I was just wondering if there was someone out there using this number.
It happens to exceed the absolute largest estimate (the 5% chance number) of technically recoverable oil (if money were no object) of the USGS.
If you just pulled it out of your ass, it’s not very interesting. [Funny one would have an occasion to use that sentence.]
Actually, from your own message above:
Gosh, someone has a overinflated sense of self importance. The drilling will be to extract oil that we all need. Pissing off the idiot greens is just a added bonus.
Except for oil consumers, you mean.
This is absolutely false. I have many friends who work in Prudhoe Bay, and I have it straight from them that, not only do caribou not avoid development during calving, they positively seek it out. It seems the concrete drilling pads offer an escape from the clouds of mosquitoes that enshroud the tundra, so caribou will come right up onto the pad to give birth. The caribou herd near Prudhoe Bay is much larger than it was before drilling began.
For the record, I am one ‘liberal’ who supports drilling in ANWR, but I doubt it will have any significant impact on oil prices or availability.
Apparently my understanding was wrong, then.
How will it benefit oil consumers? There’s not enough there to have any impact on prices. The only person to benefit will be the oil company that gets to make a quick short term profit by capitalizing on already high oil prices. In fact, the high oil prices are the only reason this venture is even feasible right now for the extracting company.
Ah, well it’s been quite a while (a year or so) since I wrote that.
Kind of gives insight into ANWR.org’s credibility, then don’t it?
It’s not so much how much is there as it is how to get it here.
The oil won’t start arriving for 7-10 years (at least)
Drilling in ANWR is good for us all.
However, it’s really not going to help in the long run because the real issue is refinery capacity. The treehuggers have blocked every attempt to build new refineries in this country for the last 20+ years; until we get more refinery and production capacity, having an expanded source isn’t going to help us out all that much.
We also need a change in thinking in two major areas:
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We really need to have new vehicle technology. This could be accomplished by something as simple as the government implementing laws that state that all fossil fuel powered vehicles operated in the USA have to have a minimum MPG of 40 for city and 50 for highway (as an example) and put a deadline in place, say 7 years from now to allow the manufacturers time to ramp up for it.
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We also need to understand that OPEC is waging economic warfare against the USA. This could easily be addressed, as a start, by diverting every penny of foreign aid earmarked for OPEC countries into a development fund to assist in the refinery building and new vehicle development listed above.
Really, we need to have a major effort to create a new energy source.
If the Us were the Opec of the coming century it would be very helpful to many of our foreign policy entanglements.
We could call more shots through the use of soft power and other alternatives that’re cheaper than military force- simple witholding for starters.
As I have pointed out, the money spent on securing our access to ME oil had been spent on alt energy research, there’d be thousands of universities and research centers with $100,000,000 + grants.
It’s a very important issue that will have to be addressed at some point.
Baloney. We could easily make up for the mythical supply shortfalls with modest increased support for conservation efforts over the same period, which would benefit the whole world, and accomplish at least as much in terms of reducing our dependency on ME crude. This is ideology, pure and simple. It’ll keep the AL Pipeline people in business for a couple more decades, we’ll suck it all dry for what amounts to a relatively expensive drop in the bucket, and alter a pristine wilderness in the process. It’s already been show that simply having facilites present significantly alter caribou migration patterns to great detriment, and on and on. The ecosystem there has already been rendered more fragile by global warming, so it’s not like we can extrapolate impact from the time the Pipeline was built in the first place.
This is all about business interests flexing muscle. The “benefit” is that they can demonstrate that when there are sympathetic politicians in Washington, environmental concerns can be swept away. Many feel this is proper, as absolutely nothing should impede the flow of capital. I tend to find that ideological stance myopic, selfish, and destructive in the long term. We’d gain a lot more by reducing our dependence fossil fuels, rather than drilling for more of it. But the oil lobby has Bushco firmly in its pocket, and that ought to be absurdly obvious. Drilling in ANWR makes zero long-term fiscal sense, and even less ecological sense. It’s simply a means for conservatives to strike back at “special interests”.
I’m less concerned about that than others are. It’s true that the watermelons have stopped new refineries, but that’s really had more effect on pollution (they caused more of it) than on domestic refinery capacity. Through creeping capacity additions on existing plants industry capacity has increased at the same rate as refined product demand even as the number of refineries has dropped by half or so in the past generation. It’s true that right now we’re in a squeeze and that some people are making big bets on that squeeze continuing (building clean product tankers, for example). It’s also true that there are some regional squeezes which are persistent (I’m thinking of PADD IV in particular here). But overall I have confidence that the industry can continue to increase existing capacity over the intermediate term.
Who’s to say that oil taken from ANWR will stay in the US?
What’s to prevent the oil companies from selling where they can get the biggest profit? That might not be the US.
Well, any oil which comes through the trans-Alaska pipline must by law be sold in the US – Congress could easily put similar restrictions on oil out of ANWR.
That would be stupid, though. Oil is (almost entirely) fungible. If there’s bigger profit to be found in Japan, say, than if ANWR oil is restricted to the US than Mexican or Californian or middle east oil will go to Japan instead until the imbalance is corrected. A lot of people in the oil industry who are not oil companies depend on exactly those kind of short-term arbitrages to stay in business and the liquidity (heh) of the market helps keep prices lower than they would be otherwise. Removing ANWR oil from those liquidity considerations would actually make it more expensive to US consumers.
Wouldn’t matter. The population will increase by much more than 5% in 10 years, so any benefit of conservation will be more than cancelled out.
Well then increase the conservation efforts to keep pace with population.
Of course, it’s much easier to just do nothing.
The 5% number has already been adjusted for projections of future usage levels.
Even if it hadn’t been adjusted for 2020 projections…
If the ANWR will be supplying 5% of today’s usage, an increase in population, and therefore presumably usage as well, would translate into ANWR supply being an even smaller percentage of what was used. This would mean that a 5% decrease in usage would exceed the percentage supplied by ANWR.
Furthermore, 5% is still 5% benefit no matter how large the number that it’s apercentage of.
Okay, I’m really done now.
The US Government will get revenues from the use of the pipeline that will move the ANWR oil around. I’d support putting every cent of that money into next-generation energy research.
Radio talk-show host Mr. KABC was discussing this last night. Sorry I don’t have a better source, but he made the point that U.S. oil companies are currently exporting oil to countries such as Korea and Japan. He believes that we could reduce dependence on foreign oil simply by having the oil companies stop exporting oil, and he doesn’t believe ANWR drilling is going to have any effect on prices. If this is true, it does seem rather ridiculous to cite dependence on foreign oil as the reason we need to invade protected wilderness, when we aren’t even using all the oil we already have.