Wednesday, August 09, 2006
Vincent Carroll on Petroleumless British Petroleum and Petroleum Rich Alaska Oil Fields
Today’s Rocky has an editorial by Vincent Carroll that made me smile. That’s a tough job when I’m back up after just a few hours of sleep, facing another long day at the office, and wondering how to get my freelance clients to actually pay me without burning any bridges for the future. It’s also tough when dealing with a subject as irritating as oil production and the continued idiotic prices paid for the stuff in global markets (leading to, unsurprisingly, higher prices paid by me when filling up my little Mazda).
I figured that if it worked for me, it might be worth sharing.
BP has spent the past few years trying to convince consumers that it has no real interest in producing oil. Now we learn to our dismay that the company may have been telling the truth. It has so little interest in producing oil that it permitted its pipelines in Prudhoe Bay to corrode to the point that they must be replaced, a fact that is driving oil prices through the roof.
Admittedly, that isn’t funny in itself, but the turn of phrase makes me smile.
I like words.
The Wall Street Journal noted Tuesday with mischievous glee that whereas the BP pipeline fiasco removes about 400,000 barrels a day from the market, drilling in the nearby Arctic National Wildlife Refuge would “result in an extra 1 million barrels a day” - and yet is routinely dismissed by opponents as a meaningless addition to supplies.
Yet even the Journal may have understated ANWR’s potential.
As former Interior Secretary Gale Norton noted in House testimony three years ago, “ANWR could produce nearly 1.4 million barrels of oil (a day), while Texas produces just more than 1 million barrels a day, California just less than 1 million barrels a day, and Louisiana produces slightly more than 200,000 barrels a day.”
And that 1.4 million barrels a day would likely last for 30 years - long enough to make huge strides toward development of alternative energy sources.
What is so funny about that? The idea that the opponents of ANWR drilling are paying the same as me at the pump and a goodly number of them are screaming for BP blood right now because, well, these prices are getting to be painfully high. I wonder how many of them have changed their minds about small footprint, limited drilling in the flat, desolate, mud puddle that is the portion of ANWR that would be open to oil production?
Which, come to think of it, maybe there isn’t anything funny about this stuff at all…
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Comments & Trackbacks
If ANWR would be one of the few, you could not count on 30 years. It seems that when the supply keeps flowing, alternative energy falls in the annuls of failed science projects. No one thinks, what if 1 billion Chineese gave up their bicycles for autos. Think Biuck is their favorite, now. Maybe in India the small Vespa like vehicles will be replaced with sedans. India and China populations is approximately 1/3 of the worlds.
I wish the argument was not about where we will be drilling next, but to get people to understand the word, FINITE.
I know I shouldn’t think this way, but at times I see visions of many mushroom cloudS over the Middle East.
Whether people understand the word or not, the fact remains that paradigm change doesn’t happen on a whim. The accustomed way of doing things will be preferred so long as the description remains FINITE rather than UTTERLY DEPLETED.
That’s reality.