Offshore Drilling for Oil

The numbers Bush put forth yesterday, 18 billion offshore and 10 billion Bbs in the Arctic represent between three and four years worth of oil at present rates of consumption, about 7.5 billion barrels per year. Add that it could take 3 to 10 years to bring those reserves into production and it is not enough to have a significant effect on price any time soon.

There are thousands of offshore oil lease acres not developed. Selling out these leases will do NOTHING, nor is the sale intended to ANYTHING for oil price and gas price. This is just one more taxpayer giveaway to the oil companies. If they get the leases the projected value of the leases enhance their individual stock values. It's just one more callous, despicable outright lie to help the oil industry until Bush and his band of oil patch bastards are thrown out in January 09.

The US needs to develop another energy source. If we are genuinely serious about finding a replacement for oil, the DoD can with 1 or 2 weapons systems contracts put the best minds in the world on finding the alternative to oil based fuels for transportation. The fuel bill for the Iraqi War is going to break the US. We must find an alternative fuel and what better way to start the search than through the most powerful industrial complex in the world, the United States of America Dept of Defense.

He makes a lot of sense to the senseless. He just got a lot of votes and made billions for big oil. He was against it now he is for it, he can be manipulated.

For the record :
The United States has less that 3% of the world's remaining supply of oil. We will never drill our way to energy independence
Even if we allowed this drilling, it will be years before the oil is available, doing nothing to solve our current price crunch
Each year we export close to 500 million barrels of oil, so there is no guarantee that oil drilled in the U.S. will stay here. Many of the largest oil companies are based abroad, and often sell their oil to other countries
Bush estimates there are 18 billion barrels of 'drillable' oil off our shores - that's only enough to replace our imports for 4 years. What then?

So is the solution to tax oil companies raise the price to the point that only the rich can afford gas. I know that my job puts in about 15 to 20 thousand miles a year. Am I suppose to quit and find a job that doesn't require driving? As a mobile business there are jobs that cannot be done without driving to the site. And somehow I don't see a mass transit solution. I suppose I could set up some sort of truck pool with my competition so we can share the truck instead of having two seperate vehicles.

Yes I'm being facetious but that's the way this issue is being debated. My side or your side. Even if we only get enough oil for 4 years or 10 years or what ever amount it ends up being should be used to soften the impact of the increase of gas prices.

Can we drill our way out of it? No. Can it make an impact? I think it can.

I keep hearing how it's going to take 3 to 7 years to even get the oil. Ok fine. What else is there that pick up the difference in the next 3 to 7 years? Right now there is no other alternative to oil for the average American. Are there ideas that show promise? Yes. However none of them are proven to have the ability to replace oil in any meaningful capacity. Most have positive properties associated with them they also have problems with them that make them only part of the solution. We were told by many that ethanol was the way to reducing oil and we're starting to see that it is creating more problems than it is solving. While we're looking for the next energy solution we should not be cutting off the ones that are proven to give the energy we require for our country until that new solution is up and running.

There is no one solution to the energy problem. We have always used new forms of energy to make our lives better as they have been discovered. Once upon a time wood, dung, peet, and other things were our primary source of energy. Then we discovered coal, oil and others and they were better sources of energy and we transitioned from wood to them but no one was looking to stop using wood before the new forms were available in abundant supplies to replace wood. And as new sources are found we should start to use them but we shouldn't stop using current sources till there is an abundant supply of the new forms.

And people should not be told to go without as a means of forcing this change.

"There are thousands of offshore oil lease acres not developed."

And not every acre of those leases have oil on them.

Charles M. states he needs fuel to work, as do most of us. However this kind of short sited 'I want it now' attitude is not helping is it. I don't have an answer to his plight, but we had this happen in the 70's and we did nothing, absolutely nothing. Now we are complaining and saying drill every damn last inch of land and sea to keep our habit going. You know that the reality is that even if we did drill of shore and in Alaska the oil price would still be dictated by the 'free market'. So the reality is that drilling will not lower the price.
In the 90's the average American family had 3 or more cars and recreational gas guzzling toys like motorboats. Most people in my area drive huge SUV's and the own more than one!
The party is over folks, and now we have to pay the piper.
Charles M's line of work might be the kind of job that will go the way of the many jobs, due to a change in the climate. Welcome to the post-modern world Charles and fasten your seatbelt, as it will most likely be a rough ride.

Charles by all means lets ruin the oceans and destroy whats left of the ecosystem to make sure that people such as yourself can keep there life style at all cost. This kind of attitude is not going to help, it only makes it worse. We need a Marshall plan, a New Deal type of initiative to develop every kind of alternative energy source we can that is clean and reusable. People will have to change their life styles. We built these huge suburbs that require people to drive for hours to get to work, that need to serviced by people driving to get there as well. What's wrong with this picture? Lack of good civic planing and the attitude of passing the buck is how we have ended up in this mess.


We are in the last years of oil, maybe it will take 30 years or more but unless we do something to cut our consumption, we will continue to suffer.

In Great Britain in some areas the price has gone up to $10 and more per gallon.

Drilling will just give us a false sence of security for a short period of time. It is time to implement a rationing plan similar with the one used during WWII - Have the government decide how much NON-renewable energy resources are needed for the year and divide the BTUs between all citizens 16 or older. Permit the coupons to be sold on the open market. Every time energy is used, coupons have to be given with the dollars. Imports would be given a energy coupon requirement per their calculated energy inputs. Poor people who don't use much energy will be able to sell their coupons and make money. People who use a lot of energy will buy coupons from the poor or develop renewable ways of creating energy. Coupons would be valid for two years. This is the same as making an energy budget for the nation. Each year the government can reduce the number of coupons as needed.

The oil debacle is a construction of oil intrests holding power in the Federal government. Once the bastards are gone and regulation reinstated on the finance and futures market oil price will drop like a stone. It's that simple. There is no permanent economic structure holding oil at the level it is today. It is a concious decision of elected Republican officials who will maintain this disaster until they are forced out of office. It can't be made any simpler than that. No supply and demand. No Chinese/Indian consumption. No alleged Middle East conspiracy. Simple highway robbery by an elected Republican executive branch.

Tax them? Why the hell not?? Tax the pants off the bastards and use the money for alternatives that will put the oil boys out of business forever. That would be true justice. Then take what is left and treat the oil industry as a publicly regulated utility. They deserve no better treatment.

"Charles M's line of work might be the kind of job that will go the way of the many jobs, due to a change in the climate. Welcome to the post-modern world Charles and fasten your seatbelt, as it will most likely be a rough ride. "

Well I hope you can affored to replace broken windows when you lock yourself out of your car or house. Hope you know how to repair the locks on your businesses and the assisted living homes your loved one's live in. Or how to repair your safes . Of course I could just double my prices to make up the fuel costs. But then you would bitch that I was gouging.

My lifestyle is anything but lavish. Hell I live check to check and go without all the time. I've never owned a boat, an RV or more than two cars that ran at the same time. I don't even own my own home. So just how much more should I give up?

Much ado about....??? In 1965, a gallon of gas was about $.25-.30. A movie ticket was about the same, or only slightly more, about $.50. Today, at $4.00/gallon, gas is about 15 times higher, and has undergone about the same increase as today's movie ticket. Inflation has extracted a high price in every segment of our economy. Therefore the strident indignation over gas prices seems a little bit over the top, especially when the "greedy oilmen" are the sole targets of the vitriol. How about a windfall profit tax on Hollywood for a movie that comes out of production at just under $(pick a number) and grosses well over $(pick another)? That's just plain silly, isn't it?

To be sure, commodity speculation and the regulations thereof affect the day to day price of oil and gas. But to deny supply and demand, the pressure of the India/China factor, and to downplay the effect of increasing our own production....to ignore all those dynamics simply in the interest of playing your I-hate-Bush cards?? Well, your comments are entertaining, but they are so obviously agenda biased that they are well worthy of being ignored in a real discussion on the issue.

If you are one of the group that think the U.S. should butt out of world affairs and confine our problem-solving to things within our borders, then you should be on the side of the argument that wants us to drill here, refine here, and consume here. You can't have it both ways. It is a fact that we have an appetite for carbon fuels that forces us to maintain and protect a seat at the table of the world oil market. Until that changes, we'd better have some sort of alliance with an oil producing nation or two, be it an unholy alliance or not, and we'd better be ready to protect those interests. Also, to say that it would be years before the effect of drilling within our borders would affect the price of a barrel of oil is to misstate the facts. The mere rumor of an interruption of oil flow to the U.S. from any one of today's international suppliers has an overnight effect at the pump. Why, then, would the opposite not be true? Once again, you can't have it both ways simply for the sake of offering shrill and strident support to your personal agenda.

There is a dwindling supply of world oil and an increasing demand for same. We will, in this generation or another, find other sources of energy. Those discoveries will be made using either an orderly, well-planned strategy or in a frantic, time-running-out state of chaos, depending on our choices now. It all depends on when, or if, we begin to seriously try to find legitimate solutions and when, or if, we stop using oil as a talking point for our drama-laden conspiracy theories.

Danny a movie ticket???? Can you choose to go to movie?? Can you choose to drive to work, buy groceries, plastics or the thousand, thousand things impacted by oil price?? What a idiotic notion.

Look, every oil producer outside of American control has said repeatedly that oil price has NOTHING to do with supply and demand. There is plenty of oil, plenty of capacity. It is a true head and sand moment, entertaining or not, to claim the current oil level is unrelated to Bush Admin policy and deregulation and to assume nothing can be done when these guys are ejected from the seats of power. You cannot demostrate or prove otherwise. It isn't drilling for oil or where it is done that will ease our current crisis. Our woes reflect a failure of leadership on a unprecedented scale.

The long range prospect of oil resource has no bearing upon current oil price. Certainly this nation and indeed the world should free mankind from the shackles of oil and those who manipulate it for the benefit of a tiny minority, but that will never happen with the likes of Bush and those who think like him. Glibbly dismissing this blantaly contrived debacle as "conspiracy theories" is disingenous cynicism and, as we see upon the national stage, political suicide.

Actually, it should be "AN idiotic notion". And the movie ticket theme was an analogy that apparently assumed too much. There's more, but I'm not one to nit-pick.

I can agree that commodities traders, their short-coverings and the fact that they never actually have to take delivery of a contract.....all of those things certainly contribute to the bubble in the price of oil that we have now. The key word is "contribute", and I suggest that it is one of many factors. Underneath it all there is still the stark fact that world supply is going down and world consumption is going up, and to discount that is to practice a little head-in-the-sand strategy of your own. From now until the hypothetical point in time where there is no oil, the price curve is going to go up, up, up. There will be dips and rises in that curve, but in the big picture, higher prices are inevitable.

I don't understand how so much blame can be placed at the feet of the Republican executive branch when both houses of congress have a Democratic majority. I don't understand how high gas prices in the U.S. are a result of evil Bush policies, while even higher gas prices in London, France, Japan, and (you-name-the-city) are a result of....what? Also Bush and his cronies? I don't understand how nationalizing oil is going to help the individual at the pump. After all, our government bureaucrats are not exactly famous for running a successful business.

I enjoy the discussion and am open to informative rebuttal. I might even change my mind! I just think that terms like "failure of leadership on an unprecedented scale" are a little over the top, and I'm not even sure they're germane to the discussion. The original topic here was off-shore drilling, and whether it would help or hurt. I think it would help politically and economically, individually and collectively in the near term.

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We don't have to "worry less about the environment" in order to drill "for every barrel of homegrown oil we've got." The two aren't mutually exclusive. Your questions dodge the real energy issues, and the sop to the left, with the "gift to the oil men" comment is far from "on-point." I see you threw in a sop to the right, with "can we drill cleaner now," but honestly, this wasn't a balanced set-up for a debate.

I'm sorry, but I didn't listen to the discussion, so I can only comment on what I read.

"Well I hope you can affored to replace broken windows when you lock yourself out of your car or house. Hope you know how to repair the locks on your businesses and the assisted living homes your loved one's live in. Or how to repair your safes . Of course I could just double my prices to make up the fuel costs. But then you would bitch that I was gouging."

I never said you should stop your business, I said we are all in for a rough ride.
My point was we had this happen in the 70's and we never developed any cars or trucks that got more 30MPG's. That's the issue. If you have to raise prices due to fuel cost so be it.
I am already aware of this and the affect it has on my life.
My point was if we had cars right now that got more than 60MPG's per gallon or more we would not be having this discussion.

If your truck used bio-diesel or better yet you had an fully electric truck this would not be an issue.

I was pointing to our short sidedness in this. Charles your comments feed into this mentality. You might go out of business, that would be an awful event. But we have had 30 years to get this done and we have done nothing.

Yes tax the oil companies or percentage of the billions in profits should into solving this problem. It's in the oil companies best interest to be on the cutting edge of new and renewable energies.

The party is over folks, it's over for CharlseM. it's over for me as well.
The party is over period.