"If we could just drill more domestically..."

[SHRED]

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A common rightwing refrain regarding petroleum prices.
A common stupidity also.

Example: ANWR.
The CONs think if we open up "domestic" sources that somehow that translates into the USA citizens benefiting. Forgetting all the while that these oil barons are trans-national corporations and owe no loyalty except to the bottmline and their share holders.


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[Uben]

1. The answer isn't more oil

It is alternative energy. Oil is finite and reaching its production peak, and is harmful to the environment.

Give me a car than runs on seawater, goes 30 mph max, and has zero emissions! People are in too big of a hurry. Speed causes more deaths, higher repair costs, and more peril to drivers. A good way to curb oil consumption right now is to limit top speeds to 30 mph.

[Mist]

2. Also, I've read that the oil in ANWR is of a grade that would have to

be exported to be refined, as no American refinery exists to refine oil other than light crude. So as soon as it would be pumped, it would be out of the country, only to come back as high-priced fuel. It frustrates me when I hear some RWers saying "It's OUR OIL! We should drill for it!" No, it's the oil companies' oil, for fuck's sake.

[sabbat hunter]

3. refineries

actually we do have refineries that can refine heavy or sour crude. it is just harder and more expensive to do so.


In fact ~11% of the oil that we import is from Venezuela, which is all of the heavy to extra heavy crude. All of which we refine domestically.

[happyslug]

5. The big question is how much is oil and how much is natural gas.

ANWR was under Glacier in all four of the last four ice ages. This pushed the ground down. Since the collapse of the North American Ice sheet about 10,000 years ago it has slowly been raising (As do all lands that have had huge ice sheets on them thus if you do to Scandinavia and look at the sea level and ground level the sea level is appears to be DROPPING, the reason is the group is bouncing back upward from all the weight of the last glaciers.

The problem is at about 20,000 feet underground the heat of the earth is more than enough to crack any oil deposits into Natural gas. ANWR is much deeper than the North Slope was and thus more likely to be Natural gas than the North Slope was (The North Slope seems to have been outside the North American Ice Sheet, which also kept it from ever going more than 20,000 deep). In many ways if ANWR is Natural Gas, it does NOTHING in regards to our present oil shortage (It does help the upcoming Natural Gas shortage, but we have drilled Natural Gas wells as deep as 50,000 feet, thus Natural Gas is NOT a severe as Shortage as oil).

We will not know till several wells are drilled, but except for the North Slope, all the other wells around the Arctic Ocean seems to have been just Natural Gas, and there have already been indications that ANWR may be mostly natural gas which will mean a pipeline through Canada as the best way to get the Natural gas to the US.

[depakid]

4. I hear that bullshit a lot

Just goes to show that some folks are either too ignorant or too innumerate to talk intelligently about the situation.

[One_Life_To_Give]

6. Short term fix

If we drilled in all of the locations we could delay the problems by a few years. However at this point it can't be developed fast enough to have an impact for years. And would likely cause people to forget about the inevitable decline of cheap oil.