Oil and Our Economy

Oil, one of the three major causes of war on this planet, the other two being land and religion.

The US entrance into WWII was about oil. We had some, the Japanese didn't, so along came Pearl Harbor. Did they want our oil? No. They wanted to destroy our fleet so they could seize oil in the Pacific Rim - and they almost did it.

Have we gone to war over oil? Probably. We didn't really free Kuwait because we though Saddam was wrong did we? I think that was only part of the story. The other part was protecting the Saudi wells and getting the Kuwaiti wells back. The Iraq war was about deposing Saddam, wasn't it? Of course getting the Iraqi wells back into production for Western Consumption had nothing to do with it.

Now, I don't necessarily feel that going to war over oil is unjust. SOS, different day. We've sent our troops into many third world countries over the last 100 years to protect American business interests. Why not oil! Exxon and Mobil wouldn't mind. BP may even have the UK join us.

However, there is an alternative to war to acquire oil, and not paying $3.00 a gallon at the pump to do so. It's called drilling. That would require a war against the "tree-huggers", but that would be bloodless!  We need to continue drilling in the Gulf. We need to drill in the Atlantic and the Pacific. But, before we do anymore deep water drilling we must develop and enforce safety programs to prevent accidents/incidents like the Gulf oil spill from ever happening again.

The Yates Oil Field in SW Texas is estimated to still have 1 billion barrels of oil. The Kuparek Oil Field in Alaska is estimated to have 2 billion barrels. The East Texas Oil Field is estimated to have almost 2 billion barrels. The Spraberry-Dean Oil Fields in west central Texas are estimated to have 9 billion barrels. The Wilmington Oil Field in LA County is estimated to have 300 million barrels. The South Belridge Oil Field in central California is estimated to have 520 million barrels. The Coalinga Oil Field in west central California is estimated to have 58 million barrels. The Elk Hills Oil Field near Bakersfield, CA is estimated to have 107 million barrels of oil and 700 billion cubic feet of natural gas. The Kern River Oil Field, also near Bakersfield, is estimated to have 476 million barrels.The Midway-Sunset Oil Field, again near Bakersfield, is estimated to have 532 million barrels. That's about 14 billion barrels of crude oil. However, the United States uses almost 7 billion barrels of oil a year. And every one of these fields has been in production for sometime, some for over 100 years. Technically they're close to played out.

In 2009, the US Geological Survey estimated that there were 90 billion barrels of recoverable oil north of the Arctic Circle. As a crude guess, 30 billion of those are in US territory. Why aren't we trying for those fields? The Bakken Oil Formation in the Wyoming/Montana area has an additional 4.3 billion barrels. (The e-mail floating around for the last few years is a hoax). Those barrels should be easy to get to, relatively speaking.

The USGS also estimates that our outer continental shelf contains an estimated additional 85.9 billion barrels of oil and 419.9 trillion cubic feet of natural gas. Unfortunately, slightly over 10 billion barrels are off the California coast and the "tree huggers" won't let us drill there. 41 billion of these barrels are located in the Gulf of Mexico and 23.6 billion barrels are off the north coast of Alaska. 7.2 billion barrels of oil and 27.5 trillion cubic feet of natural gas.

Now if we were to drill all of that, that's about 129 billion barrels of oil. Almost a 20 year supply, without using foreign oil. In that 18 years do you think we could find alternative sources of energy.

We have, in this country, 141 oil refineries capable of refining about 16,949,000 barrels a day, when operating at full capacity.

Just think, drilling new wells, manufacturing new pipelines, shipping oil by sea, full capacity at the refineries, just what does it mean?
A. JOBS
B. 20 YEARS WITHOUT FOREIGN OIL.
C. MONEY THAT WAS GOING OVERSEAS STAYING HERE.
D. JOBS IN RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT OF ALTERNATIVE ENERGY SOURCES.

One little flaw in the above information is that it's all Federal government info and most of it is no newer than 2006. However, I say let's go for it!

God Bless The United States.

Gunner Sends