More Oil Lies: Florida

Cross posted at my eponymous blog

I posted a rant the other day about how the oil whores are once again tossing around numbers completely devoid of context to make things seem a lot more impressive than they really are.  Now I see, courtesy of Dedalus' latest post at Blah3, that there is more tomfoolery to debunk.

See the debunkery of the tomfoolery below the fold . . . .

Dedalus is (rightfully) all over CHANG . . . uh, I mean JEB!™ for completely going back on his promise to not allow drilling off the coast of Florida under his watch.  Apparently JEB!™bie quit watching, because he's now saying that it's A-OK with him and CHANG! if they go on in there and tear it up.  I get the distinct feeling that CHANG! is an assclown, but I digress . . . .

The area in question, known as the mnemonically clever "Lease Sale 181 Area" is said in the article to be "an energy-rich area."  Not quite as egregious as the Teshekpuk "brimming" statement in my book, but still . . . let's see how "energy-rich" LS181A really is.

Enter Google, which leads us to a web page belonging to none other than the U.S. Dept. of Interior Minerals Management Service (Gulf of Mexico OCS Region).  On that page, they say:

"Lease Sale 181 is a positive step in improving our energy security, "Interior Secretary Gale Norton said. "True national security must expand conservation programs, reduce our dependence on foreign oil and create new jobs - all while protecting the environment".

"The Department projects the Sale area contains 1.25 trillion cubic feet of natural gas - enough to serve one million U.S. families for 15 years. The area also contains 185 million barrels of oil - enough to fuel the automobiles of a million families for nearly six years, "Secretary Norton said.

Did you see that?  Did you see what she just did, using arbitrary units to try and make the yield numbers sound bigger?  You didn't?  Oh.

Well, you should have read the Energy Information Administration website I linked to in my "Alaska oil lies" post.  For those of you that did, you will remember that the entire United States --not just Sec'y Norton's ill-defined "1 million families"-- uses 7.446 billion bbl/year of oil.  Reading further down that EIA page, we see that the entire United States goes through (estimated for 2004) 22.0 trillion cubic feet(Tcf) of natural gas a year.

Of course, the real picture isn't so rosy.  According to my math --so feel free to check yourselves-- that gives us 20 days of natural gas, and nine days of oil, based on 2004 usage data.  And if the timeline for LS181A is anything like ANWR, that nine days of oil will start becoming available some time after 2010, with peak production around 2020 or 2030.

So once again I ask:  do you think within 5-25 years we could come up with other ways to cut oil usage by 185 million bbl of oil?  Or save 1.25 Tcf of natural gas use?  Creative, long-term ways that wouldn't necessitate tearing more shit up later to make up for our wastefulness now?  Just maybe?

Nah. As Butt-head might say, "Uhhhhhhh . . . that's like, hard or something."