Posted on 01/29/2008 2:27:43 PM PST by saganite
WASHINGTON, Jan 29 (Reuters) - Oil and natural gas production at Alaska's North Slope has been declining since 1988 but the region holds promise if energy prices stay high and Congress opens key areas to exploration, the U.S. Energy Department said in a report released on Tuesday.
Through 2050, the North Slope could yield up to 36 billion barrels of oil and 137 trillion cubic feet of natural gas under optimistic assumptions, the Energy Department said.
That would be enough to meet current U.S. oil demand for about five years and natural gas for a year and a half, but some major obstacles stand in the way of hitting those goals.
Projections assume that a North Slope pipeline is operational by 2016, oil and gas prices near current levels, the opening of parts of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and National Petroleum Reserve to oil drilling, and drilling access to the Beaufort and Chukchi seas, the study said.
If those assumptions are met, production from the North Slope could extend well beyond 2050, and require a refurbishment of the Trans Alaska Pipeline System and building of a pipeline to bring natural gas from the North Slope to Lower 48 states.
Plans to build a natural gas pipeline from the North Slope have been delayed for years due to bickering between oil companies like ConocoPhillips (COP.N: Quote, Profile, Research) and Alaskan officials.
Without opening ANWR -- where drilling is currently banned -- the total economically recoverable supplies would drop to about 30 billion barrels of oil and 135 trillion cubic feet of gas, the study said.
Through 2015, exploration efforts could add about 2.9 billion barrels of oil and 12 trillion cubic feet of natural gas to economically recoverable ANS supplies, the report said.
(Excerpt) Read more at uk.reuters.com ...
ping
Sit on it until the price goes to $500 per barrel.
What the heck is wrong with GWB! He could have made a big deal last night at the SOTU speach...castigating the Dems for refusing us the ability to drill..he could have hung them for high gas prices. But GWB is so nice instead! And this is only one issue..how about if he had said the audience was filled with politicians who wanted the USA to lose in Iraq. He could have made fools of a bunch of them for specific earmarks. It does on and on....
Drill it deep, hard, and often
Mukluk
LOL
The GOP has been such ballless wonders on this. If they hammered home the message over and over that Joe Six Pack was paying $3 a gallon gas becuase of the RATS blocking cheap oil, it would certainly work.
Really? Where?
Suck all the oil out of the middle east first, before we tap our last reserves.
If that 36 Billion were dollars instead of barrels of oil, congress would have spent it before the headline was printed.
There are guestimates of as much as 60 billion barrels of oil off our coasts. There are estimates of as much as 400 billion barrels of oil in ND, Mont and Canada. That doesn’t even cover the 200 billion barrels (probably a lot more than that)of tar sands oil or the shale rock oil in Colorado (still no viable way to recover it though).
Suck all the oil out out of the desert and use the reserves in Alaska, and off shore Fl and CA.
And Venezuela.
We will all be living in caves before the libs/tree huggers give in on Alaska oil. IMHO
With you on that, and then charge them $200 a barrel for fresh water.
It was Bahrain or one of those little Gulf kingdoms about 1920 where the king hoped the oil drillers would strike water and was disappoionted when they hit oil.
When you let others walk all over you you are either ignorant or stupid. Guess which I think about Bush's inability to lead?
When do we start mining Methane Hydrate, which exists as a mineral under Arctic conditions?
In a generation, the current reluctance to tap the (continuously renewing) supply of Methane Hydrate beneath our oceans, at depths of 1,000 to 3,000 feet down, on the ocean floor, shall (hopefully) been overcome, and we may be able to use it to supplement our growing demand for energy.
Despite what the “greenies” and the “enviroweenies” say, the world is going to continue to use carbon-based fuels, as, contrary to some opinions that have somehow crept into law, carbon dioxide is NOT a pollutant in the earth’s atmosphere.
Plus, the art of reformulating methane into liquid fuel (thus fulfilling the promise of CLEAN Diesel fuel) will provide a large and growing demand for the recovery and harvest of Methane Hydrate.
There is easily (and provably) well over 200 bio bbl-equivalent of recoverable hydrocarbons in the CO shales. BTW, and FWIW, two other firms have had good test results using a microwave-driven process. It'll be interested to see how that technology pans out, ultimately.
He should have brought up that if Hillary had allowed drilling in 1992, we’d have ANWAR oil right now.
Ahh... Hello!? How about in Alaska or in the Gulf of Mexico?
That oil is not cheap and has not been cheap. That is some of the most expensive oil in the world.
“Through 2050, the North Slope could yield up to 36 billion barrels of oil and 137 trillion cubic feet of natural gas under optimistic assumptions, the Energy Department said.”
If it is up to the majority of this generation this national wealth will stay exactly where it is. They rather be indebted to foreign oil cartels than be independent.
“But GWB is so nice instead!”
He allowed the damns to play him like a violin, instead.
“Suck all the oil out out of the desert and use the reserves in Alaska, and off shore Fl and CA.”
Oh the horror of all the greenhouse gases.
From the article:
"That would be enough to meet current U.S. oil demand for about five years and natural gas for a year and a half, but some major obstacles stand in the way of hitting those goals."
It was in Bahrain when a man by the name of Steineke looked west across the water at Saudi Arabia and said to himself: “There is oil in them hills, and he was right. The result was ARAMCO.
They said then there was no oil in Saudi. Or Kuwait. Saudi and Kuwait have been fairly reasonable abou their oil. We will miss them when they are gone, eaten by wahabs or iranians.
And it will do us just as much good as all that clean burning coal in Utah. We are overloaded with Luddites in Washington and that will not change any time soon. The anti industrial party also believes America should sink to a much lower relative level among nations and energy availability and efficiency runs counter to that vision.
They say, ‘Don’t drill, but woe upon he who lets us run short of gasoline.’ Woe!
Won’t happen before we get away from the breast-beaters who inhabit Washington. They are a hardy breed and convert newcomers pretty consistently.
Theres a huge difference between being nice and being a pnssy! Reagan was nice!
Wrong. When you factor in geopolitic costs, it is very cheap.
Your “uncertainty, uncertainty and uncertainty” really support my contention that the shale oil is not recoverable at this time. You cite regulatory, political and market problems with the product. Just because something can be feasibly done from an engineering standpoint doesn’t mean it will get done.
What we are talking about here is the intention of the gooberment to PREVENT increased production, which has been the case since, at least, George Bush was elected, and even well before that.
Were I the CEO of Shell (that's 'Royal Dutch Shell', for those in Rio Linda), I too wouldn't spend a dime on production until/unless I had some sort of assurance from the assholes in D.C. that they would allow production w/o interference, or at absolute minimum define the interference very specifically.
Ordinarily, ANY energy production company will -- guess what? -- produce energy. However, exactly NO energy production company will produce anything if they've any suspicion at all that gooberment intends -- after the fact, of course -- to sweep in and confiscate their efforts.
Until this attitude changes, BROADLY AND MORE OR LESS UNIVERSALLY, America is stuck with artificially high energy prices.
I'm a trader. Presumably I have the opportunity, at least, to profit from this sort of willful stupidity. Whether I have the sense to do so or not is entirely my responsibility (and, here's a hint, right now: get long the gasoline crack; in English, that means buy May or June gasoline futures and sell same month WTI crude futues against).
The damage to the Republic from this sort of stupidity, the institutionalised and continuous discouragement of energy production will, if this tendency remains unstopped, prove fatal to our nation, and in fairly short order.
It's interesting to note that, at law, and according to the Sedition Act signed by that famous 'Progressive', Henry Woodrow Wilson, the assorted scumbags who PREVENT energy production in this nation should be prosecuted. Read the text of that statute; I've nothing to sell you here.
I've rather given up on ''law'' in this nation, sorry, and the Constitution is shredded daily by those in power.
However, markets, representing as they do a sort of sum of human behaviour, are to be respected when they are allowed to operate without brain-damaged restraint. Other than that condition, they are subject to the uncertainty (not risk, which is a definable term) of the goobers in gooberment.
Now, you may choose to accept that uncertainty, which is continuous and increasing with every year, and good luck to you.
I do not choose to accept it, and so I trade according to other considerations.
At the risk of overstretching a metaphor, I don't believe we've come quite to the event of a Randian ''Atlas Shrugging'' by the productive people in our nation -- but I do believe we are not too far away from it. Certainly, we will 'achieve' this level of antiproductive dissociation within a couple of decades, or perhaps less.
And that, sir, in my view, would and will be perhaps the greatest tragedy in the history of the world.
FReegards, and best wishes to you!
He was nice! :^)
A lot of false info in that article:
Here is a couple, makes me doubt most of their numbers.
—137 trillion cubic feet of natural gas
—natural gas for a year and a half
The US use 21.65 trillion ft3 a year. This equals 6.3 years.
http://tonto.eia.doe.gov/dnav/ng/ng_cons_sum_dcu_nus_a.htm
—up to 36 billion barrels of oil
—Without opening ANWR...drop to about 30 billion barrels of oil
—and 135 trillion cubic feet of gas
ANWR mean expected oil reserves is over 10 billion barrels, not 6. The “up to” value they discussed is 16 billion barrels.
ANWR is also expect to hold 35 trillion ft3, not 2 as implied.
http://pubs.usgs.gov/fs/fs-0028-01/fs-0028-01.pdf
—and require a refurbishment of the Trans Alaska Pipeline System
This was started a few years ago. Several pumps stations have had the mainline pumps, drivers and controls already replaced and the new ones are in service.
http://www.alyeska-pipe.com/sr.html
Shell have demonstrated already that their process works.
Please show me in my post where I said it wouldn’t work (the engineering) It’s not feasible for the reasons I stated, political, financial and regulatory. None of which have anything to do with the company’s ability to actually get it out of the ground.
The reporter drew this info from the government survey. The potential for misunderstanding what he/she read is immense seeing as how reporters don’t know a thing about anything.
Neither the DOE or the EIA web sites show a report released yesterday with this subject.
Maybe we could let Russia drill.
(sarcasm)
You may be closer to right on than you know.... somebody is holding Alaska back for somebody... who knows what the government fine print agreements really say. We did prevent Russia from collecting on their oil contracts with old Saddam... I am sure they have NOT forgotten and they do not usually forget.
Hmm. That’s interesting.
Is this business information or personal?
Um.....(looks for mods)....BOTH!
Without scientific verification, I suspect that the methane hydrates boil off with the reduced pressures from lower sea levels and help bring the climate back into a warm period by acting as greenhouse gasses.
I would like to see some research on the ability of Methane to affect climate, as well as the stability of Methane hydrates under reduced pressures before I would proffer this as a hypothesis, but that might be the one resource we do not want to tap...
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