Obama war on oil production threatens Alaska pipeline

The House is voting on the Reversing President Obama's Offshore Moratorium Act today which, among other things, would require the administration to allow drilling in at least 50 percent of the Outer Continental Shelf, including the Arctic. Also today, The Wall Street Journal's Russell Gold has a great article on how President Obama's efforts to stop new oil fields in Alaska is threatening to shut down the entire Alaska pipeline:
Unless a technological solution can be found, the arcane physics of crude flow may force the multibillion dollar, 48-inch-wide steel pipeline to shut down — and determine the fate of the largest oil field ever found in the U.S. ... There’s one other, seemingly simple fix: Add more oil. “If I could ask for one thing, it is to figure out how to get more oil into this pipe,” says Tom Barrett, president of the pipeline’s owner, Alyeska Pipeline Service Co. But production from Alaska’s giant oil fields has been falling for years. Turning that around would require drilling in new areas, some of them environmentally sensitive and most controlled by the federal government.

So just how many barrels of oil could we lose if Obama does not reverse course and allow new oil production in Alaska?

The Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) contains an estimated 10 billion barrels of oil.
The Beaufort Sea contains an estimated 7 billion barrels of oil.
The Chukchi Sea contains an estimated 15 billion barrels of oil.

But that is not all. If the pipeline becomes inoperable because of a lack of oil production, all of the available oil in the already developed North Slope. That would be another 22 billion barrels of oil lost.

That's more than 50 billion barrels of oil Obama is willing to keep out of the hands of American consumers.