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What the hey?? “our oil production reached its highest level in seven years”?
indicated that “our oil production reached its highest level in seven years. Oil production from federal waters in the Gulf of Mexico reached an all-time high,”
The curious claims on oil production are debunked in detail by Steve Everly
Here are the three biggest myths from President Obama’s remarks this afternoon:
- “We can’t escape the fact that we control only 2% of the world’s oil.” This is a common refrain among anti-drilling Democrats and environmentalists, and it’s repeated enough that many people accept it as true. In reality, it’s 100% false. The number comes from a highly conservative estimate from the Energy Information Administration totaling America’s proven reserves where we are already drilling. It does not include the 10 billion barrels available in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. It does not include most of the 86 billion barrels available offshore in the Outer Continental Shelf, most of which President Obama has placed under an executive drilling ban. And it does not include the 800 billion barrels of oil we have locked in shale in Wyoming, Utah, and Colorado. Those shale resources alone are actually three times larger than the proven reserves of Saudi Arabia, so the claim that the U.S. only has 2% of the world’s oil is clearly false.
- “Industry holds leases on tens of millions of acres both offshore and on land where they aren’t producing a thing.” President Obama adds to this whopper by saying he wants to “encourage companies to produce [on] the leases they hold.” While this sounds like a common sense fix, it’s actually just blind rhetoric reserved only for people with a shocking ignorance of drilling. You can read more about this here and here, but it basically boils down to this: A lease is for exploration and production, not just production, and because oil is not equally distributed across the globe, one parcel of leased acreage may not hold any oil. Moreover, due to the circuitous and needlessly complicated permitting process, it can take years for companies who own a lease to complete their exploration activities. To get to the production phase, it could take as long as ten years. Ironically, President Obama wants to tax companies for not producing on their leases, even if the federal government’s refusal to grant permits is the reason why those companies are not drilling.
- “Last year…our oil production reached its highest level in 7 years.” This is pure spin. President Obama is deliberately trying to take credit for actions unrelated to his policies. The increased level of production is due to the actions of previous administrations and production in the Dakotas where most drilling is occurring on private land. By contrast, the Energy Information Administration projects that there will be a decline in production of 220,000 barrels of domestic oil per day in 2011, and in 2012 America will produce 150 million fewer barrels in the Gulf of Mexico, all because of President Obama’s policies to discourage or ban domestic drilling. In addition, President Obama’s drilling moratorium (and subsequent refusal to issue drilling permits) has forced at least 7 rigs to leave the Gulf and sign contracts in other countries, taking much needed jobs and revenue with them.
As gas prices skyrocket, Americans are reminded every day that the federal government’s refusal to allow responsible domestic drilling can have an incredibly destructive economic impact. Instead of trying to fix this problem, the Obama administration has worked every day to make sure that America produces less oil and has to rely more on OPEC for our energy needs.
Everything else is lies.
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Enough with the compact flourescents
Jim has the lunacy,
Here’s the problem,
The mercury in one bulb, for example, is enough to contaminate up to 6,000 gallons of water beyond safe drinking levels.
Consisting of glass tubes twisted into a spiral, they require more hand labor and so are made largely in China, where labor costs are lower and environmental regulations are not so strict. The Times of London recently reported that “large numbers of Chinese workers have been poisoned by mercury, which forms part of the compact fluorescent light bulbs.”
I hope Michelle Bachmann’s proposed legislation goes through.
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The curious case of the frozen windmills
Wind turbines are supposed to be a clean, efficient, green, environment-friendly way to generate the megawatts needed by industrial societies, or so the Quixotic idealists tell us.
Unfortunately they freeze (h/t Matt):
vA $200-million wind farm in northern New Brunswick is frozen solid, cutting off a supply of renewable energy for NB Power.
The 25-kilometre stretch of wind turbines, 70 kilometres northwest of Bathurst, has been shut down for several weeks due to heavy ice covering the blades. GDF Suez Energy, the company that owns and operates the site, is working to return the windmills to working order, a spokeswoman says.
That’s when they don’t fall apart,
In other energy news, Obama’s assault on our domestic energy now a 4-alarm fire. Go read about it.
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Compact fluorescents not the brightest bulbs
The Wall Street Journal sheds a jaundiced light at the compact fluorescent bulb:
The New Light Bulbs Lose a Little Shine
Compact Fluorescent Lamps Burn Out Faster Than Expected, Limiting Energy Savings in California’s Efficiency Program (emphasis added)
California’s utilities are spending $548 million over seven years to subsidize consumer purchases of compact fluorescent lamps. But the benefits are turning out to be less than expected.
One reason is that bulbs have gotten so cheap that Californians buy more than they need and sock them away for future use. Another reason is that the bulbs are burning out faster than expected.
Here’s what the compact fluorescents are supposed to do in theory,
Here’s what happened at casa de Fausta: I went to Lowe’s, purchased a box of three CFs, replaced a burned-out incandescent that had been working well for four years with one of the CFs, and turned on the light.
The CF turned on, flickered, and died.
Until some good LEDs are readily available, I’ll keep using incandescents, thank you.
Cross-posted at The Green Room
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Obama administration: collapsing small business in the Gulf of Mexico
I have posted in the past on how the USA is the only country in the world that forbids itself from exploring and exploiting its own natural resources of oil, shale, and natural gas.
This affects small business:
At NPR:
Lack Of Drilling Permits Hurts Small Energy Firms
Interior Secretary Ken Salazar will meet with oil industry executives in Houma, La., on Monday. The big topic will be the government’s slow pace in issuing drilling permits for the Gulf of Mexico, despite the Obama administration lifting its deep-water drilling moratorium last month and the shallow-water moratorium in May.
It’s not the big oil companies hurting now. The Gulf of Mexico is just one sliver of their worldwide portfolios. It’s the smaller companies that rely more heavily on the Gulf. Among them is Hercules Offshore.
About 25 miles from Aransas Pass, Texas, the huge Hercules 205 shallow-water jack-up rig is sitting in about 100 feet of water. It’s not drilling any wells right now because Hercules’ customers can’t get permits.
…
Historically the government approved 10 to 15 shallow-water drilling permits a month. But now, that number has fallen to almost none.
How so?
Hercules Offshore has lost more than half of its stock market value since BP’s Deepwater Horizon accident last April, though the work Hercules is doing here isn’t nearly as complicated as drilling in the deep waters of the Gulf.
“They’re natural gas wells, not oil wells,” says Jim Noe, senior vice president, general counsel and chief compliance officer at Hercules Offshore.
“We’re using technology that we’ve been using for decades — safely and without incident,” he says.
It looked like the Obama administration recognized this, too — at first. The shallow-water moratorium lasted less than a month.
“And yet we’ve been facing what we’ve called a de facto moratorium because the Obama bureaucrats won’t issue permits,” Noe says.
Historically the government approved 10 to 15 shallow-water drilling permits a month. But now, that number has fallen to almost none.
Conservation groups want “a complete stop with permitting offshore drilling.”
The Obama administration is also proposing two punitive measures against the US oil & gas industry,
two massive tax hikes. First, he’d ban oil and gas companies from using the “Section 199″ tax credit, a measure for domestic manufacturers enacted in 2004 to boost US employment. (The Senate is set to vote this week on its version of the ban.) Second, he wants to end “dual capacity” protection for US energy firms.
Without this shield against double taxation on foreign revenues, American companies would be competing on an uneven global playing field.
This gives an advantage to other countries that are already drilling in the gulf,
legislative proposals such as the possible tax changes could exacerbate disadvantages already experienced by U.S. companies, making them less competitive than companies from other countries analyzed in that report. Yergin and Hobbs say that is because companies from countries such as Canada, China, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Russia, and the United Kingdom pay less tax on repatriated income than do American companies. This in turn gives them a competitive advantage, which would presumably be expanded were the proposals being pursued in fact implemented.
while,
lawmakers would be slamming the very teachers, firemen and factory workers that they claim to want to help. And the fallout wouldn’t end there. Higher energy taxes would cost the US $341 billion in lost economic activity and $68 billion in wages over the next nine years.
Prof. Joseph Mason explains how this will cost the US over 150,000 jobs. Go read his articles here and here.
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Obama’s Big Spill speech
Like Stacy, I didn’t watch President Obama’s speech last night because I was busy on something else. Besides, as readers of this blog may remember, I usually read the transcripts instead of watching politicians’ speeches since that way I’m looking at content instead of body language, intonation, etc.
You can watch the video on YouTube in 12 parts. Here’s part 1:
Here is the transcript of last night’s speech.
You can summarize the speech into this:
- It’s a disaster. But “it’s more like an epidemic”. Which is it, then?
- “make no mistake: We will fight this spill with everything we’ve got for as long as it takes”
- There’s a cleanup going on
- Chu won a Nobel Prize
- “Wrenching anxiety”
- Obama’s finally going to meet with the chairman of BP
- More bureaucracy to come: National Commission, new Csar, more regulation. “Cleaning house”.
- A lawyer with no oil industry knowledge or experience will be in charge.
- Moratorium on offshore drilling, green jobs, “the need to end America’s century-long addiction to fossil fuels”, bottom line = it’s going to cost you
- And if that fails, pray.
Even the guys at MSNBC were underwhelmed: MSNBC Trashes Obama’s Address: Compared To Carter, “I Don’t Sense Executive Command”. Hardly surprising, since there wasn’t any.
Though ‘cleaning house’ is not exactly the same as knowing how to fix a leak or supervise oil drilling, it may have to do. But maybe it’s close enough for government work. And the intention is to fix things someday. Fix it so’s we never to drill. And for that we look to Cathay. The President in his speech from the Oval Office said that America was falling behind China in Green Jobs and he was not going to let that happen.
Countries like China are investing in clean energy jobs and industries that should be here in America. Each day, we send nearly $1 billion of our wealth to foreign countries for their oil. And today, as we look to the Gulf, we see an entire way of life being threatened by a menacing cloud of black crude.
We cannot consign our children to this future. The tragedy unfolding on our coast is the most painful and powerful reminder yet that the time to embrace a clean energy future is now. Now is the moment for this generation to embark on a national mission to unleash American innovation and seize control of our own destiny.
In that Green paradise Birnbaum may have a future after all, after Bromwich finishes cleaning house. But not everybody believes this grandiose scheme will come to pass because if the current administration can’t plug a hole, or talk to a company about how to plug a hole, then that glittering prospect at overhauling China at Green Jobs may be beyond it’s competence to attain. Overhauling more than a trillion industrious Chinese will be harder than meeting one BP CEO. And the implication of what the state of the administration’s competence is may be depressing. The most lugubrious site on the Internet after the President’s speech is the comments section of the Huffington Post, because what do you know, not even die-hard liberals are buying it. A few die hard optimists point out that “Yes, BP will lose billions from this oil spill, but they’ll make TRILLIONS when the new Energy Bills passes”. After all, BP helped write it: “McConnell Charges That ‘Major Part’ of Democrats’ Cap-Trade Bill ‘Essentially Written by BP’”. But for many of the other commenters such consolations were inadequate; the truth was painfully obvioius. There’s nobody home. And it’s beginning to dawn on them that maybe there never was anybody home. This means that for next two and half years America will be trailing a slick of blood, like a giant wounded whale, careering across the seas like the ghost ships of yesterday’s legend, bound for nowhere but the horizon.
But that’s in the future. The immediate problem is right here, right now. Little Miss Atilla:
It seems to me that the President is jumping the gun in discussing long-range plans for alternative energies. I can see that there isn’t a moment to lose in tackling the problems at the Minerals Management Service, but that’s as far-reaching as he should get right now while the oil is still flowing at this prodigious rate.
It’s as if the Brits and the U.S. Congress had held their hearings on the Titanic disaster while people were still drowning. Let’s save their lives, and then talk to the shipbuilders about their construction standards, shall we? Get people out of the icy-cold water, and afterward you can form all the damned commissions you want.
Indeed.
Instapundit has a mini-roundup.
Speech done. Time to suck up a Bushwacker with a straw.
UPDATE
Obama’s clean energy pivot goes awry
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While Obama talks, Jindal acts
Tonight President Obama is scheduled to talk on TV about the Gulf oil spill, after he compared the spill to 9/11 and spent four hours working on his golf crisis. You may call it his pet golf moment, if you are so inclined.
Meanwhile, over at the Gulf, after eight long weeks of waiting for the federal government to authorize what’s needed, Gov. Bobby Jindal Orders National Guard to Build Barrier Wall Off Louisiana Shore
In Fort Jackson, La., Jindal has ordered the Guard to start building barrier walls right in the middle of the ocean. The barriers, built nine miles off shore, are intended to keep the oil from reaching the coast by filling the gaps between barrier islands.
…
Today, huge Blackhawk and Chinook helicopters lined up in the air, dropping sandbags one by one into the sea.“They are lifting up about 7,000 pounds of sandbags,” said 1st Lt. James Tyson Gabler.
Jindal also asks Obama to end the moratorium on the gulf:
Gateway Pundit explains,
Barack Obama’s oil drilling moratorium will cost tens of thousands of American jobs. Oil companies are planning on moving their rigs from the Gulf of Mexico to South America off the coast of Brazil where the government is more friendly to energy corporations.
At Patterico, DRJ notes,
Just over 10 days ago, BP and the Obama Administration authorized the construction of five barrier islands. Hugh Hewitt said that represented 2% of what Jindal wanted. Apparently Jindal has decided to go forward with the remaining 98%.
Kudos to Gov. Jindal for taking the initiative.
I hope the governors of each of the Gulf states also take the initiative and do what is needed.
The White House remains in denial: Dutch say They Could Speed Gulf Oil Recovery with US Permission
Louisiana and The Netherlands have developed strong ties since Hurricane Katrina flooded New Orleans five years ago. The European nation has developed special expertise in protecting its lower than sea-level land for centuries with a system of dikes. The country, home to the Royal Dutch Shell oil company, also has experience with mitigating oil spills in the North Sea and elsewhere.
White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs last week rejected the idea that the Jones Act has caused any problem in regard to the Gulf cleanup, but he said the president would provide a waiver if one is needed.
“We are using equipment and vessels from countries like Norway, Canada, The Netherlands,” said Robert Gibbs. “There has not been any problem with this. If there is the need for any type of waiver that would obviously be granted, but we have not had that problem.”
…
Floris Van Hovell says Dutch dredging ships could complete the sand berms in Louisiana twice as fast as the local companies contracted for the work, if allowed to do so.
Question: Why hasn’t the President waived the Jones act? Senator Lemieux of Florida is in the news right now asking exactly that question: “There are over 2,000 ships waiting. Why aren’t they heading to the Gulf?”
In a lighter vein, Scrappleface speculates about tonight’s speech.
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