April 13, 2008
Still sucking the foreign-oil teat
Click cartoon for larger, easier-to-read version.
It seems that little has changed in the nearly two years since I wrote this, other than gas prices climbing higher as demand outstrips supply -- and Congress refuses to do anything.
Anything useful, that is.
As war in the Middle East helps drive petroleum prices to record highs, it's good to remember that those politicians who pay lip service to the U.S. achieving "energy independence" are resisting efforts to wean us off the foreign-oil teat.
France relies on nuclear power to generate the vast majority of its power; we haven't broken ground on a reactor for decades. What about the "cleaner" technologies? You mean like wind-generated power? Well, there was a proposal to build a wind farm off the New England Coast, but the founding member of the Chappaquiddick Swim Club joined forces with Walter Mitty Flipper John Kerry to kill the unsightly energy alternative.
And let's not forget that, although the U.S. is sitting on oil reserves big enough to completely replace our foreign oil-producing kleptocrats, mullahs and strongmen, Congress won't allow us to tap it.
ANWR, the strip of Alaska that, well, that Alaskans want to open to exploration remains off limits, thanks to the feckless nincompoops in the Senate. The House has voted several times to allow drilling, but their counterparts in the "World's Greatest Debating Society" (Ack!) can't bear the thought of actually doing something that will help Americans -- at least, not when the hated GOP and Chimpy McBushitler Halliburton could take credit for it.
There are also huge energy reserves off our coasts, but again they remain verboten to us, because oil platforms offend our aesthetic sensibilities.
But others aren't so sensitive.
That bastion of free education, universal health care, and economic justice, i.e., Cuba, isn't sitting back on its well-worn heels; they're doing what we ought to do, if we had cojones: drilling for oil off their coast -- and ours.
While American politicians try to extend the ban on drilling to more than 200 miles from the Florida coastline, Supreme Maximum Socialist Commandante Castro has been pumping sweet crude and natural gas from a mere 60 miles from the shores of the Spring-Break mecca.
According to the Washington Times:
Republicans in Congress have tried repeatedly in the past decade to open up the outer continental shelf to exploration, and Florida's waters hold some of the most promising prospects for major energy finds. Their efforts have been frustrated by opposition from Florida, California and environmental-minded legislators from both parties.
Florida's powerful tourism and booming real estate industries fear that oil spills could cost them business. Lawmakers from the state are so adamantly opposed to drilling that they have bid to extend the national ban on drilling activity from 100 miles to as far as 250 miles offshore, encompassing the island of Cuba.
Cuba is exploring in its half of the 90-mile-wide Straits of Florida within the internationally recognized boundary as well as in deep-water areas of the Gulf of Mexico. The impoverished communist nation is eager to receive any economic boost that would come from a major oil find.
"They think there's a lot of oil out there. We'll see," said Fadi Kabboul, a Venezuelan energy minister. He noted that the oil fields Cuba is plumbing do not respect national borders. Any oil Cuba finds and extracts could siphon off fuel that otherwise would be available to drillers off the Florida coast and oil-thirsty Americans.
Canadian companies Sherritt International Co. and Pebercan Inc. already are pumping more than 19,000 barrels of crude each day from the Santa Cruz, Puerto Escondido, Canasi and other offshore fields in the straits about 90 miles from Key West, and Spain's Repsol oil company has announced the discovery of "quality oil" in deep-water areas of the same region, the National Ocean Industries Association said.
Cuba's state oil company, Cubapetroleo, also has inked a deal with China's Sinopec to explore for oil, and it is using Chinese-made drilling equipment to conduct the exploration.
That compounds the frustration for U.S. oil companies and other businesses that have lobbied to open up the estimated 45 billion barrels in oil reserves and 232 trillion cubic feet of gas reserves in banned drilling areas of the Gulf -- enough to fuel millions of cars and heat millions of homes for decades.
U.S. companies, which have the best deep-water equipment, cannot participate in the Cuban drilling because of the 45-year economic embargo against Fidel Castro's communist regime.
If oil is found in commercially viable quantities, Cuba could be transformed from an oil importer into an exporter, ending chronic energy shortages on the island and generating government revenue.
That prospect and the involvement of China and Venezuela in exploration activities have attracted the attention of the CIA and other national security agencies, even if congressional opposition to offshore drilling has not budged.
Sterling Burnett, a fellow at the National Center for Policy Analysis, a conservative think tank, said Cuba's activities show that the quarter-century ban on offshore drilling is putting the U.S. at a strategic disadvantage at a time of increasingly scarce energy resources and record high oil and gas prices that are hampering economic growth and stoking inflation.
"Canada and even economically backward Cuba are moving forward with plans to drill in offshore areas that abut U.S. coastal waters," he said. "Since pools of oil do not respect international boundaries, it is almost certainly true that Canada and Cuba will be accessing oil that could otherwise be developed by and for the benefit of Americans."
More than half of the nation's untapped offshore oil and gas reserves lie within the Gulf, much of it within Florida's protected waters. In the latest attempt to exploit the reserves, the House last month passed a bill that would allow coastal states to decide whether to open the first 100 miles of their waters for exploration.
The bill allows states such as Florida and California to vote for a permanent moratorium on drilling but also includes a powerful enticement to allow exploration: half of the hundreds of billions of dollars in royalties and fees from drilling that otherwise would go to the federal government.
Until Congress actually votes to build nuclear power plants, ignore the bleating of namby-pamby NIMBYs, put windmills off Hyannisport, and drill for the energy reserves that we already own, the pissing and moaning about the high cost of gas is nothing more than craven political posturing -- and deserving of nothing more than a shrug and a sigh as we pay for the next tank of gas.
Posted by Mike Lief at April 13, 2008 09:59 PM
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