Saturday, March 02, 2002
3:32 PM LINK
Green Domino
If ANWR is drilled, what will be the next "oil domino" in the Arctic? The answer is NPRA, another acronym. It stands for the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska.
It is a contiguous area of 37,000 square miles (roughly the size of Indiana) on Alaska's north slope, lying to the west of Prudhoe Bay and extending inland into the Brooks Range.
By contrast, ANWR lies just to east of Prudhoe Bay. Here's a map from this site comparing them. The red area is the Section 1002 area, the part of ANWR that is the subject of the current drilling proposal, and which may hold 10 billion barrels.
You can click on the map to enlarge it.
The NPRA used to be called the Naval Petroleum Reserve No. 4. It was established in 1923 by President Harding, whose administration was racked by a big oil-related scandal.
As the name suggests, the reserve was meant an emergency supply for oil for the Navy, which at the time was the biggest consumer of petroleum. The stipulation was that it would be drilled only in a time of national emergency.
The name was changed to its present designation in 1976 by act of Congress, in a bill which strengthened the protection by a stipulation that drilling in the area could only be undertaken by an act of Congress itself.
The iron-clad protection lasted exactly four years. In 1980, a rider to an appropriations bill by Senator Stevens basically allowed leasing of the reserve for oil and gas explorations.
1:44 AM LINK
The Burden on the Environmentalists
The vote coming up the U.S. Senate on whether or not to open up ANWR to drilling is going to break down largely on party lines. Passage will depend on swing votes. Who are the swing votes? I don't know. I'm not interested in that.
What does interest me are the motivations of those who oppose the bill in the Senate, most of whom are Democrats. Why exactly shouldn't we open ANWR to drilling?
If you are an environmentalist, probably you are satisfied with the argument that it is simply a place that should be left alone. But on the other hand, there are other places in Alaska that can be left alone, ones that do not hold 10 billion barrels of petroleum below the surface.
Yes, it is true that the "2000 acres" is a big lie, as Paul Klugman wrote about today in the Times, although Sen. Murkowski will gladly tell you that the "roads all melt in summer."
It is also true that the oil from ANWR will not lessen our dependency on imports in any substantial way. Yet if you agree that petroleum will be the foundation of our energy supply for many decades to come, and that we should obtain the oil from as many diverse sources as possible (while also conserving as much as possible), then I believe that you have obligation to explain why ANWR is so important that we should not retrieve the petroleum in it.
Perhaps many environmentalist see ANWR as a bulwark, which must defended against the encroachment of industry on the wilderness. The history of this country suggests that this is a rational reaction. Call it the "Green Domino theory, if you will. This approach says we must fight for ANWR to stay undrilled, not so much for what it is unto itself, but because of the precedent it would set.
Wednesday, February 27, 2002
9:24 PM LINK
A Case for Drilling in ANWR
If you take "energy independence" off the table, are there any good reasons to drill in ANWR?
For starters, there is still the fact that 10 billion barrels is a lot of oil, at least for a reserve in the U.S. It would do barely anything to alleviate foreign dependency, but heck, it's there, why not use it? As long as we're burning oil, it seems odd to leave a puddle that big sitting below our own feet, so to speak.
Drilling there would create jobs in Alaska, relieve the citizens of that state from the threat of a state income tax, and would give the oil companies something to do. Riches would be made off of it. Who would get rich off ANWR? I'll leave that to you to speculate, but if you think of creation of wealth in society as a good thing, then drilling in ANWR has definite positive benefits. If you're a Libertarian, then this probably enough reason for you.
But I think everyone would agree that those arguments alone would not resonate well in open debate in Congress. Without the "energy independence" card, how could one, from the standpoint of a national energy policy, rouse the emotional support to open up a wildlife refuge for drilling ?
The best argument I've heard for drilling, beyond the "it's there, we might as well use it" argument, is the one articulated in a letter to editor in Monday's N.Y. Times in response to their own editorial.
The letter was from John Lichtblau and Lawrence Goldstein of the Petroleum Industry Research Association. Surpisingly, they point out the fallacy of pursuing "energy independence":
Your proposed move toward energy independence, a goal of the Carter administration, has been discarded as unachievable and not required.
The real issue, they argue, is not energy dependence, but
supply vulnerability. That is, although it is an unavoidable fact that the U.S.will import ever more petroleum, the most dangerous consequences of this situtation can avoided so long as the petroleum itself comes from
enough different places around the world.
In other words, it would be very bad if we got all our imported petroleum from the Persian Gulf. This indeed would put us a great risk from an interruption, as it did in 1973, when the level of imports was much lower.
On the other hand, suppose that the petroleum imports come from diverse places, say, some from the Persian Gulf, some from Nigeria, some from Mexico, some from Canada, and so on. Then interruption in the supply from any particular source could be balanced by increased production from other countries.
You could call this stategy petroleum realpolitik. From this standpoint, ANWR will be equivalent to another country of modest reserves from which we import oil. The fact that it's in the U.S. is actually not so important in this view of things. ANWR would be just one fairly moderate-sized spigot that fills the bucket of U.S. petroleum, none of which is absolutely crucial to the supply, as least in the short-term. Strength is in diversity, and if the sources are diverse enough, then it is almost as good as "independence."
If the idea then is to maximize the number of sources from which oil flows into U.S. market, then it is hard to ignore the 10 billion barrels in Alaska.
Note: Regarding the authors of that letter to the Times, I don't know who the heck Lawrence Goldstein is. He seems to pop up in the media all the time giving one-line quotes about the oil industry. It's hard to get a bearing on what his philosophy is, actually.
Likewise with John Lichtblau. He has appeared before Congress, at least according to this site from the State of Oklahoma. And whatever anyone says in front of Congress must be true. They only listen to experts.
In the letter they mention the necessity for minimizing supply vulnerability, but then they end by saying that we have a cushion, in the form of the Strategic Petroleum Reserve! What are they advocating, exactly?
Also I can't get a bearing on their so-called Petroleum Industry Research Foundation. They don't seem to have a home page, whoever they are. I get the idea they are talking-heads-for-hire who have the right "industry credentials", who know how to regurgitate the right pithy comment to get in print or on television, but don't really have anything deeply original to contribute.
On the other hand, maybe the organization is a cover name of the Trilateral Commission, and I'm about to get a knock on my door...
Tuesday, February 26, 2002
6:39 PM LINK
What Bush Implies
So does ANWR hold a lot of petroleum? Probably, at least by U.S. standards. Will drilling in ANWR increase U.S. proven reserves substantially? Yes, at least in terms of percentage increases (upwards of a 50% increase, adding 10 billion barrels to the 22 billion barrels currently).
But will ANWR make any difference in the "energy independence" of the United States? No.
Why? Because a 50% increase in "not nearly enough petroleum" is still "not nearly enough petroleum."
Whatever the reasons for drilling in ANWR, "striving towards energy independence" is simply not one of them. To imply such an idea is to deceive, and this idea should be taken off the table in the debate about drilling there.
But this exactly what Bush has been implying. In a recent speech, he said:
"It's important for Americans to remember that, as we debate
an energy bill, as we have a discussion about an energy plan,
that America imports more than ... 10 million barrels a day and
the figure is rising.
In other words, he is perfectly willing to acknowledge that the U.S. faces a continuing crisis about its dependency on foreign oil. He turns follows this up in his speeches with exhortations to drill in ANWR. The implication is that this will change the situation.
It's very clever. He and Cheney know full-well that ANWR, as big a reserve it is by U.S. standards, is a drop-in-the-bucket when it comes to satisfying long-term demand.
They never come right out and say ANWR will solve foreign dependency problems. They are too smart for that. Instead, they simply put these two ideas together over-and-over in hopes of continuing the myth among the I-listen-to-Rush-in-my-SUV crowd that drilling for ANWR is the petroleum equivalent of planting the flag on the hill at Iwo Jima.
The flag-toting pro-drilling site www.anwr.org likes to dangle this canard in its pages. On this page, one finds a seemingly wonderful implied consequence of ANWR:
The 2,000 acres of the ANWR designated for exploration could replace Iraqi imports for the next 70 years
To which one should rightly ask: so, uh,
will it?. The answer is of course
no.
Such is the caliber of debate on this issue.
NOTE That anwr.org article is hilarious. Check it out. It shamelessly uses a poll result showing 48% of surveyed Americans support drilling in ANWR to conclude that "Americans favor the President's plan."
Wow. Bush really has rewritten the rules, even for basic arithmetic. Just like in the 2000 election, 48% actually means "a majority." I need to get used to this new math.
Monday, February 25, 2002
1:20 PM LINK
Reality with ANWR
Last week I broke down the New York Times phony arguments about oil drilling in their editorial. Their thesis rested on two basic assumptions:
1. Petroleum will be the major component of U.S. energy supply for decades to come.
2. The U.S. can and should retain as much "energy independence" as possible by keeping imports as low as possible
Taken together, these two premises lead to the conclusion that we should
both conserve as much a possible
and drill for as much new oil as possible.
They especially imply we should drill in ANWR, the last big enchilada of an oil field we may find in the U.S., and the Times diatribe against drilling there came off as unpatriotic by their own standards.
So does that mean we ought to drill in ANWR? Like I said before, it seems like it is our duty to do so, but only if you accept the first two propositions above. But if you examine them, you find the motherlode of phoniness in the petroleum debate.
Let's look at (2) first, the idea that we can and should retain some "energy independence." It is the basis of the Bush-Cheney energy policy. It takes the liberal long-standing "it's patriotic to use less oil" argument and runs with it, waving the flag to promote more expanded drilling. But opening up more public lands to drilling, they argue, we can not only give Americans the energy we want, we can remain standing tall as a nation.
The stench of garbage from this argument is almost unpalatable. We need to face some facts here, people: The world may not be running out of oil yet, but the U.S. certainly is. Yes, there is a lot left to recovered, but it is paltry compared to our long-term needs.
The wells will keep pumping long into the future, but the overall rate of production will keep declining, year-by-year, as it has done for thirty years. New discoveries will throw only slight wrinkles in this downward trend.
Meanwhile, demand is going to keep going up. Taken together, these two facts imply that the percentage of imports in our petroleum supply is going to keep climbing. It is inevitable. We are going to importing more oil (both in real terms and perecentage-wise) in five years, in ten years, in fifteen years, no matter what gets found and drilled here.
The big oil fields in this country were by-and-large discovered by the 1930's. They supplied our domestic needs completely until 1971, at which time our demand outstripped production. U.S. production has been in fairly steady decline for three decades as output has been dwindling from the old fields.
Even the discovery of the Prudhoe Bay only slightly retarded the decrease in overall U.S. production. Meanwhile U.S. demand has continued to rise at a steady pace, and will continue to do so.
The idea that finding more domestic oil will ever get us anywhere near "energy independence" is about the same as trying to get to the Moon by building a tall skyscraper.
This is the big lie from Bush-Cheney: that national security depends on finding more domestic oil. Whatever the reasons one might find for drilling in ANWR or anywhere else in the U.S., "energy independence" is not one of them.
Ten years from now, when ANWR petroleum finally gets to market (either in the U.S. or in the Far East), the U.S. will be importing more oil than it is now. The year after that, the U.S. will be importing even more oil.
ANWR looks big from the size of current U.S. reserves, but that's only because current reserves look paltry compared to domestic demand.
But no one seems to be saying this. No one wants to tell the people of America how bleak the future is, from the standpoint of "energy independence", so long as petroleum remains the major component of our energy supply.
Sunday, February 24, 2002
5:02 PM LINK
Hydrogen-Powered Toyota Coming
The Bangkok Post reports that Toyota plans to offer its hydrogen fuel-cell FCVH-4 (stands for "fuel cell hybrid vehicle") in 2003. According to Toyota's press release, it will be modeled after Toyota's Highlander SUV, will have a top speed of about 90 mph, and range of at least 150 miles.
