digimark wrote:Woodbutcher wrote:We have plenty of oil right in the good old USA. Drill for it and quit sending our dollars to people that hate us.
We use 25% of the world's daily oil usage, and we have 2% of the known reserves. It takes up to 10 years for new oil deposits to come online. We currently import at least 33% of our daily oil needs. A lot of the untapped oil in the US is in wilderness areas that would be spoiled by the effort. Absolutely we should drill for more oil in the US, but it's going to be a trickle against the flood we get from overseas. Our only real option is to conserve by reducing use and increasing our efficiency using oil, and by tapping alternatives like solar and natural gas. The country received some very good news last week -- it appears we have a lot more accessible natural gas than we thought we had, and every therm of gas we tap instead of oil pollutes the air less and doesn't send money to the people who hate us.
I agree it takes ten years for new oil to come on line. Had we done something about this in the 70's we would not be talking about this now. I sat in gas shortage lines then. Not the manufactured shortages they have now. Real ones with dry tanks and a 10 gallon limit if you found a station with fuel. There is plenty of oil in Anwhar (SP) and several off shore areas. Have you seen Anwhar? Not much wild life there. If we don't do something about securing our own reserves we will be eating those Caribu. I disagree with the amount of oil we have available in this country. I have heard we can provide about 1/3 rd the oil we use for over 30 years. There is also a break even point where the cost of retrieving oil from old wells etc. becomes profitable again. We had companies doing that when oil went so high last year. Canada has a process where they use hot water to extract oil from shale and sandy areas that with 30$ a barrel oil you could not make any money. Those days of 30$ oil are gone. So lets explore better ways of using what we have.
With that said, when was the last nuclear plant or oil refinery was built in this country. For God sakes the French get most of their electricity from nuclear with no problems. If they can do it anyone can. It's time to pull our heads out of our @sses and start securing our own country and to do that you need secure energy. Who will be the first President to do it. I know it won't be Obama, he is to busy picking eveyones pocket to pay attention to the big long term picture.
OK, I'm off my soapbox...........
by dakotamouse » Fri Oct 23, 2009 6:57 pm 
Danny