Oil for centuries, a million jobs, and keeping $4 trillion a decade at home
Here’s part of a plan to add a million jobs and stop sending $4 trillion a decade overseas.
We probably have 1000 trillion cubic feet of shale gas alone in the US. We consume about 25 trillion cubic feet of natural gas a year, so exploiting our own resources is a no brainer, and there’s substantial opportunity to do so with this clean fuel. And this resource will last quite a while, at least until we’re flying around in cars powered by hydrogen and good vibes.
By the way, 1000 trillion cubic feet of natural gas is the energy equivalent of around 167 billion barrels of oil (at a 6:1 ratio). Including ANWR, US oil and gas reserves total 130 billion barrels or so (though that estimate may understate US reserves by a factor of as much as 10x!). So, even granting that all of the various objections to shale gas are true (here and here, for example), shale gas appears to double US petroleum resources or at least take them much farther into the future. It is the height of foolishness not to be exploiting this domestic resource as quickly as can be accomplished profitably.
There are many reasons to move quickly. We import 70% of our oil, and that’s unhealthy when so much of the world market flows through an unstable region. It is irresponsible to ignore this issue. The cost of importing 10 million barrels a day of oil is $365 billion at $100 a barrel. That’s almost $4 trillion over the course of a decade. It’s ridiculous to send all that money overseas, especially given the unsustainable trade imbalances of the United States.
But the final issue that makes this a no-brainer is the jobs crisis in America. Why are we exporting good paying oil and gas, oil service, and support industry jobs (like some steel production) to be done by foreign workers? Question: how dumb is that as a government policy, given a 20% unemployment rate in a key demographic? Answer: about as dumb as a 7-year moratorium on offshore drilling.
June 23rd, 2011 at 4:21 pm
A couple of additional items:
– Industry experts project that just the lifting of the offshore drilling ban would create 1,000,000 new U.S. jobs.
– If California lifted its drilling ban in the 50-mile strip of coastal waters it controls the state estimates oil lease revenue to the state would be $50 billion over the first 5 years. Can you say ‘balanced budget’? How about ‘solvency’? (And for the residents of the People’s Republic of Santa Monica, an oil derrick can’t be seen from shore if it’s more than 25-miles away – it’s an earth curvature thing.)
As usual, liberal decisions seem a bit… counter-intuitive. But recently things seem more insane than usual in Liberal-world…