Are the current 'no drill' restrictions wise in the US?

I see Chuck Norris weighed in on this, Yikes !: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zaw4k6DERdc

We can’t drill our way out of this, opposers say, while begging the Saudis to help us drill our way out of this - Hmmm

Technological conditions have changed as well. We now are able to drill with far more precision and environmental care than a quarter-century ago. We have thousands of rigs in the Gulf of Mexico, yet not even hurricanes Katrina and Rita resulted in spills of any significance.

Drill vs Drill results:

Just because we can’t gather the apples from the tree until Fall, doesn’t mean we don’t plant the seeds now.

“But the question is do we want our country turned into one giant oil pump, devastating local ecosystems and contributing even more to human-induced climate change in the process?”

Exactly. Especially Alaska.

thanks to the no drill restriction prices will keep sky rocketing, seems bush still wants to get the oil from iraq. I think its a bad idea, if the recourse is there why not use it? is it just some sort of plan that when the world oil is famished the US can have the power to decide what to do with it? it certainly seems so…

I wouldn’t say we have an abundance of oil in the US. The US oil production hit its peak in the 1970s; it has been all downhill from there. There is more oil down there but it is getting increasingly difficult and expensive to extract. When oil was $40/bbl it was cheaper to import crude oil than to pump most of what remains here. Now that oil is over $100/bbl we are pumping more domestically. When oil was cheap it wasn’t economically profitable to extract oil from Canada’s tar sands but now it is and Canada is extracting oil from tar sands as fast as it can. Canada will not be able to meet its obligations as a signer of the Kyoto treaty because extracting oil from tar sands generates large amounts of CO2. There is enough tar sands in Canada to provide oil for a very long time albeit expensively. After tar sands are gone there is oil shale which is even more expensive to use. The problem isn’t that we are running out of oil; it is that we are running out of cheap oil.

If we drilled every oil well we could we still would not be able to meet our petroleum needs.

ethmer, I like your answer and I agree with some of what you said. But the environmental impact of drilling in the Prudhoe Bay, to be specific, is much greater than the oil industry would like us to believe. Oil spills alone in that area are shockingly high (I think I heard over 400 annually a couple years ago). Disposal of hazardous drilling waste, air pollution and greenhouse gas emission, and disrupting local plant and animal life are also huge concerns. Thousands of acres of habitats have been lost due to the sprawl of the drilling. The region is NOT a model of oil drilling being in harmony with the environment.

For once I can agree with you two without hesitation. . .

I’ve heard that between the year 2017 and 2030 Half of the worlds oil supply will be gone and at the rate of use the other half will have been depleted around the year 2090. At that rate we need to stop wasting money on drilling for more oil and develope new sources of Energy. . . Truth is I think no one is going to bring the pump price down short of a War thanks to the Greed of big Business. since they can make more selling our oil to other countries they will continue to do so. I noticed that only 2 CEO are listed as top payed by Forbes last year. http://www.forbes.com/lists/2007/12/lead_07ceos_CEO-Compensation_CompTotDisp.html I couldn’t local the 2008 list.

We’ve known for a while now that North America is sitting on more barrels of oil than any other region on earth. The US, Canada and Mexico could, in theory, outstrip all of OPEC in oil production if they tapped every known reserve and explored further ones.

But the question is do we want our country turned into one giant oil pump, devastating local ecosystems and contributing even more to human-induced climate change in the process? The reason much of that land is federal property is because it is home to parks, wildlife preserves, and more. Also, don’t forget that a lot of natural resources are on those lands which benefit the economy in other ways.

I will say that technology is allowing the oil industry to greatly reduce its footprint when drilling. But that is the industry adapting to nature and environmental law, which is what we want…not the other way around.

I also wonder if, in the future, public desire for cheap oil not produced by the Middle East will trump environmental concerns.

“Some 90 billion barrels of oil and nearly a third of the world’s undiscovered natural gas remain untapped under an area north of the Arctic Circle, government scientists estimate, in the largest-ever survey of the area’s energy potential.”

• Associated Press, 7/24/08

Sen. Mary Landrieu, D - La: “We must eliminate our dangerous dependency on oil from places in this world that do not share our values and are not friendly, safe places to operate. There are benefits to drilling in Alaska. There are not many people there to aggravate. There are only 500,000, and people in Alaska, like people in Louisiana, want to have oil and gas drilling. They believe in using their natural resources.”

“If we drilled every oil well we could we still would not be able to meet our petroleum needs.”

It’s estimated there are 117 billion barrels of oil onshore and offshore, in areas that are federal or managed by the government. What’s on privately held land is much less, around 20 billion barrels.

Drilling all of this oil would be extremely costly, as you point out. But it would meet current US oil demands for about 15 years. Of course, that’s assuming that oil demand doesn’t grow more than 1 million barrels per day, which is possible.

And that’s just what’s in the US. Canada, in the tar sands alone, has estimates as high as 1+ trillion barrels.

I do agree the problem is not “peak oil”, but more of a production issue. The 1980’s was probably the last major period of cheap oil production we’ll ever see.

No. They keep us overly dependent on foreign oil.

Environmentalists mislead the populace into thinking that the oil companies will corrupt the environment. This is not true. The oil companies have demonstrated quite well in Alaska that they are capable of going about their business without hurting the environment.

Oil is a necessity. Not just for transportation, heating and power generation, but also for much that you use in your daily lives. You would be hard pressed to find anyone in America whose life isn’t touched daily by the use of oil.

In reality, we are hoarding our own oil while helping to deplete the resources of other countries. Eventually, when oil runs out elsewhere, we can then turn to our own oil reserves. We may think that that may be beneficial to our grandchildren but it isn’t. In that process we are not only paying an extremely high price to maintain our lifestyle but we are also slowing the need for invention and discovery of alternative methods of maintaining our standards of living.