Hoarding is exactly what the government is doing right now by filling the SPR, and frankly it's the best thing that could happen. It drives prices up. High prices encourage demand destruction. They also finance new well development. The hoarded oil gives us a buffer to fall back on once shortages become more prevalent. High prices are what we need in order to adapt to what's coming, and the sooner they happen, the better.
Joined: Jul 14, 2004 Posts: 380 Location: The Motor City
Posted: Thu Jun 19, 2008 7:55 am Post subject: Unused drilling permit info.
Thom Hartmann has been beating on this on Air America. Apparently, a ton of drilling permits are going unused. This is a pretty interesting twist to all the drilling rhetoric we hear now. This production info has to be bull----.
Quote:
Since the 1990s, drilling on federal lands has steadily increased as a result of federal government policies that encourage development. The number of drilling permits has exploded in recent years, rising from 3,802 five years ago to 7,561 in 2007. Between 1999-2007, the number of drilling permits issued in public lands increased by over 361%, yet gasoline prices have also risen dramatically, contradicting the argument that more drilling means lower gasoline prices. There is simply no correlation between the two.
Even if increased domestic drilling could reduce gas prices, there's no justification to open additional federal lands because oil and gas companies can't keep pace with the number of drilling permits the federal government is handing out.
Over the past four years, the Bureau of Land Management has issued 28,776 permits to drill on public land - 18,954 wells were actually drilled. That means companies have stockpiled nearly 10,000 extra permits. The Feds have made 47.5 million acres of on-shore federal lands available to developers - about 13 million acres are in production. Similar trends are evident offshore where only 10.5 million of the 44 million available acres are currently producing oil or gas.
Combined, oil and gas companies hold leases to nearly 68 million acres of federal land and waters that they are not producing oil and gas. Oil and gas companies would not buy leases if they didn't believe oil and gas could be produced there, yet they are not producing oil or gas from these areas already under their control.
Current inactive leases could produce an additional 4.8 million barrels of oil and 44.7 billion cubic feet of natural gas each day.
That would nearly double total U.S. oil production, and increase natural gas production by 75%. It would also cut U.S. oil imports by more than a third, and be more than six times the estimated peak production from the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR).
Posted: Thu Jun 19, 2008 9:34 am Post subject: Re: Unused drilling permit info.
Ahem... _________________ "We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time." - TS Eliot*
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