Dems’ Ostrich Approach On Oil - [ A look at Obama’s “Oil SENSE Act” ]
…Despite his conditional support for limited offshore drilling, Obama is the sole sponsor of legislation that would block geological research to locate offshore oil.
Federal officials employ estimates based primarily on two-dimensional maps that oil-industry surveyors produced in the 1970s and furnished to the Interior Department. Since 1981, Congressional appropriations amendments effectively have barred Interior from financing or permitting survey expeditions.
In 2005, Congress mandated new, quintennial inventories, then gave Interior six months and $0 to assess how much oil and natural gas undergird the 1.76 billion-acre Outer Continental Shelf - a laughably impossible task.
“They couldn’t even board a research vessel,” explains a congressional staffer who studies these issues. Interior’s “paper inventory,” the aide adds, “examined Canadian and West African coastal data, imagined where those sediments pooled before the Continental Drift, then extrapolated to guesstimate what’s off our Atlantic coast today.”
The resulting document states: “Resource estimates are highly dependent on the current knowledge base, which has not been updated in 20 to 40 years for areas under congressional moratorium.” Translation: “We have no idea what’s really out there.”
Obama’s “Oil SENSE Act” would repeal the 2005 Energy Policy Act’s authorization of these inventories. S.115 would leave decision makers with Carter administration maps drawn with pre-PC technology. This is like engineering a Space Shuttle mission with slide rules.
Obama’s bill would prohibit expanded use of 3-D seismic techniques that locate and measure underwater oil deposits. In October 1999, President Bill Clinton’s Energy Department evaluated the environmental quality of the 1970s’ 2-D equipment against last decade’s 3-D technology.
With the latter, Energy concluded: “Overall impacts of exploration and production are reduced because fewer wells are required to develop the same amount of reserves.” In 1970, 17 percent of offshore wells struck oil….