Bush wins another one for his buddies in the oil Industry

I'm still waiting for any substance whatsoever from you.

Frustrated? Not at all.

Angry? A bit, but very little of my ire has to do with ANWR.

Amusement? A ton from watching you flail about trying to avoid anything remotely approaching meaningful dialogue.

As I mentioned in my post to your brother (I guess they don't teach reading comprehension at Rice, eh?), I don't drink and as such, I really don't have any problem with not being aware of the spelling of a brand of tequila. I am satisfied with having the ability to analyze information and present it to others in an intelligible, logical manner that does not rely on statements like GAME. SET. MATCH.

I guess you are just happy being able to spell Cuervo. The bonus for me is that I can look up spelling, but it appears that you will never be able to analyze information or express yourself intelligently.

 

It's about more than just holes in the ground or about the price of oil. If there's no oil, you just don't pull up and say "no foul. Ciao"

There's the impact that building roads and hauling heavy machinery has in a potentially environmentally sensitive area. You simply cannot do it without some impact. And that impact takes longer to remediate in harsh climates like the north. THat's why it's taken 20 years to push this through. And given his past record, I'm not convinced those impacts have been considered.

 

First of all, want to take a guess of the probability of actually finding oil in any particular drilling? Let me just say the odds are stacked against you.

Secondly, you say OK, we'll just have a few holes in the ground. Yeah, that and a pretty hefty bill. I suppose you are willing to pay for that.

Thirdly, you say oh, only a fraction of ANWR will be drilled. Well, you apparently never heard of the term scope creep. Everything project starts out small but then grows. In some cases, companies plain lie about it. In many others, they have no idea exactly how much oil is there. But rarely do projects with low probability of success like these ever end up the same size as they started.

Yet you assume that as soon as we start drilling, everybody in the country will benefit, jobs, lower fuel cost, etc. OK, if they don't bring oil prices down, then you "non-liberals" pay for all the cost. Fair?

 

You simply do not understand the industry or this issue. I will waste no time in dignifying your response with an answer. My points all stand.

 

mcmark, this guy MFW (who I've never heard of) is unaware of both who will do the drilling and is completely oblivious to the fact that reserve studies have been done. He jumps into the thread at the tail end and essentially takes the conversation backwards several pages. We've covered all this stuff and he is simply wasting our time.

 

Perhaps this information will help clarify things:

http://www.sibelle.info/oped15.htm

 

Also to be flesh out the debate here is a picture of ANWR in the summer.

 

Is that the part that will be drilled on, Sishir? Can you tell me that?

 

Only if you can tell me if the picture that Trader_Jorge showed is the only part to be drilled on.

 

T_J provided a map of which part will be drilled on.

Uninformed people who think the entire ANWR will be drilled on are part of problem that has plagued this issue for the past few years. Ignorance.

 

But is the photo he provided from the part to be drilled on and do all of the parts to be drilled on look like that and will they look like that during the lifetime of drilling?

 

ANWR is much adoo about nothing. A day's supply for an insatiable junkie. It's time to think outside the barrel.




March 15, 2005, 12:51AM



MONEYMAKERS
Amy Myers Jaffe
Energy scholar sees room in policy for more science
Copyright 2005 Houston Chronicle

When Amy Myers Jaffe flips the light switch in her Rice University office, she sees the entire chain of power production it took to bring that electricity to her fingertips.

As the energy fellow at the university's James A. Baker III Institute of Public Policy, Jaffe is confounded by the public's misperceptions about energy, environmental issues and the science behind them.

"People are against everything these days, even the better options," she says.

"In Martha's Vineyard they don't want windmills because they're ugly. On Lake Powell they complain hydroelectricity ruins water recreation. They don't want coal mining or drilling.

"We have to have some of these things or we're going to have to sit in the dark."

Jaffe recently talked with Houston Chronicle reporter Lynn J. Cook about U.S. energy policy and how it needs to be refocused.

Q: You believe spending on solar could actually commercialize it. Why?

A: With solar, whatever you take out of the atmosphere you've taken out, but there's no waste. There are no corollary issues. Politicians say solar would take too much space, but did you know to electrify the entire United States through solar panels it would take less land than we are using right now to grow corn for ethanol? And don't forget it takes diesel to run the farm equipment to plant the corn.

You have to look carefully at the science behind this stuff. Hydrogen is the perfect example. If we are going to use natural gas to create hydrogen to power cars, we need to know what the implications are. Where's this stuff coming from? Given the limitations of our own domestic resource base, we're going to have to import it and — bingo — we're back to OPEC. And what's the point of building an entire hydrogen infrastructure derived from natural gas when the whole idea behind it is to diversify from the Middle East?

Q: Energy issues are tough to understand. Do politicians get it?

A: Energy is too complicated for most politicians to understand, so they go with constituent-related positions that might not be well-informed on all aspects. "Clean coal" sounds good, so a miner-voting state naturally wants it. Another is concerned about losing automotive jobs, so everything is considered from that angle. Every politician has his issue.

President Bush's position is for more drilling access offshore — but not in Florida, his brother's state. Think about this: We had the worst hurricane we've ever had in the history of the oil industry, Hurricane Ivan. Underwater mudslides wrecked pipelines, the tops of rigs with no GPS systems on them were floating around lost for weeks. It took months to get production back on line. This was the largest crisis in energy infrastructure in the United States, and there were no pollution consequences at all.

We have politicians sitting on the Hill saying we can't drill off Florida or North Carolina because if a giant hurricane hit, we'd have terrible pollution. But one did hit, and it didn't happen.

Q: So what is the status of the energy bill?

A: It's not like last time. In the last go-round, it looked like anything would die a quick death with ANWR. (The proposals to open the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to drilling.) Now ANWR seems realistically passable, but there are questions about MTBE. MTBE is the new ANWR.

The public may not be focused on it, but for stakeholders it's a much bigger issue. It's about health, liability and what it's going to mean for the litigation community. The politics are complicated.

Q: What's wrong with U.S. energy policy?

A: It's not effective or broad enough. We did originally have fuel economy standards — and they're still in place — but we don't enforce them. We have an energy science policy. The president has allocated money toward clean coal and the hydrogen-powered FreedomCAR. We rejoined the international fusion project. But the amount of money we're spending is small compared to the magnitude of the challenge. And I don't particularly like the choices we've made.

We need more science. Energy technology could be an export item for us if the government would get on board. I think this administration has the right idea — the spirit sits well with me — but then I have to ask whether they're doing the right things to get us there. That's when I start to be critical.

Q: What would you like to see the government do differently?

A: We're actually cutting spending on science in the current budget. We need real breakthroughs, and $1 billion a year isn't going to get us there by 2050.

As Americans, we need to understand how these things come about. Take Japanese cars. We can buy them, get better mileage, have fewer emissions, and they're still convenient. The reason we can do that is because the Japanese government subsidized the research that went into those cars.

Japanese industry benefited, and jobs were created from the export market. The U.S. doesn't have that.

ljcook@chron.com

 

Looking at that picture of the size of South Carolina compared to Alaska I realize that Texas is now crap. I mean I knew it was bigger than Texas but damn!


Back to the subject...

 

OK then Trader_Jorge, give me the probability distribution. Show me the chances that significant levels of oil will be found there. You didn't have an argument for me to set you back several pages. And yes, I actually read the pages.

 

Oops, never mind.