If Not Us......

Well, as we expected, there's been a huge bruhaha about the BP oil spill in the Gulf.

And to be sure, it is a pretty major spill.

One that is likely to impact fisheries in that area for quite a while.

A bunch of polticians now want to put a moratorium on all offshore drilling in our waters.

Now disregarding what that is likely to do to our continued dependence on foreign oil, and disregarding what it will do to the price at the pump, and disregarding the fact that we really have nothing else operationally viable as alternative power as yet....

There's another thing that these politicians haven't figured out.

Something far more logical and far more impactful than what they've come up with so far.

It's that we're not the only country in the world.

There are other countries all around the Guld of Mexico, the Carribbean, the Pacific, the Atlantic, the Mediterranean, and the other parts of the world.

And they all want oil.

Cuba, merely 90 miles off the coast of Florida, is already licensing drilling rights to China, Russia, and Eastern European countries.

Venezuela, at the southern end of the Gulf, is licensing drilling rights to its own buddies as well.

And, China is also working to gain drilling rights off the coast of Baja California in Mexico.

So, merely curtailing US drilling offshore isn't going to do diidly squat to prevent another oil spill there.

In fact, it might actually increase the odds of one occurring.

Foreign drilling is not subject to the same regulations, checks, inspections, and protective measures we require in the United States.

Which means that foreign drill rigs are inherently more dangerous, and more likely to cause a spill.

So, by preventing US offshore drilling, not only do we not reduce the likelihood of spills, but we concede all the oil in those areas to countries who can sell it back to us, worsening our trade deficit, and increasing our dependence on foreign oil.

The United States consumes nearly one-fourth of the world's oil but produces only about 10%.

Its 1.76 billion-acre Outer Continental Shelf, which extends from about 3 to 200 miles offshore, is prime oil hunting ground.

In 2006, a consortium led by Chevron proved that oil could be produced from a geological area about 175 miles from Louisiana that's estimated to hold 3 billion to 15 billion barrels of oil.

By most estimates, at least 18 billion barrels of oil can be produced from areas that these politicians are saying should be put off-limits, on top of 68 billion barrels in other areas where drilling is likely to still be allowed.

Louisiana has had offshore drilling since 1947.

About 172 active rigs dot the Gulf of Mexico waters off the coast, producing about 79% of the oil and 72% of the natural gas that comes from drilling off the nation's coastlines.

The state gets about $1.5 billion annually in oil and gas revenue, a figure that will grow when it starts receiving part of oil companies' royalty payments in 2017 under federal law.

California was home to the first U.S. offshore oil production in 1896.

There are 26 oil and gas drilling platforms off the southern California coast and 1,500 active wells.

Those in federal waters have produced more than 1 billion barrels of oil and 1.5 trillion cubic feet of natural gas since the 1960s.

Now even with all that coastal oil production, since the 1969 spill until this most recent BP spill,  they've spilled only 852 barrels of oil in California and Louisiana, the result of better technology and regulatory vigilance.

When viewed in terms of the millions of barrels of oil these operations have produced safely, that's an infintesimally small percentage, less than one one thousandth of a percent.

Coast Guard reports show that the amount of oil spilled from all sources in U.S. waters dropped from 3.6 million barrels in the 1970s to less than 500,000 in the 1990s.

A report by the National Research Council found that offshore oil and gas drilling was responsible for just 2% of the petroleum in North America's oceans, compared with 63% from natural seepage and 22% from municipal and industrial waste.

Read that again.

63% of the oil spilled into the oceans off America's coasts come from natural seepage.

Yep... 63% of the spilled oil occurs because.... the earth leaks.

Only 2% comes from offshore drilling spills, and that's throughout North America, including Canada and Alaska.

The BP spill is terrible, no question.

But it's also the first major US offshore spill in over 25 years.

As usual, our politicians are more concerned with regulating risk out of every human endeavor in America than addressing the true problem.

But when you legislate to eliminate all risk, you also eliminate all initiative to be better, all endeavors to improve, all incentive to excellence.

And in this case, all you succeed in doing is to let other, higher risk entities do the drilling.

So they can sell the oil back to us.


“There will be those who strongly disagree with this decision, including those who say we should not open any new areas to drilling, But what I want to emphasize is that this announcement is part of a broader strategy that will move us from an economy that runs on fossil fuels and foreign oil to one that relies more on homegrown fuels and clean energy. And the only way this transition will succeed is if it strengthens our economy in the short term and long term. To fail to recognize this reality would be a mistake.” ---- Barack Obama, March 2010

“We import 70 percent of our oil at a cost of $700 billion a year ... I have been an oil man all my life, but this is one emergency we can’t drill our way out of. If we create a renewable energy network, we can break our addiction to foreign oil.” ---- T. Boone Pickens


PORK OF THE DAY:
$167,000 by Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.), House appropriator Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), and Reps. Buck McKeon (R-Calif.) and Mary Bono Mack (R-Calif.) for exhibits at the Autry National Center for the American West in Los Angeles. Rep. Schiff, with his Gun Owners of America rating of F minus, may want to know the museum recently showcased an exhibit called “Pistols: Dazzling Firearms.”