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Gustav Drives Home Palin’s Point About ANWR |
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Written On: Friday, September 05, 2008 |
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Written By: Don C. Brunell |
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Three years ago Hurricane Katrina unmasked America’s oil and gas vulnerability. On Labor Day, Hurricane Gustav underscored that point when a quarter of the U.S. domestic crude supply was shut down.
A lot is at stake in the Gulf of Mexico, which is home to 4,000 drilling platforms and 33,000 miles of pipelines. That network sends 1.3 million barrels of crude a day to the Gulf Coast’s 56 refineries. The U.S. Energy Information Administration figures it is 25 percent of the oil produced in the United States and 10 percent of the natural gas, an energy source oil magnate T. Boone Pickens wants to combine with wind energy to power America’s energy independence.
Much of the presidential election debate this year is over additional offshore leases in the Gulf of Mexico, a region Cuba is frantically leasing to China. In fact, Cuba is going ahead full steam leasing its fields in the Florida Straits and Chinese oil drilling rigs are already appearing within 50 miles of Key West.
The Chinese are directional drilling in the Straits, allowing them to tap into U.S. oil reserves that are estimated to reach 9.3 billion barrels. That is the roughly minimum amount of crude thought to be beneath the Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Reserve which experts say contains 10 billion to 17 billion barrels of recoverable oil along with huge reserves of natural gas.
Until Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin showed up on the Republican ticket with John McCain and Gustav ripped through the Gulf, ANWR was dead. In fact, there was so much opposition from environmental groups like the Sierra Club, headquartered in House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s San Francisco, President Bush withdrew ANWR to save additional leasing in the Gulf.
Palin is an avid supporter of environmentally sound oil production in a tiny part of ANWR’s 19 million acres. When the refuge was created in 1980, Congress specifically left the door open to explore for oil on the coastal plain because of its vast potential and proximity to the Prudhoe Bay production complex and Aleyaska pipeline.
But until gas prices soared past $4 a gallon, the American public had little appetite for any new domestic oil exploration, but the latest polling shows a dramatic change in public attitudes toward offshore drilling and for oil exploration in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.
In June, Rasmussen, Zogby and Gallup polls showed that public opinion reversed itself from January. By a 60-40, margin people support offshore drilling, and Gallup specifically asked about ANWR and 57 percent of the people supported drilling there. The opposition dropped to 41 percent.
It is not as if oil production isn’t happening in U.S. wildlife refuges. Even the Audubon Society has earned more than $25 million in royalties by allowing oil and natural gas production in Louisiana’s Rainey Wildlife Refuge and Michigan’s Baker Sanctuary.
A U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service survey commissioned by Congressman Ed Markey, D-Massachusetts, in 2001 reported 77 of 567 wildlife refuges in 22 states had oil and gas activities on their land in 2000. Ironically, the Rainey refuge is the winter habitat for snow geese migrating from ANWR while the Baker Sanctuary, a 900-acre wetland, provides hundreds of Sandhill Cranes with a critical nesting area.
So what’s happened to the caribou in the Prudhoe Bay area adjacent to ANWR? Over the last three decades, the caribou population has skyrocketed from 3,000 to more than 27,000.
Alaska North Slope technology now allows directional drilling up to eight miles from production pads. For example, Alpine, the latest production facility on the slope, is a 40,000 acre roadless oil field tapped by a single isolated 97-acre production pad accessible only by helicopter in the summer and ice roads in the winter.
That same technology can be applied to ANWR where there is enough recoverable oil to replace 58 years of Iraqi oil output. For Gov. Palin, whose oldest son is about to be deployed to Iraq with an Army Striker Brigade, that point hits home.
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