Wednesday, August 20, 2008
The oil drilling debate
There's no quick way out of our oil problem; and that has been known for a LONG time.
Our politicians have clearly dropped the ball on this; and, apparently are content to continue with more of the same...
Our politicians have clearly dropped the ball on this; and, apparently are content to continue with more of the same...
At money.CNN.com, Jon Birger states this opinion:
"It is government's job to think long term, which is exactly why Congress should allow more offshore oil exploration. I've already written in this space about the absurd moratorium on oil-shale production. As far as offshore drilling goes, what's most frustrating is we can't even have an informed debate.
There may be very little undiscovered oil in the outer continental shelf (OCS), or there may be a multiple oil fields the size of Tupi - the monster field that Petrobras discovered off the coast of Rio de Janeiro in 2006. We just don't know how much oil is out there because oil companies have no incentive to do the costly seismic surveys required to find out.
'The fact is that much of the data we have about potential resources in prospective OCS areas is very limited - the equivalent of a few snapshots the size of postage stamps - because it's based on technology that is more than 25 years old,' Chevron CEO David O'Reilly said last year. 'When we consider the development of domestic oil and gas resources in the OCS, we've created a kind of Gordian knot in the policy arena. We've become paralyzed in a debate confined by fixed positions and fuzzy data.'"
