You are correct. Though I don’t remember that sticker, I remember the sentiment.

It takes two years for a deepwater drilling platform to be built. There are many in the pipeline. The correct answer to this is for the US to free up all international waters for our domestics right away. Otherwise, in 2 years we will be in the same place, only 2 years farther down the hole. There is a surplus of shallow rigs, but the oil companies refuse to suggest shallow drilling off Florida due to the likely S__t storm it would cause.

Part of the problem is the anti drilling congressional types. I love the latest crap they put out today. Oldie but goodie – It will take 7 years for ANWR to come online, it’s no solution. Of course, they have been saying that for what, 20 years?

A really nasty one from another Rep. Idiot(D) from Slumville, USA. Near quote – there are over 69 million acres that are under lease that the oil companies aren’t drilling now. Why don’t they drill there? The truth – Expensive, eco-friendly drilling techniques allow the drilling of large areas from a single pad. Those acres are being drilled, they are just using horizontal drilling to reduce the footprint. IOW, the oil companies do something good for the environment, but the Demogogue of the hour uses that against them. That crap may fly when they want to shout about each other, but if I were an oil exec I wouldn’t stand for it.

Overall, I can tell you that the pendulum has swung the other way in Houston. Oil companies are now REALLY cautious about over investing in exploration. They seem to have finally learned their lessons. The late nineties glut was much easier for them to deal with, and wasn’t as much self caused as the eighties problems.

When you have a moratorium for long enough, your chances of catching up quickly without economic dislocation at the end of the catch up period go way down. You’ll have a lot of suddenly surplus gear.

Wasn’t there a bumper sticker in the early ’80s that went

Dear Lord, Please send another oil boom. I promise I won’t screw it up next time.

It may be possible that we have a short term situation with deep water rigs, but we can always build more. There could be high demand for the existing ones, but that is no reason to say that we should not open more areas to exploration at all. As soon as those wells are drilled, those rigs are again free, so we need places to drill. Also, we need certainty in the market that if you build one, it will get used instead of being parked down in Beaumont. I used to fly over several of them everytime I went east out of Houston. Just sitting there, waiting to be used and costing huge $.

The really stupid thing is preventing drilling in places that we don’t really control, so foreign powers can still drill there.

All that being said, much of the off limits areas are NOT deep water.

Deep water rigs are all tied up, IIRC. These are the babies that can drill in thousands of feet of water. Land rigs shouldn’t be a problem. But even if we don’t have enough of them, their technology is as old as dirt. Diesel electric drive, big ol’ mud pumps, tower, racks and swivel, shakers and so forth. And with slant drilling you can cover a lot of ground with a single stationary rig. The jobs are dangerous and lonely, but the pay is great. Rather than giving bazillions in windfall profit taxes to the gov’t to squander, lets allow the majors to drill here and spread that money around in gainful employment with the aim of moderating oil prices and propping up our supply side somewhat.

Are you talking about offshore platforms, derricks, what?

Whatever it is you are talking about, it makes no sense.

First, there are tens of thousands of people employeed around here to do nothing other than create this equipment. Second, the equipment used to run a well is easy to produce. The drilling rigs are only needed long enough to tap the well, and then are replaced with a pump jack on land or a platform for offshore. In any case, I just got got an email from a guy this morning who was laid off. He works for an oil service provider. They are being laid off because there really isn’t that much exploration possible right now in the US due to government restrictions.

I don’t know who sold you this idea about an equipment shortage, but either they are blowing smoke, or you really misunderstood them.

Based on Coasian economics, the people who really want that oil pumped should offer half of that to the environmentalists. Think what they could do with a half-trillion smackers.

There are many times more oil reserves off the east coast, west coast, and Florida gulf coast that are off limits to US producers. Strangely, much of it is not off limits to foreign oil companies so you get a situation like the chinese drilling where the state of Florida won’t let Exxon drill.

Everyone,
One of the things people don’t understand (because it’s really complex) is that the price of a barrel of oil is more closely based on the value of the LAST barrel than the average barrel.

It’s not as much like a lot of other commodities in that way.

What that means is that increasing supply by a small amount can have a big effect on the price.

Would you be willing to allow drilling in ANWR if it brought down the price of gasoline by half a dollar? I am not saying it would, but that is closer to the truth than the argument of the leftists who claim it’s a drop in the bucket.

Any new oil we add to market is added into the world supply, and is likely to get claimed, at the world price, by the growing car populations of China and other developing nations. North America has been scrutinized again and again by five generations of petroleum geologists. I trust their diligence. I don’t think there’s much left to find.

And there are many more productive uses for the oil that remains than burning it into your gas guzzlers. It’s a key ingredient in plastics and many other materials. Just today I read that tire prices are rising sharply because of the rising cost of oil. Wouldn’t it be sadly ironic if future generations perfect cars that don’t need petroleum products for fuel, but they can’t be built because we lack the oil-based materials to construct them?

Get real, people, and think beyond your next vacation (or staycation). Petroleum is a vital resource for many purposes, and not all of it is destined for your personal use, here and now.

You cannot “conserve” your way to energy independence, either. Period. It has to be combination of the two. Conservation, YES. Energy Production, YES. Is it really that hard to understand????

The problem is that, as we’ve seen, increasing production eliminates the pressure to develop conservation strategies because there’s no penalty for doing otherwise. The phrase “necessity is the mother of invention” is apt here, even though it’s not just invention that’s being driven by scarcity (or at least cost), but also the shift in usage patterns.

And yes, to some degree, consumption will increase with population–right to the point when we collectively hit the wall (Peak Oil, Carrying Capacity, etc). And then, things get very bad, very quickly, for a lot of people. By constraining supply and increasing the cost of resources slowly, we can decrease the speed at which we hit that barrier.

It’s nice to hope that innovation will continue in the absence of cost- and/or supply-based pressure, but it just ain’t so. Innovation needs incubation, and cost pressure is one of the best ways to do that. If General Motors et al, as well as the modern American economy have taught us anything, it’s that we’ll happily forsake planning and innovation for short-term gain.

I don’t want to discount what individual people or organizations may achieve through innovation, but on a macroscopic level, people are shallow and lacking in foresight, and hoping innovation will solve problems while steaming full ahead won’t address that.

Six to eight dollars a gallon, though, certainly will.

I don’t understand how REDUCING our dependence on foreign oil is a bad thing. We do have a lot of oil here in the U.S., but if it is too expensive to extract, it won’t be extracted. Can’t we at least make it legal for that moment when it becomes a cost-effective proposition? And why is profit for companies locating and extracting this commodity something to be cursed? Profits create jobs and create tax revenue to the government, no?

If the government just mentioned that we would start drilling in these heretofore untouchable areas I would bet that the oil prices would tumble. This is a national crisis. The onus is squarely on the US Congress to do something, and stop the free fall in the value of the Dollar, too.

We won’t need massive quantities of oil 100 years from now, I’m certain that technology will have moved on, but we will need it for the next 40 to 50 years.

By the way, when Hurricane Katrina went thru the Gulf , it did damage a number of oil rigs. I don’t recall there having been a great environmental disaster after that, do you?

Bring on all the energy producing technologies: wind, tidal, solar, nuclear, everything. We need energy. I like living in the 21st Century, I don’t want to go back to the 18th.

I need gas for my car and oil for home heating and that’s not going to change in the near future.

At the rate that gas (Regular gas is $4.29 here, it went up 8 cents overnight) and oil prices have been raising, our whole economy is going to collapse.

People have this crazy idea that if we increase domestic production so that we produce 60% as much oil as we consume instead of 50%, that prices will shoot way down, because that’s like a fifth more oil, man.

The problem is that compared to the WORLD market, which is where the price is actually set, it’s more like half a percent, if that.

I just contested the idea that as soon as we conserve energy, population will increase commensurately. That may have been true in the 19th century, but certainly now now, not even in developing countries.
The problem now is not the number of mouths to feed, but how much food (and entertainment, gas, housing,…) they require.

I must have missed who in this thread thinks that domestic oil is free or thinks that the U.S. is separate from the world oil market. The point of tapping into our enormous domestic reserves isn’t because it is free, but because it is a source of supply (moreover, one we control); and increased world supply should lower world prices, and we’d benefit (as would everyone).

And it wouldn’t take much extra supply at the margins to dramatically reduce the price of oil.

Here’s a prediction for you. No matter what new technologies come along, in 2040 the majority of cars in the U.S. will still be burning gasoline. This will be the case even if wonderful new electric cars are rolled out in the next couple of years, just due to lead times, supply constraints, costs, etc (eg, Hybrids have been here for a DECADE and represent ~ 0.5% of the fleet).

And that’s a LONG time to be paying way too much for gasoline.

Malthus’ theory has proven wrong, but the general concept is not worthless. Most people would intuitively agree that there is a finite limit to the number of people the earth can support. So the real argument is how many.

Even those who disagree on a finite limit would have to agree that there is a limit given a certain level of technology. Anyone silly enough to still disagree would have to admit that at some point it wouldn’t matter because we would all be miserable.

So sure, Malthus was wrong, but that doesn’t mean that everything thought about overpopulation is just crazy talk.

It certainly isn’t foolishness to question the subsidization of more and more children while creating social pyramid schemes making the state dependent on never ending population growth.

Sure!

http://finance.yahoo.com/currency/convert?amt=1&from=USD&to=EUR&submit=Convert

Down 20% in one year.

http://www.wtrg.com/daily/crudeoilprice.html

Up by 100% in one year.

Any other theories?

I don’t see the relationship here. I mean, malthusian thought has been debunked (thankfully) for a long time now.

This said, I agree with the basics that both conservation and production are necessary, simply because production is necessary to research and the society that supports it. However, over the long term, conservation wins, simply because there may be limits to additional production.
Superconductors would help, a lot. Now the problem is just inventing them.

And in regard to “energy independence”, I find funny that we make such a big fuss of buying oil from Venezuela and Saudi Arabia, yet gladly increase our national debt, held by all sorts of investors, such as the Chinese Central Bank, sovereign wealth funds, and so on. I remember a cartoon in The Economist where Uncle Sam was standing in a riverbank, yelling at the Chinese Dragon about the value of the Yuen. The dragon was perched on top of a dam and had its paw on the opening controls, the water behind it labeled “U.S. debt”.

I guess we’re ok with being dependent as long as it means buying cheap stuff…

I am really tired of people buying homes on land they don’t own the rights to and whining when a rig comes in. Why the hell do you think the lot was so frigging cheap? Most of these idiots KNEW it could happen. The screaming now is nothing but extortion.

Guess what, you can have costly gas with no drilling, or cheap gas with oil rigs and refineries. Frankly, I don’t care which one. I just wish people would be honest about their positions.

Those who want cheap gas without any drilling or refineries and who think they can have it by simply stealing it from the oil companies using government fiat ought to simply be shot. There is no right to life or liberty without right to private property. How many times do we have to go through this? These people are nothing but thieves. Thank God for the Bill of Rights.

Yet another tired head media induced line that has no basis in reality.

I am all for figure out ways to become more efficient. Let’s say we figure out how to become 30% more efficient with our energy usage. That would be monumental and a great thing. Problem is that the efficiency gains would be matched by an virtually equal or greater population gain, and a greater still need for improved technologies, more bandwidth, more shopping, etc, etc.

You cannot “conserve” your way to energy independence, either. Period. It has to be combination of the two. Conservation, YES. Energy Production, YES. Is it really that hard to understand????

My answer: Yes! We’re talking about back yards like Alberta, which is a quarter-million squire miles and contains vast beautiful areas such as Banff National Park. (Note to those passionately opposed to drilling in ANWR: the drilling site is nothing like Banff, contrary to media propaganda.)

The topic of this thread always brings out lots of comments, many of which reflect ignorance of how oil and gas is extracted from the ground. There’s an oil well in front of the Oklahoma State Capitol that used slant-drilling to tap oil directly beneath the building. The derrick remains just as a historical relic. Our state parks have oil wells drilled by environmentally-sensitive companies; many park visitors go down a road within fifty feet of a well and never realize it’s there.