In Alaska, The Drill Is Gone.

[Fieldmouse]

In Alaska, The Drill Is Gone
INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY
Posted 11/24/2008

Energy: Remember those 68 million acres House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said the oil companies had to use or lose? According to the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco, they can't drill there either.

When President Bush lifted the executive order banning oil and gas exploration in federally protected offshore areas, Speaker Pelosi called the action a giveaway of "more public resources to the very same oil companies that are sitting on 68 million acres of federal lands they've already leased."
We thought it was nonsense to accuse the oil companies of sitting on profitable oil resources waiting for sky-high oil prices to rise even higher. We still do. With gas prices having fallen back to earth, her vast oil-rig conspiracy theory seems to have fallen flat.
Proving it was so much hot air was Royal Dutch Shell's recent expenditure of $2.1 billion to acquire oil leases in the Chukchi Sea off Alaska and spending $84 million to buy leases in the Beaufort Sea. Clearly they weren't sitting on anything and wanted to drill and wanted to get these oil and gas reserves into the hungry American economy.
Last Thursday, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals blocked a major drilling effort in the Beaufort Sea, ruling that federal officials failed to properly address environmental concerns when they granted permission to Shell Oil to drill there. The decision followed a temporary order issued last year that halted Shell's drilling at Sivulliq, 16 miles off the coast of northern Alaska.
"There remains substantial questions as to whether Shell's plan may cause significant harm to the people and wildlife of the Beaufort Sea region," the current ruling said.
It was prompted by a pair of combined lawsuits filed by environmental and Native groups that alleged oil drilling in the Beaufort Sea would disturb migrating whales.
In a July interview with IBD in which we asked better questions than Katie Couric, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, before she was picked as John McCain's running mate, said: "There are even bigger sources of crude than ANWR . . . such as offshore areas like the Chukchi Sea and Beaufort Sea."
Palin in May challenged the listing of the polar bear as an endangered species; the listing was another move designed to block drilling in these areas. She argued that polar bears were and are well-managed and their population has dramatically increased over the last 30 years. Since 1960, when the Alaska oil hunt began, only two oil-related bear fatalities have been documented, according to the federal Mineral Management Service.
The problem, Palin said, was "we frequently find ourselves at the mercy of those who think that we must be protected from ourselves. Shell is up here wanting to drill offshore, but they've been fighting various environmental groups through the 9th Circuit Court and are running into very fierce push-back."
The Alaskan Outer Continental Shelf holds 26.6 billion barrels of recoverable crude oil and 132 trillion cubic feet of recoverable natural gas, according to recent Minerals Management Service estimates. Most of that is in the Beaufort and Chukchi seas.
In the March/April issue of Foreign Affairs, Scott Borgerson, an international affairs fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, noted: "The U.S. Geological Survey and the Norwegian company StatoilHydro estimate that the Arctic holds as much as one-quarter of the world's remaining undiscovered oil and gas deposits."
Oil companies have been criticized for not using their "obscene" profits to find more oil and then are attacked by the greenies when they want to. Everywhere oil exploration and development have occurred in Alaska, wildlife from polar bears to caribou has thrived.
Greedy oil executives aren't the ones who block developing existing leases. It's environmental activists and their black-robed friends.

[burniegoeasily]

Dont worry. Daddy Obama will have us on alternatives next week. Also will create a bazilliondy condrilliondy new green jobs by next Thur.. So we do not need to worry for a moment where our next energy source will come from.


Now lets look at the real world, shall we? We can't drill our own oil. Who has the oil right now? Who have the Republicans been accused of being bed fellows with? Obama will not let us use our own oil, sooooooooooo who does that make as his bed fellows? Because we have got to have gas for many many more years during this big green transition.


I think ill start brushing up on my Arabic.