“Drill Baby, Drill! The Left has America’s number. Take away a smidgen of our pain, such as $5 a gallon gas, and fill the TV screen with loads of football, baseball, hockey and basketball – throw in a healthy dose of NASCAR, and we’re willing to forgive just about anything. Are we suckers, or what? The environmental movement and the Democratic Party think so.
What the hell do they know!
The world is a complicated place. Oil prices go up and down with no
reason or predictability. Either inflation or recession runs rampant across the globe. Governments are helpless. They either print more money, which causes more inflation, or regulate the situation into another recession. Stability seems a thing of the past. Or is it?
Despite best efforts of Barack Obama and the anti-oil wackos, who care more about tinny minnows swimming in some river, or a parirrie rat or a forest owl than Americans keeping their homes warm in the winter or being able to have enough food on their tables, the American people want cheap gasoline.
We have the solutions to our oil dependency in Alaska’s Anwar and in the western states of the good old US of A. Unemployment in North Dakota is currently at 2.5%. Residents of Alaska receive an annual subsidy thanks to the oil industry there.
There is a place the energy companies call the Bakken, an oil reservoir that has erupted across a forgotten corner of the U.S. It is a frenzy of drilling and pumping and moneymaking. It is also a place where a new energy future is emerging, one that holds the promise of ending U.S. dependence on overseas oil and kick-starting the country’s stagnant economy.
Government estimates suggest it could yield 4.3 billion barrels of oil. One industry estimate is five times higher, which would mean the Bakken alone could hold as much recoverable oil as the rest of the country. And it’s just the beginning.
Today, the U.S. imports 9.2 million barrels a day of oil – two million of that fromCanada, 4.9 million from OPEC countries. In the next 10 to 15 years, tight oil may supply an extra 3.5 million barrels a day – although estimates on this vary broadly. The oil sands, if pipelines like TransCanada Corp.’s Keystone XL are approved, can pour out an additional 1.2 million barrels a day.
We are not taking into account what the Anwar oil fields can produce: Editor
“There might be some possibility that we could reduce our oil imports to zero,” said Leta Smith, director of oil and gas supply outlooks with energy consultant IHS CERA. “That’s a really optimistic case. And that’s not what we’re forecasting right now. But still, it’s an interesting question to postulate.”
The International Energy Agency, in its 2011 outlook, sees the Bakken stalling out just past 600,000 barrels a day, and tight oil across the entire U.S. producing some 1.4 million barrels a day by 2020.
The weaning the U.S. off OPEC crude seems possible. Analysis by Dallas consulting engineers Turner, Mason & Co. suggests that by 2014 or 2015, the massive Gulf Coast refinery complex will no longer need to import light sweet crude from places like Saudi Arabia. By 2020, that part of the U.S. could be completely off Middle Eastern crude.
That possibility has major foreign-policy ramifications in a country whose oil interests have often had important military and diplomatic consequences.
Harold Hamm, the billionaire chief executive of Continental Resources Inc., which holds the largest Bakken land position and is among its most bullish promoters, has said it is ushering in “a new era in the American oil industry.”
“We can be the Saudi Arabia of oil and natural gas in the 21st century,” Mr. Hamm said.
As children we tuned out our parents when they told us to think about starving children in Africa andAsiaand finish the food on our plates. As adults, we don’t want to hear about how much gasoline cost inEurope. We can have cheap gasoline and home fuel oil if we stop letting Barack Obama and the Democratic Party and their toadies at ABC, CBS, NBC and CNN lead us around by the nose and demand” Drill baby, Drill.”
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