If there is anyone left without any doubt that the Obama
administration is hell-bent on destroying the economy of the United States,
they are either:
a.
Naïve
b.
Stupid
c.
Lying
d.
A Democrat
e.
All of the above
FOX NEWS AND HUFFINGTON POST REPORTS: Shell Oil just announced that it must
scrap its plans to drill for oil in the Arctic Ocean this summer. Drilling off the northern coast of
Alaska will terminate before it gets a chance to get off the ground due to a
ruling by the EPA’s Environmental Appeals Board to withhold critical air
permits.
The oil giant has spent five years and close to $4 billion
dollars in its quest to explore for oil in the Chukchi and Beaufort Seas. The leases cost an additional $2.2
billion, which makes Shell Oil’s investment over $6 billion and it has nothing
to show for it. Next thing you
know the liberals in Congress will be complaining that Shell took the $6
billion loss as a deduction on its corporate tax return and are therefore not paying its
fair share of taxes. That’s the
liberal mentality; create a problem and then dance around and try to deflect responsibility through political sleight-of-hand and class warfare.
Shell Vice President Pete Slaiby says that obtaining similar
air permits for a drilling operation in the Gulf of Mexico would take somewhere
around 45 days. But the Appeals
Board’s rationale for denying the permits is that the drilling would be
hazardous to people who live in the region. The folks who would ostensibly be victimized live in the burgeoning metropolis of Kaktovik, Alaska, one of the
most remote places in the United States.
The village is one square mile in area and sits on the shores of the
Beaufort Sea, 70 miles from the proposed drill site. Population:
245.
According to the U.S. Geological Survey, the drill area has
an estimated 27 billion barrels of oil.
That is two and one-half times more oil than has flowed down the Trans
Alaska pipeline in the 30 years of its existence. That pipeline is precipitously low on oil and is
carrying only about one-third of its capacity. The production on the North Slope is declining at a rate of
about 7 percent per year and pipeline officials say they will be forced to shut
it down if the volume gets any lower.
Now for those of you who are mathematically impaired (or too
lazy to get out your calculator,) the United States imports 160 million barrels
of oil a year from our “friends” in Saudi Arabia. So we could replace all of Saudi Arabian oil for 168+
years. In 2010 the oil
cartel OPEC exported 1,783,170,000 barrels of oil to the U.S. Just the oil from this Arctic
find could replace all the oil we import (from nations that seek to destroy us
and use our petrodollars to finance terrorism and buy off our politicians) for
15 years. Is that going to give us
all the oil we need in the long term?
The answer is no. But we
haven’t included the oil in Bakken, ANWR or off our coasts.
What the Heck is a Bakken Formation?
The Bakken formation, initially described by geologist J.W. Nordquist in 1953, is a rock unit from the Late Devonian to Early Mississippian age occupying about 200,000 square miles (520,000 km2) of the subsurface of the Williston Basin, covering parts of Montana, North Dakota, and Saskatchewan. The formation is entirely in the subsurface, and has no surface outcrop. (Source: Wikipaedia.)
The mother of all Bakken estimates comes from Dr. Leigh
Price, who worked for the U.S. Geological Survey. Price estimated that the
Bakken could generate between 271 billion and 503 billion barrels of oil with
an average of 413 billion barrels. Price came up with a higher amount than his
peers because he argued that oil from the Bakken had not migrated to the
Mission Canyon or Madison formation and was thus still trapped within the
Bakken. Price also put a recoverable estimate at the Bakken resource at 50%, implying
that approximately 200 billion barrels of oil could be recovered from here.
(Source: Investopaedia)
How Much ANWR Oil Are We Talking About?
In 1998, the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) examined ANWR’s
coastal plain, specifically Area 1002, to estimate the amount of technically
recoverable oil. Based on the geology, the USGS projected that there could be
anywhere from 5.7 billion to 16 billion barrels of oil (average = 10.4 billion
barrels). Of this potential oil, 74 percent lies on federal lands, with the
remaining oil on state and native lands. So 7.7 billion barrels of oil might be
located on the federal portion of ANWR (based on the average numbers). For
comparison, the rest of the undiscovered, recoverable oil within the United
States is estimated at 120 billion barrels [source: U.S. DOE]. Therefore, the
estimated oil within Area 1002 is about 8.7 percent of the total undiscovered,
recoverable oil within the United States. Since 1998, there have been no
further surveys of ANWR oil.
(Source: US Geological
Survey.)
Even if these estimates are off by 50%, we could have enough
oil to be self-sufficient for several decades. That’s certainly more than enough time to find an
alternative, viable and cost-effective energy source to power our economy. So, anyone telling you we are running
out of oil is just flat out lying to you.
But what else would you expect from ideologues who believe America is
what’s wrong with the world and it needs to be “transformed.”
Alaskan officials are fuming over the EPA ruling. Alaska’s DNR Commissioner Dan Sullivan
said: “It’s driving investment and
production overseas. That doesn’t
help the United States in any way, shape or form.”
As a side note, the Environmental Appeals Board has four
members: Edward Reich, Charles
Sheehan, Kathie Stein and Anna Worgast.
They are all registered Democrats and Ms. Stein was an activist attorney
for the Environmental Defense Fund; one of the foremost so-called environmental
groups responsible for our inability to drill for domestic oil, natural gas and
the building of nuclear and clean-coal-fired power plants.
Put together with the moratorium on deep water drilling, the
denial of leases to drill in ANWR, the Bakken fields and off-shore, and you
have a formula for economic destruction.
Yes, that’s change we can believe in.
