RYAN WRONG ON US OIL RESERVES CLAIM
Special to the Readers of Milwaukeeworld
By Michael Horne
and the Milwaukee World Hound Dog Team
Rep. Paul Ryan [R-1st] claims in his campaign website and television advertisements that there is "more oil under US soil than the entire Middle East." As a result, he says, we must drill here at home rather than send money to "foreign governments who are hostile to America."
However this bald inaccuracy is utterly contradicted by the U. S. Department of Energy Energy Information Administration statistics on World Proved Reserves of Oil and Natural Gas, Most Recent Data. [August 27th, 2008].
That data shows U.S. reserves of 29,444 billion barrels of oil and 281,648 trillion cubic feet of natural gas. The "entire middle east" has 755,325 billion barrels of oil and 2,585,351 trillion cubic feet of natural gas.
Go ahead and add those Canadian Oil Sands -- even the rosiest prediction for the total oil buried under North American soil -- and under its coasts -- is 211,214 billion barrels.
These are the "official energy statistics from the United States government," and should be available to any Library of Congress Card-carrying member of the House of Representatives.
It cannot be determined where Ryan got his statistics, or the idea that a campaign focusing on drilling for oil is at all related to the needs of his constituents.
The congressman, who modestly calls himself, "perhaps the Free Market's truest friend in Congress," should know that high gasoline prices are so yesterday. The collapse of his precious free markets is what is on voters' minds today.
posted by Michael Horne @ 9:00 AM
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5 Comments:
Guys, I’m not a Ryan supporter but I’m also not willing to find out eight years from now that we should have acted in 2008 to cover our 2016 needs. I favor “all of the above.”
As a retired CEO I realized years ago that if you want to get a job done, don’t give it to someone who already thinks it is not possible.
We must do several things:
1) Fund all sorts of developments in “wise, well though-out” energy alternatives.
2) Require that the oil companies use it or lose it. If drilling is not going to take place on already-leased land, turn the land back in.
3) Open up drilling to free-market drilling in ANWAR and off-shore, but require technology development in the event of spills. If the shareholders believe in it, don’t stand in their way.
4) Create a government-owned entity to do its own off-shore drilling. If China can do it, we can too. Let the taxpayers compete with the oil industry like the post office does with FedEx and UPS.
See http://tinyurl.com/yr2vfd for more details on the latter.
Jack Lohman
http://MoneyedPoliticians.net
You forgot the oil shale in Wyoming and Colorado. If you add in these estimated reserves you will find that Ryan is right.
The reason is political why these reserves have not been added to the estimated reserves and why they have not been utilized.
I'm sure there's energy potential in the molten core of the earth, too. It's just about as useful and easy to get to as the oil shale. When the energy required to extract a source of fuel is greater than the BTUs contained within, you really can't expect to count it among your proven reserves. Middle East oil remains a bargain.
Horne
I'm 71 and this issue won't affect me much. But to those who feel expert in this area I'd say, be careful of what you ask for. You may just get it. I think you are playing with fire, and a wrong decision could be deadly for your own families.
>You forgot the oil shale in Wyoming and Colorado.
http://www.energybulletin.net/node/11707
The “vast,” “immense,” and “unrivaled” deposits of shale buried in Utah and Colorado have the energy density of a baked potato.
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