Posted by
BrianR on Saturday, April 16, 2011 8:05:44 PM
“Dependence on foreign oil”.
We’ve been hearing the mantra for years, but in this spring of 2011 it seems especially galling as the country’s mired in economic crises, unemployment is through the ceiling, and gas prices at the pump are so high that we’re used to $4 per gallon and are being set up to get hit with five bucks per. And that war cry grows shriller by the day.
But there’s a dirty little secret you should know.
The reality is that this country is absolutely awash in oil. We have more oil right here than Saudi Arabia. In recoverable shale oil alone we have over a TRILLION harvestable barrels of oil available according to the Department of the Interior's (DOI) own studies ( Here ). In Utah we have about 18 billion barrels recoverable in tar sands. We have oil in Alaska, offshore, all over the place. We’re actually drowning in oil.
Or we would be, if we actually used any of it.
We’re the only oil-producing country in the world that doesn’t utilize its deposits to the fullest extent possible.
According to that DOI report, we use about 20 million barrels of oil a day. Do the math. That means that in shale alone we have enough oil to last us 50,000 days, or one hundred and thirty-seven years. Throw in all our other known resources, then add those so far undiscovered, and we have plenty enough oil to be, not only completely energy-independent, but a net-exporter country well into the next century if we so choose, with petro-dollars flowing our way instead of to foreign nations.
Canada’s Athabasca tar sands project has proven the technology viable and economic. As a matter of fact, we import quite a bit of our oil from Canada, and that’s exactly where it comes from: the tar sands.
Further, as extraction technology advances even MORE oil will become available. Wells that were previously capped because the remaining oil was deemed unrecoverable will enjoy new life. And who knows where the next fields will be discovered? Well, surely not us, since the government makes exploration and development almost impossible by making the task of getting permits an insurmountable hurdle.
The ugly truth is that there is no “shortage”. There’s an artificial scarcity created by bad government policy pursuant to enviro-fanaticism. Our personal finances and the economic viability of this country as a whole are being held hostage to the demands of the eco-freaks.
The price of fuel to power our transportation grid is a major driver of economic health, as transportation is where 70% of the oil is used, and as those costs rise so do the costs of virtually everything else in our economy.
The enviroNazis' response? "Projects would take years to come on stream and would only increase our oil addiction, the heart of the problem." (LA Times, 15 April 2011)
Well, if we'd started using these deposits all those years ago, instead of letting enviroNazis block them, they'd all be online now. The words “oil addiction” reveal the true agenda: social engineering.
Lunacy.
Instead, they propose we develop forms of “alternate energy” that are even further down the road (if they’re achievable at all), depending on wishful thinking and bad science.
Yeah, okay, maybe the Vulcans will show up and share their dilithium crystal technology with us, but unless they do we're stuck with oil to power our transportation infrastructure for the foreseeable future.
You can't power ships and aircraft on solar power. Some ships can use nuke power, but the ONLY way to fly jet aircraft is with kerosene. Period. And that ain't gonna change.
Further, what about the hundreds of millions of cars and trucks already on the road? Gonna just wave a magic wand and make them disappear? Replace all the gas stations with... I dunno, something else? Absurd.
The ONLY reason the price of gas will continue to go up is because of the artificial shortage created by that self-same government and the "enlightened" elitists who then bootstrap that "shortage" into a "reason" for why we should do away with cheap personal transportation.
Kind of an Alice in Wonderland Queen of Hearts approach.