Drilling for Oil

They keep beating the same drum about how anyone who doesn't support despoiling the ANWR animal refuge with oil drilling isn't serious about solving our energy policy, and I've mentioned here before that I think solving our fossil fuel addiction by drilling for more oil is like solving our drug addiction by manufacturing our own crystal meth.

Nevertheless, in honor of President Bush's symbolic lifting of the Executive Order banning off-shore drilling (an Executive Order signed by his father, by the way) let's discuss again the reasons why it's all cost and no benefit.

First, there's the issue of timing. Even assuming that the oil companies were to immediately lease the land and begin fully making use of the resources, it would be 8-10 years before any oil was pumped from the sites and 15 or so before we started reaching anything like large volumes. Now, the counter argument to this one is valid, that we can't know what it'll look like in 10-15 years, and if we'd started drilling in these locations 15 years ago instead of putting the ban in place, we'd be getting that oil now.

Which brings us to the second point, the price of oil is not local, all oil is sold on the world oil market, and the amount of additional oil we could pump compared to the total sold on the world market would be a drop in the bucket. People smarter than I (and who know the industry better) have said that the effect on the world price of oil if we could dump all of that oil into the supply instantaneously would be negligible. The fact is that companies are in business to make money, and if they can make more money selling that oil to China than locally. We simply are not a country that would pass laws requiring that a corporation be required to sell locally what they drilled locally, even if such laws would help. Heck, we're not even a country that can understand that stopping the huge subsidies that we give to the oil industry, now that they're raking in profits hand over fist isn't a penalty, it's the way government SHOULD run. Remember that, next time one of your friends tells you that big government is the problem and we need to stop spending money on programs that either don't work or once the need for them has passed: these are probably the same friends who insist that it would be un-American to hit the oil companies with a windfall profits tax to get back from them some of the subsidies we've been giving to them, even though clearly this is a government program whose need is not current.

The third reason why more area available for leasing won't help the oil situation is that the oil companies are already sitting on millions of acres of lease rights that they're not exploiting, some of them in the same basic areas that we're now being told are vital to our energy policy. If there's really lots of oil to be had under Alaska, why aren't we drilling in the areas that AREN'T ANWR, which reportedly have about an equal chance of finding (and equal difficulty to get to) oil? If your problem is not having enough milk in your fridge, the solution isn't to get your grocery store to order larger supplies, the solution is to go and get some of the milk that's already at your local store. Ordering more supplies at the store is only a solution if you've already bought out their full supply and still need more.

But the newest reason (or at least, the one I hadn't heard before) is that our problem isn't the amount of oil, it's the size of our pipeline, in the form of refineries. Apparently, U.S. refineries are operating at or near 100% of capacity. Which means that more oil wouldn't solve the problem.

Suppose you're a firefighter, but when you arrive at the fire you discover that the only hose you have with you is a garden hose. So you start fighting the fire with that, because it's the only tool you have available, but it's clearly very slow going and not working as well as you'd like. Arguing that we need to drill for more oil is like that firefighter arguing that we need to up the pressure at the fire hydrant. All the pressure in the world isn't going to turn into gasoline any faster if we're already using the full capacity of the hose we have.

What we need at this point is for someone to suggest a REAL energy policy, something that gets us off of fossil fuels entirely, and in the interim if you want to solve the problem while still using oil, let's look at building additional refining capacity, and perhaps throwing a "use it or lose it" clause on all of those leasing rights the oil companies already hold and aren't using.

Or at the very least, before we start drilling in one of the comparatively few places in our country that we've set aside for the wildlife that we displace everywhere else we go, let someone explain to us how it's actually going to be better than the sites a few hundred miles away that they already have rights to but aren't drilling in, and how more oil into an already fully saturated pipeline is going to translate into any more gasoline (and thus, any downward pressure on the price of a gallon of gas).

Liam.