WhyOilEnergyIndependenceMayNotBeaGoodIdea.pptVIP

Why Oil Energy Independence May Not Be a Good Idea Dennis Silverman Dept. of Physics and Astronomy U C Irvine /~silverma/ October 30, 2008 World Proven Oil Reserves by Region (2003):Total 1,150 BBls, 31 BBls yearly usage.63% is in the Middle East. Iraq has 10% of the reserves. 80% are in nationalized oil companies. U. S. Oil Usage The US uses about 8 billion barrels of oil a year. This is about one quarter of the worlds oil usage. We import about 2/3 of our oil. From the world’s oil reserve bar chart, our 64 billion barrels of oil would last only 8 years if we truly went oil energy independent. We would of course have to triple our drilling wells to do so, and then abandon them after 8 years. The world’s oil stocks look like we could use them at the current rate for about 40 years. The true world reserves are not know to a factor of two, and the 1,200 billion barrels here is optimistic to some, and pessimistic to others. U. S. Offshore Oil Reserves Outer Continental Shelf Offshore Oil Drilling is Not Energy Independence The blue areas are the 68 billion barrels of reserves that are already allowed for drilling on the continental shelf. The white areas are the 18 billion barrels that are not yet allowed or leased on the further than 3.3 mile outer continental shelf. Even drilling all of these would only give us an extra 2 years of total oil use. ANWR at 4 to 12 billion barrels would only give us an extra one year of total oil use. But even if the current rate of California extraction on the near offshore drilling could be continued at the outer continental shelf, it would take about 100 years to extract the 10 billion barrels or one year’s worth of total oil use. If we drill, baby, drill all of the banned areas plus ANWR at say 28 billion barrels total, that will only add 2.3% to the world’s total reserves, and hardly effect the price of gasoline. Ways to Achieve Some Oil Energy Independence The Alberta tar sands are estimated to hold 180 billion barrels of recov