"Big oil?" Someone should inform Markey and the rest of the Lefties just who exactly owns "Big Oil"
Posted on 06/29/2008 12:44:47 PM PDT by kellynla
NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) -- Oil companies and many lawmakers are pressing to open up more U.S. areas for drilling. But the industry is drilling on just a fraction of areas it already has access to.
Of the 90 million offshore acres the industry has leases to, mostly in the Gulf of Mexico, it is estimated that upwards of 70 million are not producing oil, according to both Democrats and oil-industry sources.
One Democrat staffer said if all these existing areas were being drilled, U.S. oil production could be boosted by nearly 5 million barrels a day, although the oil industry said that number is far too high and one government agency said it was impossible to estimate production.
Recent proposals to open up offshore coastal areas near Florida and California, as well as Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, might yield 2 million additional barrels, according to estimates from various government sources that also stressed the difficulty in making forecasts. The United States currently produces 8 million barrels of oil and other petroleum liquids a day and consumes about 21 million.
Oil companies "should finish what's on their plate before they go back in line," said Oppenheimer analyst Fadel Gheit.
Some Democrats also charge that oil companies are deliberately not drilling on the land to limit supply and drive up oil prices.
"Big Oil is more interested in pumping up prices and pumping up their own profits rather than pumping more oil," said Rep. Edward Markey (D-Mass), who has co-sponsored a bill to charge oil companies a fee for land they hold that's not producing oil. "We should not even begin discussing handing over more public land to the oil companies until they first use [the land] they already hold."
(Excerpt) Read more at money.cnn.com ...
ping
* Cease all ethanol production. It takes away from food production and the unintended consequence is higher food costs. As diesel prices go up, the cost of farming tips the balance of cost to make ethanol a bad idea. Just say "no" to ethanol! Even Jimmy Carter says that diverting farm production from food to fuel is dumb – even HE gets it. This will create only ONE "blend" of gasoline and will cease regional "boutique" blends (gasohols) which are stupid, costly, and meaningless. Trucking custom blends around the country is wasteful. Ethanol blends may actually lead to fewer miles to the gallon, and adds to the cost of production and transportation. Newer cars do not need oxygenated fuels.
* Lift the restrictions in order to drill for oil in Alaska, Gulf of Mexico, and other sites in the CONUS as a matter of national security.
* Encourage the petro industry to construct state-of-the-art refineries and/or retrofit current and dormant ones and crank up production for our newly-accessed oil in the CONUS.
* Make all “carbon credit” scams unlawful. Discrediting Algore should have been a slam-dunk a long time ago. Stop electing Reps who buy into the Global Warming / Global Cooling / Climate Change Hoax. CO2 is not our enemy!
* Construct SEVERAL, regional Pebble-Bed Modular Reactors (or other similar modern designs) that are rechargeable, and cleaner than any current nuclear generator design. Refine spent nuke fuel for recycling. DO SOMETHING NUCLEAR to resolve energy problems.
* Use the residual heat from the reactors above to process motor fuel from coal and/or shale. Even though Clinton "stole" some of the best coal reserves, we still have a lot to use.
* Become independent enough to make the cartels (i.e. OPEC) inconsequential.
* Lift or cap the tax on gasoline. When the tax is higher than the profit margin, the argument over what is “obscene” becomes moot.
* List (chapter and verse) all the regulations and laws that need to be repealed in order to drill, and drill now. Use this list as the new "Contract With America for Energy Independence". Have a mega-bill introduced that in one fell swoop removes the self-imposed energy embargo.
If you squint real hard, and read between the lines, the ‘manifesto’ will require fewer RINOs and LibDems and the election of some clear-minded conservatives to even consider the above.
“With prices at $135 dollars a barrel, everyone is trying to pump as much as they can, he said. But fearing oil prices will eventually fall, the industry is leery about making too many investments in the fields it has - many of which are in deepwater areas that can be pricey to develop.”
This would indicate that the guys in a position to know think there’s an oil bubble.
CSPAN now has the oil speculation hearings on.
Actually....it has do with REFINERIES...BUILD NEW REFINERIES...should be the cry...
This guy is nuts! The owners are already paying taxes.
Good stuff.
Gees another one who does not get it! You reduce the 20 million barrels of oil were are imorting by replacing it with oil from the U.S.A. keeping the money here.
Tax everything that is productive... and land that isn’t.
The nasty little secret that the Dem bigwigs don’t tell their constituencies is that they LOVE!!! high gas prices. They want to destroy the automobile industry as it exists. I wish we could give lie detector tests to all Dem pols. Obama let it slip recently when he admitted that he wished the prices had gone up gradually. Which meant of course that he was quite satisfied with high gas prices. And obviously wishes they’d go higher. That will teach Big Oil. It will teach Big Oil and make life a lot tougher for average Americans.
Excellent! Is there a link available to facilitate sending this information to others?
Perhaps the companies are not drilling in these areas because they feel oil doesn’t exist in commercial quantities or the costs may exceed the revenue.
No link - it came to me in an email. Freepmail me your email address and I'll forward it to you.
The ‘Idle’ Oil Field Fallacy
Red Cavaney
WSJ
06-20-08
>>...Anyone with even the most basic understanding of how oil and natural gas are produced – and this should include many members of Congress – knows that claims of “idle” leases are a diversionary feint.
A company bids for and buys a lease because it believes there is a possibility that it may yield enough oil or natural gas to make the cost of the lease, and the costs of exploration and production, commercially viable. The U.S. government received $3.7 billion from company bids in a single lease sale in March 2008.
However, until the actual exploration is complete, a company does not know whether the lease will be productive. If, through exploration, it finds there is no oil or natural gas underneath a lease – or that there is not enough to justify the tremendous investment required to bring it to the surface – the company cuts its losses by moving on to more promising leases. Yet it continues to pay rent on the lease, atop a leasing bonus fee.
In addition, if the company does not develop the lease within a certain period of time, it must return it to the federal government, forfeiting all its costs. All during this active exploration and evaluation phase, however, the lease is listed as “nonproducing.”
Obviously, companies want to start producing from active fields as soon as possible. However, there are a number of time-consuming steps to be taken before they can do so: Delineation wells must be drilled to size the field, government permits must be obtained, and complex production facilities must be engineered and installed. All this takes considerable time, and during that time, the lease is also listed as “nonproducing.”
Because a lease is not producing, critics tag it as “idle” when, in reality, it is typically being actively explored and developed. Multiply these real-world circumstances by hundreds or thousands of leases, and you end up with the seemingly damning but inaccurate figures our critics cite.
Our companies have made tremendous strides in developing cutting-edge exploration technology. But they are not magicians. They cannot produce oil or natural gas where it does not exist. A significant percentage of federal leases simply may not contain oil and natural gas, especially in commercial quantities...<<
Who to believe, an oil company expert or a Dem staffer, tough one. If you like $5/gal, Thank Congress.
Pray for W and Our Troops
Thank you for this B-Cause, I’ve been wanting just this very thing - sometimes you really have to go ‘visual basic’!
Just another crazy example proving that you can't fix stupid - as if any more proof were needed!
That's what passes for "real reporting". THe first person quoted is some democratic staffer -- a political hack with no known expertise in anything. His word is put on par with "the oil industry" (which I assume they mean a trained engineer in the industry) who says the number is bunk, and a government official who likely is responsible for tracking the oil leases who says you can't have any idea what is available where.
There are lots of places in this country that aren't being drilled, because there are lots of places that don't have oil. Some of them MIGHT have oil, and the government makes industry buy leases for this speculative land, which the oil companies can run tests on (they need the lease to run the tests). If the tests rank the leases, and the industry takes on the most promising.
Oh, but when they find one that is promising, often environmentalists throw up roadblocks, so while the oil companies wait for a 2-year impact study, they move on. And the Democrats count that as a lease that isn't being utilized.
The companies already have to show they are active on the lease, or the lease agreement is terminated. The government probably doesn't terminate a lot of leases because it's free money to the government. I don't know if the oil companies are allowed to give back the leases.
We could nearly triple the domestic oil production before reaching the existing capacity of our US refineries. We could produce more of our own oil and quit sending so many dollars to OPEC.
Because most of the cost of the products are the cost of the crude oil.
We could about triple the US oil production before reaching the capacity of our existing refineries. For every little increase in US oil production, we can quit sending so many dollars to OPEC.
The obvious answer is that it costs money to drill and drilling in these areas with marginal oil supplies is not cost effective and would RAISE the price per barrel. In areas with large KNOWN reserves drilling is more cost effective making the oil cheaper by the barrel to extract, i.e, lowering the cost. This let Big Oil drill where they already can is another lame excuse by the Democrats to blame the big oil boogy man for high oil prices rather than the failed energy policies of their party.
Dang!
This is excellent.
“...find some Democrats who have at least one working brain cell!”
That’s the proverbial needle in a haystack scavenger hunt.
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