Posted on 10/27/2009 11:38:08 AM PDT by Shellybenoit
"With 3 percent of the world's oil reserves, the U.S. cannot drill its way to energy security," then-presidential nominee Barack Obama wrote on his campaign website in 2008. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) stated, "All told, the U.S. has only 1.6 percent of world's known oil supply." And in the Senate, Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) added, "The math is simple: America has just 3 percent of the world's oil reserves, but Americans use a quarter of its oil."
The President, Ms Pelosi and their Democratic party followers are lying, Republican Senator Inhofe, ranking member of the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works points to a new study from the Non-Partisan Congressional Research Service (CRS) showing that the United States has more energy reserves than any other country in the world.
(Excerpt) Read more at yidwithlid.blogspot.com ...
I’m fine if we use theirs first, as long as we don’t sell the country in the process.
But I’m not fine with betting the farm on so-called “green energy”, when we should be building nuclear plants and at least putting the infrastructure in place to produce our own, if OPEC raises the price too high.
I was never able to find that article.
And if we just had a viable nuclear gameplan, we wouldn’t need as much of anyone else’s and our natural resources.
That only works if our reserves are made accessible, (ie, well net to drill and tap.) The cost of OPEC oil would then drop to a price just less than utilizing our own reserves, (since they are suppliers not users.) This would then force OPEC to reduce their own spending, or drop prices more and increase output to keep up their income. All good for us, and everybody else in the world.
drill now ping
Plus Nuclear Plants can be used to power biofuel production as well stretching out our resources to nigh infinity.
We can also use reactor nuclear waste products to breed “light beta producing isotopes” to create fuel for “Nuclear Beta Batteries” than can be used for both millitary and commercial uses.
Not only that but I am sure we could even tap into Yellowstone for geothermal as well, if we did that we could become the world’s #1 producer of aluminum due to the need for energy when making aluminum. But people would bitch a raise a fit if we tried that because they are attracted to the idea of “old faithful” with romantic notions.
We should be an exporter of products and services not a consumer.....
^ Forgot to add the steam byproduct from nuclear plants can be used to process oil tar sands as well.
A good book....
The politicians/idiots who "plan" our energy programs don't have a clue.
1. If government provided a tax credit for everyone to convert their lightbulbs to the new flourescent or LED lightbulbs we could get the same of amount of lumens with about 35% less elextrical generating plants. this means all the coal fired plants could be turned off.
2. Convert the coal burning plants to coal gasification plants and you would have natural gas and the other constitiuent parts of the coal for feeding industry with NO air pollution.
3. Produce hybrid cars powered by the miniwankel engines. The wankels are the size of a penny and run on butane! 600 penny sized wankels, about the size of a loaf of bread and weighing about 50 lbs would generate a kilowatt of electrical energy.
All this was chronicled in the Sept 1991 Scientific American. Who do you think will solve our energy problems. Scientists or Politicians?
Use ours now and we will find more later. Its suicide to import energy when were sitting on the solution.
Pray for America’s Freedom
No other source of energy on Earth contains more energy per useable unit than hydrocarbon fuels.
Hydrocarbon fuels are the most efficient natural energy source known and the harnessing of that energy is what made this the greatest nation in history.
(Can’t tell you how many I’ve sent this to Mrs. Palin hoping she would use it...)
Oil shale production has been in commercial operation in Estonia, Brazil and China for many years.
http://www.kirj.ee/public/oilshale_pdf/2009/issue_3/oil-2009-3-357-372.pdf
But still, oil resources offer only a glimpse of the full picture. CRS also reveals that America's combined recoverable natural gas, oil, and coal endowment is the largest on Earth. In fact, America's recoverable resources are far larger than those of Saudi Arabia (3rd), China (4th), and Canada (6th) combined. And, that's without including America's absolutely immense oil shale and methane hydrates deposits."
I am an active trader and investor in energy stocks and I do a lot of research in this sector. So I can tell you for sure that North America is absolutely loaded with hydrocarbons, in Canada, Mexico, and the United States. We are very fortunate to have so much oil and natural gas in America, and also large reserves of coal (not a hydrocarbon but essentially pure carbon.) That 3% number for percentage of the world's reserves appears to be based on what is called proved reserves, which includes only oil in areas where wells have already been drilled and only counts oil that can be produced for sure with technology already in use today. Proved reserves doesn't count oil or gas that is very likely to exist based on seismic surveys but where wells have not yet been drilled. It also doesn't count oil that we are very likely to be able to produce in future years as technology improves.
And technology does improve constantly. One of the biggest improvements in recent years is the invention of horizontal drilling and multi-stage fracturing ("fracing") of oil-bearing rock. This has opened up entire vast new regions where oil and gas is contained inside shale formations where these hydrocarbons could not be produced before the invention of horizontal drilling. The Bakken shale formation in North Dakota, the Barnett Shale in Texas, and the Marcellus Shale in Appalachia are three large shale formations that have recently begun to produce large amounts of oil and natural gas, especially gas. This wasn't even possible just ten years ago.
Then there are huge offshore areas off our Atlantic and Pacific coasts that have never been explored because of restrictions on offshore drilling. We can't possibly know how much oil is out there until we drill some wells. Look at Brazil, which has made huge oil discoveries off its Atlantic coast in recent years. Another key idea that the anti-drilling extremists never mention is the low price elasticity of demand for oil. Low elasticity means that demand is very insensitive to price, so that the price of oil has to go way up to reduce demand when supplies are restricted and prevent a shortage (and gas lines around the block.) This means that just an increase of a few percent in global oil production can hold oil prices down and save American consumers many billions of dollars. So it is a false argument that drilling off the US coasts would not do much to help consumers. The truth is offshore drilling, if it just adds 2% to total global production, could result in oil prices that are 30-50% lower than oil prices without any offshore drilling. The Canadians can drill off their Atlantic coast without any environmental problems, so why can't we? We can do that too, of course, if congress would just stop pandering to environmental extremists and let the states decide where and when to drill for oil offshore. Offshore drilling might not be appropriate for Florida because of its large tourist industry, but it might be OK for Virginia or New Jersey in deepwater areas 30 miles offshore. It's time to open up our energy industry and get it out of the grip of environmental extremists.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.