Drilling in Anwar
Out of context: Reply #47
- Started
- Last post
- 53 Responses
- TheBlueOne0
"Between 1999 and 2007, the number of drilling permits issued for
development of public lands increased by more than 361%, yet gasoline prices have also risen dramatically (Figure 1) contradicting the argument that more drilling means lower gasoline prices. There is simply no correlation between the two. Even if increased domestic drilling activity could affect the price of gasoline, there is yet no justification to open additional federal lands because oil and gas companies have shown that they cannot keep pace with the rate of
drilling permits that the federal government is handing out. That means that companies have stockpiled nearly 10,000 extra permits to drill that they are not using to increase domestic production.
Further, despite the federal governments willingness to make public
lands and waters available to energy developers, of the 47.5 million acres of on-shore federal lands that are currently being leased by oil and gas companies, only about 13 million acres are actually in production, or producing oil and gas (Figure 2). Similar trends are evident offshore as well (Figure 3), where only 10.5 million of the 44 million leased 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 (Figure 4). Oil and gas companies would not buy leases to this land without believing oil and gas can be produced there, yet these same companies are not producing oil or gas from these areas already under their control. If we extrapolate from today=s production rates on federal land and waters, we can estimate that the 68 million acres of leased but currently inactive federal land and waters 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)."US Government PDF: http://resourcescommittee.house.…