Offshore
Will drilling for oil offshore help or harm?
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Offshore
This is the last week before the election, and it’s time to explore that last subject on our agenda — offshore drilling and the future of the petroleum industry.
The congressional ban on offshore drilling that had been in place for over 25 years expired on October first and was not renewed. President Bush nixed the executive ban, leaving the shores wide open for lease applications. Here are some questions we should be asking ourselves about this opportunity. How much oil is there? How long will it last? How soon will we get it? Will it help me at the pump? Unfortunately, no one has definite answers to these questions, but some educated guesses will get us nearer to answering the big question. Sure, now we can drill; but should we?
How Much Oil is There?
The United States Petroleum Reserves, as estimated by the United States Geologic Survey rests at about 20 billion barrels of oil. Estimates of reserves contained in offshore resources stand at just 4 billion barrels. At our current use rate of 21 million barrels a day, we would deplete offshore oil resources in just over 6 months. The end of US produced oil probably won’t come with a bang and a collective sob when someone uses the last drop. Instead, it will be a slow climb of prices as we use more expensive methods to squeeze more stubborn oil out of the ground — a long, slow, and painful death.
It does not seem that even pumping our known petroleum resources will offer relief at the pump. However, the US does have plentiful coal and natural gas resources, so one way to break the link to foreign powers might be to drive coal-fired electric cars and compressed natural gas cars. This would still leave us with the whole non-renewable problem of fossil fuels, plus a lung-full of toxins and a baking world climate.
Why Did We Stop Drilling?
The government banned new drilling off America’s coastline in 1981. The inspiration — or the straw that broke the camels back, depending on your perspective — came when a petroleum pipeline faced off with a very large ship anchor. You can guess who won. Three million gallons of crude oil spilled into the ocean, covering some 35 miles of the most beautiful Santa Barbara beaches with crude.
Wildlife do not escape this coating, either; seabirds covered in oil cannot fly, so they try to preen and end up poisoning themselves. Oil also sticks to seals, interfering with their coats’ natural insulation properties.
To prevent environmental contamination with crude oil and other chemicals associated with petroleum production, we no longer drill the Outer Continental Shelf or in sensitive wildlife areas like the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge, or ANWR. A major barrier to drilling is the PR problem. Oil spills have diminished with better technology and regulatory oversight, but accidents have the potential to impact the public image of offshore drilling in a nasty way.
Will Offshore Drilling Help?
Big oil has a lot of money and resources, both technological and informational. With the end of the ban, the next president could choose to follow what President Bush started. Leases could be approved as soon as 2010, with exploration, drilling, and extraction finishing in three years. So we could be seeing offshore product on the market between five and ten years. That’s still five more summers of nearly five dollar-a-gallon gas.
Plus, as we calculated earlier, this oil can only be expected to last us half a year at current consumption. So unless we can find ways to extract more and more oil and use less than we do now, offshore oil resources will be a drop in the bucket, and we’ll be back to square one: high gas prices and dependency on volatile foreign oil, with one exception — we’ll be without a safety net.
What Are the Alternatives?
Panicked drilling because of high gas prices is a sure-fire way to bleed off one of America’s most precious resources. Petroleum does not just go into your car at the pump — it fuels our entire lives, in more important ways than getting to work. Petroleum is the starting material for jet fuel, asphalt, plastics, clothing, fertilizers, and pharmaceuticals.
All the alternative sources of oil for our cars, like shale oil and coal liquefaction are still in the developmental technology phases, which means the techniques used to extract these resources are expensive and won’t help our pain at the pump anyway. Much of these extractable resources also happen to be in environmentally sensitive areas in the US and Canada, so unlike drilling which has the potential to impact wildlife, these techniquesdefinitely will.
So my answer to should we be drilling offshore is no. We should be saving this resource for when times are especially tough, which are yet to come, and diverting it to the industries that can’t make do with anything else yet, like plastics and pharmaceuticals. It would be disastrous to run out of the oil which runs our medical systems because of our panicked “Drill, Baby, Drill!” attitude.
We need to conserve our oil, instead of searching for new supply. Our best hope will be to change our society’s infrastructure away from the single-occupant gasoline powered vehicle to mass transit, away from trucking and toward rail, away from a global economy and toward a local one. So if high gas prices are giving you indigestion at the station, get out of the car. Get on the bus, train, or in someone else’s car. Even if you have to buy yourself an electric car and run it off your coal-fired grid, do it.
You’ll be thanking yourself, because you’ll be encouraging a new kind of economy instead of calling for drilling that would only hasten the end of the oil-driven economy.
Resources
United States Geological Survey: World Energy
Energy Information Administration
Hot, Flat, and Crowded by Thomas L. Friedman