It burns cleanly and there is a lot of it...

My question today is this: Why aren't we allowing energy companies tap into our vast natural gas resources? It's clean burning and abundant.

Every few weeks, it seems, fresh news arrives telling of impressive discoveries of oil and gas in the Gulf of Mexico, an area that, until recently, was viewed as well worked over and unlikely to yield any new bonanzas.

Last September brought word of a giant Gulf oil field reeled in by British Petroleum. And the latest Gulf headline-maker is a potentially major gas play offshore Louisiana that appears likely to add new trillions of cubic feet of gas to growing domestic reserves of the cleanest-burning carbon fuel.

Drill, drill, drill!!!

Conference call with API

Yesterday, I participated in a blogger conference call with the American Petroleum Institute. The conference was very informative. One of the issues that stood out in my mind was the issue of ethanol subsidies and the cost incurred by taxpayers particularly now since gasoline prices have plummeted quite a bit over the last several months. Right now the cost of producing ethanol and bringing it to market is simply not cost effective but because of congressional mandates, the American taxpayer basically props up an industry that can't compete with gasoline. The question that always sticks in my mind about ethanol is how long before this bad idea of subsidizing ethanol gets undone by our government? Once a government mandate starts, no matter how bad it is, it takes years to undo it--at a substantial cost to the taxpayer.

Moderator:
Jane Van Ryan, Senior Communications Manager, API

Speakers:
Lou Pugliaresi, President, Energy Policy Research Foundation
Rayola Dougher, Senior Economic Advisor, API
Ron Planting, Manager of Statistics, API

Listen to the conference call below:

Offshore drilling ban due to expire?

I heard about this in the afternoon and I was simply incredulous: The Democrats are going to let the offshore drilling ban expire. Hmmm, we’ll see.

Pelosi's Energy News Conference Gets Overwhelmed by Pro-Drilling Americans, Then She Hops in an SUV

HT:Americans for Prosperity

Obstructionist by any other name

Pelosi and the Democrats are beholden to the radical environmentalists in their party. Hence, we get the obstruction and the usual straw man arguments regarding drilling for domestic oil supplies.

HT: Jimmy Cardoza at Liberty Pen

American Energy Freedom Day

Will it come to pass?

HT: Andrew Roth

Around The Horn--Posts on Oil

Posts worthy of note and your time:

The Bobo Files has a petition to sign for those that want Congress to lift the moratorium on off-shore drilling.

Domestic oil myths are covered by The Historian at The Real World.

Shaving Leviathan comments on the controversial drilling at ANWR.

Bush acts on drilling, challenging Democrats

Bush has lifted the moratorium on off-shore drilling. The ball now falls on the Democrats’ court.

The idle oil field fallacy

When the Democrats tell the public that oil companies are sitting on oil leases that they have willfully not developed in order to push the price of gas higher, they fail to tell the full story. From the WSJ

A company bids for and buys a lease because it believes there is a possibility that it may yield enough oil or natural gas to make the cost of the lease, and the costs of exploration and production, commercially viable. The U.S. government received $3.7 billion from company bids in a single lease sale in March 2008.

However, until the actual exploration is complete, a company does not know whether the lease will be productive. If, through exploration, it finds there is no oil or natural gas underneath a lease – or that there is not enough to justify the tremendous investment required to bring it to the surface – the company cuts its losses by moving on to more promising leases. Yet it continues to pay rent on the lease, atop a leasing bonus fee.

On NIMBY elitists…

One of the best written synapses I have read of the off-shore drilling debate is from Tom Rants:

So, apparently President Bush and Senator McCain are both listening to reason on offshore drilling. The political deal with the devil that Bush made to push drilling in Alaska, where it's politically popular, and not off the shores of the lower 48, where local politicians opposed drilling in their backyard, may turn out to be the biggest mistake of his Presidency. Unfortunately at the time, environmental extremists owned the ANWR issue because they made it about greedy oil companies and greedy Alaskans trying to hurt the lichens. You can't be a much more defenseless underdog than a lichen. With oil prices at $1 a gallon, it was hard to sell the American people that drilling mattered much and, with little to focus public concern, it was easy for the elites to push the idea that preventing US drilling in the Arctic was the best way to protect the Arctic environment. (Read More)

What about those “unused leases” that Democrats keep talking about…

One of the talking points used by Democrats against off-shore drilling is that the oil companies are sitting on thousands of leases that are not being pumped for oil. They accuse oil companies of sitting on millions of barrels of oil and that oil companies should drill from those leased lands instead of opening up new areas for drilling.

Well, one of the best counter arguments I have read that trumps the Democratic response against offshore drilling and their claim that oil companies are sitting on unused leases was made by Bobo over at the Bobo files:

What they also have failed to inform the general public about these leases is that many of them cannot be drilled because there is no oil in them. The government makes these oil companies purchase these leases before they are allowed to survey them. The company geologists then survey, find there’s nothing in there, and now the big oil companies are stuck with these leases that they can’t do anything with..and…who pays the cost for those non-productive leases? We the people do as a pass through expense. It’s just another scam by the government and something they don’t want everyone to know about.

I couldn’t have said it better myself.