Posted 5/8/2006
Energy Policy: What is the opposition to increased offshore drilling for oil? That it's a dirty business and will foul the environment? That won't stand up to scrutiny.
Since 1985, according to the National Ocean Industries Association, more than 7 billion barrels of oil have been produced in U.S. territorial waters. Of that, less than one one-thousandth of a percent (0.001%) has been spilled.
Not perfect, we'll grant. But pretty close. And a record, we would think, that should mute even the most ardent opponents of increased drilling in the U.S. outer continental shelf.
But there's even more than usually meets the eye. Of the petroleum found floating in U.S. waters, just 2% is from drilling and extraction and 3% from tanker transport.
Nearly a third, or 10 to 15 times as much, is caused by boats and cars. And by far the most petroleum pollution of our waters — 63% — doesn't involve man at all. It comes from natural seeps that have been around since time immemorial.
Given these facts, maybe it's time that opponents of lifting federal restrictions on offshore drilling moved on to other arguments. But here, too, they run into trouble when the facts are fairly presented.
We keep hearing, for example, that there simply isn't enough oil offshore to bother with. This, of course, is one of the big arguments against developing fields in Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge: They would yield "only" a million barrels a day.
Well, using the 1.4 million barrels a day that former Interior Secretary Gail Norton used for ANWR, that happens to be more than three times the oil that we now import from Iraq. And keep in mind that ANWR is estimated to hold as much as 16 billion barrels, almost a third more than what's been pumped out of Alaska's Prudhoe Bay since 1977.
As for the outer continental shelf, it provides about 1.3 million barrels a day. That's nearly a third of our entire daily domestic oil output. But most of the OCS has been off-limits to exploration for decades. It is estimated that as much as 11.2 million barrels a day could be recovered if the ban on drilling off much of the coast was lifted. That's more than half of the current 20.7 million barrels we use each day in this country.
We base these figures on an Interior Department estimate that 86 billion barrels of undiscovered but technically recoverable oil wait to be pumped from the earth below the oceans. There could be more. As Michael Kearns of NOIA points out, "Exploration has been off-limits on 80% of the OCS for 25 years, so we can only guess based on data acquired using old methods."
But even 86 billion barrels amounts to 3 1/2 times U.S. proved oil reserves.
Combine the potential supplies from both ANWR and additional offshore drilling and the U.S. would move much closer to the goal of energy independence (see table alongside).
Or, by bringing that much more oil to the market, policymakers would have a beneficial effect on energy prices, which are causing a lot of financial pain across the country.
Whether environmentalists and their allies in the media and Congress like it or not, there soon will be new drilling just off the Florida coast. But it will be a Cuban project in Cuban waters near the Keys done by Chinese, as well as Canadian and Spanish, companies.
A capitalist nation that lets a communist bloc drain its oil supply is not paying enough attention.
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