Posted on 07/16/2009 10:22:50 PM PDT by george76
The 47-year-old trade embargo against Cuba has been shaken by the revelation that drilling for oil and natural gas is about to take place less than 50 miles off the U.S. coast - in Cuban waters.
No one knows for sure just how much oil lies off the northwest coast of Cuba, but the consensus is that it's sizable.
The U.S. Geological Survey initially came up with an estimate in 2004 of between 5 billion barrels and 10 billion barrels. But Cuba's state oil company, Cubapetroleo, recently said the undersea geology was "very similar" to Mexico's giant Cantarell oil field in the Bay of Campeche and that the Cuban field may contain 20 billion barrels, more than twice the previous estimate.
If confirmed, this would place Cuba's oil reserves among the top 20 in the world and not far behind the United States, which has 29 billion barrels. A number of U.S. geologists believe Cuba's revised estimate could actually be conservative and that it may only scratch the surface of its real potential.
The Cuban government is not only sitting on a potential oil bonanza but it has already awarded oil and gas exploration leases to companies from Canada, China, Spain, India, Venezuela and Norway. And Cuba is negotiating with Brazil's Petrobras, a company with years of experience in deepwater drilling.
If U.S. firms are forbidden by their own government to drill for oil and gas in Cuban waters, then the national oil companies of other countries will benefit while our investor-owned companies watch from the sidelines.
(Excerpt) Read more at billingsgazette.com ...
Make Cuber the 58th state!
Another good reason to end the embargo.
And then can we end the embargo on ANWR?
I’m a little slow right now, but 51-57??
They will be drilling OUR OIL, they have mighty big straws nowadays.
I wonder which Mark Perry this is? There was a far-left writer for the various “City Papers” many years ago, including DC.
Does anyone know who this guy is?
Oh yeah, dems won't let us.
There is some production in Cuba. A bonanza offshore? Let it play out.
BTW, I am in no way in favor of the Florida ban. It is important to recognize however that there is little onshore production in Florida. Ergo, unless there is something unique occurring offshore, don't count your barrels before they hatch.
One last comment: Parts of the panhandle are very prospective. If a big field is going to found in Florida, maybe it will be a pure wildcat, but likely more it will be found in under explored extension ["on trend"] of places where oil and gas are known to exist.Once again: Cantarell? ????
They’ll drink our milk shake.
That will be a GOOD mishap, because it will be a communist mishap. At least according to the Democrats.
Won’t count, donchaknow.
Apparently so. Just ask teddy “ the swimmer kennedy” or john effin’ kerry about wind farms off their beach house coasts.
The Chinese are the world's capitalists now. We are on our way to becoming a failed socialist state consigned to the dustbin of history.
Well then, good for China and Cuba.
The nitwit assh@ts we have here making energy policy think if we can’t exploit our own resources, then nobody can.
Oil, being a fungible commodity, can then be sold back to us,
or used in their own countries.
We are now governed by vile, pernicious degenerates.
The Cubans couldn't know that unless they'd drilled the structure.
Cantarell is almost unique in the world, so it's fairly rash to say that whatever they're drilling in the Cuban OCS is "very similar".
Cantarell is an enormous mass-flow or slump deposit (submarine landslide) of carbonate shelf sediments mobilized by the Chicxulub bolide when it struck the Yucatan shelf in about 100'-300' of water (sea levels were higher than now), ending the Cretaceous Period and the Mesozoic Era.
Cuba's close enough that the Chicxulub (pron. "chick-shoo-loob") impactor could have mobilized the Cuban shelf-edge deposits in similar manner, so it's not totally outside the realm of possibility -- but for them to make the claim means that they would have to possess a very strong time-tie of the Cuban slump event to either the Chicxulub crater or the Cantarell debris flow.
If the Cubans are right and their play works, or even if it works for the wrong reasons (hell, let's not be picky), it would be a tremendous benefit for them and for the whole world economy, which could use some really big discoveries in the next 10 years. It would benefit the U.S. as well, even if nary a drop were sold into U.S. markets. It would go into world markets, and all would benefit. Now, if the Left manages to find a way to politicize world markets and screw everything up, then it doesn't matter how well the geologists or engineers or anyone anywhere does his job -- you can't stop political Leftists from screwing up everything they touch.
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