I am not saying it should not be drilled because it will take 5 years, therefore no point drilling at all (in fact my post was pro drilling).
Ever notice how no matter how wide a freeway is, it’s always bumper-to-bumper at rush hour?
Well, that’s how our use of oil is. Our consumption rises to meet the available supply. If we had drilled in ANWR 20 years ago, we’d all be driving cars that got 10 MPG instead of 15. Cheap oil is simply not possible over the long term. We need to price it as if it had value, instead of thinking that America has some sort of natural right to drive inefficient cars subsidized by cheap gasoline.
They plan to put windmills on the platforms and residents don’t want their ocean views interrupted.
I have heard that the drilling platforms outside New Orleans handled Katrina pretty well.
Hmm well sort of, but some not so well.
See here for and over view (and a picture of the damaged Mars TLP) , you can download a report from there as well.
Several jack ups were wiped out completly. For the deeper water TLPs and drillships, these survived, some with substantial damage. I don´t recall any oil spills due to these instalations.
Since Katrina, a fair few new regulations came in, quite a few were pushed by the insurance companies. New mooring requirements for semi subs and stability requirements for jack ups have been some of the contributing factors that have led to a large reduction in the shallow shelf rig fleet. Now this is mostly gas drilling, rather than liquids, but it will have an impact on natural gas prices as shelf drilling will not be able to respond as eaisily to price and demand changes.
I think we can all agree that ANWR is relatively negligible for the potential gain, compared with the potential hassle.
How are we offshore? What’s the estimates? I’ll buy Oredigger’s words, I’m not seeing major problems with some hot Gulf drilling action, here.
I think you’re missing the point. In my humble opinion, proving vast reserves exist and showing the political and engineering willpower to tap them would ease the marketplace, not inflame it. The only scenario I could foresee is OPEC nations cranking down produciton to put a squeeze on supply in order to discourage us from attempting to harness our own reserves.
I also don’t believe it’s a political stunt to argue for exploration, at the very least. New technology will show us what we have, how long it will take to get it and how much production we can expect. I think there’s a lot of uncertainty as to how much reserves in the ground either on land or by sea we really have. We should exhaust every effort to find that information out because even when we have hydrogen or whatnot powered cars, there will still be a huge demand, albeit thankfully reduced, for oil in this country into the foreseeable future, and by that I mean decades at the least.
yeah, isn’t ANWAR basically a pretty big provable reserve but fraught with logistical problems due to it’s remote location?
Petrol prices in the US are clearly affordable, since people are affording it. Petrol costs you nearly half what it does here, yet our economy is doing better than yours. Don’t confuse “much more expensive than I’m used to” with “unaffordable”.
And don’t confuse “I’ve been paying 2 dollars USD per litre for years but have excellent mass transit options” with “gee, my price of gasoline suddenly rose 40 percent and I don’t have an option other than to keep filling this tank”.
No, you have an option - you can move closer to your job, dumbo. Because moving is super-easy and convenient, and real estate that’s in commercial areas is always very cheap.
:dubious: Oh, yes. So are heroin and cocaine prices.
Unless you are talking about unconventional reserves (like tar sands or shale oils) then our total reserves aren’t even close to enough to make a difference. I’m not against offshore drilling or exploitation of ANWR…I simply don’t think it will make a difference in the price of crude on the world market, especially not in the short term.
There is some level of uncertainty as to the extent of our reserves…but not that much uncertainty. The only real vast, untapped reserves left in the US are the shale oils…and they are currently too expensive and labor intensive to economically exploit. That isn’t to say that if we did exploit our more conventional reserves it wouldn’t be profitable…it would be. And I’m not saying that’s a bad thing. I’m just saying that this is a political stunt by Bush et al, and that offshore drilling or drilling in Alaska shouldn’t be opened with the expectation that this will solve anything.
-XT
The U.S. would be drilling about 40mi off the coast of Florida. Do you know who’s drilling 60 miles off the coast? China and Cuba.
Look, this really is nuts. Some of you say it’s not worth drilling because no oil would come online for 5 years. Uh, aren’t governments supposed to plan for the future? Hell, Global Warming isn’t going to have a negative effect for at least a decade or two, so why bother doing anything about it now?
If it’s worth doing one now to save the future, why doesn’t the same logic apply to the other?
Some of you say you should wait until the price of oil goes really, really high. What makes you think it will go that much higher? It will get to a point fairly soon where it doesn’t make any sense to burn it for transportation, and demand for it will will fall. And if that triggers a sea change away from petroleum while the price is high, demand could fall, keep falling, and not come back up again. Oil is never going to be $2000 per barrel, because we’d all be riding bicycles before we’d pay that, and we’d be building nukes as fast as we could.
The bottom line is that the U.S. is sitting on hundreds of billions of dollars of material the world wants to buy. Oil is fungible - even if you just keep it at home, and this reduces foreign purchases, it’s the same thing. The U.S. has money it did not have before.
And opening exploration and development would have an immediate effect on prices, because it would reduce future uncertainty about supply. At the very least it would stabilize the market a little more.
And it may turn out to be absolutely critical if we really are past peak oil and there’s a rapidly building gap between supply and demand. Having any additional oil at all will improve things on the margin - whatever price spike and shortages that might occur would be a little less intense.
So there are very good, serious arguments for drilling. The opposing arguments? Well, since the platforms are environmentally ‘clean’, it comes down to an aesthetic argument - they’re ugly - or a larger political issue, which is that some people simply want to keep the stuff in the ground so we can’t use it and we’re forced to feel the pain, for the good of the planet. That way we will change our evil ways and repent.
I prefer the drilling.
One US senator was talking earlier about how US oil companies are already sitting on tens of millions of drillable acres of land on US soil, but they simply won’t step up to develop those locations. Does anyone know anything about what he was talking about?
Here’s an admittably loaded Committee on Natural Resources report (PDF) regarding unproductive leased lands.
Interactive map showing how many acres are being leased versus how many are producing. Taken from this 2004 article suggesting that much of the unused land gets leased by energy companies to use in various accounting acrobatics.
All those billions of dollars going overseas that can’t be taxed and used to fund energy solutions. But no, we’ll do nothing which is somehow better than something while inflation eats up household budgets. It’s not just a matter of the people driving trucks who suffer, everybody gets screwed.
Does the US Government still maintain oilfields (like teapot Dome) as a strategic reserve for the Navy? I wonder if this reserve would yield a lot of oil with modern drilling technology. How about the Los Angeles basin? hasn’t been drilled since the 1930’s. And the original texas oilfields (like Spindletop)-would there be interest in redrilling those old fileds?
I’m sure there’s nothing to worry about in that particular case, Alaska being so big and all, but remember, what causes animals to breed more is not necessarily good for the ecosystem; they might end in overburdening their food supply.