are they really going to drill in Alaska?

jtr1962

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The House still has to approve it and there's no guarantee they will. This is bad, bad policy akin to selling the family jewels for a night on the town. We can't replace the ANWR once it's gone. We can find alternate sources of energy beside oil. In fact, sooner or later we'll have to.
 

Glow_Worm

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My goodness, I certainly hope so. We've been waiting over 10 years for this: the ANWR drilling site occupies less than 1/10 of 1% of its total acreage (2,000 acres out of 19,000,000), it was specifically set-aside at inception for oil-exploration, it'll potentially replace 30-yrs-worth of Arab-oil-imports, it'll be as environmentally-clean as currently possible, it'll make at least one small increment toward US energy-independence... The US has been stagnant in petroleum refinery & North-American petroleum explorations for over a decade, so this is a huge positive step.

One would think that only an anti-American advocate could decry it, as what more could anyone else want in terms of pros-cons???
 

paulr

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Replace 30 years of oil imports?! Where on earth did you get that figure? The figures I've seen are much lower. It will barely make a dent in imports. To get away from imports, we need to get away from oil, not drill a little bit more.

Note also that the supposed "2000 acre site" apparently mean 2000 contiguous acres. Rather it can mean 2000 separate holes/rigs of 1 acre each.
 

jtr1962

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Also, there is another reason that 2000 acre figure is misleading. All the equipment to drill won't just magically materialize at the site. You'll need roads to get it there. You'll need places for the workers to stay. Way more that 2000 acres will be destroyed, and it'll only meet a small amount of our energy needs. We don't have 30 years worth of Arab oil imports in the entire United States. In fact, there probably aren't 30 years of Arab oil imports left in the Arab oil countries themselves. As paulr said, if we want to get away from oil imports we need to get away from oil. So long as the US depends on oil it'll never be energy independent.

And as I mentioned in the EV thread, even if trillions of barrels of oil exist in hard to get at places then they may as well not exist at all. Once the net energy to extract the oil equals the energy you get from burning it, you've reached a zero sum game. It won't matter whether it makes economic sense or not at that point. Most of the world's remaining "proven reserves" fall into this category. Read about this scenario here.
 

Glow_Worm

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Regarding 2000 acres, wouldn't you agree that 2K out of 19M acre's is a small amount, however it might be distributed?

ANWR contains an estimated 10.3 billion barrels of oil, according to mean United States Geological Survey (USGS) estimates. These figures were derived based on this mean estimate and petroleum consumption for each state according to the Energy Information Agency (EIA).

We currently import about 750K barrels/day from Saudia Arabia. At 300 days/yr, that is 225,000,000 barrels/yr. Divide that by the >10 B barrel estimate & you'll see it's much greater than 30 years.
 

Beamhead

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Glow_Worm...Game...set... match!
Facts are a potent weapon.
I do believe that we should use what we have within our own borders, think of the exponential economic potential.
However we also need to get serious about alternative methods of energy for the same reasons!

If we could just work together instead of letting ideaology shift us further apart, we could solve this situation in a decade!
After all "WE are Americans" and yankee ingenuity will win out every time! /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/grin.gif
 

ikendu

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are they really going to drill in Alaska?

Of course, we are going to drill in Alaska.

Why am I so sure? 'Cause Americans are still using oil at a prodigious rate! You think Mr., Mrs. or Ms. Average is going to let their shiny new vehicle simply sit in the driveway while they have no way to get to work? I don't think so.

So...whenever there is a price spike (like now) or whenever there is rumor of a supply disruption (also like now), the average American will forget whatever doubts they've had about Global Warming or National Geographic covers of pristine wilderness and starting thinking... "Man, we gotta drill that oil!".
 

ikendu

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[ QUOTE ]
Glow_Worm said:
One would think that only an anti-American advocate could decry it, as what more could anyone else want in terms of pros-cons???

[/ QUOTE ]

OK. For the sake of discussion, lets say that this is completely right. How many more ANWRs are there?

I don't know for sure, but I'm betting that the number is not infinite. So, when we run out of ANWRs, what do we do next?

Well?

We can already see the end in sight, sometime.

So...is it any less "anti-American" to just be guzzling up our national treasures, with no thought or plan as to how to keep our society moving after it is gone?

Here is my prediction:

We WILL switch to other sources of fuel. I don't think we'll simply let our machinery stop.

The only issue is how well we will plan for it and how much societal disruption happens as a result of our planning...or lack thereof.

Think it is a mark of good leadership that we will now drill ANWR? I don't. The green light to drill ANWR in the absence of a plan for what will come after, IMHO, is the mark of short sighted, reactionary, complete lack of leadership.

Think we need real energy policy in this country? You betcha we do.
 

imfrogman

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Drill baby drill. The environmentalist wackos always spout this doomsday nonsense anytime America tries to lessen its dependency on foreign countries. remember when the Alaska pipeline was being constructed the wackos were out there saying how this was going to wipe out the caribu by disrupting their migration routes. What a load of crap! There are more caribu then ever.
We will drill in Anwr, & none of this disaster nonsense will happen & in 10 years, except for the wells, you will not be able to tell anyone was there.
Golbal warming is just plain crap science. We have only been keeping records of temperatures for about 100 years. How old is the earth? Billions of years old. How many warming & cooling trends has the earth been through in that time? No one knows. To say that we are causing this with the limited information we have is just plain crap.
 

Malpaso

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Once again people are wringing their hands and doing their Chicken Little immitations (great point about the pipeline, imfrogman, you just beat me to it). It's great to say that we have to find alternative energy sources, and I believe we do, but we can't sit on our hands in the mean time. Before we know it China will be using more oil than we could even dream about.
 

turbodog

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[ QUOTE ]
Beamhead said:
Glow_Worm...Game...set... match!
Facts are a potent weapon.
I do believe that we should use what we have within our own borders, think of the exponential economic potential.
However we also need to get serious about alternative methods of energy for the same reasons!

If we could just work together instead of letting ideaology shift us further apart, we could solve this situation in a decade!
After all "WE are Americans" and yankee ingenuity will win out every time! /ubbthreads/images/graemlins/grin.gif

[/ QUOTE ]

Every think that this could BE part of energy policy as you guys say? I mean, it's not like AK will start pumping tomorrow straight to my house. It's slated to take 10 years to get this stuff..... right?

I see all the complaining about energy coming from up north and out west. Some of you guys need to come to parts of the country where there is absolutely no alternatives to our current fuels. We should do this, we should do that..... wah!

I'm all for alternative fuels. But that's from more of an economic standpoint rather than pollution one. Most pollution comes from the bottom 1% of cars. Think that market segment is gonna be an early adopter of the latest whiz bang car?

I say drill in Alaska. I'd help start the first pipe if I could. If this helps offset our 750 billion/year trade deficit, start drilling.

Do you know that the animals in AK use the overhead pipeline for shelter from the weather and storms? But, noooooo, we don't see the positive aspects of this.

For those that have never seen 1000 acres all in one place..... it's not that big. Even parcelled out into 20 acre plots you're still only talking about 50 locations. It's NOT going to be 1 acre locations. You can't drill a new well and have room to store your extra drill stem in 1 acre. Especially for wells that will produce this kind of delivery rates that these fields will.
 

jtr1962

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[ QUOTE ]
imfrogman said:
Golbal warming is just plain crap science.

[/ QUOTE ]It may or may not be but cancers/asthma from air pollution, acid rain, noise pollution from internal combustion engines (especially on airliners), toxic waste from refining oil, environmental damage from oil tanker crashes, and finally collapsing skyscrapers from burning jet fuel are all quite real. Those are plenty of good reasons to stop using fossil fuels yesterday. And then of course all those tanks of explosive gasoline everywhere are a terrorists dream. Add in the geopolitical consequences of oil use for good measure. After all that, the possibility of global warming is just the icing on the cake. I think the environmentalists shot themselves in the foot by adopting global warming as their poster child. Rather, they should show pictures of patients in a cancer ward. 650,000 die from air pollution related diseases in the US each and every year. That's 13 times the number who die in auto accidents. Or put another way, it's the equivalent of 9/11 every two days. Where's the outrage? Or maybe the general public was never made aware of this because it might cut into SUV sales.

I'm no wacko environmentalist but I want to be able to breathe knowing that what I'm breathing won't kill me down the road. While I think preserving nature is a good thing I also realize that if we worried about saving every species out there progress would come to a halt. At the same time, I don't think we should destroy the natural world if better alternatives exist. If oil were a pristine form of energy without any negatives then I would say drill the hell out of the ANWR. However, it's a filthy, primitive way to generate power. Indeed, burning anything to generate power in 2005 is. It should have been abandoned the minute commercial nuclear reactors were possible, which was sometime in the 1950s. I'll grant that nuclear power has issues of it's own, but I'd rather we have a few thousand tons of radioactive waste buried in some cave in a remote area than billions of tons of toxic wastes from burnt oil floating in the air. Long term we should be spending lots more money to develop commercial fusion which is far cleaner than fission.

What we have here isn't planning or leadership. It's simply reacting from crisis to crisis. Both parties have been asleep at the wheel on this issue for far too long. We've had warning signs since the 1970s that oil wasn't forever, yet time and again every attempt to develop alternatives, or even to conserve what we have, was stopped dead in its tracks. The SUV craze, the EV1 fiasco, and now this are but the latest sagas in that sordid journey.

There's an old saying that people get the government they deserve.
 

turbodog

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[ QUOTE ]
jtr1962 said:
[ QUOTE ]
imfrogman said:
Golbal warming is just plain crap science.

[/ QUOTE ]It may or may not be but cancers/asthma from air pollution, acid rain, noise pollution from internal combustion engines (especially on airliners), toxic waste from refining oil, environmental damage from oil tanker crashes, and finally collapsing skyscrapers from burning jet fuel are all quite real. Those are plenty of good reasons to stop using fossil fuels yesterday. And then of course all those tanks of explosive gasoline everywhere are a terrorists dream. Add in the geopolitical consequences of oil use for good measure. After all that, the possibility of global warming is just the icing on the cake. I think the environmentalists shot themselves in the foot by adopting global warming as their poster child. Rather, they should show pictures of patients in a cancer ward. 650,000 die from air pollution related diseases in the US each and every year. That's 13 times the number who die in auto accidents. Or put another way, it's the equivalent of 9/11 every two days. Where's the outrage? Or maybe the general public was never made aware of this because it might cut into SUV sales.

I'm no wacko environmentalist but I want to be able to breathe knowing that what I'm breathing won't kill me down the road. While I think preserving nature is a good thing I also realize that if we worried about saving every species out there progress would come to a halt. At the same time, I don't think we should destroy the natural world if better alternatives exist. If oil were a pristine form of energy without any negatives then I would say drill the hell out of the ANWR. However, it's a filthy, primitive way to generate power. Indeed, burning anything to generate power in 2005 is. It should have been abandoned the minute commercial nuclear reactors were possible, which was sometime in the 1950s. I'll grant that nuclear power has issues of it's own, but I'd rather we have a few thousand tons of radioactive waste buried in some cave in a remote area than billions of tons of toxic wastes from burnt oil floating in the air. Long term we should be spending lots more money to develop commercial fusion which is far cleaner than fission.

What we have here isn't planning or leadership. It's simply reacting from crisis to crisis. Both parties have been asleep at the wheel on this issue for far too long. We've had warning signs since the 1970s that oil wasn't forever, yet time and again every attempt to develop alternatives, or even to conserve what we have, was stopped dead in its tracks. The SUV craze, the EV1 fiasco, and now this are but the latest sagas in that sordid journey.

There's an old saying that people get the government they deserve.

[/ QUOTE ]

Well, plenty of stuff in our environment will kill us from residual exposure but I don't see us banning all those other substances.

Hey wait... this was about the anwr right?

Oh yeah.

Drill.
 

imfrogman

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Do you know how much carbon monoxide & other so called pollutants were released when mount st helens erupted? A hell of a lot more than all gasoline engines put together.
This stuff is natural to the earth & the earth has ways of dealing with it. We are all going to die, nothing you or anyone else can do about it.
 

turbodog

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[ QUOTE ]
imfrogman said:
Do you know how much carbon monoxide & other so called pollutants were released when mount st helens erupted? A hell of a lot more than all gasoline engines put together.
This stuff is natural to the earth & the earth has ways of dealing with it. We are all going to die, nothing you or anyone else can do about it.

[/ QUOTE ]

Yeah!

I had been meaning to touch on these points myself.

If we quit burning fossil fuels, then CO2 emission will be lower. Then the trees will suffocate! Then we'll suffocate! Quick.... the the SUV Batman!
 

twentysixtwo

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The 2000 acre figure has reached urban legend status - even the supporters of drilling acknowledge that 1) that number is grossly understated 2) the 2000 acres is distributed and doesn't include pipelines, roads, etc.

Game, set, distort incorrect facts?
 

jtr1962

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[ QUOTE ]
turbodog said:
Well, plenty of stuff in our environment will kill us from residual exposure but I don't see us banning all those other substances.


[/ QUOTE ]
Actually, OSHA has a whole list of banned/restricted substances which incidentally even at their zenith didn't kill even close to the numbers which air pollution does. I personally think the whole lead paint thing was an overreaction, for example.

Anyway, this thread just proves to me how selective people can be when it comes to reacting to information. We'll throw fits when a few dozen people a year die from overexposure to some chemical yet conveniently ignore hundreds of thousands of deaths because doing something about it would mean a huge loss in profits for companies with strong political lobbies and heaven forbid a change in the status quo.

Believe what you will. I see now that trying to use logic or reason on this issue with some of the posters in this thread is a pointless waste of mine and other's time. If any of these same posters one day decide to post a thread about someone in their family dying of cancer of some sort forgive me for not having any sympathy. I'll just repost your flippant dismissals of the pollution issue right in that thread. I'm frankly astonished at the level of ignorance of some of the comments in this thread from people who by any other measure seem to be quite intelligent.
 

Malpaso

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[ QUOTE ]
jtr1962 said:
If any of these same posters one day decide to post a thread about someone in their family dying of cancer of some sort forgive me for not having any sympathy. I'll just repost your flippant dismissals of the pollution issue right in that thread.

[/ QUOTE ]

My father has skin cancer. The dermatologist said it is likely from so much time in the sun playing golf. What should we ban here, the sun, golf clubs or dermatologists?
 
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