Senate Defeats Arctic Drilling

[spotty_dog]

Now, someone explain to me how the hell natural gas got to be just as, if not more, expensive than heating oil? NG isn't imported from overseas, is it?

I can tell you that Alaskan natural gas is simply pumped right back down after the oil is extracted, to help maintain pressure. A lot of it is burned off too (huge flares on the fields, you were supposed to report if they lasted more than a certain amount of time...)

Now that the Prudhoe reserves are not producing very well, it makes sense to get that gas out and to the market. But there's no viable way to do it.

The oil companies formed a huge feasibility study (my daddy played a big role) and drafted a plan for a natural gas pipeline to go through Canada to Chicago. After years of being dangled as part of the controversial Energy Bill, it was passed by Congress with some assurances to make it practicable for the companies. Then it had to get approval and assurances from the state government. Where it's stalled, as everybody thinks they know better than the oil companies about where and how to build the damned thing.

FWIW, Prudhoe Bay started producing in the mid-seventies, and it's been on its last dregs for a while (hence the ~30 yr estimate). Some would put ANWR's reserves as greater than Prudhoe's -- but the last I'd heard, the restrictions on drilling in ANWR prevented proper geologic surveys from being done as well. I'm not sure anybody has even a good scientific guess of how much oil is down there (the USGS data is old and collected unreliably, I believe.) I used to think that information mattered to the decision of whether to drill; but now I think that the amount of recoverable oil is immaterial. Either we plunder every square inch of this planet in our quest for an unrenewable resource and attempt to keep patching the energy problem, or we get our act together and apply our human ingenuity and bloody solve the problem at its source.

[DCJenn]

What she said...

Amen.

Jenn

Yeah, what she said.