Posted on 03/07/2006 8:47:21 AM PST by Isara
Energy: The environmental lobby has thus far blocked tapping the oil reserves in Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. Meanwhile, Canada draws oil from a remote and frozen region and sells it in the U.S.
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Though we already get 2.1 million barrels a day from Canada, oil from northern Alberta's oil sand fields has rarely reached southward beyond Chicago. That changed last week when crude from those oil sand reserves were piped to Oklahoma, from where they will be sent to refiners that had long been getting their crude from other sources, particularly the Gulf of Mexico.
It was a landmark day when the flow of the Spearhead Pipeline, which originally streamed from Chicago to Cushing, Okla., was reversed.
The U.S. has relied on the Gulf to provide oil for decades. Now that reliance is moving north, where oil is squeezed from a mixture of sand, water and clay called tar sands or oil sands. A third of all oil produced in Canada is from these oil sands.
Because the largest known reserve of oil in the world — an estimated 1.7 to 2.5 trillion barrels, according to the Oil Sands Discovery Centre in Fort McMurray, Alberta — can be found in the oil sands of that western Canadian province. And thanks to modern systems, Canada is likely to double its oil production in the next decade based on what's sitting in the northern reaches of Alberta.
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ANWR is the most important oil reserve this nation has. It's probably more crucial to the U.S. than the tar sands are to Canada. Cutting our reliance on foreign sources and keeping gasoline prices at the pump at sane levels are desired conditions that could have been achieved had production at ANWR not been blocked in the 1990s.
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(Excerpt) Read more at investors.com ...
....as it should. Let the market decide.
P.S. Choke on it. Signed, Cindy Sheehan
The financial backers of the green movemint find it a nifty way to export all those dollars we print and internationalize American assets with foreign FDI.
People who block our ability to secure our own resources in this time of war we find ourselves in are TRAITORS....and should be shot as such.
The useful idiots can be pretty effective when they have Big Oil helping keep the price propped up.
Because they're really socialists and hypocrites.
"Cutting our reliance on foreign sources and keeping gasoline prices at the pump at sane levels are desired conditions that could have been achieved had production at ANWR not been blocked in the 1990s."
Bears repeating everytime someone tries to pull the "But but it will take years to get the production online" mantra.
Actually we export sand to them. Their sand has been so wind blown over the centries that it has become round and does not bond well. We send them sand that is sharp and of different shapes so they can make cement.
There are competing movements. One is the greenies, who are somewhat influential in the US and Europe. Another is the Global Civil Society, which is also organizationally ad hoc, but which has a far different goal even if the results would be the same. The greenies and the GCS happen to be fighting the same bogeymen sometimes: when it is environment and international corporations together, which it is in ANWR, they may inadvertently act together. In Canada the greenies lack resources, and the GCS would show up only if there were an international business conference such as Davos or other economic summit.
This brings up a question I've had for some time.... the tree-huggers oppose ANWR drilling/exploration because it will affect the caribou, polar bears, arctic foxes, etc., and because they think crude oil will be all over the place.
They protest the U.S. for merely thinking about the idea. However, none of them protest the Canadian government for actually DOING these things, in more-or-less the same area. The polar bears don't understand or recognize national boundaries, so these areas are really all one and the same to the wildlife. I wonder why the greenies aren't protesting Canada???? [/sarcasm]
Pretty apparent that they don't care about the caribou at all, huh? -- I guess it just proves that the greenies really are America-haters after all.
Well, it's not really the same area. Fort MacMurray is about 1500 miles from Alaska. No polar bears within aboy 800 miles, black bears, though, and moose.
It's also evergreen forest and covers a few square miles of active extraction and processing.
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