 50 years?
Everyone wants alternative energy. But it’s a big damned problem. Barack Obama doesn’t have a clue how to solve that problem, and neither does John McCain. Ultimately, it will be the market that solves it. In the meantime, more exploration and drilling will help keep prices from spiking hard, and will help prop up the U.S. economy.
Faced with all that, what’s the anti-drilling argument? Vague warnings about unspecified environmental damage. You’re paying a hell of a price for that.
What are you talking about? The oil we drill TODAY is worth billions of dollars in tax revenue in the US a year. It generates thousands of jobs. And injecting additional oil and potential slack into the market will almost certainly lower the price, if just a little.
As for ‘dependence on foreign oil’…I note that a good percentage of the evil foreigners we import oil from is Canada and Mexico. Even if it were Iran though, us NOT drilling doesn’t help one way or the other…it just generates less tax revenue and less US jobs.
How are either of those a good thing?
So is wide scale solar or wind today. Attempting to claim that either of these technologies are ready for wide scale use, and stating that a commodity that we KNOW is valuable should just be left in the ground is on par I’d say…which was my point.
No, it injects capital into our system and buys us time for all your unicorn technologies to actually mature enough to be feasible…in theory anyway. If we drill or don’t drill we are STILL going to be using oil for the foreseeable future…THAT is the reality. If we don’t drill or if we do drill we are still going to be pursuing alternatives, regardless.
However, if we don’t drill then we don’t generate those billions of dollars, we don’t generate the associated jobs, and we don’t provide the world market with that additional oil. We lose all that while we sit around with our thumb up our collective ass and STILL use oil and wait for the mithril to become available…a few decades down the pike.
-XT