Tuesday, August 12, 2008

BARACK OBAMA, JOHN MCCAIN

The Washington Post Tears Apart Anti-Drilling Arguments

Every time I write about the tire inflation and offshore drilling, I get some readers reciting arguments about the dire environmental effects, or how little oil is out there, or that inane "use it or lose it" argument, where the government ought to insist that oil companies that currently have leases drill in spaces that don't have any oil, or else we'll take away their rights to drill and give them to... well, someone else, even though that part of the plan is never all that clear.

But the editors of the Washington Post take ... the pointy end of a tire gauge to the arguments of the anti-drilling crowd and poke holes in them.

The editorial brings great new bits of data for this debate. On the argument that there isn't enough oil out there to make it worthwhile, they point out how wildly inaccurate past estimates have been:

In 1987, the MMS estimated that there were 9 billion barrels of oil in the Gulf of Mexico. By 2006, after major advances in seismic technology and deepwater drilling techniques, the MMS resource estimate for that area had ballooned to 45 billion barrels.

On the "use it or lose it" inanity:

The five leases that have made up the Shell Perdido project off Galveston since 1996 are not classified as producing. Only when it starts pumping the equivalent of an estimated 130,000 barrels of oil a day at the end of the decade will it be deemed "active." Since 1996, Shell has paid rent on the leases; filed and had approved numerous reports with the MMS, including an environmentally sensitive resource development plan and an oil spill recovery plan that is subject to unannounced practice runs by the MMS; drilled several wells to explore the area at a cost of hundreds of millions of dollars; and started constructing the necessary infrastructure to bring the oil to market.

Finally, on the environmental fears:

According to the MMS, between 1993 and 2007, there were 651 spills of all sizes at OCS facilities (in federal waters three miles or more offshore) that released 47,800 barrels of oil. With 7.5 billion barrels of oil produced in that time, that equates to 1 barrel of oil spilled per 156,900 barrels produced.

(Again, remember, one natural seep off the coast of California leaks 150 to 170 barrels a day. In other words, that seep, in one day, generates as much spilled oil as drilling for 23,535,000 barrels, or 461,286,000 gallons of gasoline.)

I have to take issue with one part of the Post editorial, though. They write:

Contrary to the baldly political suggestions regarding lower gasoline prices by President Bush and Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), drilling would make no impact on today's pain at the pump because it would be years before any oil flowed from the Outer Continental Shelf.

I'm not 100 percent certain the Sanford Bernstein report, contending that oil could be extracted within one year in some places off California, is correct. But I haven't seen any drilling skeptics show that it's wrong, nor even make the attempt. Their response has been to pretend it doesn't exist, and just assert, again and again, that it would take years and years to get any oil out of the ground (from a region where the oil is coming to the surface in natural seeps, mind you).

Kudos to the editors of the Post for fact-checking the claims in a full-page ad that the Natural Resources Defense Council ran in their own paper.

08/12 10:20 AMShare