Diagramming President Obama's Oil Lies

Wednesday, March 14, 2012

Diagramming President Obama's Oil Lies

And I call them lies because more diplomatic terms like "misstatements", "fibs" or "fabrications" simply don't apply to agitprop.

When he was running for the Oval Office four years ago amid $4-a-gallon gasoline prices, then-Sen. Barack Obama dismissed the idea of expanded oil production as a way to relieve the pain at the pump.

"Even if you opened up every square inch of our land and our coasts to drilling," he said. "America still has only 3% of the world's oil reserves." Which meant, he said, that the U.S. couldn't affect global oil prices... It's the same rhetoric President Obama is using now, as gas prices hit $4 again, except now he puts the figure at 2%...

But the figure Obama uses — proved oil reserves — vastly undercounts how much oil the U.S. actually contains. In fact, far from being oil-poor, the country is awash in vast quantities — enough to meet all the country's oil needs for hundreds of years...

• ...At least 86 billion barrels of oil in the Outer Continental Shelf yet to be discovered, according to the government's Bureau of Ocean Energy Management.

• ...About 24 billion barrels in shale deposits in the lower 48 states, according to EIA.

• ...Up to 2 billion barrels of oil in shale deposits in Alaska's North Slope, says the U.S. Geological Survey.

• ...Up to 12 billion barrels in ANWR, according to the USGS.

• ...As much as 19 billion barrels in the Utah tar sands, according to the Bureau of Land Management.

• ...Then, there's the massive Green River Formation in Wyoming, which according to the USGS contains a stunning 1.4 trillion barrels of oil shale — a type of oil released from sedimentary rock after it's heated.

• ...A separate Rand Corp. study found that about 800 billion barrels of oil shale in Wyoming and neighboring states is "technically recoverable," which means it could be extracted using existing technology. That's more than triple the known reserves in Saudi Arabia.

All told, the U.S. has access to 400 billion barrels of crude that could be recovered using existing drilling technologies, according to a 2006 Energy Department report... When you include oil shale, the U.S. has 1.4 trillion barrels of technically recoverable oil, according to the Institute for Energy Research, enough to meet all U.S. oil needs for about the next 200 years, without any imports.

And even this number could be low, since such estimates tend to go up over time...

Recent polls show Americans overwhelmingly support expanding offshore drilling and tapping the tiny spit of land in ANWR.

But this sort of obstructionism is just one more example of the Democrats' senseless hatred of the people's will -- as they continually operate without the consent of the governed -- be it energy, health care, forced unionization, national security, and every other issue of national import, etc.

But take heart. November is coming.