Recently, I've heard the same, odd message from a number of different, seemingly unrelated people. Essentially it goes like this "America is being held to ransom by crazy foreigners over oil. In order to solve the problem, we should drill into our own huge reserves, and become self-sufficient so we don't have to import any from those capitalist pigs at OPEC. Naturally then oil prices would tumble, fuel would be cheap. We wouldn't be dependent on those evil foreign-types." There's even a petition up about it at
http://www.americansolutions.com/. So I thought I'd take a look at this meme.

Paul Weyrich neatly sums up the view, apparently supported by 60% of Americans, as follows: "What many of us wonder is this: When will the people of the United States say enough is enough and demand of their elected representatives that we develop our own resources? If we did we would not need to import one drop of oil from these ruthless dictators who would like to see us defeated or dead."

Weyrich is referring to a U.S. moratorium on drilling in certain areas - namely the Alaskan wilderness and the deep sea. What he and others are now loudly campaigning for is for this moratorium to be lifted, and they're using the current oil shock to try and turn it into an election issue.

It sounds great.. but what reserves? In terms of conventional oil, it seems these people have the Alaskan National Wildlife Refuge field, and various offshore sites in mind. What effect would tapping those have? Well why not ask the U.S. Energy Administration themselves.

"The opening of the ANWR 1002 Area to oil and natural gas development is projected to increase domestic crude oil production starting in 2018. Between 2018 and 2030, cumulative additional oil production is 2.6 billion barrels for the mean oil resource case, while the low and high resource cases project a cumulative additional oil production of 1.9 and 4.3 billion barrels, respectively. Additional oil production resulting from the opening of ANWR would be only a small portion of total world oil production, and would likely be offset in part by somewhat lower production outside the United States. The opening of ANWR is projected to have its largest oil price reduction impacts as follows: a reduction in low-sulfur, light crude oil prices of $0.41 per barrel (2006 dollars) in 2026 for the low oil resource case, $0.75 per barrel in 2025 for the mean oil resource case , and $1.44 per barrel in 2027 for the high oil resource case, relative to the reference case."

So if you go and drill the crap out of Alaska now, you won't see the first barrel of oil for another ten years, and the total reserve there is likely to be about 2.6 billion barrels, which is about what America uses in 4 months. And the effect on oil prices would most likely be $0.75 per barrel at best, or about 0.5%. And again, those are the government's own figures. It's a miserable return on a desperate investment.

So what about the offshore stuff? I'll be generous here and look at Bush's estimate of the available offshore reserves - 18 billion barrels. That's roughly 2.5 years of supply (again taking about 10 years to come online), and it's just an estimate. In fact, that 18 billion barrel figure is pretty meaningless, again according to the administration's own figures (HT: Smash the Mirror): "According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, when production in the OCS gets fully online in 2030, it will give a boost of about 200,000 barrels/day. This is the equivalent of 1% of today’s U.S. daily consumption. The effect on prices would be, well, nothing.

Of course drilling for it is going to be very expensive, not to mention the possibility of environmental damage. Like exploiting the ANWR, it's a fools' game that benefits pretty much nobody except for Exxon, Chevron, and other big greedy energy companies ending in -on.

So again, what reserves? Here we come to the ace card - oil shale. Because get this liberal appeasers, the United States has over two trillion barrels of oil in oil shale. That's enough to power the nation for another 110 years. Oil shortage? What oil shortage!

Oil Shale though is the dregs. It doesn't even contain oil as such, but rather a waxy substance called Kerogen from which oil can be processed. The richest deposits offer us a fairly miserable 30 gallons of oil per ton of shale. As for actually squeezing it out, here's a description of Shell's proposed extraction technique: "Shell proposes to heat a 1,000-foot-thick section of shale to 700 degrees, then keep it that hot for three years. Imagine a 100-acre production plot. Inside that area, the company would drill as many as 1,000 wells. Next, long electric heaters would be inserted in preparation for a multi-year bake. It's a high-stakes gamble, but if it works, a 6-mile-by- 6-mile area could, over the coming century, produce 20 billion barrels." (Energy Bulletin)

I don't think I'm the only person who'll read that, and think it sounds like something from a Dr. Who episode. And the energy that would be required to do this is obviously enormous. "To produce 100,000 barrels per day, the company would need to construct the largest power plant in Colorado history. Costing about $3 billion, it would consume 5 million tons of coal each year, producing 10 million tons of greenhouse gases. (The company's annual electric bill would be about $500 million.) To double production, you'd need two power plants. One million barrels a day would require ten."

The costs - financially and energy-wise - are so enormous that we'd use a substantial amount of the energy available just extracting the stuff. The amount of water required by the technique is equally frightening - in fact officials have stated that they fear Shell's plans could drain every drop of available water in the region. Essentially, then oil shale is like the gold in the oceans. Trillions of dollars of gold washes around the world's seas in minute particles, but retrieving it is far too impractical for serious consideration. Will be get some oil from it? Probably, but it's not going to come gushing forth, and neither will it be cheap or clean.

So where is this myth coming from? I don't know, but it has "lobbyists" written all over it. Big Oil firms have been suffering in recent years, and are looking for survival. Republicans can play on fears about oil supply (and Islam) to present new drilling as a bold policy decision, rather than the desperate clutching of a drug addict(in fairness I should criticize the Democrat position too, but I don't think they have one). Meanwhile the public are seduced by an apparent quick fix. Never mind that the dream of ending reliance on OPEC - who hold 75% of the world's reserves - is impossible as long as you still want to use oil, never mind the fact that drilling will have no significant impact on oil prices (by the government's own figures) - anything goes in an election year.

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(See also: Oil Denialism: Tackling Peak Oil Conspiracy Theories)