No kidding. It's a myth. A Chinese company reportedly has a contract for exploratory drilling on land, but nothing has been drilled. A Norwegian company drilled a test well in 2005 (on shore) and this story was mixed with the Chinese story by a dumb Congressman because Cuba is 90 miles off the shore of Florida. Vice President Cheney repeated the myth on a Sunday news show with a new distance and the myth was reborn.
How about some photos of those Chinese oil rigs? 
It worked though. The end result was opening up drilling to provide a few years worth of oil. This oil price increase is just another warning from the marketplace to do something different. The legislation is just another aspirin to mask the pain from the tumor. Spot price is not much different than future prices. It's moot.
I've heard that too, and I'm pretty sure you're correct....but the bigger thing is they have the
permission to drill, in pretty much the same area we do
not . I'd have to assume rigs will spout up sooner or later, and drill or not, yes we DO need a more long-term plan than to find more oil....but there's no reason we can't do both?
“If they [Saudi Arabia] produced half a million barrels more oil a day the price would come down a very significant amount and, at the same time, it would stop the speculation that keeps driving up the price of oil,” Sen. Charles Schumer (D., N.Y.) said on the Senate floor Wednesday.
In the short term, if a half million barrels a day (on our part) could fix the recent pain, why not do it? Has it escaped EVERYONE'S attention that Bush ended the ban on Monday, and oil dropped $10 a barrel over the next 2 days? (This assumes the Left in House/Senate isn't secretly happy with high prices, as it furthers green agenda)
REALLY isn't as hard as it's made out to be to put a rig online:
Last December, at the behest (and expense) of the American Petroleum Institute and Shell oil, I flew down to the Gulf Coast to visit an offshore oil platform. They helicoptered me 165 miles out into the gulf and I stepped onto Brutus, a tension-linked platform anchored to the seafloor 3,000 feet below. It would be an understatement to say I was in awe. Until you’re actually standing on one you can’t begin to appreciate the sheer size and complexity of such a thing.
The platform is the size of a few football fields jammed together, and the top of the derrick was easily a few hundred feet off the water. Dozens of people lived on board, and everything — from the computer systems to the actual drilling rig — was state of the art. Brutus produced over 100,000 barrels of oil a day — down from over 300,000 at its peak capacity.
That sounds impressive. But here’s what truly floored me: Shell decided Brutus’s location in the gulf would be profitable for drilling in April 1999. The company then built the massive oil platform, transported it to the right location in the gulf, anchored the floating leviathan onto the seafloor 3,000 feet below, drilled 17,000 feet below that, and began producing oil in July 2001. It took only two years to get Brutus online.
Of course, it helps that the oil companies have plenty of money to throw at the problem. Constructing oil platforms can cost in the billions of dollars. A few new oil platforms equivalent to Brutus off-shore in the U.S. could easily account for the half a million barrels Senator Schumer claims are driving prices up.
http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=N2M3YWQ5MTE3Yzc0ZmY3OGM1YmU0OTVhZWUwZjQ0ZTk=
