Energy myths – battling for better energy choices and lower prices

The phrase “drill here, drill now, pay less” has become a popular in the past few weeks. Sure, if we open up exploration now, it will take some time for the oil to actually start flowing, but just a commitment to drill here and drill now will lower the price of fuel immediately. We know this as fact.

Jim Vicevich – radio host at WTIC 1080 in Hartford – just started updating his blog again and posted a few good links. If you’re up to arguing the point with those who think windmills are the answer, Vicevich provides a link over to Investor’s Business Daily (IBD) and an editorial entitled Energy Myths.

The IBD article was from early July and I missed it. It provides good talking points for readers, but I always encourage you to do your own research and listen. Play devil’s advocate, try to prove the information wrong; it will improve your debate skills.

To start, let’s look at a good response – with data – to the “we can’t drill our way out of this problem” answer. Yes. We. Can.

Actually, we can. As we’ve noted before, conservative estimates put the total amount of recoverable oil in conventional deposits at about 39 billion barrels. Offshore, we have another 89 billion barrels or so. In ANWR, 10 billion barrels.

In oil shale deposits, we have more than 1 trillion barrels of oil. In perspective, that’s about four times the total reserves of Saudi Arabia. And if estimates of shale reserves as high as 2 trillion barrels prove true, we’ll have about a 300-year supply of oil just from shale. This compares with current estimated total U.S. oil reserves of about 21 billion barrels.

ANWR alone is expected to yield 1 million barrels of oil a day. Now make the highly conservative assumption that we’re able to get a like amount of oil from the other sources — for a total increase of 3 million to 4 million barrels of oil a day.

That’s an enormous rise in oil output. Today, we produce just under 8 million barrels of oil a day from domestic sources. So we could, in effect, boost our energy output 50%, and thus our energy independence, by bringing an additional 4 million barrels of oil to thirsty world markets each and every day.

By the way, those calculations don’t include the trillions and trillions of cubic feet of natural gas found in the same locations, which, along with nuclear power, could be used to fire our power plants.

By 2030, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, we will need at least 30% more energy to fuel our economy. Nearly 85% of that increase will come from oil and gas, even with expected gains for alternative energy. Can’t drill our way out? In fact, it’s the only way out of our energy crisis.

Read the entire post over at IBD, it will only take you a few minutes and I encourage you to do some fact checking on your own.

The article from IBD is part of a 47-part series – yes, 41 articles – entitled Breaking the Back of High Oil. I’ll admit that I have only read a couple of them, but I challenge you to read two or three articles per day like I plan to do.

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Steve McGough

Steve's a part-time conservative blogger. Steve grew up in Connecticut and has lived in Washington, D.C. and the Bahamas. He resides in Connecticut, where he’s comfortable six months of the year.

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