re: #156 watching you tiny alien kittens are

This gets to one of my soapboxes - Americans and “oil”.

The Macondo project was important because it was a major find that would have slowed down the net loss of petroleum production in the GoM. It turns out that the deep-water GoM plays deplete quite quickly and new wells (and thus platforms) have to turn around more quickly than one might have thought even 10 years ago.

Thus not only was/is it an environmental disaster, the blowout also effectively reduced US GoM production.

While the sustained high prices for petroleum has allowed for the high cost production in North Dakota to make up for the loss of GoM so far, the production from the Bakken is expected to peak in a couple of years as depletion overtakes new exploration.

Thus we will be right back to where we were in 2006, after the 2005 hurricanes sidelined so much US production, by the end of this decade.

But don’t tell that to the wingnuts, who believe that it’s only those damn libruls who are keeping America from having all the “oil” it deserves.