Posted by
TOTA on Wednesday, July 16, 2008 12:00:00 AM
Reid's latest
screed about drilling boasts that 106,000 square miles, a total area about the size of Colorado, is currently open to exploration and drilling and is not being drilled. Reid is implying that this is a huge area, but consider a
map of the US and the outer continental shelf (OCS) provided by the Dept of the Interior.
Reid of course refers to the now famous "68 million acres not being drilled". Reid notes that only 24 million leased acres are in production. His argument is that oil companies are sitting on fat deposits they simply refuse to exploit. Greedy beyond words in every other conceivable way, big oil must be waiting until the last minute to develop this 68 million oil rich acres, hoping that Haliburton will drive prices higher first, or whatever nut-jobbery is in fashion around the Reid asylum on any given day. The truth is that companies are drilling where it is profitable to do so.
But back to the map. Montana has the square mile area (145,000) closest to the total of leased square miles (130,000). For those waiting for the short bus, Montana is the big one at the top, with the Nixon profile. So Montana is larger than all of the controlled territory that our benevolent congress has allowed energy companies to explore. I would guess from eyeballing the map that it's less than 2% of the total land mass under our control, a pittance. Humans occupy a tiny percentage of the country, let's open the rest up. We can reclaim land, and priority for new wildlife refuges can be given to resource-poor areas. We're going to plumb all of these resources eventually anyway, we might as well send as clear a signal to the world as we can: America is back, we still have will.
Reid's essential dishonesty is also on display in his missive, it should be read with caution. For example, his arguments about the bulk of oil on the OCS already being open to leasing and drilling are misleading to say the least. He speaks of technically recoverable oil - oil already found. But much of the OCS has never been explored, we have no idea how much is there, for certain. The map above estimates that on the OCS alone, there are 86 billion barrels of unmapped recoverable oil as of 2006. Note that the same bureau's
2003 estimate was 76 billion barrels.
The more we know about the OCS, the more resource rich it looks to be, particularly for oil. In the three years between these Dept. of the Interior estimates, the oil estimate went up by 13%, the gas estimate by 3%.
Mr Reid and his cohorts face a mounting public firestorm. This question has been front and center for some time now, and they stubbornly cling to their juvenile worldview. This nation consumes 20 million barrels of oil a day, nearly 3 gallons per person. Day in, day out. 14 million of those barrels are imported. Americans simply will not tolerate ongoing risk of financial ruin because Harry Reid thinks oil and coal are dirty. He and his ilk are literally holding the entire planet hostage - as the US goes economically, so goes the world. If they don't budge, they threaten the entire world's economy. Food riots are already commonplace in the developing world.
It would be bad enough if this myopia were occurring in isolation. The fact that it is happening alongside the chaos in the middle east and the credit crisis makes it unforgivable.
TOTA
