ANWR is not the answer

[jpak]

http://www.aspo-usa.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=388&Itemid=91

Americans are easily misled about domestic "supply-side" solutions to rising oil prices and dwindling global exports. Their confusion is understandable. Oil company executives like Shell's John Hofmeister have called for opening up now restricted areas in Alaska or on the outer continental shelves, implying that salvation is only a few oil wells away.

The United States Geological Survey (USGS) or the Mineral Management Service (MMS) routinely assign huge reserves numbers to unexploited, presumably prospective, areas, but it is not clear to people that do not follow the oil industry that these agencies are talking about undiscovered oil.

The age of easy, cheap oil in the United States is over and done with (ASPO-USA, May 26, 2008). The Lower-48 peaked in 1970. The volatile shallow-water oil production in the Gulf of Mexico last peaked in 1998, forcing operators to move out to deeper and deeper water. The impressive development of Alaska's Prudhoe Bay in the 1970s will not be repeated elsewhere in Alaska onshore or off. Prudhoe Bay peaked in about 1989.

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In the mean oil resource case, the total volume of technically recoverable crude oil projected to be found within the coastal plain area is 10.4 billion barrels, compared to 5.7 billion barrels for the 95-percent probability estimate, and 16.0 billion barrels for the 5-percent probability estimate. Because the USGS 5-percent and 95-percent probability oil resource estimates are asymmetric around the mean estimate, the expected field size distribution and, in turn, the distribution of projected oil production are also asymmetric with respect to the mean estimate’s field sizes and projected production...

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