[Al B.]

ping

Related article by Mr. Reiss:

Cold, Hard Facts: U.S. Trails in Race for the Top of the World

As tough as the technological barriers are to developing Artic undersea resources, politics is the number one hurdle. At stake is 25% of the undeveloped oil & gas reserves on the planet. As the Coast Guard Admiral stated in the related article:

"If this were a ball game,....the U.S. wouldn't be on the field or even in the stadium."

Sarah Palin understands the urgency and complexities of the issue. Few others political leaders, even on the right, do.

[Cicero]

I thought that OBoBo’s EPA regulators recently announced that there would be no more offshore drilling for the next seven years. Specifically in the Gulf and the Atlantic. But will these jerks allow drilling off of Alaska?

I doubt it, under current leadership.

Imagine spending three billion on acquisition and exploration and not knowing if you’ll even be allowed to drill. Or how many years the delays will be.

[chrisser]

$3billion dollars - and they still haven't been able to even drill a single exploratory well. There might not be oil down there when they eventually get to.

So let's use $100/barrel as a convenient measure. At that price (and keep in mind, that $100 per barrel is revenue, not profit), the oil company has to sell $3 milliion barrels of oil from this well, just to cover the costs incurred so far if the oil were "free". Now multiply this across all their prospective leases, plus the cost of exploratory drilling, plus the cost of extraction drilling, if they actually do find crude. The numbers here are mind boggling, before any oil even starts to flow.

Gosh, I wonder why gasoline is so expensive - must be those evil oil company profits /sarcasm.

[marron]

So you lay out $3 billion, and you don’t know if you will be allowed to drill.

This assures that OPEC will never see much competition from American resources.

If you have to lay out $3 billion up front, and then they can string you out for twenty years before turning you down on your permit, you can see that only the really big boys with big pockets can survive this kind of thing, and even they have to consider if its worth it when there are other places they can drill where the host countries actually want the oil to flow.

A concentrated effort to achieve energy independence would require an overhaul of our regulations, it would require a determination to steam-roll the hurdles we have set up over the years to let our own energy companies develop our own resources. We can never achieve independence if some bureaucrat has the power to stymy it with impunity. Endlessly.

[Al B.]

Update for related links:

Shell: No Beaufort Sea drilling in Arctic for 2011

Heritage Foundation: Breaking an Ice-Bound U.S. Policy: A Proposal for Operating in the Arctic