ANWR Coastal Plain
Relative size of ANWR
Microscopic area affected by drilling
GET IT JOHNNY BOY?
Posted on 06/15/2008 8:44:42 AM PDT by moneyrunner
Who said that? The Washington Post!!!
Jonah Goldberg is a national treasure.
Livin' in a Frosty Paradise? ANWR is not as pristine as it's cracked up to be.
Sen. John McCain said this week he would not drill in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge for the same reason he “would not drill in the Grand Canyon . . . I believe this area should be kept pristine.”
Pristine means unspoiled, virginal, in an original state.
One wonders how pristine the Grand Canyon can be if it has roughly 5 million visitors every year, rafting, hiking, picnicking, and riding mules up one side and down the other. Campfires, RVs, and motels that do not conjure the word “virginal” ring around large swaths of it.
(Excerpt) Read more at moneyrunner.blogspot.com ...
McCain needs to be loaded up on a helicopter, dragged kicking if need be, and dropped off in the middle of the 2000 sq acres where we need to drill in ANWR. Let him have a town meeting with mosquitoes.
“One wonders how pristine the Grand Canyon can be if it has roughly 5 million visitors every year..”
Don’t pay too much attention to what McCain says — the man has to lie in order to look credible.
The oil region of ANWR is more than a lot like the Prudhoe Bay oil region.
I see no reason why Hugh Rowland and Alex Debogorski couldn’t drive over the ice roads to deliver drilling supplies to ANWR. BTW, as noted in the series, after the ice road season is over, the tundra beneath the ice roads are untouched because the roads simply melt away.
ANWR needs a pipeline and a pipeline needs a permanent access road. The access road would be built of gravel in the winter and thick enough that the permafrost underneath wouldn’t melt in the summer.
How do the Canadians deliver their oil?
Canadians have pipelines.
I think we should put a measure to the senate...to return national parks to the “ANWR-standard”...meaning no roads...no resturants...no hotels...no drilling...no business...etc. It would be curious who would stand against the “ANWR-standard”.
All of these guys would look like fools in opposing it...and basically bring questions to the concept of pristine.
There is oil in the Grand Canyon? Who knew?
“McCain needs to be loaded up on a helicopter, dragged kicking if need be, and dropped off in the middle of the 2000 sq acres where we need to drill in ANWR. Let him have a town meeting with mosquitoes.”
McCain needs to be loaded up on a helicopter, dragged kicking if need be, and dropped off in the middle of the “pristine” everglades where we already drill but no new permits. This is not a huge amount but could be brought online very fast. Let him have a town meeting with mosquitoes. And maybe some of the critters that live at the drilling site including Gators and man-eating pythons will “git’ em.
I remember being pleasantly shocked years ago when "60 Minutes" (I think) did a segment on ANWR showing how modern oil drilling and producing techniques would do very little environmental damage there. So even See B.S. News was at least open-minded about the issue back then.
Idea of expanded oil drilling in Florida Everglades greeted with furore
13-06-01 Down an 11-mile washboard road, past deer and alligators darting among stands of cypress trees, workers keep tabs on something most people don’t expect to find in the Sunshine State: Ten wells that produce about 3,400 bpd of oil.
For nearly 60 years, oil companies have been extracting oil from underneath the 729,000-acre Big Cypress federal wildlife preserve adjacent to the Everglades National Park ecosystem.
Federal law protects the preserve from commercial development but keeps it open to limited minerals-extraction and recreational use. President Bush’s contemplated opening of federally protected areas including Alaska’s Arctic National Wilderness Refuge to new oil-exploration leases has met with divided opinion. But the idea of expanded oil drilling in federal waters off Florida’s prized beaches along the Gulf of Mexico has been greeted with a furore.
Demonstrators, some dressed as oil barrels, were out in force for President Bush’s visit to the Everglades, during which he managed to avoid discussing the issue. His brother and fellow Republican, Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, who is running for re-election next year, opposes new oil leases in a portion of the Gulf known as Lease-Sale 181, a 5.9 mm-acre section running from south of Pensacola to west of Tampa.
Oil industry officials are happy to point out that drilling takes place just 30 miles from where the President spoke. “What a great place for the president to go — in the middle of the Everglades where just miles from where they stand we’ve been producing oil for 60 years,” David Mica, executive director of the Florida Petroleum Council, a Tallahassee industry group, says.
Environmentalists opposed to expanded oil drilling acknowledge that production inside the Big Cypress has gone unnoticed because it has been relatively incident-free. But Charles Lee, senior vice president of Audubon of Florida, says oil production in the Big Cypress and the Gulf of Mexico aren’t comparable. “It’s not... like it is in the Gulf, where there’s a chance [the oil] could burst out,” he says. “The oil in the Big Cypress is tar-like, and you pretty much have to pump it out.” Containing a spill in the Everglades is much easier than it would be in the Gulf, he says.
Elizabeth Hirst, a spokeswoman for Gov. Bush, says offshore oil production is risky for Florida’s glittering white beaches. The governor believes that “our tourist-based economy and our beaches are the bread and butter of the state, and any expansion to oil drilling could be potentially harmful and even disastrous to our environment and economy,” she says.
There are 14 offshore oil and gas platforms within 25 miles and some 240 platforms within 100 miles of Florida’s Perdido Key, near Pensacola, without any harm to the beaches, says Mark Rubin, general manager for exploration and production at the American Petroleum Institute, a Washington trade group. No one can guarantee there won’t be an accident, he notes, but says the Big Cypress wells prove something: “We can produce oil and naturalgas in sensitive environments and protect the environmental values that are there.”
Another reason the Big Cypress wells have avoided controversy is that there isn’t much anyone can do about them. The wells predate the preserve, which was created in 1974 when Florida’s prominent Collier family sold the land to the federal government.
Barron Collier, a Tennessee native who made his fortune in New York streetcar advertising, came to Florida in 1928 and bought 1.5 mm acres, which later became Collier County, nearly the entire south-western corner of the state. He and his descendants developed agriculture and carved communities out of the swamps, marketing them to northerners.
Peninsular Oil & Refining, later part of ExxonMobil, discovered oil in southern Florida in 1943. Since then, the Sunniland trend underneath the Big Cypress preserve has yielded about 110 mm barrels of oil, according to Ed Garrett, geologist with the Florida Geologic Survey. The Colliers kept about 400,000 acres of subsurface mineral rights beneath the preserve, leasing portions of their holdings to Calumet Florida, a unit of Plains Resources, of Houston.
“There is oil in the Grand Canyon? Who knew?”
Drill that sucker!
The other thing the really grates on me is that we are afraid to drill in the everglades because it COULD cause damage (we know it won’t) yet we continue to permit Cuban GOP contributers that grow sugar to pollute the glades and Florida Bay.
We are on the edge of a potentially devastating energy crisis. Our modern economy simply cannot survive without oil, and we cannot afford to import it from countries that want to destroy us any longer.
Americans need to wake up! The fact of the matter is that we should be drilling ANYWHERE in this country that oil can be found, even in the middle of national parks that people DO visit! This is turning into a matter of life and death, and our very future as a nation depends on this!
The economy of tomorrow, which will run on clean, efficient, non fossil-based fuels, will simply not be possible unless the economy of today is running full swing. We don’t build the economy of tomorrow by hoping that the energy sources of tomorrow will simply materialize in our hour of need... we do it by using the resources and tools of today.
Liberal sheep, in opposing our ability to do that, are doing far more damage to their claimed causes than they could possibly imagine. Of course, the liberal leadership knows exactly what it’s doing... these people are SO dangerous.
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