Here're the savings from Arctic drilling — 75 cents a barrel

[Bleacher Creature]

Source: McClatchy

By Erika Bolstad | McClatchy Newspapers
WASHINGTON — If Congress were to open up the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to drilling, crude oil prices would probably drop by an average of only 75 cents a barrel, according to Department of Energy projections issued Thursday.

The report, which was requested in December by Sen. Ted Stevens, R-Alaska, found that oil production in the refuge "is not projected to have a large impact on world oil prices."

But the report also finds that opening ANWR could have other benefits, particularly in Alaska, where tapping the resources in the Arctic refuge could extend the lifespan of the trans-Alaska pipeline. It estimates that if Congress agreed to open ANWR this year, Alaskan oil could hit the market in about 10 years.

"I'm coming away from it saying that this is yet another an indicator that opening ANWR is important to this country and to our energy future," said Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska.



Read more: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/251/story/38223.html

---

You read that right: drilling in ANWR would produce a benefit of 75 cents a BARREL. Not a gallon, a BARREL. That sound worth it to anyone? Oh yeah, we wouldn't see any effect for TEN years.

Good luck using this as an excuse in the fall GOP.

[shain from kane]

1. That just might get rid of that .9 cents that they tack on the end.

[fascisthunter]

2. Yup.... ANWR Will Do Nothing

but enrich a few already wealthy shit heads.

[xioaping]

10. It will do 79 cents a gallon less

according to the article. That is $16 a tank full. That is $64 a month for a family that must use a tank full a week to get to work and back. For low income people especially, that is not nothing.

[fascisthunter]

17. edited for below

[xioaping]

12. Scratch that. Just saw it was 75 cents a barrel, not a gallon n/t

[xioaping]

13. But a question

It might be 75 cents a barrel but it is 100 percent savings ($134.00 per barrel at current market) in the amount of money going out of the country, correct?

[fascisthunter]

18. Sorry... the "possible" positives come up short

too short for destroying more of our environment. We need to see the same push we see for ANWR for alternative energy and diplomacy. There are other ways much more productive than this.

[xioaping]

19. Conservation will produce more energy

That is certain. And it can do it without people having to radically change their lifestyle.

[fascisthunter]

20. conservation.... exactly

it's time most Americans realize what we consume is finite and how much we consume has a direct impact to our well being.

[xioaping]

23. I made effort and it paid off

I use 1 gallon of gasoline every two weeks. I ride my scooter to work. Our electric bill this month is $43 and the highest was $78. That was in August because here it gets very hot in summer so we had to use the A/C a bit for that month (118 F was too hot).

I save money and have a great lifestyle because of it and I am proud that I conserve as a bonus.

[cstanleytech]

26. *raised eyebrow* Just wondering how often are you at home though?

Also what kinda home do you live in, apartment, house and if house is it made with an uncommon construction method like mostly underground or rammed earth?

[xioaping]

29. Home every night

Regular house but modest 1200 feet. I think it is made with common materials has tile roof and stucco and I think metal boards in the walls not wood. Definately not underground LOL

[cstanleytech]

32. That probably explains our bill difference then as the average electric bill

where I live is in the hundreds per month but mostly because I have health issues so dont get out much.
I bet if we added in the utilities where you worked if you had to pay for them that it would probably come out to roughly the same amount of energy being used with the same cost but you probably just dont notice it because you are only at home at night.
Anyway I am thinking of trying to save the money up for solar panels but thats not for awhile if ever.

[xioaping]

35. That might be part of it

But also I conserve very much. It was pretty easy. I bought laundry hampers for colors and whites then only do a full load. I don't use the clothes drier - a clothes line works fine. Dish washer is a drying rack but if I have company over then I will use it. I switched to all curly cue type light bulbs and I don't turn on the air unless it gets really hot. In the summer I am comfortable if the inside is 82 or even a bit more and in winter I just use a blanket.

Solar is only good if you use it to power one appliance like an air conditioner. To do the whole house is too expensive. If I was going to do a solar panel, it would be for just the air conditioner and then I might think it neat to use the air more.

I hope you are ok and that your health is not too bad. Good thing for computer so we can get out even if we can not always get out.

[bluerum]

38. Not everyone lives in a warm climate. In the northeast

energy for heat in the winter is essential. Not only for heating buildings, but fuel for snow removal and emergency services.

[xioaping]

40. Even in Northeast you can cut down

I lived there before and you can cut down on heat in winter. It needs to be warm under the blankets of the bed but not outside them when everyone is sleeping. Still, I understand your meaining.

[bluerum]

41. As a practical matter - the pipes have to be kept from freezing. There are

lots of ways to keep them warm - most require electricity.

Personally, I love wood heat. But it is hard to heat a whole house on one or even two wood stoves/fireplaces. And when it gets really cold, you absolutely need electricity. It is scary to think that the modern home is 100% dependent on having an adequate supply of electricity in the winter.

[xioaping]

42. Its a long ways between frozen pipes and 78 degrees

Surely you can find some savings above freezing.

[bluerum]

43. Of course. I often wake up to 50-60 degrees F but I don't want to cut it much

closer than that. A below 0 snap overnight could do it.

One of the points that I am trying to make is that electricity is another stranglehold on the people - and it is not so obvious but the price of electricity has been going up yearly as well. Gasoline is the most visible and up front avenue to extort money from the masses but it is certainly not the only one.

"Free market" means free to extort as much as you can get away with - err - I mean charge as much as the market will bear.

[xioaping]

44. Definately a different situation

Hope I was not sounding like I discounted your efforts. Here I just put up with heat to say. Heat is uncomfortable. Cold hurts - and causes ruptured pipes. I'm sure I don't have the solution for that.

[dutch-Eddie]

3. LoL, we do not need American oil, Let's just sue OPEC and

force them to produce more at less. I could not stop laughing when I heard the leadership of this Congress is seriously consider this as a remedy to the high oil prices. This is too much :)

[rurallib]

4. About three years ago NPR did a story on ANWR

Seems that Mobil had been given permission by Bushco to do some test drilling up there. It was illegal, but this is Bushco.
Well, Mobil had to airlift the equipment in because the permafrost is no longer year round. Now it lasts only about three months. So the cost and logistics of just getting machinery in is daunting. At the time Mobil was questioning whether it would even be worth it. They would most likely leave what equipment they moved in there.
I am starting to see ANWR as another of the myriad of issues that Repugs don't want to win. They want it to sit out there so they use it as a club against opponents.

[Lorien]

8. I remember a repug senator (can't remember which one) say that the appeal

of drilling in ANWR wasn't the oil. "The oil companies have no real appetite for it" he said "but it would be seen as a symbolic defeat of Liberalism, and that's why it's still a part of our agenda".

Such a petty, idiotic party they are!

[Arctic Dave]

28. Never happened. I'm not sure were you heard this but it is not true.

How can I be so certain? Easy, I work in the oilfields on Alaska's North Slope. What you probraly heard was drilling in NPR-A. They drill in the winter time, so they only have a small window for exploratory drilling.

[Mountainman]

5. I'm hoping we would not need it 10 years from now!

[Lorien]

9. At most it would only supply 2-3% of our needs at a HUGE expense

how do you get the oil out when the melting permafrost won't allow you to build roads into the region? Ultimately, the only people to benefit would be Halliburtan-after they build and perpetually rebuild the infrastructure at our expense.

[legin]

6. I could easily disagree with the Department of Energy

I'd say more like $10 a barrel.

'A 1% change in supply = a 10% change in price' is a rule of thumb I found once.

[hunter]

7. At this point I think it might make oil more expensive.

As the cost of oil skyrockets, the cost of extracting this oil will skyrocket too. At some point the continuous cost over-runs of such a project complicated by unstable climatic and economic conditions (melting permafrost, inflation, etc...) will make these more difficult oil development projects untenable.

[Bake]

11. The price of oil has no bearing on the cost of extraction.

Certainly the reverse is not true, of course, higher extraction cost does lead to higher oil prices. As oil prices climb, drilling in more costly areas becomes economically attractive.

The cost of extraction is based on other factors like location, depth, etc.

Bake

[hunter]

14. Well, except most of our economy is based on fossil fuels.

Without looking at dollar values -- which are a piss-poor measure of anything -- the physical effort of extracting arctic oil, deep sea oil, tar sands, etc., is greatly subsidized by the low cost easy to get fossil fuels. It's very likely we are past the point where these difficult sorts of oil production could be self-sustaining. If you had to use this difficult oil to produce difficult oil it wouldn't be worth the cost because there wouldn't be enough economic surplus to support a society capable of such complex and expensive development.

The cost of producing something like tar sands or shale oil is very dependent on the cost of natural gas and fuel oil. It's just barely profitable now only because the system is fed by fossil fuels that are produced with much less physical effort.

[bulloney]

15. We have oil underground in much of the continental U.S.

You mean to tell me it would be cheaper to extract it clear up in northern Alaska than in other parts of the country?

And who's to say if that Alaskan oil is consumed by the U.S.? What's to keep the companies from selling it to India, China or other countries?

[MJJP21]

16. Saudis said it best

When Bush went to the Saudis to ask them to increase production the response from the Saudis was, Why? There is no shortage of oil. This is all about making money for the oil companies and there is nothing we can do about it except use less. Even though gas in near $4.00 a gallon I don't see much of a drop in driving. I believe that is because the heating season is over and money used to heat homes is not going into the gas tank. Don't be surprised if the price of gas and oil go down just in time for the election and the start of home heating season.

[IronLionZion]

21. I'm not convinced this is a supply or demand problem

because it's hard to believe either would have changed so dramatically just now. There's something crooked going on here.

[slackmaster]

22. I'm pretty sure most of the price of crude is due to speculation and the futures market

It doesn't cost over $100 to pump the stuff out of the ground.

[BreweryYardRat]

24. Something's been crooked for the last year.

Gas in my area took 6.5 miserable years to get up to $2.50-$2.75/gallon for regular unleaded. Now, within 8 months, it's suddenly almost $4 for regular.

[Outlier]

25. T Boone Pickens

Said as much on CNBC on Tuesday. Unfortunately he also said crude was going to $150. Have to take the good with the bad, i guess.

[damntexdem]

27. Wow, that drilling could buy us reversal of a whole afternoon's price rise!

[ohio2007]

30. This report states we should keep paying what OPEC wants ? which is $150, $200 , $300. bbl .

It's a bullshit skewed story from back in December when the source was quoting oil at what ?

$55/bbl ?

Start drilling, I'd prefer to see oil shave about a buck off that December price for oil.

In the meantime, lets hear from a few more "experts" then one loser doom/gloom report that says, "don't drill,don't build refineries,don't look anywhere else but your trusted royal friends.
Declare independence from those foreign price fixers.

[Psephos]

31. I agree

Time to stop sending so much cash to the world's bad people.

[Doctor Cynic]

34. Yes, we should stop sending cash to Exxon, Halliburton, Unocal, and so on.

[Psephos]

36. Yeah!!! Cuz they're not subject to American law, but Prince Asswipe and Sheikh Headhacker are n/t

[ohio2007]

37. Fill ’Er Up With Dictators (September 27, 2006 ) a NYTimes look back OpEd

Fill ’Er Up With Dictators
What’s a matter? No sense of humor? You didn’t enjoy watching Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez addressing the U.N. General Assembly and saying of President Bush: “The devil came here yesterday, right here. It smells of sulfur still today.” Many U.N. delegates roared with laughter.

Oh well then, you must have enjoyed watching Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad breezing through New York City, lecturing everyone from the U.N. to the Council on Foreign Relations on the evils of American power and how the Holocaust was just a myth.

C’mon then, you had to at least have gotten a chuckle out of China’s U.N. ambassador, Wang Guangya, trying to block a U.N. resolution calling for the deployment of peacekeeping troops to Sudan to halt the genocide in Darfur. I’m sure it had nothing to do with the fact that the China National Petroleum Corporation owns 40 percent of the Sudan consortium that pumps over 300,000 barrels of oil a day from Sudanese wells.

No? You’re not having fun? Well, you’d better start seeing the humor in all this, because what all these stories have in common is today’s most infectious geopolitical disease: petro-authoritarianism.


Yes, we thought that the fall of the Berlin Wall was going to unleash an unstoppable wave of free markets and free people, and it did for about a decade, when oil prices were low. But as oil has moved to $60 to $70 a barrel, it has fostered a counterwave — a wave of authoritarian leaders who are not only able to ensconce themselves in power because of huge oil profits but also to use their oil wealth to poison the global system — to get it to look the other way at genocide,
snip
“If Bush were the leader he claims to be, he would impose an import fee right now to keep gasoline prices high, and reduce the tax rate on Social Security for low-income workers, so they would get an offsetting increase in income,” argued Philip Verleger Jr., the veteran energy economist.

That is how we can permanently break our oil addiction, and OPEC, and free ourselves from having to listen to these petro-authoritarians, who are all so smug — not because they are educating their people or building competitive modern economies, but because they happen to sit on oil.

According to Bloomberg.com, in 2005 Iran earned $44.6 billion from crude oil exports, its main source of income. In the same year, the mullahs spent $25 billion on subsidies to buy off the population. Bring the price of oil down to $30 and guess what happens: All of Iran’s income goes to subsidies. That would put a terrible strain on Ahmadinejad, who would have to reach out to the world for investment. Trust me, at $30 a barrel, the Holocaust isn’t a myth anymore.

But right now, Chávez, Ahmadinejad and all their petrolist pals think we are weak and will never bite the bullet. They have our number. They know that Mr. Bush is a phony — that he always presents himself as this guy ready to make the “tough” calls, but in reality he has not asked his party, the Congress, the people, or U.S. industry to do one single hard thing to reduce our dependence on foreign oil.


snip
http://select.nytimes.com/2006/09/27/opinion/27friedman.html?_r=2&n=Top/Opinion/Editorials%20and%20Op-Ed/Op-Ed/Columnists/Thomas%20L%20Friedman&oref=slogin&oref=slogin





who is fxing the price ?
end foreign dependence, Drill in the US

[Solon]

33. Even if ANWR had the most overly optimistic estimate of reserves, its 300 days worth of oil, MAX...

Not even a year, its simply not worth it to drill there.

[Honeycombe8]

39. We will have hit a new low point in this country, if the ANWR is opened up to drilling.

There is no such thing as "environmentally friendly" oil drilling.

[ohio2007]

45. Oil in the Sand

Sand Trap
Syncrude's installation near Fort McMurray extracts almost 350,000 barrels a day from the sandy soil.




Just Below the Surface
Oil seeps from the ground after an oil worker's boots broke the surface at Syncrude's Aurora mine.


River Critter
moose walks on the on the banks of the majestic Athabasca River near the Syncrude installation. The company reclaims the land after all the materials have been extracted in order to restore the natural environment.



http://www.time.com/time/photogallery/0,29307,1807275_1712848,00.html

It's a shame congress wants us to keep the status quo while they cry about the price of oil .

[samsingh]

46. wow - a decimal point -that will soon disappear in the ridiculous

price of oil

remember when the idiot bush in 2000 was complaining that oil was too expensive at like $40 A BARREL?

where's the fuckin outrage?