Yeah. Because it's a drilling moratorium that's stopping the drilling!
Release the moratorium and the oil will flow tomorrow, amirite?? Originally Posted by Karnejj
http://www.americanprogress.org/issu..._drilling.html .....the Energy Information Administration... predicted that there would be no significant effect on oil production or price until nearly 20 years after leasing begins. We can’t drill our way out of the energy crisis.
report “...contradicting the argument that more drilling means lower gasoline prices. There is simply no correlation between the two.” We don’t have enough oil to meet our demand.
The U.S. oil supply-demand balance is insurmountable. We have less than 2 percent of the world’s known reserves, yet use 25 percent of its oil. Even if we drilled off of every beach, and inside every national park, refuge, and forest, we could not produce enough oil to offset our growing demand. Oil companies have not utilized the leases they have now.
Why open up new areas to drilling when oil companies hold over 4,000 undeveloped leases in the western Gulf of Mexico? What’s more, the government already leases 44 million acres offshore, of which only 10.5 million—or one quarter—are producing oil or gas. ..... according to the EIA ... “because oil prices are determined on the international market…any impact on average wellhead prices is expected to be insignificant.”There isn’t enough drilling equipment.
Due to the high price of oil, existing drilling ships are “booked solid for the next five years,” and demand for deepwater rigs has driven up the price of such ships. Oil companies just don’t have the resources to explore oil fields in the OCS. We can’t refine the oil we would extract.
...refineries are already so stretched that last year, the United States had to import almost 150 million barrels of gasoline. The Wall Street Journal reported oil companies are not building new refineries because it would be bad for their bottom line. “Building a new refinery from scratch, Exxon believes, would be bad for long-term business.”