Michele Bachmann - Petroleum Geologist!

[hatrack]

Rep. Michele Bachmann, a lawyer now turned petroleum geologist, announced to a South Carolina crowd recently, “Under President Bachmann you will see gasoline come down below $2 a gallon again. The day that President Obama became president,” she said, “gasoline was $1.79 a gallon. Look what it is today.” Actually gasoline was $1.90 during President Obama’s inauguration week, a sharp drop from over $4 during the second Bush term. The drop was primarily caused by the major recession in the latter days of the Bush administration.

EDIT

Oil companies have spent billions and several decades on the “vast shale oil deposits” in those three western states that she lists as exceeding Saudi Arabia’s reserves. So far that so-called shale oil has produced nothing because it isn’t oil. It’s a very low grade substance called kerogen which nature never got around to cooking into oil. All attempts to complete nature’s task have required lots of water and power. And the process for shale oil releases toxic material into ground water. As a minimum, any shale oil production would require oil prices well above $100/barrel. That oil price equates to $4 a gallon gas, not exactly Bachmann’s announced target for her presidency. Success with western shale oil has been five years away for the past 60 years.

She also touts the Bakken oil field in North Dakota, Alaska’s ANWR, and drilling off our coasts as sources that could bring down world oil prices. The Bakken is a substantial resource which requires expensive horizontal drilling with hydraulic fracking. It is not economic with oil at prices which would allow gas below $2 a gallon. The best estimates of economically recoverable oil from Alaska’s ANWR range up to about 6 billion barrels. That’s one year U.S. usage, not 30 years as Bachmann suggested in a recent Star Tribune editorial.

As to off-shore drilling, more leases have already been awarded than the industry is prepared to drill. You don’t take a $400,000/day drill ship out to sea to poke random holes in the ocean floor. Good seismic data will take years.

EDIT

http://www.energybulletin.net/stories/2011-08-24/michele-bachmann-petroleum-geologist

[Botany]

1. The cheap oil is gone ..... except for Iraq

In some places it costs 30 to 70 $s* to get one barrel of oil out of the ground so there is no way that
gas will be under $2.00 a gallon if we are going to go after oil in areas where it is so hard to
recover.

But facts and Michele are not exactly simpatico.


* recovery costs

[dtexdem]

2. Well, Iraq hasn't turned out to be so cheap, either.

Not if you figure in the costs of invading it.

[Botany]

3. Yes, but it just happened to be the world's richest ....

..... and easy to recover oil fields but i doubt that Dick Cheney's Energy Task Force
looked at those figures.

[Vogon_Glory]

4. This Seems To Be A Common Delusion Among Wingnutz

The idea that there is lots of cheap oil on federal lands that Amurrica-hatin', tree-huggin' "elitist" libruls have put off-limits to oil drilling is a common meme among radical righties living away from the oil patch. Any attempts to wean them away from their delusions, even using elementary economics, is doomed to failure.

I know. I've tried.

We don't hear the "lots of cheap oil on federal lands" meme down here near the oil patch. Maybe it's because local radical righties have just enough sense to believe that not even THEIR followers here in Texas (and I suppose Oklahoma and parts of New Mexico) are dumb enough to fall for such bs.

:argh:

:dem:

[Scuba]

5. Drill, baby, drill....

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