The governor of Alaska says 5 years.
And her experience in the oil business is?
the EIA point out that the last 2 Alaskan fields to be brought in to production took 6 and 8 years, and that doesn't include the time to acquire and explore the leases.
When Bush lifted the executive ban on offshore drilling the price dropped.
You're not seriously suggesting that was the cause, surely?
Seriously?
The drop in the oil price was caused by Saudi increasing production by up to 700,000 barrels a day in July, coupled with a reduction in demand due to recession and price hikes.
And of course, if they do......no more F-15's for them. No more American weapons.....in fact.....just tell them....if you do, we bomb YOU...
I don't think threatening to bomb the world's largest oil producer is going to do much to reduce the price of oil. That's why both the US president and British prime minister went cap in hand to Saudi to ask them to produce more oil.
The fact is Saudi actually cut production in 2006, and again in 2007, and that's one of the major reasons for the rise in the oil price.
It makes us less dependent on foreign oil. Anything we can do to decrease our dependency on others for our energy needs is a good thing.
It is. I'm absolutely in favour of the US drilling in the OCS and ANWR and Bakken. I just don't think it will make much difference, and I think if people expect it to, drilling could actually be counterproductive. The US needs to face up to the fact it is dependent on oil from some pretty dodgy countries.
How come when we're talking about US dependence on middle eastern oil, we keep hearing world oil market, world production levels, OPEC, etc.
Because oil is a world market.
Let's imagine the US totally eliminated ME oil imports, and instead imported only from Canada, Mexico and Russia.
What happens to Saudi? Do they get poorer? No, because the countries that were importing Russian oil will instead import Saudi oil.
There will be some effect on everybody, because oil will tend to travel further distances, which costs more, and there will be less flexibility in the refinery market, which will put up costs a bit further.
Now imagine there's a coup in Saudi. Is the US affected? Of course it is, because whoever was buying Saudi oil (say China and Europe) will now be buying Russian and Canadian and Mexican oil to make up the shortfall.
I'm convinced we can get off middle eastern oil TODAY.. and we CAN get on Canadian, Mexican and South American contracts TODAY.
You need more than just those countries.
The US consumes 20 million barrels a day. The US, Canada, Mexico and South and Central America between them produce almost exactly the same amount of oil.
But of course all the other countries in the Americas use oil as well. Canada isn't going to send
all it's oil to the US, and leave none for themselves, neither is Mexico, or Venezuela, or indeed any country.
In total the Americas produce just over 20 million barrels but consume just over 30 million, so the US is going to have to import oil from elsewhere. And production is falling in North America (0.5% last year) and South and Central America (3.6% last year), so the problem is likely to keep getting worse.
For the guy who disagreed with my numbers about the Bakken oil fields, have according to almost every set of numbers I could find, between 200 and 400 BILLION barrels of RECOVERABLE oil.
Then I suggest you go and look at more rational sources. The USGS report is available on the net.
There's certainly a lot of oil in Bakken, but
reliable sources say only a very small percentage is recoverable with current technology.
It's usually people outside America that shift the discussion to *world market* issues.
Perhaps that's because we understand the concept of a world market better.
If you are an oil producer in, say, Nigeria, who do you sell oil to? The US? Europe? Japan? China? No, you sell it to whoever offers you the most money.
The US can control its own oil supply, and make sure that all the oil produced in the US is kept in the US, but at the end of the day the US still has to import close to 14 million barrels a day, and it's going to have to do that at market price, because if the US isn't prepared to pay the market rate, there are plenty of others that will.
