ANWR

One would think that a man who is about to leave the Presidency of the United States with the lowest favorability rating, ever, would make some attempt to redeem himself and act responsibly. Instead George Bush, after having been told a few weeks ago, and to his surprise, that gasoline prices were approaching $4.00 a gallon repeated the mantra of his oil cronies and insisted that we begin drilling for more oil in ANWR (Arctic National Wildlife Refuge). The following facts can be found on the Energy Information Administration’s website; If drilling were to be approved no oil would come out of ANWR for at least ten years, that’s 2018; The biggest field in ANWR would produce, at the maximum, 1.4 billion bbls (barrels), total, secondary fields would produce another 2.8 billion bbls., which is maximum total of 4.2 billion bbls. In 2007 the U.S. imported approximately 4.9 billion barrels of oil, 2.2 billion bbls came from OPEC nations and of that 800 million bbls were imported from the Persian Gulf and the rest from various supplier nations. Considering these production and consumption figures, the most we can expect by drilling in ANWR is to sustain our economy’s thirst for oil for less than one year, ten years from now, but the potential environmental damage is immeasurable. My opinion is that the President should not be promoting the continuation of oil dependence; instead he should, for once, be a trail blazer and initiate a project to promote alternative energy and energy conservation. We’ve been through this before, back in the early 1970s. Had the President and Congress acted responsibly by creating an energy task force we probably would not be in the position we are today.

http://www.eia.doe.gov/oiaf/servicerpt/anwr/methodology.html
http://tonto.eia.doe.gov/dnav/pet/pet_move_impcus_a2_nus_ep00_im0_mbbl_a.htm