re: #27 Bagua

With the vast majority of the US coastal areas off limits to exploration and off limits to drilling, all we can do is guess at how much undiscovered Oil and Gas is there.

The whole “nearly a decade” till production is another canard. Some could be online in less than a year, with other discoveries following thereafter. The limiting factor is more the availability of drilling rigs and the construction of infrastructure. Regardless, opening the US to drilling would cause the price of oil to plunge and be online well ahead of alternatives which are still just yet to be made economically viable.

The price of oil can only drop as low as the total cost of extraction. With most of the cheaply acquired oil either depleted or well on its way, the remaining oil is going to be expensive to extract.

It would be cheaper in the long run to save as much oil as possible for uses other than direct energy, such as the synthetics that are used in the manufacturing of technology capable of supplying us with additional energy.