Radical Noesis - Thinking outside the box

Ok, first thing, that's 2,000 acres, and they say just 2,000. Sure, it's a 19 million acre refuge, but that doesn't mean 2,000 isn't alot. Plus, you have to pull drills and equipment and all the heavily polluting machinery through the thing to get to the spot where you want to start drilling. It's estimated that this would include 53 drilling pads and 250 miles of roads and pipelines that would extend far out beyond the 2,000 acres. Thing 2, ESTIMATED 10 billion barrels. That means it may not even be that many, and we won't even know how much is actually there until we've already dug up the entire thing.  Lastly, and here's the real kicker, according to the DOE, we use 20.4 million barrels per day of oil.  That's 7.446 billion barrels in one year.  Do the math. That means that even if ANWR actually holds 10 billion barrels of oil, which it may not, that's 1.34 years worth of oil. For digging up 2,000 acres of a wildlife refuge.

It's also estimated that it could take a decade or more to actually extract this oil. If many of our sources are correct, by then peak oil will likely have already occurred or be in the process of occurring, which will make this even more pointless. One thing's for sure, though - 1.34 years of oil will certainly not end our dependence on anything.

Bush stated that

"That's the same amount of new oil we could get from 41 states combined," Bush said. "Developing a small section of ANWR would not only create thousands of new jobs, but it would eventually reduce our dependence on foreign oil by up to a million barrels of oil a day."

Yeah. He gussies it up by saying it's "the same amount we could get from 41 states combined," which is a pointless comparison, then says it would create thousands of jobs and reduce our dependence on foreign oil.

Right. For 1.34 years. Then those people all get fired and we'll be right back to foreign oil, and the wildlife in ANWR will have 2,000 less acres to roam. Makes sense.

Media Matters confirms my claims.

Hannity also denied co-host Alan Colmes's assertion that according to the USGS, ANWR would produce in total "less than a year's worth of recoverable oil." But Colmes's claim was accurate: According to the USGS report, the mean estimated amount of recoverable oil is in fact approximately equal to the amount of oil the United States consumes in one year. As the report notes, the "[t]echnically recoverable oil within the ANWR 1002 area [the 1.5-million-acre coastal plain targeted for drilling] (excluding State and Native areas) is estimated to be between 4.3 and 11.8 billion barrels, with a mean value of 7.7 billion barrels." According to the U.S. Department of Energy's Energy Information Agency (PDF), the U.S. currently consumes about 20 million barrels of oil and petroleum products per day, or about 7.3 billion barrels per year.

Sean Hannity is using the same bullshit line that Bush is using, and it's just completely false and useless.

I do have to make one thing clear, though.

Though in total this is 1.34 years of oil, I responded to the idea of creating new jobs by saying that it would create 1.34 years of jobs. However, I was being shortsighted, because obviously it will take alot longer than 1.34 years to drill this oil, and we won't use it all at once as our only source of oil for 1.34 years until it's dried up... also obviously.

It's still 1.34 years of oil in total, but technically it will create jobs for longer than that. I don't see that as a justification for drilling up several square miles of wildlife refuge, but it was a correction I had to make to be honest.