We Are Not Fully Exploiting American Resources.
We have vast untapped resources in America that we have been unable to extract—not because they are not there, but because of environmental concerns. We want to be energy independent, but we don’t want to use our oil and gas. With sky-high prices, we are filling the Strategic Petroleum Reserve and talking about opening another one. We need to change expectations by starting to use our resources. We need to use clean drilling techniques off the coasts, in Alaska, and in the Gulf of Mexico to extract oil and gas. Then we need to build more refineries to turn these resources into fuels we can use. That will show OPEC that they can’t push us around by pushing up the price.
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I thought that oil output tends to peak and then decline in the case of an individual field or an individual country. That ti pretty well established. The US peak was in 1970 as we now know with the benefit of hindsight. So the question for Diana Furchtgott-Roth is:
Your view that the US can increase oil output--which countries can you cite where this has happened--a peak is reached, decline occurs for many years, but then the flow reverses and rises?
We may be able to find more oil. In fact peak oil would say we will. It is just that the amount extracted each year is likely to trend lower. So the US could have VAST amounts of oil, but hat does not mean that the amounts recovered don't get a little LESS vast each year.
Given that fundamental predicament of our industrial civilization is its "overwhelming dependence on an exhaustible resource" (William Catton), it is not surprising, to those familiar with human psychology, that it is precisely those resources that are invariably described as "vast", "huge," "enormous" etc. Plainly, this is an important cultural denial mechanism. Notice that I said "cultural"; though Ms. Furchtgott's particular perspective is rather right-wing, many examples of the same denial mechanism at work can be found accross the standard political spectrum. Notice also that, in the context of the question at issue, Ms. Furchgott-Roth's argument must be taken to mean that the US region has not really reached its geological peak oil. But in fact, US lower-48 production peaked in 1970 and has been declining ever since. Even with the most advanced extraction technologies, Prudhoe Bay - largest in N Am - began its terminal rapid decline only 12 years after its first production.