SLIPPERY STUFF

President BO is bound and determined that the way to get us off of our dependence on foreign oil and onto "green energy" is to force us to buy products that we are not economically ready to buy.

Electric cars are a joke...pure and simple.

In order to get us to buy them, President BO is perfectly willing to allow the price of crude to rise until we cannot tell the difference between the cost of operating our oil based vehicles and the cost of buying and operating the inefficient, unusable electric vehicles, such as the Volt and the Leaf.

During the last oil crisis, I wrote frequently about our need to start drilling in the US for oil.

The hue and cry then was, "We can't drill ourselves out of this crisis."

That was not true then and it is not true now, for several reasons.

The price of crude oil is not determined by how much it costs to get it out of the ground. It is based, in large part, on how much it is believed it will cost to get it out of the ground in the future.

The other objection was often, "It will take us ten years to realize the first drop of oil from any new drilling operations."

That, too, was a lie. If the oil companies had gotten the green light, they would already be producing new barrels of crude today. They can do that. Yes, they can.

Besides, if the ten year mark were true, we'd be that much closer to it today than we were then.

Here are the facts about oil availability in the US.

According to our own government, North Dakota and Montana have an estimated 3.0 to 4.3 billion barrels of technically recoverable oil in an area known as the Bakken Formation.

"It is clear that the Bakken formation contains a significant amount of oil - the question is how much of that oil is recoverable using today's technology?" said Senator Byron Dorgan, of North Dakota. "To get an answer to this important question, I requested that the U.S. Geological Survey complete this study, which will provide an up-to-date estimate on the amount of technically recoverable oil resources in the Bakken Shale formation."


The USGS estimate of 3.0 to 4.3 billion barrels of technically recoverable oil has a mean value of 3.65 billion barrels. Scientists conducted detailed studies in stratigraphy and structural geology and the modeling of petroleum geochemistry. They also combined their findings with historical exploration and production analyses to determine the undiscovered, technically recoverable oil estimates.

("Technically recoverable," in this context, does not mean that it could be recoverable, it means that we presently have the technology to recover it.)

USGS further states that in order for oil to be economically extracted from the Bakken fields, it must cost about $50.00 per barrel. With oil currently at well over $100.00 per barrel, are your math skills high enough to realize that we passed that $50.00 level long ago?

In the "sacred," though minute portion of Alaska called ANWR, according to US Geological Survey, ANWR contains up to 9.2 billion barrels of oil. The entire coastal plain has up to 29.4 billion barrels of recoverable oil.

Some estimates put the amount higher. According to them, "...economically recoverable oil ... including reserves growth in known fields, is 35 to 36 billion barrels."

Add to that current oil reserves in Texas where less than a third of the 190 billion barrels of oil available have been produced, and the rest of the states where oil is found as well as the oil available off-shore, and we have enough oil to be come totally independent of Middle Eastern oil for the next 100 years, which would give us time to develop alternative energy sources the right way, instead of the mistake-filled way it is being done now.

Given this information, what conclusions would you draw as to why President BO and his cohorts in the Congress and Senate resist going after the very oil that would make us independent of foreign oil, if that's what they really want us to do?

Consider, in addition to all of that, the fact that oil is being produced in South America, Russia and China, all of whom have significant technically available oil, and the world supply of oil becomes immense...something that should be lending itself to reducing the price of oil globally were it not being artificially kept high by such organizations as OPEC.

Remember, the electric car thing is not a solution anyway, because it only addresses the reduction of oil used in vehicles (and does not address trains, buses, trucks and other commercial uses of carbon based fuel), and ignores the hundreds of thousands of other things made from oil including the exterior and interior components of electric vehicles!.

This whole "green energy" thing is a total farce. Everywhere it has been tried it has failed, mostly because we are not technically ready for it.

It is time to contact your congressperson and urge him/her to get on the ball and let's get this oil need satisfied while we have the chance to do so.

It will buy us the time we need to properly seek and develop alternatives.