Oil Companies Sit on 68 Million US Acres That They Have Not Drilled
The call for expanded offshore drilling is a fake solution that only Big Oil wants, because keeping Americans dependent on oil is the best thing they could do for their bottom line.
Oil companies currently sit on 68 million acres of our nation’s oil-producing land. This is land that they could have started drilling years ago, but they left it untouched while gas prices soared. In fact, the number of new offshore drilling permits tripled since 2001, and yet we’re paying triple what we were in 2001.
Perhaps opening more of our coasts to drilling isn’t the panacea oil companies claim it to be.
Yet today, these companies and their Washington allies are pleading for more. Though they already have access to 80 percent of our offshore areas, they want to open it all despite the significant costs to coastal businesses and the environment. Before opening the remaining 20 percent of our coasts, which would wreak havoc on fishing operations, tourism and recreation, oil companies should be drilling what they have instead of asking for more.
Members of Congress, when they return to Washington in September, should focus on solutions that will help Americans deal with rising energy costs, create jobs and reduce our dependence on foreign oil. As even this administration pointed out, if we start drilling today, we won’t see a drop of oil for ten years. So instead of discussing plans that won’t deliver for at least a decade, we need to start investing in renewable technology and real solutions that will produce results without harming our coasts.
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IN 2008, . MORE THAN 50 TAXI DRIVERS DIED WHILE DRIVING, WHILE 20 OIL DRILLERS DIED.
DRILLING FOR OIL CAN CREATE HUNDREDS OF SAFER JOBS FOR THOSE WHO LOST THEIR JOBS BECAUSE OF THE ECONOMY. IF THE U.S. SPENDS MONEY ON FOREIGN OIL, THEY CAN USE THE MONEY TO CREATE NUCLEAR WEAPONS AGAINST US. HOPE THAT YOU GUYS COULD TRY TO CONSIDER ABOUT WHAT I JUST SAID. THANK YOU
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If oil companies have sufficient oil inland, it is a purely selfish act to stake out oil fields offshore to insure their continued profit.
This post by the NRDC shows that it does not understand basic concepts of the exploration process.
Some reasons for inactive leases:
1) Your prospect covers 300 acres, but the lease it sits on covers 2385 acres. The lessor does not want to subdivide it. You lease all of it or none of it.
2) You lease a trend. You have an idea for a prospect, and you see a group of them lying in a given area. You lease all of them now to ensure that competitors don't outbid you for the others if your first one is a success. You don't drill them all at once, even if you could. You drill one, you learn from it, if it works, you drill more.
3) Some leases are actually owned outright by oil companies. They may have historical origins, such as old railroad right of way grants or land swaps. They may not be prospective, and the mineral rights may therefore have little or no market value.
4)It takes time and costs a lot of money to drill prospects. You have to locate rigs, you have to allocate funds from the budget. You can't do everything at once. It might take a year or more to secure a rig contract.
5) Many companies are staff constrained due to massive industry layoffs throughout the 1980's 90's and early 2000's (20 years of relatively poor oil company performance). This can cause drilling schedules to slip. I know of many cases of this. It's real.
6) Your company ranks prospects, and some fall at the bottom. Those leases may sit idle while you try to sell them, or until you get to the bottom of the pile. It acn easily take a year to locate a buyer and sign a contract.
7) you've drilled a dry hole in one prospect, and you have leases on similar adjacent prospects. You decide they are too risky and you don't want to drill them. You hold the acreage until it expires, or the next rental payment is due.
Others could identify many more reasons.
Additionally, you seem to think that there is a simple linear formula that relates lease surface area to oil reserves. But the reality is that some leases are better than others. If Acme Oil has 10,000 acres onshore, and its best prospect may have 5 million barrels, and it finds after a successful bid that it could drill a lease offshore California for a 500 million barrel prospect, what do you think they's do?
You claim that an environmental disaster is a certainty. Yes since the 1969 spill, over 7200 wells have been drilled in offshore California without one serious spill incident. 80,000 wells have been drilled in the offshore Gulf of Mexico, and I know of no serious spills due to drilling on the American side. The risks are not zero, but you wildly exaggerate them.
You say that the 10 year time frame is a reason not to drill. So you must believe we shouldn't have drilled on the North Slope, or in the deepwater Gulf of Mexico. The UK shouldn't have drilled the North Sea, and Brazil is acting foolishly in their deepwater plays. If it benefits our children, and not us, it shouldn't be done. Correct?
You pose this as an either/or debate. Oil or alternatives. But the DOE you quote also says that oil consumption will be rising steadily through 2030. Meanwhile alternative energy companies, with huge incentives for success (taking OPEC's market share?) are getting mountains of cash. Both can go on in parallel. In fact, legislation could be written to allocate offshore royalties and bonus bids to alternative energy research. Why not?
What we really need in the energy debate is informed contributors looking at all possible solutions, and contributors who are able to think critically. Those who attempt to make arguments on subjects they don't understand, or who attempt to frame a real and serious problem in the simplistic 1960's language of good guys and bad guys, like the NRDC, are not helping anyone.
This whole argument about the 68 million acres is aimed at the idiot constituency who believe anything that is repeated enough times by the media and special interest groups.
I could go look for my keys over on the table where the light is good, but I already know they are in the room with the locked door, and I don't have the key. My wife has the key, so I guess I have to wait until she gets home.
Congress holds the key to lower retail gas prices for consumers, but the party in control of congress at the moment (dems) is so beholden to special interests that they adjourned and went out on the campaign trail without giving us the keys. I say throw the bums out.
Democrats submitted a reasonable bill giving oil companies more leases 50 miles off shore if the states want it (states rights), use American made equipment and labor, end oil tax subsidies and invest in alternative energies (funny, oil company advertisements say they are doing just that). Republicans don't like it and Bush might have to veto it. So much for the emergency Congress was supposed to stay and work on. I say we are throwing the bums out.
The dems have controlled congress for the last few years and are only just now doing anything. I say, vote out all incumbents and make the special interests buy off a whole new batch. Then throw them out in two more years. Rinse and Repeat.
Dems have been in "control" for 2 years with the most fillabusters in history carried out in those two years. Trent Lott was quite up-front about thier intentions when he said they were going to roadblock everything and then run against the do-nothing Congress. Rinsing and repeating is wasting too much shampoo when we could buy the good stuff at the salon and go to publicly funded campaign finance. This would gain us a seat at the table. Right now we can't afford the wood. If you aren't living in a cave you are seeing on the TV and internets that the lobbyists and corporations are about to pull off the biggest heist in history. That 3 page document was an equivelent to a stick-up.
The lobbyists get their power from contributing to the re-election campaigns of incumbents. If we change the culture of US voters to one of voting out the incumbent, then the lobbyists would lose much of their leverage. Lobbying in its current form is the real evil of US politics.
Meanwhile, drill more in the US. Build nuclear, coal, and wind farm power plants. Find ways to make ethanol and bio-diesel from non-food materials like algae, weeds, and wood. Also, convert fleets to natural gas. Just a serious threat of backing for any of these initiatives, will have an immediate impact on the futures and spot markets for oil.