Jophiel wrote:
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by choosing which 5% of the market not to buy from, we can ***** them more.
I was responding to the argument that the increase to global supply from ANWR would just be offset by some other oil producers reducing the supply, therefore keeping the price the same. If that happens, someone (or a set of someone's) has to reduce that supply, and therefore make less money selling oil in the short run. You can't argue both sides Joph. Either it will increase total supply and the prices will go down as a result, or other nations will reduce their production output, keeping the global price the same, but shifting where that money is going.
Either way, we as a nation are better off producing that oil then not doing so.
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Because doing so would have moderated and perhaps prevented all of those things
Are you aware of the percentage of the total US oil consumption has historically been provided from the Prudhoe Bay area? Not much more then what ANWR would give us. Yet we spent the funds for a big ole pipeline for it, because it was worth doing. Um... Today, the relative opportunity cost of utilizing ANWR is insignificant in comparison. We've already got the pipeline. ANWR is right next to the region we're already drilling in. Why not expand operations into ANWR, tie it into the existing oil infrastructure and shore up our domestic production?
When Prodhoe bay was first assessed, they calculated 10 Billion barrels of oil. They eventually re-assessed it at 25 Billion. Today, with a similar amount of analysis, we're told that ANWR has 4-12 Billion barrels of oil. If we're off by a similar ratio (not unlikely since we're *always* low on those estimates), we could be looking at an oil field that's upwards of 70% of the total size of Prudhoe. That was sufficient for us to spend significant effort to get. Why not ANWR?
In 1998, supply from Prudhoe "peaked" at 1.5 million barrels a day. Today, we're pulling out less then 300 thousand barrels a day (so about 20% of what we used to). That area is drying up. Has been for the last decade. Current estimates put the remaining amount we could obtain with current technology at about 2 Billion barrels. What this means is that while ANWR is often said to be "small", it's actually likely to be only slightly smaller then Prudhoe, which has proved sufficient oil to be worthwhile for 30 years. ANWR has at a minimum more then twice as much oil available then what's left in Prudhoe. Why wouldn't we shift there?
You say that the critical points are about whether the amounts of oil in ANWR are "significant" or "meaningful", but you don't set any definition for those terms. But if we compare ANWR to Prudhoe, I can't see how we can call one significant and meaningful enough to justify the expense of the Alaska pipeline, but not call the other significant and meaningful enough to simply explore and drill and dump into a nearby endpoint of that same pipeline. It's practically pennies on the dollar in comparison. If the amount of oil in ANWR is even in the same magnitude as Prudhoe (which is absolutely is even by the lowest estimates), then I can't see how it's not worth utilizing in relation to Prudhoe, given the much much cheaper relative cost to get up and running.
Look. I'm not going to go point for point here. We can debate the total effect of said oil all day long, and it'll be two guys with no professional knowledge about the industry arguing this point. Whatever. But if we just asses ANWR in relation to Prudhoe Bay, it seems pretty clear that we should be drilling there. There's no reason to have decided to drill in Prudhoe back then but *not* do so in ANWR today.
I'll also point out (but admit that this is just correlation on my part), that it's interesting to note that shortly after 1977 when we first started getting oil from Prudhoe is when the series of oil crises and artificial shortages generated by OPEC stopped. We'd been crippled with high oil costs for most of the 70s, but as the Alaska pipeline came online and US sources appeared on the market, suddenly everything stabilized. Not just for us, but for the world. Now that those sources are dwindling and we're not pumping out anywhere near what we were, prices have begun coming back up (from 1998 to today). You can almost chart the global price of oil directly against the barrels/day pumped through the Alaska pipeline as an inverse function.
Sure. We can speculate as to why this occurred. We can dismiss it as coincidence. But there are just so many different reasons one can use to argue for drilling in ANWR (and off the coasts as well), and very few not to. Even if the impact on global fuel costs is slight, that's better then nothing. Which is what we're being offered as an alternative...
