One Year Later: Where's the Energy?

Energy independence is a worthwhile pursuit. However, there are two problems that aren't being addressed by AS: (1) Currently, the price per barrel is lower than the cost of production. Many wells are being shut-in until the prices increase and many drilling projects are being cancelled. (2) Oil is a world-wide commodity that is sold to the highest bidder. There are no guarantees that our oil will remain in the US. We currently ship diesel fuel overseas.

Dixie's dead on with the comments above (although I struggle seeing us produce enough oil to be a consistent exporter). I'm assuming the diesel exports you're speaking of are primarily due to the "splash-n-dash" subsidy our govt pays to "bio-diesel" exports, which most often amount to diesel coming from the Bahamas, brought to NOLA or Houston and "splashed" with biodiesel to meet the standards of the subsidy, as it's then considered a product "manufactured" here and shipped to Europe (bottom line, about $1B/yr to subsidize European diesel for them....).
But just to add additional points, business in general HATES being in a position of guessing what govt's going to do next. When fear about what govt might do (windfall profits, cap & tax, EPA driven mandates/regs, inflationary monetary policy, subsidy elmination, threats of nationalization (Waters, Hinchey & Emmanual blatantly said it should be a consideration at last year's "big oil" hearings!), Waxman-Markey draft including GW lawsuit provisions against companies/US govt, etc, etc, business freezes. It's beyond analysis paralysis, it's pure risk aversion when the entire fossil fuel industry is at the end of every attack...they're rightly not investing heavily right now in new production. It's no different in the credit markets.
On the global market aspect, while it's true that the oil we import from the Middle East/Venz is the equivalent of pawning your wedding ring to pay off your drug dealer, a bigger threat is in the fact that Russia/China, both of which are much more capable foes, are running around the globe nailing down as much oil/gas production as they can in Africa, the arctic circle, Venz, even off the coast of Cuba (ie, Florida). Sitting on our resources and allowing foreign countries like China/Russia to produce more is FAR more dangerous to the global environment than the US, whose technology/environmental policies/etc make us the cleanest producers in the world, producing our resources. Even the hypocrisy in importing so much via vessel (how many massive oil spills have you heard about from pipelines vs vessels?) into our ports, along with the environmental/security risks associated with them, versus transporting the oil domestically in our own pipelines is so insane it would be comical, if it weren't this Admin's/Dems standard position.

My understanding is that after George W. Bush asked Congress a year ago to lift the ban on drilling offshore and in Utah that Congress did, in fact, lift that ban in September of last year.
Gasoline prices immediately fell from over $4.00 a gallon to $1.49 a gallon. Other oil based fuels also fell dramatically.
In January, shortly after he was sworn in, new President Barak Obama by executive order rescinded Congress lifting of the drilling ban. With the stroke of a pen Obama stopped the drilling that Congress had authorized cold and drove the price of fuel for Americans up dramatically.
President Obama and the Democrats want us dependent! Who these guys working for anyway?

Drill Here
Drill Now
Pay Less($1.00 per gallon on regular)

PUMP AMERICAN OIL!

AMERICAN OIL!
AMERICAN JOBS!
AMERICAN ENERGY!
AMERICAN INDEPENDENCE!
PUMP DOWN THE PRICE, PUMP AMERICAN OIL, PUMP UP THE AMERICAN ECONOMY!

Mr. Harding,
I agree with the drilling sentiment...but the less than $1/gal is a pretty significant stretch. Fed/state excise taxes alone exceed $.50/gal on a national average. This of course doesn't include the severance taxes on oil/gas production most states have (about 8% of sales price of oil/gas, this is partly how Alaska natives get rebates every year from oil/gas industry), lease costs as most prime US production areas are federally controlled and of course potential impact of cap & tax should it, God forbid, be passed. With just these taxes alone, not counting drilling, transportation, refining, storage, etc costs..crude oil would have to be less than $15/bbl to meet your less than $1/gal expectation. Of course crude prices that low, would not only kill any new US drilling, but much would shut in even more domestic production. See 1998, when oil fell to about $10/bbl as an example of what happens.

Americans want diversity in energy and more jobs
Nuclear
Biofuels
Hydrogen
Hydroelectric
Solar
Wind
etc.
We need one of everything!

i guess i was over exagerrating with the $1/gal. statement.Thanks for correcting me about that.

No biggie...gasoline prices are just another example of how much of the price of everything we spend money on is made up in taxes...that we pay for with after-tax dollars of our own. For govt, it has a nice little marketing effect though, as everyone screams that it's the oil companies & greedy big business, while the govt ratchets up prices for them through the insanity called the tax code...exempt this, tax that, subsidize those, penalize these, bake on high at 400 degrees for 30 minutes and you've got yourself a nice gumbo that NOBODY can define the ingredients...

Doesn't anyone at American Solutions know that the oil drilling question is tied to the banking problem that we now have in the country? Every barrel of oil coming out of the ground in the middle east costs approx. $5.00 per barrel.
However, Mr. Henry Kissinger after the first oil crisis in 1973 cut a deal with all of the OPEC countries in that they all would buy a portion of our national debt (Fed Bonds) through the world bank,then through the international monetary fund, then through the brokers in London and New York, and finally through the Private Federal Reserve Bank, This hiked the price per barrel up to at least 25 bucks a barrel at minimum; and after that it's all a speculation game.

With this kind of activity always in play we will never get a drill now agreement in the good old USA. This specialized deal has to be canceled and then drill now could happen with each barrel of oil costing only $3.00/barrel to get out of the ground here in the continental USA with no middlemen like there is with the orchestrated Kissinger/OPEC deal.

Get real American Solutions, be on point about how to get drill now going. The deal already in place has to be done away with and people made aware of it in order to do so. Newt, to date is avoiding exposing the Kissinger/OPEC deal and it makes him look bad because he's got to know about it. Newt has to change his approach to do any real good.
Anyone wanting further information on this matter can buy the Lindsay Williams book called, "The non-energy Crisis," or you can view the Youtube or Google video version on line. I believe it's in 8 parts.

I know I continually harangue on the issue of banking and money but the opportunity to mention it briefly here is something I can't pass up. With the money issued from the Federal Reserve in the convoluted way that it is through up to 5 banking and banking related entities as mentioned above, there is no way to address drill now because of the polluted system of banking and money that we already have in this country. The Federal Reserve needs to be audited at the very least because it is a private bank for the benefit of those who the Fed wants to favor and its policies are not for the benefit of all of us. Just look at this rotten deal in place in the production of OPEC oil to float money into existence with up to 5 "middlemen" inflating the cost of gasoline and everything else derived from the oil sector of the economy.

We could easily afford the oil at 3.00 dollars per barrel here in the United States, even with the additional cost of refining it as a heavy crude, and we would really be able to afford it if United States Notes were put into circulation straight out of the United States Treasury to pay for the oil, instead of borrowing the money from the Private Federal Reserve Bank at interest to pay for the oil. We should demand the President and Congress take back the "Money Power" from the Private Federal Reserve Bank and start using United States Notes to replace Federal Reserve Notes. This can be done easily with the President invoking Executive Order #11110 from the Kennedy Presidency or the National Bank Act of 1863 from the Lincoln Presidency where the "fractional banking" practices of today originated from. There may even be United States Notes stacked on pallets at Ft.Knox which were discovered there with the Gold Commission's search for the country's gold under President Reagan.

In Auditing the Fed I would urge American Solutions to strongly support the two bills before congress HR1207 and S604. It has passed the House with 250 votes. The Senate has stopped it on a flaky,crummy,procedural move and anyone wanting to sign the petition to support the Senate bill can click on the link below to sign the petition:

http://www.wnd.com/…tition_fed

Something that may be interesting to some of you is the interest of Celebrity, Chuck Norris who is now aware of the problems with the Federal Reserve Bank and you might click on the link below to view his interchange with the well known Fox news channel Judge Andrew Napolitano:

Chuck Norris takes on the whole Federal Reserve Bank. http://bit.ly/gaEem

Doesn't anyone at American Solutions know that the oil drilling question is tied to the banking problem that we now have in the country? Every barrel of oil coming out of the ground in the middle east costs approx. $5.00 per barrel.
However, Mr. Henry Kissinger after the first oil crisis in 1973 cut a deal with all of the OPEC countries in that they all would buy a portion of our national debt (Fed Bonds) through the world bank,then through the international monetary fund, then through the brokers in London and New York, and finally through the Private Federal Reserve Bank, This hiked the price per barrel up to at least 25 bucks a barrel at minimum; and after that it's all a speculation game.

With this kind of activity always in play we will never get a drill now agreement in the good old USA. This specialized deal has to be canceled and then drill now could happen with each barrel of oil costing only $3.00/barrel to get out of the ground here in the continental USA with no middlemen like there is with the orchestrated Kissinger/OPEC deal.

Get real American Solutions, be on point about how to get drill now going. The deal already in place has to be done away with and people made aware of it in order to do so. Newt, to date is avoiding exposing the Kissinger/OPEC deal and it makes him look bad because he's got to know about it. Newt has to change his approach to do any real good.
Anyone wanting further information on this matter can buy the Lindsay Williams book called, "The non-energy Crisis," or you can view the Youtube or Google video version on line. I believe it's in 8 parts.

I know I continually harangue on the issue of banking and money but the opportunity to mention it briefly here is something I can't pass up. With the money issued from the Federal Reserve in the convoluted way that it is through up to 5 banking and banking related entities as mentioned above, there is no way to address drill now because of the polluted system of banking and money that we already have in this country. The Federal Reserve needs to be audited at the very least because it is a private bank for the benefit of those who the Fed wants to favor and its policies are not for the benefit of all of us. Just look at this rotten deal in place in the production of OPEC oil to float money into existence with up to 5 "middlemen" inflating the cost of gasoline and everything else derived from the oil sector of the economy.

We could easily afford the oil at 3.00 dollars per barrel here in the United States, even with the additional cost of refining it as a heavy crude, and we would really be able to afford it if United States Notes were put into circulation straight out of the United States Treasury to pay for the oil, instead of borrowing the money from the Private Federal Reserve Bank at interest to pay for the oil. We should demand the President and Congress take back the "Money Power" from the Private Federal Reserve Bank and start using United States Notes to replace Federal Reserve Notes. This can be done easily with the President invoking Executive Order #11110 from the Kennedy Presidency or the National Bank Act of 1863 from the Lincoln Presidency where the "fractional banking" practices of today originated from. There may even be United States Notes stacked on pallets at Ft.Knox which were discovered there with the Gold Commission's search for the country's gold under President Reagan.

In Auditing the Fed I would urge American Solutions to strongly support the two bills before congress HR1207 and S604. It has passed the House with 250 votes. The Senate has stopped it on a flaky,crummy,procedural move and anyone wanting to sign the petition to support the Senate bill can click on the link below to sign the petition:

http://www.wnd.com/…tition_fed

Something that may be interesting to some of you is the interest of Celebrity, Chuck Norris who is now aware of the problems with the Federal Reserve Bank and you might click on the link below to view his interchange with the well known Fox news channel Judge Andrew Napolitano:

Chuck Norris takes on the whole Federal Reserve Bank. http://bit.ly/gaEem

Dan,
Can't speak to the OPEC deal you're talking about above, in terms of how it relates to pricing. As someone who's traded a global commodities before, my experience is that barring excessive speculation due to currency risk, war, or something of that nature, all commodities trade relative to the "marginal producer's" cost. In other words, whoever holds the competitive advantage in terms of cost (in this case the Middle East), gets the benefit of pricing their product relative to whoever is the last supplier (ie, highest cost supplier) required to meet the specific demand level. To further the point, as demand levels shift up or down, the "marginal supplier" can change as well. As demand falls, some suppliers may have to shut down, while when demand is high, even the highest cost supplier is priced into the market.
The problem with US oil production, is that we've tackled all the cheap & easy production. There isn't any $3/bbl oil to produce in the US. At a minimum, our cost of production for the new oil to produce (ie, off shore, oil shale, ANWR, tar sands, Bakken, etc) is in excess of $45/bbl.
Now don't get me wrong, I'm all for US drilling. I've just struggled with the logic that, consequently oil companies struggle with as well, in the US being a marginal producer where capital invested is most at risk as you're easily shut out of the market during periods of dips in demand. At a minimum, however, we've got to send a signal to the global market that we're not taking out production off the table and allowing them to control price at their whims either...tough hand to play and we don't have much leverage. Off shore, Bakken & ANWR offer the easiest proven reserves to exploit to keep OPEC/et al at least a little more honest, just understand that most likely it sets a higher floor price as well.

Increased US drilling is great, but the United States has to build new oil refinery first. As I understand in 2000-2005 when I talked with a rancher who had wells on his land in Texas, why the rigs were not pumping more than they were. He said that he was only allowed to produce 300 gallons a month because the refineries storage resources were full, they had no where to store new crude or refine any excess. I understand that we have lost 1/3 or more of our refineries since the 60's and have not built any new refineries since then. Just another part of the problem.