On October 1, 2008, the long-standing ban on offshore drilling, as well as the ban on shale-oil drilling will expire! Democrats apparently attempted to sneak a continuation of the ban into a continuing spending resolution for Fiscal Year 2009. President Bush threatened to veto any such legislation if it contained the drilling ban. Such a veto would have shut down the federal government. Faced with being blamed for shutting down the government over their truly unpopular support of the drilling ban, Democratic leadership in Congress buckled and passed a continuing resolution without the ban!
The legalization of offshore drilling as well as shale drilling should have a significant effect on the oil futures market, as speculators are now confronted with the prospect of a significant increase in oil supply in the near future. When President Bush lifted the executive ban on drilling, the price of a barrel dropped by almost $10 virtually overnight. Now that Congress has apparently lifted the last obstacle to drilling, it's hard to imagine that the price of oil will not plummet even further.
Drill baby, drill!
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3 comments:
You of course realize that we have 3% of the oil and we use 25%? So even if we do drill it is at the VERY best a bandaid?
Actually, the 3% figure you cite refers to currently recoverable domestic oil supplies. Most of our proven (not to mention unproven) oil reserves are off-limits to drilling. When you factor in the Bakken oil fields, ANWR, and Shale oil deposits in the US, we're sitting on billions of barrels of oil. Billions. We import 2.5 million b/d. Were we to tap all of our own resources, we'd certainly make more than a dent in our foreign oil dependence.
In my first post, if you noticed, I forgot to mention currently off-limits proven and unproven oil deposits located in the outer continental shelf. We could potentially be sitting on more oil than that which exists in the entire Middle East.
So many environmentalists in the US suffer from an almost masochistic desire to inflict economic pain on America. It's amazing to me that we've denied ourselves access to our own reserves for 26 years. Amazing. If we tap these resources, we can significantly reduce the price of gas globally. Isn't that a good thing?
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