Today, President Bush decided he will solve our pain caused by higher fuel costs by taking an action that will do very little to actually reduce fuel costs and that reduction will be a decade or longer away. Today, President Bush eliminated the executive prohibition against the exploitation of our outer continental shelf. for oil and gas. He blames the democratic congress for the increased oil prices.
The problem is that according to the Energy Information Agency (full report):
The projections in the OCS access case indicate that access to the Pacific, Atlantic, and eastern Gulf regions would not have a significant impact on domestic crude oil and natural gas production or prices before 2030. Leasing would begin no sooner than 2012, and production would not be expected to start before 2017. . . . Similarly, lower 48 natural gas production is not projected to increase substantially by 2030 as a result of increased access to the OCS.
So it may be several presidents away before we would see this great benefit and in the meantime we would continue to pay $4+ a gallon for gasoline. This really doesn’t sound like much of a solution to me.
Then even when we begin to see production from these offshore oil rigs, will it really reduce our cost of oil? Again a look at the EIA indicates the answer would be no. In fat the EIA wrote:
In 2030, the OCS access case projects a decrease of $0.13 in the average wellhead price of natural gas (2005 dollars per thousand cubic feet), a decrease of 250 billion cubic feet in imports of liquefied natural gas, and an increase of 360 billion cubic feet in natural gas consumption relative to the reference case projections.
So if I get this right, in 22 years we can expect the cost of gasoline to decrease by 13 cents? That really doesn’t seem like a great deal to me. This also doesn’t at all discuss or address why many leases for both offshore and land based facilities are not in production. Also, opening up more areas for drilling does not prevent all of that oil being sold to other countries. In 2007 over 510 million barrels of U.S. oil was sold to other countries.
What we need are real solutions and not unproductive rhetoric. If President Bush was serious when he stated in 2006 that we are addicted to oil, then the solution is not to feed the habit.