Bush and the offshore drilling...good or bad?

I’m very pro drilling. You will be to once you read this.

The legendary Willie Sutton robbed banks because, as he famously explained, that’s where the money was.

Well the US is finally taking a cue from the late Sutton. It's finally going to expand drilling for oil and natural gas in offshore waters because that’s where many of the nation’s biggest untapped petroleum deposits probably can be found. About damn time!!

At a time when gasoline prices have soared to the once-unthinkable level of $4.00+ per gallon, the country is more vulnerable than ever in terms of its exceptionally heavy reliance on foreign oil.

Expanded domestic oil and natural gas production is needed in part for national security purposes. The more the nation reduces its reliance on foreign oil from volatile regions such as the Middle East, the stronger and more self-reliant it is in terms of international relations. The Prize, Daniel Yergin’s history of the oil industry, chronicles how oil played a crucial role in the Allies’ defeat of Germany, Italy and Japan.

Don’t expect much from congress. Congress probably won’t give serious consideration to lifting the moratorium until after a new president takes office in January. But the President’s speech this morning laid it right in their laps, didn't it?

Even if the moratorium were lifted today, we shouldn’t expect any near-term relief from record-high fuel prices. Major offshore oil and natural gas projects generally take several years to complete and are hugely expensive. The price tag for a big offshore oil production platform in extremely deep waters could exceed $1 billion.

Time to stop the foreign aid for awhile and use that money here to build the oil extraction equipment.

Likewise, if the Arctic refuge suddenly were opened to drilling, it could be 10 years before oil was produced. Why weren’t these steps taken a decade ago??

Oil monger fatheads and the almighty $$$ and drilling activists lobbying congress, that's why.

Nevertheless, adopting such policies to expand future oil and natural gas production could contribute to lower energy prices further down the line.
In 2007, 26.8 percent of U.S. oil production and 14.2 percent of natural gas production came from offshore wells.

The U.S. Energy Information Administration says that undiscovered U.S. offshore petroleum deposits recoverable by conventional means total an estimated 75 billion barrels of oil (40 times the annual domestic production of 1.86 billion barrels) and 362 trillion cubic feet of natural gas (18 times the annual production of 20.1 cubic feet). About 21 percent of the oil and 17 percent of the gas deemed recoverable are in areas currently off-limits to drilling.

A discovery by Chevron and two partners in the Gulf of Mexico in late 2006 illustrates the potential for big fields offshore.
A test oil well, dubbed "Jack 2," was drilled 175 miles off Louisiana to a total depth of 5.3 miles (19 times the height of New York’s 102-story Empire State Building), making it the deepest well successfully tested in the Gulf. It flowed at a prolific 6,000-plus barrels a day and was drilled in a promising geological trend known as the Lower Tertiary, which runs about 200 miles east to west and 30 to 40 miles north to south, Chevron spokesman Mickey Driver said. The area potentially could yield 3 to 15 billion barrels and become the largest domestic oil find since Alaska’s Prudhoe Bay discovery in 1968, according to media reports.

I think that it’s about time to take these steps to insure our own countries health, economically don’t you? About 3.5 billion dollars a day on oil imports!! Enough!!

I also think that the pro-greener’s need to shut up on this issue. We need to get to where the oil is. The no-drill activists use oil just like the rest of us. Shut up!!

We as a species are addicted to oil, plain and simple…end of story. It is everywhere in our society and it's not going to change any time soon.

If we can get it here, in our own backyard, than we should.

P.S. Could this drill ban be Bush’s legacy?

Time will tell.