3/2/2005
Elephant #2: ANWR is America's Answer to OPEC
I've seen a number of estimates of how much oil there is in Area 1002, W's pet name for the coastal region of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.
Now that I think about it, it's important to acknowledge the difference in the two names the Bush administration and environmentalists give this region. And by environmentalists I mean people opposed to drilling on the Alaskan coast, which this poll says is most Americans (by a margin of 53 percent to 35 percent).
Environmentalists (or as I prefer to call them, most Americans) hear the expression Wildlife Refuge, and they think of a place where animals live free from the demands of the manufacturing lifestyle. The Bush administration hears the expression Area 1002, and thinks that sounds like a place where WMD might be. Let's go invade it.
How much oil is there in ANWR? How much oil do we consume? To answer these questions let's take a look at a passage similar to ones I've seen on a number of sites that aspire to sound like Jonah Goldberg:
Reports put the amount of oil available under ANWR somewhere between 3 and 16 BILLION barrels. The common estimate is 1 MILLION barrels of oil per day could be extracted from the area. (By comparison, we get 650,000 barrels daily or 10% of our oil from Iraq.) By my math, this gives us somewhere between 8 and 44 years of oil.By my math, or at least what I absorbed from those hazy college days when I wasn't reading poetry to my bonzai plant, I have to conclude that this wannabee Golbergian has no idea what he's talking about.
According to the most recent US Geological Survey we get this graph:
At an average price of $40/gallon it would be economically feasible to extract a total of 7 Billion barrels of oil. The US consumes oil at a rate of 20 million barrels per day (20.0 in 2003, 20.4 in 2004) . That means the total potential supply would last:
7 billion barrels/20 million barrels per day = 350 days.And that's what could be extracted over the lifetime of drilling in ANWR. And that's assuming consumption stays at 2003 levels. And that's assuming that oil prices stay close to their all-time high.
To foreshadow a future column, it may be useful to put it in other terms. At the first year of peak production in the year 2020, we could get out about 1 million barrels per day. Currently, we consume by driving about 9 million barrels per day. In other words, the real question here is whether the the Dodge Dakotas, Land Rovers, and Humvees that some of us might drive are 9 times more important than the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge . And allegedly we choose these vehicles to put us more in touch with nature.
file under: anwr.
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