McCain's Energy Plan Will Drill Us Into a Deeper Crisis pt1 ( Archived) (15)

Would more permits for oil drilling benefit U.S. consumers? McCain would like you to think so, but there's more to the story than he's telling.

The worst thing you can do when you are in a hole is keep on drilling. The country is in a hole called energy crisis and oil addiction. But Senator John McCain and President Bush are planning to keep on drilling.

On June 17, the same day his campaign premiered a TV ad on which he boasted to have stood up to the White House's global warming policy, Sen. McCain changed course by announcing his plan, which was supported by President Bush, to open up the rest of the country's coasts to oil drilling. This, he said, "would be very helpful in the short term in resolving our energy crisis."

But two weeks earlier, on May 29, the same Sen. McCain reiterated his opposition to opening up the country's coasts to oil exploration by saying that the necessary infrastructure would take "years to develop" and that "it would only postpone or temporarily relieve our dependency on fossil fuels."

Which McCain is right, the June 17 one or the May 29 one? Are you and the rest of consumers going to benefit from drilling our shores and our dearest and most pristine places? Let's put all this crude rhetoric through the truth refinery.

For starters, Sen. McCain's plan will not benefit the consumer until 2030 and only marginally. For instance, the big prize of the new oil drilling boondoggle would be the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska. If drilling this, one of the last complete ecosystems left in the Western Hemisphere, would start right now, consumers would not see the first drop of fuel until 2018, it would take another decade to reach peak production and even then it would lower gasoline prices by just three cents, according to federal estimates.

Implicitly, the Senator McCain and President Bush plan blame the environmental movement for hand-cuffing the country's energy alternatives by opposing opening more coastal areas to oil drilling. What neither Senator McCain nor President Bush would tell you is that Big Oil already has access to 6,000 offshore leases that they are not using.

The American people aren't stupid, when an independant government agency tells them drilling more oil wells will take years to yield the first drop of oil and lower the price of gasoline only a few cents a gallon I think even poor people will understand that it's a waste of time and money. The only people that will benifit from more drilling are the oil companies.

Here's a little tidbit I bet you didn't know. You're a big fan of drilling in ANWR, did you know that any crude that comes out of ANWR will have to go through the T.A.P.S. (Trans Alaska Pipeline System) which can't handle any more oil and is springing leaks from corrosion?

Don't you care about leaving some oil for your grand children and future generations Indy? This planet will be a very hard place to exist on without a reasonable supply of crude oil. Not just for fuel but all the other irreplacable products we get from it like plastics and fertilizer. But by all means lets suck the last drop of oil out of the ground so we can burn it up in our Escalades and Hummers. The hell with our grand kids, what have they ever done for us anyway?

OPINION


The 'Idle' Oil Field Fallacy
By RED CAVANEY
June 20, 2008; Page A13

A bill introduced in Congress this week would "compel" oil and natural gas companies to produce from federal lands they are leasing. If only it were that easy to find and produce oil. Imagine, an act of Congress that could do what geology could not.

These lawmakers ask why oil and gas companies want more access to federal lands to drill if they aren't using all of the 68 million acres they already have? Anyone with even the most basic understanding of how oil and natural gas are produced – and this should include many members of Congress – knows that claims of "idle" leases are a diversionary feint.

A company bids for and buys a lease because it believes there is a possibility that it may yield enough oil or natural gas to make the cost of the lease, and the costs of exploration and production, commercially viable. The U.S. government received $3.7 billion from company bids in a single lease sale in March 2008.

However, until the actual exploration is complete, a company does not know whether the lease will be productive. If, through exploration, it finds there is no oil or natural gas underneath a lease – or that there is not enough to justify the tremendous investment required to bring it to the surface – the company cuts its losses by moving on to more promising leases. Yet it continues to pay rent on the lease, atop a leasing bonus fee.

In addition, if the company does not develop the lease within a certain period of time, it must return it to the federal government, forfeiting all its costs. All during this active exploration and evaluation phase, however, the lease is listed as "nonproducing."

Obviously, companies want to start producing from active fields as soon as possible. However, there are a number of time-consuming steps to be taken before they can do so: Delineation wells must be drilled to size the field, government permits must be obtained, and complex production facilities must be engineered and installed. All this takes considerable time, and during that time, the lease is also listed as "nonproducing."

CONT.

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Because a lease is not producing, critics tag it as "idle" when, in reality, it is typically being actively explored and developed. Multiply these real-world circumstances by hundreds or thousands of leases, and you end up with the seemingly damning but inaccurate figures our critics cite.

Our companies have made tremendous strides in developing cutting-edge exploration technology. But they are not magicians. They cannot produce oil or natural gas where it does not exist. A significant percentage of federal leases simply may not contain oil and natural gas, especially in commercial quantities.

As I've often said, the first step in our business is called "exploration" for a reason. Exploration is time consuming, very costly and involves a great deal of risk. Importantly, you see neither a drop of usable oil nor a cubic foot of natural gas while it is going on. But it is absolutely essential, and there is nothing "idle" about it. Without the exploration that took place years ago, less domestic oil and natural gas would be available today to meet consumer demand.

In reality, a lease is simply a block on a map, with no guarantee that it contains any resources. If all of them did, one could simply pay for the lease, haul in equipment and start pumping oil. But that only happens in fiction.

And it happens in the minds of those who use the undeveloped-lease argument as a smokescreen to mask their intent to keep America's vast energy resources locked up underground, despite increasingly strong consumer demand for oil and natural gas. For exploration to take place, our companies need access to the areas – offshore and onshore – that we know have the potential to produce the oil and natural gas consumers will need, if ours is to remain a viable economy in an increasingly competitive global marketplace.

Today's short-term need was yesterday's long-term opportunity. If Congress had acted on that opportunity years ago, America would not be in the energy bind it finds itself in today. Working with industry, Congress now has the opportunity to help secure America's energy future. It should not miss the chance again.

Mr. Cavaney is president and CEO of the American Petroleum Institute, the trade association that represents America's oil and natural gas industry.

Chew on that some

Down that Bottomless Government Sewer!!!!!!!