What prevents the US oil & gas industry from producing secure domestic energy supplies from US offshore areas?

Question

A strange paradox is preventing the U.S. oil-and-natural-gas industry from producing secure, domestic energy supplies from U.S. offshore areas. As a nation, we want affordable and plentiful supplies of energy, yet our government has not adopted an energy policy that encourages the development of America’s own oil and natural gas resources. Perhaps the Wall Street Journal said it best when it observed, "the constraints on our ability to find and extract new oil are not geologic or scientific."

According to the latest published estimates, the OCS holds approximately 77 billion barrels of oil and more than 420 trillion cubic feet of natural gas. That’s enough oil and natural gas to heat 100 million homes for 60 years.

The OCS resources off the lower 48 states alone are enough to provide gasoline for 116 million cars and heating oil for 47 million homes for 15 years, plus enough natural gas to maintain current production levels for almost 70 years.

The total recoverable resources, using today’s technology, are equivalent to the oil resources of Canada and Mexico combined and nearly three times their natural gas resources.

In addition to offshore potential, it’s estimated there is enough natural gas in the Mountain West alone to heat the 62 million homes currently using natural gas for more than 50 years, but efforts to increase natural gas domestic production in that region also are stymied.

http://www.houmatoday.com/article/20071031/NEWS0101/710310317/1026/NEWS01

Here's a clue. The answer is in the article.

Answer 1

Doc.' Read the August 2005, dept. of Energy Report, and the law that GWB, signed. It reports ( besides other things) that there has been known for over 70 years that in Colorado, southern Wyoming, and eastern Utah, there is at least 3 times more oil, locked in "Shale" rock formations, than in ALL OF THE MIDDLE EAST !!!
I worked in the refinery construction industries, several years ago. 1. THERE HAS NOT BEEN ANY NEW / MAJOR REFINERIES BUILT IN THE USA, IN OVER 20 YEARS. 2.YOU CAN THANK THE "tree huggers, a.k.a. liberals , aka environmentalists FOR "STOPPING" ALL OF THE CONSTRUCTION and Major improvements in our refining industry.3. These same people do not want any drilling in the known oil o.s. reserves / deposits areas, as "THERE MIGHT / MIGHT BE AN ACCIDENT", and they do not want to take the chance of damaging their waterfront beach areas.

Answer 2

The articles are seriously misleading.

Granted there are significant oil and gas deposits in the Gulf and Alberta.

What the article fails to say is not only are these often difficult to tap but it is expensive to do so in the first place.

currently it is not very profitable to do so.

People also make the mistake in thinking that once you tap into an oil deposit you can simply suck out all the product. It dose not work that way if you try to draw it out too quickly your going to get less. Their is a threshold of how fast you can and should draw it out.

tarsands and shale are even worse, in those cases you often have to "dig" out the oil and refine it out of the tar.

It is not as simple as you think it is.

Answer 3

"for 15 years" , that's the problem. The faster the remaining oil is removed and processed, the faster we run out. We are passed peak oil, and the total amount of oil in the world is finite. We can't make any more.
However, the real problem today is refinery capacity. Oil companies are making record profits and are using the profits for large paychecks to the officers of the corporations. Twenty million dollar pay packages when they could have built more refinery capacity.
I believe the oil companies should be slapped with a windfall profit tax, which they can only get out from under paying by putting the money into renewable energy sources. Lee Raymond and the good old boys have had their day and raked off enough profits.

Answer 4

Purchasing our oil form the ME gives us leverage in controlling the region that we wouldn't have otherwise.

Plus, though they complain about oil prices, the treehuggers would tie themselves to the drilling equipment if we ever tried to develop our own resources.

EDIT: "...over the past 25 years, oil companies directly paid or remitted more than $2.2 trillion in taxes, after adjusting for inflation, to federal and state governments—including excise taxes, royalty payments and state and federal corporate income taxes. That amounts to more than three times what they earned in profits during the same period, according to the latest numbers from the Bureau of Economic Analysis and U.S. Department of Energy.

These figures do not include local property taxes, state sales and severance taxes and on-shore royalty payments.

....the 1980s windfall profits tax depressed the domestic production and extraction industry and furthered our dependence on foreign sources of oil."

http://www.taxfoundation.org/news/show/1168.html