As others continue to hammer home (Check it out here, here, here, and here) the new propaganda coming from the Bachmann campaign, I thought it was high time we learned about the realities of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. The Energy Information Administration put out a study of ANWR in May of this year and its conclusion is that drilling in the region will have little affect on world oil prices.
With respect to the world oil price impact, projected ANWR oil production constitutes between 0.4 and 1.2 percent of total world oil consumption in 2030, based on the low and high resource cases, respectively.17 Consequently, ANWR oil production is not projected to have a large impact on world oil prices.
Also, one has to wonder where Bachmann gets her magic number of $2 per gallon of gasoline (apart from just being told to repeat it often enough to try make it truth) when the best estimates of the EIA state that ANWR will bring a barrel of oil down a whopping $1.44.
Additional oil production resulting from the opening of ANWR would be only a small portion of total world oil production, and would likely be offset in part by somewhat lower production outside the United States. The opening of ANWR is projected to have its largest oil price reduction impacts as follows: a reduction in low-sulfur, light crude oil prices of $0.41 per barrel (2006 dollars) in 2026 for the low oil resource case, $0.75 per barrel in 2025 for the mean oil resource case, and $1.44 per barrel in 2027 for the high oil resource case, relative to the reference case.
Chris Truscott makes an excellent point that we should never cede ground in this fight when our opponents have consistently pandered to the interests of Big Oil. The same people that were in complete power of the law making and law administering branches of this government for roughly 6 years did nothing more than offer their oil buddies government subsidies and allow the oil industry to run our energy policy. To claim now that they can effectively reduce gas prices by half is utter propaganda.
1 Response to "The Realities Of ANWR"
That report isn't worth the paper it's printed on.
Ask yourself this question: Why would oil companies invest billions of dollars to harvest oil in a harsh environment for a pittance of energy? They wouldn't. They aren't in the business of losing money. Therefore, we must assume that there's alot more oil there than this report says.
I was around when the Sierra Club & other environmental groups forecast awful destruction for a couple years worth of oil when the Alaska pipeline was built.
Pictures have existed showing caribou calves nursing underneath the pipeline. Meanwhile, the oil that was supposed to only last a couple years is still being harvested 28 years later.
The reality is that government agencies routinely get numbers wrong. This is one of those situations. (I remember a couple years ago when the CBO revised the budget deficit downward 3 separate times in the last half of the fiscal year.)