Posted on 03/17/2012 10:06:06 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
The President has been traveling on Campaign Tourapalooza 2012 this month and seeking to explain rising oil and gas prices. One of his favorite tag lines has been to say that you “can’t just drill your way to lower gas prices.” (And he’s partly correct there, but more on that later.) But he’s also tossing out another figure when he makes these remarks.
“With only 2% of the world’s oil reserves, we can’t just drill our way to lower gas prices,” he said. “Not when we consume 20% of the world’s oil.”
So is that actually true? Are we an oil barren nation? As John Merline points out at Investors Business Daily, it’s not even close to being accurate unless you’re really picking and choosing your terms. This is because the figure that Barack Obama is quoting relies on estimates of proved reserves.
But the figure Obama uses — proved oil reserves — vastly undercounts how much oil the U.S. actually contains. In fact, far from being oil-poor, the country is awash in vast quantities — enough to meet all the country’s oil needs for hundreds of years.
The U.S. has 22.3 billion barrels of proved reserves, a little less than 2% of the entire world’s proved reserves, according to the Energy Information Administration. But as the EIA explains, proved reserves “are a small subset of recoverable resources,” because they only count oil that companies are currently drilling for in existing fields.
When you look at the whole picture, it turns out that there are vast supplies of oil in the U.S., according to various government reports.
Proved reserves is a valuable number to keep track of, no doubt. It gives you a good snapshot of the amount of oil you’re currently tapping into, and that allows you to develop solid estimates of what’s going to be entering the pipeline each season. But by the same token, it’s not any sort of reflection of what your total assets are. That’s like saying that Bill Gates only has $20K of liquid cash in his primary checking account this month so he must be close to filing for bankruptcy. Here’s a more complete picture for you:
The main problem is that most of these resources are roped off. Just knowing the oil is there comes as little comfort if there are never going to be any leases issued by the government for energy companies to explore. And our ability to access the shale oil – while technically well withing our capability today – will be significantly hamstrung as long as activists continue to fight fracking and horizontal drilling.
But before we get too carried away, it’s still worth noting that one part of Obama’s claims is actually true. Even if we opened the floodgates and were able to jack up our domestic production by 20% overnight, it wouldn’t do much to move the needle on gas and oil prices in general. That’s because, as we’ve noted before, the idea of “energy independence” is something of a misnomer. Energy is traded on a global market, not compartmentalized by nation. When we produce more than we need, the rest is immediately sold as exports with few exceptions. When we don’t produce as much, we import more. It’s just the way the free market works.
A better way to understand Obama is to just observe that his lips are moving, therefore he is lying... there, isn't that much simpler?
Don’t forget, more production lowers the price AND most countries are already spending most of their oil profits on keeping the unwashed masses quiet and prevent revolts. If the price of oil goes down the third world Hell holes will have to pump more oil to be able to support the same level of local spending.
Yes, to a conservative that will suffice. But if you want to get a confused look from a liberal Obama zombie, then try to explain reserve growth to them. A waste of time for sure, but it is fun to watch their green energy fuse blow.
I like to get liberals all confused, when we talk about electric cars. I tell them that, if we had millions of electric cars on the road, that greenhouse gases would increase, because so much of that additional electricity for the cars would be generated in coal fired power plants.
That gives some pause to the liberals, as they try to think through where the power will come from for electric cars.
Thats true but its also neither here nor there.
Every barrel we produce is a barrel not purchased from overseas.
Every barrel produced means Americans who are working, and it means royalties and taxes paid into the national treasury and local tax bases instead of Nigeria's treasury, or the Saudi treasury.
A half trillion dollars a year spent bringing in oil from abroad is a half trillion that could have been spent putting your neighbors to work. When neighbors are working they are buying cars and clothes and houses putting more of your neighbors to work.
Oil from Canada would come down through a pipeline built by American workers and staffed mostly by Americans and itself paying royalties and taxes all along the line into local tax bases. It also opens up another means of getting Bakken oil to market.
If you want zero unemployment, you have to follow the North Dakota model, which is to drill, baby, drill.
Either way, it's money that won't be leaving the country.
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