There is little question of BP's culpability in the current Gulf of Mexico oil spill. Cutting corners, sacrificing sound procedures for profitability, and so on apparently caused certain safeguards to not be in place. One need only listen to the tapes of a call from the oil rig shortly after it exploded, to a home office in Houston, in which the rig supervisor exclaimed, "Are you f***ing happy? I told you this was going to happen, and now it has!" BP has, and should continue to bear the major expense for the errors that created this environmental catastrophe.
But taking a longer view of what has happened reveals perhaps equal, if not greater culpability, on those in Congress and the environmental lobby who have set and guided American energy and environmental policy for decades. Ask this question - why are companies like BP, Exxon-Mobil, Shell, and others drilling for oil in reserves that are a mile beneath the ocean surface, with no available technology to deal with or respond to leaks or blowouts at that depth? The answer? Primarily, lack of access to land-based, plentiful oil reserves within the confines of the United States.
Most of us have heard of "ANWAR", the Alaska National Wildlife Reserve (ANWR). Proposed drilling there has been stymied by environmental concerns, even though the footprint of drilling operations in the massive area have been compared to a postage stamp on a football field. Remember all the controversy over the Alaska pipeline, that was supposed to devastate caribou herds? Experience has shown that the caribou actually thrive near the pipeline, and sleep near it because it is warmer than the surrounding tundra.
Even if we forget ANWR, there are other plentiful reserves that remain untapped. One such reserve is called the Bakken formation, which sits under western North and South Dakota and eastern Montana. The Bakken is the largest domestic oil discovery since Alaska’s Prudhoe Bay, and has the potential to eliminate all American dependence on foreign oil. The Energy Information Administration (EIA) estimates it at 503 billion barrels.. Even if just 10% of the oil is recoverable, we're looking at a resource base worth more than $5.3 trillion. This is light, sweet oil, and those billions of barrels will cost Americans just $16 per barrel - not the $70+ that is the present world oil market price.
That's not all. Hidden 1,000 feet beneath the surface of the Rocky Mountains lies the largest untapped oil reserve in the world. It is more than 2 TRILLION barrels. On August 8, 2005, President Bush mandated its extraction. In four and a half years of high oil prices none has been extracted. With this mother load of oil why are we still fighting over off-shore drilling?
How do these reserves stack up with the big producers? 8-times as much oil as Saudi Arabia; 18-times as much oil as Iraq; 21-times as much oil as Kuwait; 22-times as much oil as Iran; 500-times as much oil as Yemen, just to name a few. THIS, President Obama, is how to develop energy independence - free ourselves from the foreign oil producers, allow our economy to ease back from higher energy prices and heal, and use the economic savings to invest in those precious alternative energy sources. This is a national security issue, too. The benefits of freeing ourselves from dependence upon unstable foreign powers are incalculable.
A Rand Corporation report issued in 2005 contains some additional stunning information - stunning to me, that is. Estimates of the oil contained in the Green River Basin range from 1.5 to 1.8 TRILLION barrels, of which between 500 BILLION to 1.1 TRILLION barrels are deemed recoverable by currently-known technology. This is more than THREE TIMES the predicted Saudi reserves, and at current American usage levels, taking the mid-point reserve of 800 BILLION barrels, this would yield enough oil to last the U.S. 400 YEARS. Yet there has been no significant discussion of oil shale development in U.S. energy policy since the 1980's.
Oil shale was once considered undesirable because extraction required mining of the shale and cooking it to extract the oil, leaving tons of waste rock. There is now, however, commercially feasible technology to extract the oil without mining the shale, and thus no good reason to not utilize this resource.
This is the patent stupidity of American energy policy, fully exposed by the BP disaster in the Gulf. We have sufficient land-based reserves to provide this country with full energy independence and the concurrent national security that would be derived from same. These reserves can be utilized with substantially less environmental risk than offshore drilling, where any oil spill is subject to the wind and currents of the oceans, and being spread in far wider areas than would any comparable land spill. Indeed, the likelihood of a "comparable land spill" is miniscule, because land-based drilling is far more accessible to repair and/or shut off a well, than a well one mile deep in the ocean.
Can you spell A-S-S B-A-C-K-W-A-R-D-S?
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