it will reach $130bbl, there is little reason to expect gasoline prices to do anything other than climb higher in the near future.Posted on 03/05/2011 7:22:47 AM PST by Kaslin
We are living lives of self-imposed impoverishment.
it will reach $130bbl, there is little reason to expect gasoline prices to do anything other than climb higher in the near future.
One of the problems we face right now is the uncertainty in Libya, an OPEC nation that has cut its normal daily output of 1.6 million barrels of oil per day (bpd) to just over 700,000, amid the political tensions surrounding Muammar Gaddafi. What this means for humanity as a whole is that there is now less oil on the world’s market to meet the demand around the globe. What this means for you and I as Americans is that our refusal to “drill here, drill now” is catching up to us with a vengeance.
The noose we allowed foreign oil producers to place around our necks is tightening.
And the worst part of all this is neither the per gallon gasoline price nor the per barrel price of oil, but rather the fact that it doesn’t have to be this way. We could be pumping enough oil here at home to offset the ramifications of the upheaval in Libya, but our president, various members of his administration, and the majority of Democrats in the Senate remain unwilling to budge on the idea. Therefore, we’ve literally turned our backs on billions upon billions of barrels of oil that we could be extracting and using right here at home.
For example, there are formations in Montana and North Dakota that hold upwards of “20 billion barrels of recoverable crude.” Moreover, these “formations also hold the natural gas equivalent of 4 billion barrels of oil.” These figures represent such vast amounts of oil that if we were just to avail ourselves of the crude in North Dakota alone, it would place that state among “the 13 or 14 largest producing countries” in the world.
And how about Alaska? Recent reports about that state’s Outer Continental Shelf (OCS) show that it contains amounts of oil on par with Montana and North Dakota, and even exceeds them in the amount of natural gas it contains (“15 trillion cubic feet of natural gas”).
In fact, studies show that “drilling on Alaska’s OCS could make Alaska the eighth largest oil resource province in the world.” Yet we choose to rely on the Saudis, countries like Venezuela, and men like Gaddafi for the crude we need to make fuel for our cars, trucks, trains, airplanes, etc.
And I haven’t even mentioned the number of jobs active oil exploration and extraction would produce in Alaska, Montana, and North Dakota. The job figures for Alaska alone number “almost 55,000.”
The bottom line is that we are sitting on a gold mine folks — “Black gold, Texas Tea” — yet we are living lives of self-imposed impoverishment. Although we have oil supplies sufficient to offset much of the tensions arising in the Middle East (and elsewhere), we’ve chosen instead to be dependent on foreign oil producers who aren’t very trustworthy, to say the least.
Why can’t Democrats who are always touting things like “common sense [gun] regulation” and “common sense financial regulation” remove their partisan blinders long enough to understand that allowing oil companies to drill here and drill now is obviously one of the most common sense actions anyone could take?
It’s time to turn the spigot in Montana, North Dakota, and Alaska’s OCS, thus providing the American people with the peace of mind that comes from relying on American oil for a change.
We need refineries. Oil is backed up waiting to be processed. It takes almost 10-15 years to build one.
I could be wrong, frequently am but that’s another story, but I think the world has seldom seen the kind of panic there would be in the oil markets around the globe the instant it became clear that the US is through playing the oil game any longer. We have the oil, we know where it is and we know how to get it out of the ground and into our tanks, and we’re going to move Heaven and Earth to get busy getting it done.
And then just do it. Even if the cost of oil falls to $10 a barrel, just ignore it and keep on exploring, drilling, extracting and refining OUR oil from OUR soil. And use the billions and billions of dollars such a policy would produce for US to work on the idea of renewable energy.
Only because we let it. We know how to do it and how do it with as little risk to the environment as anyone on earth. We've let the Greenies BS and sue us into buying their groundless fears for Earth because it's been the cheapest and easiest path of resistance not to stand up to them.
That time period is without the EPA butting in. You can add in another five years to that total.
re: without the EPA butting in
In my private world there will be no EPA. It’s become nothing more than a tool of those who don’t wish us well. Like so many well-intentioned inventions of government it might have served a purpose at first, perhaps a few years, but like every other alphabet-do-gooder agency it soon got more interested in self-preservation and kingdom building than serving its intended purpose. Give any of the them a few years and they become barely recognizable as the potent agency for good they set out to be.
No! That's a fundamental misunderstanding of how a free market works!
Oil futures prices will dive because of anticipation of all the new oil coming into the market. You make it sound as if there is some malevolent force, some conspiracy at work "to get us not to drill."
Or did I miss a sarcasm tag?
ReverendJames knows what he’s talking about. A refinery is not just a factory, it’s finely tuned, industrial sized instrument. It takes a great deal of construction and engineering, adjusting every stage along the way, to bring the beast to production. 10 years is reasonable.
The biggest part of a refinery is the cracking tower(s) - that’s where they pull off the different distillate products from oil. After all is extracted, they pave the roads with the remainder.
Al;l GW had to do is threaten to drill to bring down the price
You can see what’s going on if you see a refinery close-up (<1/2 mile). There about 10 million miles of pipes in those things. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to see there is major-league science at work. And people think they can be pasted up in a month.
You can see what happens to the nations gas supply if even one refinery goes down. Texas, Louisiana and California have the most. There’s about maybe a hundred scattered around 32 states. Even still we read about how oil is backed up waiting to be refined. Any refinery shipping gasoline to California has to add so many additives and then too shut down to convert over to heating oil. We need dedicated refining capacity to just refine oil to gasoline. And get EPA out of it.
Yes. Get EPA out of it. Then we may have a prayer. Nukes would be nice, too. Like France and Germany (West).
They built a new nuke plant out on Long Island, NYC. When a new Dem. governor got in he had it shut down before it even got started. He went so far as to have holes bored into the containment vessel rendering the whole billion dollar facility ruined. It’s just junk now.
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