Casey At Bat

Every few months some Democrat decides that oil companies are to blame for high prices.

Except they're not. It's Democrats who are at fault.

This time it's Senator Casey's turn.

The federal government is so poorly staffed to investigate oil speculation and price gouging that its agents might as well be “cops going after criminals with water pistols,” said U.S. Sen. Bob Casey Jr.

In a meeting Monday with the newspaper's editorial board, the Pennsylvania Democrat called for a national effort to define price gouging and make it illegal.

... because frankly their semi-annual effort has failed.

Oil and gas woes dominated the discussion with the editorial board as Casey cast doubts on what he called shortsighted proposals to expand drilling along the U.S. coastline and in the Alaska wilderness.

“Republicans believe we can drill our way out of this problem,” Casey said. “But only a small percentage of the area available for drilling is now being used.

“It would take about 10 years [to drill in Alaska] and we'd only get about six months' worth of oil out of there,” he said, noting that “those would be a really nice six months.” But, he added, we would lose a chunk of pristine wilderness forever.

Six months worth of oil: Lie. If we got it all out immediately and refined it and sold it our current consumption rates that's "possibly" what it would take. But you cannot drain an oil reservoir that fast (nor would you want to, you need to replace the oil volume removed with water to maintain pressure).

Even the oil volume potentially produced in those six months is not true. You cannot (and the Senate damned sure cannot) forecast advances in oil production and drilling technologies. Oil that was out of reach even 10 years ago is being produced with new techniques. Who's to say what big oil companies or service companies like Halliburton or Schlumberger will develop in the coming years?

Don't bet against ingenuity.

The 10 years of drilling is also a lie. It does not take 10 years to drill a well.

It takes weeks to drill a well... and one rig can only drill one well at a a time. So it might take years to bring more and more wells to production.

But first you must do exploration... which usually amounts to dragging microphones over the surface looking for oil.

We can't even do that.

If we took Senator Casey's (and the Democrat) acreage complaint to heart, it would only lead to more dry holes being drilled. If you do non-invasive exploration and no oil is found, of what use would drilling into nothing be? Of no use.

Once a company determines there's potentially oil under a lease, then they do exploratory drilling.

If they establish there's financially producable amounts of oil beneath a lease, THEN they go into production mode.

In the Alaska oilfields (an area with I have personal experience), if there is a production facility nearby, it's generally a matter of plumbing at that point.

However, all of the existing leases have already been explored and re-explored. All the oil that can be found in those location has been identified.

So when you hear dishonest Democrats saying "they have 80 million acres of leases"... this is true. But not every acre has oil under it!

If oil is discovered, and the nearest processing facility is thirty or forty or fifty miles away, a production facility needs to be built... which means years of environmental permitting and lawsuits.

It's not 10 years, it's more like 5.

If five years is too far out for oil, why should we spending billions or trillions to tackle .4 degrees of global warming in fifty?

Oil and Energy Senate Posted by AlexC at July 1, 2008 12:19 PM