Just another doomsday proposition - shut up already

Drill Here. Wait 10 Years.

By Terrance Heath

Created 06/18/2008

 

First John McCain, then Newt Gingrich, and now president Bush [1] — in an apparent about-face that puts him in the position of opposing both his father and his brother — has taken to peddling offshore drilling as the quickest way to ease consumer pain at the gas pump. As Isaiah J. Poole [2] pointed out, Gingrich has even launched an online campaign, with a simple slogan: "Drill Here. Drill Now. Pay Less."

But the reality is more like, "Drill Here. Wait Ten Years."

Bill Scher [3] explained that (a) there's not all that much oil off our coastlines, and (b) it would shave only a couple of bucks and some change from the price of a barrel of oil, which neared $140 this week. And I'm here to tell you that if we do start drilling along our coastlines, you won't see relief soon enough to make a dent in the cost of filling up your tank this summer, next summer, or the summer after that, or the one after that.

But don't just take my word for it. The oil industry's own trade group says it will take seven to 10 years before we see a drop [4].

Opening America's coastal waters to oil drilling, as John McCain urged in an address Tuesday, is unlikely to provide Americans with more oil for at least seven to 10 years.

That's the estimate from the American Petroleum Institute, the oil industry trade group. Major environmental groups think the increased supply would be at least that distant before arrival, and say it mostly would benefit Big Oil.

"It would take a decade to bring new leases into production, and then they would only line the coffers of the oil industry," said Carl Pope, the Sierra Club's executive director. Major environmental groups think the increased supply would be at least that distant before arrival, and say it mostly would benefit Big Oil.

"It would take a decade to bring new leases into production, and then they would only line the coffers of the oil industry," said Carl Pope, the Sierra Club's executive director.

And that's from the people who want to drill. Should they get their wish, there are still a few more "ifs" between the oil rig and the gas pump.

Even if states let drilling proceed, it would take years before new oil would flow.

First, drillers would need to clear regulatory hurdles and overcome environmental concerns.

Even if permission were granted, oil companies would have to find it worthwhile economically to drill; that's probably not a problem if prices stay high, but could be questionable if they fall again, as they did in the 1980s and '90s.

If companies found significant amounts of oil, some question whether this country has enough refining capacity to handle the new supply. The nation has slightly fewer refineries than it did in the mid-1980s

.

So, if all those conditions are met, it's likely we wouldn't see the first barrel of oil until sometime around the 2016 presidential election, at the earliest. And any oil we find will probably be used up before whoever's elected president in 2016 completes his or her first term in office.

The world consumes about 86 million barrels a day. The U.S. share of that is about 20.6 million barrels, 60 percent of them from foreign sources.

One thousand million barrels equals 1 billion, so if there are 19 billion barrels in the areas McCain would open to drilling, that's enough to provide about 920 days, or about 2.5 years, of current U.S. consumption.

Drill Here? Drill Now? Pay Less? In about 10 years. Maybe.

Then what?