OIL RESERVES

Think About It
Aggravated that the price of gasoline is running around $3.50 per gallon and an average fill-up is above $50? The threat of a global recession brought crude oil down from $100, to about $90 a barrel for a while, but the dollar’s collapse has pushed it back to $117. However, we need to realize the problem is much greater than just price gouging by producers. The United States needs to invest more money in becoming energy independent, and less on trying to establish democracies around the world.
In the 70’s, when our Alaska slope oil was discovered, we had 39 billion barrels of US oil reserve un-pumped, but by 2006, we were down to 21 billion barrels of reserve. In 1970, we produced an annual total of 3.5 billion barrels; while in 2006, we produced a total of only 1.8 billion barrels; so in 36 years, our internal production went down by 50%. At the same time our consumption went up to 7.3 billion barrels annually. The net difference, 5.5 billion barrels annually, was imported. We seemed to have a policy of wanting to sit on our oil, as long as we could buy worldwide. Apparently someone had conjectured that the world barrel price would never surpass the $30-$50 range. It costs us something like $10 a barrel to pump oil out of the ground. According to the US Department of Energy, our 2007 oil consumption was predicted to be 20.9 million barrels per day, while production would fall to 5.1 million barrels per day. That means our consumption is now 4 times our production, and yet we still have only about 12 years of known domestic reserve production left under our soil. What then? While protecting the environment, which we can do, it is extremely essential we start to drill in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, and in all known US coastal resources.
But even that is not enough to achieve long time independence. Fortunately, the US has the largest known concentration of oil shale in the world, 2.5 trillion potential barrels, enough to meet our current internal demands for 110 years. Unfortunately, oil from shale currently must be produced by methods other than drilling and pumping, and is much more expensive. There is current research being done on using carbon dioxide, of which we produce too much, as a catalyst to release the oil more efficiently. Also being studied is a method of freezing a donut ring in the earth, within which steam is pumped under high pressure, helping release the oil with less danger to the environment. It is called In-situ conversion process, or ICP. If we direct the time, money and talent to this project that we invested in a moon landing, instead of a new moon landing, we could probably succeed within 10 years, as we did before.
Our good neighbor, Canada, which is actually our major single source of petroleum imports, (6.5 billion barrels annually) has one of the largest world deposits of oil sand (tarry sand), 265 billion barrels. Canada, our ally, and Venezuela, our antagonist, each control about 1/3 of the world supply of oil sands. Oil sand is much less expensive to convert that oil shale. To put it into perspective, Canada now ranks 3rd in worldwide oil production, and has 174 billion barrels of recoverable oil in oil sands, while Saudi Arabia has only 260 billion barrels of traditional crude oil reserve.
What is Congress’ solution? In December, they passed legislation mandating that auto manufacturers increase their Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFÉ) standards to 35 mpg by 2020. This means that the average mileage of all the cars they offer must be 35 mpg. Don’t you wish you could solve all your own problems by ordering some one else to engineer a quick fix? It is high time that we citizens educate ourselves to our nation’s problems and demand that our Congress address them with a righteous determination to solve them proficiently.