They have the ability to produce many times more a day but they don't why? To keep demand high as well as prices. The oil is here & now but they have a lot of wells capped & only produce enough to get the Government perks.
No, that doesn't make sense. Oil companies make money by producing oil, not by sitting on it. If any of them had large enough market share it might be worthwhile to reduce production, but none of the western oil companies are anywhere near big enough.
I remember when in the '80s Reagan started some government synthetic fuels production program and gave enormous incentives for oil production - the result? In 1981 when Reagan took office Oil was about $70/Barrel He got all of these incentives into play and by 1982 Oil had fallen below $50/Barrel and by 1985, the price had fallen to about $20/Barrel. Oil remained low and plummeted to $12/Barrel in 1998 under Clinton.
Why did this happen? Because we looked and acted like we were serious about solving our problems ourselves, so OPEC flooded the market, forcing prices down and Our synthetics operation which can produce oil from coal at $40/Barrel was deemed a waste of money.
OPEC certainly didn't flood the market with oil.
In 1981 world oil production was 59.5 million barrels a day, 23.3 million barrels of which was produced by OPEC.
By 1985 production was down to 57.5 million barrels a day, with OPEC producing just 16.9 million.
What happened is that the early 80s recession, coupled with the price hikes, greatly reduced demand.
Our cars and trucks run off of OIL products right now... We cannot wait for synthetic/alternative energy, we must ease the financial burden on our People, Trucking Companies and Airlines right the hell NOW.
There is nothing the west can do to reduce oil prices NOW. Drilling in the OCS will take several years to increase world oil production by 0.25%. ANWR will take a decade to increase production by 1%. And of course, Saudi can cut production by that amount to keep the price high, as they have in the past.
The sad fact is western oil companies control only a tiny proportion of the world's oil reserves, with various despotic countries controlling most. There is nothing we can do to force them to produce more oil.
We cannot touch oil right off our east coast BUT the damned communist chinese and cubans have partnered to slant drill oil wells (Slanted toward US BTW) just 54 miles off our own coast.
Don't believe everything you read in an internet chain letter. Cuba has leased some exploration blocks 60 miles off the Florida coast, but not to Chinese companies, and there haven't even been exploratory wells drilled yet.
The Bakken Oil Fields holds an INCREDIBLE estimated 100 to 400 BILLION barrels of oil.
But how much of it is recoverable? According to the USGS it's 3.65 billion barrels, a report commissioned by the state said 2.1 billion barrels.
That's going to add up to less than 1 million barrels a day. The world currently uses 86 million barrels a day.
There's no good reason not to produce the oil, and the argument that it will take years seems to me even more incentive to start now, because we can't predict what the situation will be like in 10 years time. But don't make the mistake of thinking that the US can increase its oil production enough to make much difference to prices, either now or in the future. The only thing the US can do that will affect prices substantially is to develop alternatives to oil.
