XVII
i dont had the opportunity of filling up my gas tank when gas prices in the states were a dollar, but now being 2.29 and rising...will i ever see gas prices back down to a dollar?
Plus all this commotion with oil in alaska that we won't drill because of environmental issues? Isn't most of alaska barren wasteland anyhow? If we did drill in alaska, would we still have to buy oil from other places?
Bringing this back on topic...
This is being discussed on a dozen boards and mailing lists, and the arguments sum up to three things:
A) It'll "destroy" an untouched pristine wildlife refuge.
B) It only has ten weeks/six months/less than a year's oil so it's not worth tapping.
C) It won't affect oil prices.
Plus the usual side jabs of it taking years to ramp up to production, etc.
The typical argument is "Why not spend all the exploration and development money on researching alternative fuels?"
In response:
As far as the "destruction", the entire Arctic National Wildlife Refuge is 19.5 million acres, or just under the size of the entire State of Ohio. The Coastal Plain, the only area to be explored, is 1.5 million acres, and the actual "footprint", or area that can be developed, altered or even driven on, is 2,000 acres, or smaller than just the parking lot at JFK International Airport.
That's just over three square miles in a state of 572,000 square miles, or four times the size of California.
You'd have a hard time "destroying" it with a nuclear warhead, let alone a few roads.
Now, the majority of the exploration and drilling will take place in the winter, on roads and pads made of ice. Snow will be dozed into berms, flooded, and smoothed. Drilling modules trucked in, set up, and operated. Come spring, the rig is dismantled; the modules disconnected trucked back out. The roads and pads melt, leaving only a wellhead, a device about eight feet high, on a pad of gravel about ten feet in diameter.
Pipelines for outlying wells can be a flexible stainless tube, simply unrolled and laid down. When the well is depleted, the pipe is rolled up, leaving no pylons, no legs, no trenches, nothing.
Some new production pads will be made, yes. But again, you're looking at pads of a few acres, in an area literally a million times that size.
As for the wildlife, they are almost entirely migratory, passing by the production equipment a few times a year. Thirty years of North Slope production hasn't affected the Caribou in the least- their numbers are actually growing, and have been for over a decade.
'Slope' workers are forbidden from even honking a truck horn at the animals. There is no hunting of them, no harassment. If and when wildlife shows up on the pad, it's the workers that shut down and get out of the way, not the other way around.
"B" is, of course, a straw man argument, not only wrong but intentionally misleading.
Yes, if
only ANWR production was taken into account, it would indeed be something like a year's supply. But obviously we're not going to stop production on the Slope, and in Texas and Pennsylvania, stop importing from Saudi Arabia and Venezuela, and shut down the Gulf rigs to JUST live off the estimated ANWR production.
None of those will, of course, happen. To say otherwise is either willful misdirection or plain ignorance.
Now, the US consumes about 19.7 million barrels of oil a day, about 55% of which is imported, mainly from Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Iraq and Venezuela.
Best estimates from ANWR say it could pump a million barrels a day, possibly surpassing the North Slopes' current 3/4-million barrels a day. Personally I think that's a bit optimistic, but even if it "only" pumped half a million barrels per day, that's better than 5% of the current US production today.
Also, at about $50 a barrel at the moment, if ANWR means we can reduce Saudi imports by the same half-million a day, that's
a quarter of a billion dollars a day going to US or US-based companies, and staying in US employees' pockets. And NOT, I might add, going to a barely semi stable theocratic dictatorship with known anti-American tendencies.
And on top of THAT, the Saudis are doing very little, if any, research into alternative fuels or alternative energy sources. Whereas the US and British companies, like BP, Shell and Unocal, are doing extensive research and development on things like fuel cells, gas-to-liquids conversion, thermal depolymerization and even the old standbys of solar and wind power.
Personally, I'd prefer to see
those companies have that quarter-billion a day, rather than some Saudi prince.
And "C", no, it probably won't affect oil prices. So? Won't higher gas prices tend to convince those "evil" SUV owners to maybe buy something a bit more efficient? I thought that's what everyone wanted.
Also keep in mind that higher oil prices are a good thing for domestic producers. If they were making a living back when oil was only $20 a barrel, the cost to produce that barrel hasn't gone up, only the
value of that barrel has risen. That means better profits for oil companies- and if you try and tell me they're all evil oil barons bent on destroying the land for money, I suggest putting down the Greenpeace pamphlet and going to the library sometime.
The oil industry and it's subsidiaries is a huge industry in the US, employing millions. The company makes more money, then the employees make more money, and/or the company can hire more employees, etc.
And those same "evil" oil companies are the ones doing the majority of the alternative fuel research in the US right now. Higher profits means more R&D funding. Again, isn't that what everyone wants?
The other benefit to higher oil prices is the fact that oil recovery systems that were too costly to bother with before, are now becoming economically viable. The Alberta Tar Sands in Canada, for example, has estimated oil reserves
in excess of Saudi Arabia's- some ten or twenty
trillion barrels of oil.
Unfortunately, it's thick and tarry, and saturated into loose sands. It takes quite a bit of energy, and thus cost, to recover a barrel of oil, and get rid of the leftover residues and sand. The process loses money at $20 a barrel, but starts to make money at $35 or $40 a barrel.
If that could be brought to high production, the US could
significantly cut it's Middle East imports.
There's also the brand-new conversion technology that can convert abundant and relatively cheap Natural Gas into a very clean non-cryogenic liquid that's basically a synthetic crude oil. This synthetic can be run directly into existing refineries as a feedstock.
There's the old but previously too-expensive process that can convert Coal into a sort of synthetic crude. And we have massive coal supplies; over 50% of our US electrical production is from coal-fired plants.
All these are not worth chasing at $20 a barrel, but start being very attractive at $50 a barrel.
All told, other than the purely emotional arguments of "it'll ruin an unspoiled wilderness!" and similar nonsense, I have yet to hear a good reason why ANWR should
not be explored.
AO
