Mittopia

Nice math but what you forget to add is the oil that is no being tapped in the gulf, california, the shale oil in utah etc.

Yes fuel standards are great but we can still drill more oil. There is tons of oil. China is now drilling in the gulf of mexico. Near Cuba! Why can’t we? Oh yeah, enviromental freeks.

SELMA, Ind. — It’s just a drop in the global oil bucket, but an eastern Indiana man is operating an oil well in his backyard in an effort to capitalize on soaring crude prices.

Greg Losh’s rig produces three barrels of crude oil a day, though he told FOX News that he hasn’t started selling it yet. For now, he and his partners are keeping it in storage containers.

He declined to say how much oil they’ve collected in the two weeks they’ve been pumping.

But as oil is going for about $127 a barrel on the international market, three daily would yield just under $400 a day for Losh on the global spot market — or 1/100,000 of the daily production increase the Saudis agreed to earlier this month.

Still, in spite of those returns and the $100,000 it costs to drill a well, it’s worth it to Losh considering the current price of oil, he told WISH-TV in Indianapolis.

The oil his well produces comes from the Trenton field that fueled the growth of east-central Indiana cities more than a century ago, he told the station.

He expects to drill four more wells soon on his property in the town of Selma about 55 miles northeast of Indianapolis.

Read below. Its in Idiana. LETS GET IT

“It’s a money maker. It is paying off,” Losh told FOX.

The oil is stored in a tank and transported to Ohio for sale, he said. His oil well also produces natural gas to heat his home and several others.

The Associated Press contributed to this report

CHINA STARTS OIL DRILLING OFF FLORIDA

WHILE AMERICA TWIDDLES THUMBS, CHINESE TAP BILLIONS OF BARRELS

By Mike Blair

While Washington dithers over exploiting oil and gas reserves off the coast of Florida, China has seized the opportunity to gobble up these deposits, which run throughout Latin America, the Caribbean and along the U.S. Gulf coast.

The Chinese have forged a deal with Cuban leader Fidel Castro to explore and tap into massive oil reserves almost within sight of Key West, Florida. At the same time, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, who controls the largest oil reserves in the Western Hemisphere, is making deals to sell his country’s oil to China, oil that is currently coming to the United States.

Meanwhile, a new left-wing populist regime in Bolivia has nationalized the natural gas industry, threatening to cut off supplies to the United States.

SLANT DRILLING

There are new reports out circulating that Chinese firms are planning to slant drill off the Cuban coast near the Florida Straits, tapping into U.S. oil reserves that are estimated at 4.6 billion to 9.3 billion barrels. This compares with 4 billion to 10 billion barrels believed to be beneath the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge, where drilling is held up in Congress due to the objections of environmental groups which warn of endangering caribou. Permission to drill in the refuge, which experts are certain will not present any environmental hazard, has failed by just two votes in the Senate.

As Chinese business increases its reach around the world, it is seeking oil, which it lacks domestically.

After elections in Mexico in early July, when a new regime hostile to Washington is expected to take power, the United States might be without supplies of Mexican crude oil. The United States gets about 40 percent of its imported oil from Mexico and Venezuela.

China is eager to tap into oil reserves in the Florida Straits and then make a deal with Castro to control it. The Chinese have already reopened an abandoned Russian oil refinery in Cuba. Much of the gas refined there is believed to be destined for Freeport in the Bahamas, where the Chinese, through front company Hutchison-Whampoa, has developed a massive port facility and airfield.

With the refinery reopened and expanded it will also meet the needs of Castro.

Sen. Larry Craig (R-Idaho) has introduced legislation to ease U.S. restrictions that prevent dealing with Cuba to drill in the Florida Straits. It is hoped that Florida regulations that prevent U.S. oil drilling off the state’s coasts could also be eased.

The irony is that Chinese drilling could be even more of an environmental hazard since China is not as concerned about or equipped to deal with any potential ecological disaster as a result of a spill, said Craig.

Marine Drilling in the Florida Straights sounds interesting. But they are dealing with Cuba and we don’t. When it comes to drilling in the Gulf, it’s International Waters, and there isn’t much I can do about that.

On the other hand, China has an interesting challenge. They have no presence in the Gulf. Hence no infrastructure. It isn’t like you build a platform, float it in, install it and start pumping. A typical gulf pumping system consists of a platform, a couple of dozen underwater well heads, and hundreds of miles of deepwater piping. Pipes then need to be laid to storage and loading stations. In the US, this is in Texas, Louisiana, etc.

But hey, they can do that, because it is international waters.

But I think My Kempo, you are missing the MATH, which you said you saw, but I don’t think you grasp. Its called a cost/benefit ratio, coupled with an ROI. Sure there are many place with untapped reserves. Many of them are only profitable when oil is expensive (ie. your guy in Indiana). But developing this fields costs many many billions of dollars and take many many years. You achieve the same result, for LESS MONEY, by doing things like improving efficiencies across the board.

Like I pointed out, simply improving average US fuel economy by a few MPG is the same as developing a brand new oil field, and bringing it completely online. Except, in this case, the savings go on forever, while the oil well doesn’t.

So if you think it makes more sense to drill for more oil and forget about efficency, then you sir are an idiot. The reality is that we need safely develop domestic sources while at the same time vastly improving our efficency. If we don’t, then we are worse off 20 years from now. And developing alternate renewable sources is a far better alternative than using up valuable non-renewable. Pumping the money into research programs that provide these solutions is a far more cost effective solution with a better ROI then simply business as usual, which it seems you are advocating.

Here is some more math for you. Assume you can bring all of the oil reserves you mention online magically, and use them right now. Also assume that you keep it all for domestic use. Also assume that you can make the fields produce at a rate which can support domestic demand. Current US resources produce 38% of our needs, so we need to make up the remaining 62%. We bring online all these fields using some super technology and off we go. Estimated reserves in these new fields, 20 Billion Barrels. Heck I’ll even double that number. 40 Billion Barrels. Current US Consumption, If we assume consumption remains flat, then at 95 million bpd (or 34.675 billion barrels per year (bpy)), we would consume these resources in a little over a year. Of course, we can’t develop that quickly, and these fields certainly won’t produce at that consumption rate, so in the end, it provides no solution.

Now personally, I think that the number of 95 mbpd is high, and is based on some hinky math, its probaby closer to 30, but that doesn’t save us. So, in the end, I think that the answer is self evident. If you don’t find alternate energy sources, the oil becomes harder to find, even more expensive, and in the end, we all lose.

QED Biyatches!

UPDATE: Found this fantastic resource which has much more accurate information than my back of the napkin math. I read an article on Alaskan well development to get some of the statistics for my earlier posts, and it appears that data was not accurate. But then I found this site ( http://www.eia.doe.gov/oil_gas/petroleum/info_glance/petroleum.html ), which has really cool accurate data. So allow me to update a previous argument with better numbers. See upcoming post.

For the math question originally posed in this post, how about C) both. More oil and more efficient cars equals one big unnecessary desert in the Mid East.

China is not drilling off the coast of Florida. That’s a bogus story.