More Oil Facts

US "Domestic" Oil Production today is roughly 5.7 million barrels a day. The US uses roughly 20.7 million barrels a day. World consumption is roughly 82.2 million barrels per day. We import the difference between that 20.7 million needed and 5.7 million domestically produced. Why? Because the cost of domestic production on lands currently available to the oil industry is too high when compared to the costs to import cheaper oil from foreign sources.

To increase the US Domestic Oil Production, we need to develop fields where the volume and rate of production will justify the costs. Fields like those in Anwar or on the Continental Shelf will support those rates and volumes.

For example, the Thunder Horse platform in the Gulf of Mexico, built and owned by BP, cost $1 billion to construct. That one single platform could reach 250,000 barrels of oils a day and 200 million cubic feet of natural gas at peak production. One platform like that built by the US would increase our domestic production by 4.5%. And that is just one such platform.

Barrack Obama wants to spend $150 billion over 10 years on his plan to subsidize alternatives and subsidize the purchase of gas by Americans. With $15 billion a year, and Nancy Pelosi's support in lifting the ban imposed by Congress, we could fund up to 15 of these platforms a year for a decade, with the potential to more than eliminate our dependence on foreign oil. But honestly, we'd probably only have to build a couple before world markets and speculation would recognize that supply is not being threatened by leftist supply side barriers.

So why aren't we drilling more on the OCS? Why is there not a single proposal from the left for a lifting of the offshore drilling ban? The answer is simple. Democrats do not want to give up the energy issue. They do not want to upset their environmental base. And most importantly, they want to drive Americans into government-operated mass transit systems and out of their private automobiles.

Just one more bit of info. The US Strategic Oil Reserve is not some big tank that can last us for years. The reserve currently holds 700 million barrels of oil. That's roughly 35 days at our current rate of consumption. So Democrat proposals to tap the reserve is not a solution, but only a dangerous ploy to deceive Americans into the belief that the oil companies and the Bush Administration are sitting some vast reservoir that could be tapped to decrease our dependence on foreign oil. The reserve is there to help our economy in a real emergency, not a crisis created by Democrats who are refusing to let America contribute to the supply side of the global energy equation.