Originally posted by: conjur
Originally posted by: Whoozyerdaddy
Originally posted by: conjur
Originally posted by: Genx87
Which is going to solve things how exactly? There's not much oil up there...and nowhere near enough to make a noticeable dent in imported oil.
If there isnt "much" oil up there then we can assume the oil companies wont spend money exploring,drilling, and extracting?
Let's see...ANWR is projected to have about 10.5 billion barrels of oil available. The U.S. consumes about 21 million barrels per day. So, if we were to tap ANWR, we'd have all of about 500 days' worth of oil. Wow...big help there.
That's the argument the greenies love to use... :disgust: Now let's look at reality. And that reality is that ANWR would produce enough oil on a daily basis to reduce our need for Middle East imports almost in HALF.
Now that's not nothing is it?
Did Prudhoe Bay dry up after 600 days? Nope. In fact it's still producing 20% of our domestic oil supply some thirty years after it started pumping. (That is 10 years past original predictions - And still going strong) ANWR is a simalarly sized field. What's more, the method for delivery of that oil is already in place.
We import about 11 million barrels a day. About 2 million of that comes from the ME.
Link
ANWR at full production should produce anywhere from 800,000 - over 1,000,000 barrels a day.
Link
Drilling in ANWR is good mmmkay?
<ahem>
http://www.eia.doe.gov/emeu/cabs/usa.html
Consumption
The United States consumed an average of about 20.4 million bbl/d of oil during the first ten months of 2004, up from 20.0 million bbl/d in 2003. Of this, motor gasoline consumption was 9.0 million bbl/d (or 44% of the total), distillate fuel oil consumption was 4.1 million bbl/d (20%), jet fuel consumption was 1.6 million bbl/d (8%), and residual fuel oil consumption was 0.8 million bbl/d (4%)l. Total 2005 petroleum demand is projected to grow by just 1.4% (280,000 bbl/d), to an average 20.7 million bbl/d, in response to the combined effects of somewhat slower economic growth and relatively high crude oil and product prices. All the major products (except residual fuel oil) are expected to contribute to this growth. Motor gasoline demand is projected to increase 1.8%, to 9.22 million bbl/d. Jet fuel demand is projected to post a growth rate of 3.1% in 2005 to average 1.67 million barrels per day, still below 2000 jet fuel consumption but sharply up from post-9/11 lows it reached in 2002 and 2003. Distillate demand in 2005 is projected to grow only 1.5% year-over-year as industrial growth slows. Demand for residual fuel oil is projected to remain about flat in 2005.
http://www.eia.doe.gov/oiaf/servicerpt/ogp/analysis_summary.html
Surveys conducted by the USGS suggest that between 5.7 and 16.0 billion barrels of technically recoverable oil8 are in the coastal plain area of ANWR, with a mean estimate of 10.4 billion barrels, divided into many fields.9
Didn't realize that the Dept. of Energy were the "greenies".
What's your point? Greenies don't want to drill ANWR no matter what logic you use or how much the argument for drilling there makes sense... both from a national security point of view and from an economic point of view. They use the
stupid... STUPID argument that there are only 500 days of oil in reserve up there. Like there are no other oil fields in the US or anywhere else... Come on.
I have no idea what point you are trying to make.
We consume 20 million barrels a day. 11 Million of that is imported. 2 million of
that comes from the Middle East. When it's up and running ANWR could produce about 1 million barrels a day. That extra million barrels of domestic production would reduce our dependence on ME oil (assuming we choose to stop buying oil from them) by half.
Numbers don't lie.
So what is the argument against drilling in ANWR? Harming the virgin wilderness? Like we're running out of wilderness in Alaska? Please. I think part of the problem is that most people can't even comprehend just how big Alaska is and just how small a relative footprint ANWR would leave. I don't know how to describe the size of this place adequately.
Let me try it this way... Last year we had some bad forest fires. Our fires comsumed acreage greater than the area of Rhode Island, Delaware and Connecticut... COMBINED! More area than the state of Massachuchets. More than the state of Hawaii. And what was the final carnage generated by these fires? 8 houses. In fact if you take away the Haystack fire that burned near Fairbanks, we had 6.3 million acres (Massachusetts) burn with no damage.
Ok? The place is huge. Drilling on a few thousand acres in the middle of nowhere will have virtually no impact on the status of Alaska as a wilderness haven. Trust me when I say that none of you will ever notice the minor, almost microscopic, loss of wilderness. But cutting our ME oil imports... and consequently reducing the amount of money we hand over to terrorist states... That seems like a good thing to me.
Drill it.
EDIT: As for your backing of nuclear power. Fine. I'm all for it. There is just one problem. The same
IDIOTS who cry a river of tears for ANWR have filed suit against and blocked pretty much every nuke plant proposed over the last 20 years.
Other great forms of alternative energy we're not allowed to use:
1. Wind power: Kills the birds.
2. Hydro-electric: Kills the fish
3. Tidal power: Pulls the earth a 1/4 inch closer to the moon every century.
4. Etc...
5. Etc...
I guess we're all just supposed to climb back up into the trees eh?
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