Who knew that the US is currently exporting 1.8 million barrels of oil a day?
To make sure everybody does, Rep. Edward J. Markey (D-Mass.), Chairman of the Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming, sent a public letter to President Bush, asking him to "keep our oil at home."
Who knew that the US is currently exporting 1.8 million barrels of oil a day?
To make sure everybody does, Rep. Edward J. Markey (D-Mass.), Chairman of the Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming, sent a public letter to President Bush, asking him to "keep our oil at home."
The letter didn't specify how, but it didn't miss the opportunity to take a shot at the GOP plan to open up protected offshore waters to oil drilling.
.....at the current export rate, by the time the first barrel of oil could be produced from increased offshore drilling, America would have already exported the equivalent of nearly 40 percent of the oil that is projected to lie beneath protected areas offshore.
It was no coincidence that Markey's letter was released just as John McCain paid a visit to an offshore rig off the coast of Louisiana -- in order to highlight his support for increased domestic offshore drilling.
As the public battle over access to oil in protected US waters continues, Jad Mouawad in the New York Times explains why the stakes have gotten so high: it turns out the major oil companies, desperate for new sources of supply, have almost nowhere else to turn.
And after reading this story on Think Progress, it will also become clear why a McCain election victory would deliver what the oil companies want more than anything else: a clear path to an endless fossil future.
Mouawad reports that as late as 1970's, the major oil companies were responsible for 50% of global oil production. Today, their production accounts for a mere 13%. That's because the 10 largest holders of petroleum reserves are state-owned companies.
Oil company executives see a straightforward explanation: a trend known as resource nationalism. They contend that they have been shut out of promising regions by a rising assertiveness in the Middle East, in Russia, in South America and elsewhere by governments determined to keep full control of their oil.....
This sense of being hemmed in helps explain why the Western oil companies want more offshore drilling in the United States. They see it as one of their few options.
And it's a lot easier for these oil companies to influence US government policy than the decisions of Russia’s Gazprom, or Iran’s national oil company, or Venezuela.
And it looks like they've got the McCain campaign in a bear hug. Think Progress reports that Wayne Berman, McCain's national finance co-chairman, who has bundled over $500,000 for his campaign, has lobbied for Chevron since 2004; McCain's chief Congressional liaison, John Green, has lobbied for Chevron since 2005; and Richard Hohlt, a McCain fundraiser and DC insider, has also lobbied for Chevron since 2005.
It should come as no surprise that the McCain campaign chose to visit a Chevron-owned drilling platform.
All this also explains why the battle over offshore drilling is just the leading wedge of an effort to remove government restrictions on the exploitation of unconventional fossil fuels: tar sands, oil shale and coal-to-liquid fuels.
With access to global oil fields more restricted than ever, the oil companies are not going to be satisfied with the meager pickings from offshore wells. They're after the mother lode, which both McCain and President Bush identified in their calls for increased domestic oil production: "tap into the extraordinary potential of oil shale."
Oil shale is a type of rock that can produce oil when exposed to heat or other processes. In one major deposit – the Green River Basin of Colorado, Utah, and Wyoming – there lies the equivalent of about 800 billion barrels of recoverable oil. If it can be fully recovered, it would equal more than a century's worth of currently projected oil imports.
Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the endless fossil future. And never mind about all those US oil exports, or the horrors of oil shale production, the dirtiest fuel on the planet.
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