Grumpy Editor notes that President Barack Obama, in calling on Congress to give federal regulators more authority to crack down against price manipulators, said it again yesterday at the White House:
“I've said repeatedly, the problem is we use more than 20 percent of the world's oil and we only have 2 percent of the world's proven oil reserves.”
Media remain mum while running with that line for months.
“In classic fashion, (the president) is using a technicality to skirt the facts and keep the myth of energy scarcity alive,” points out the Institute for Energy Research, a Washington, D.C.-based not-for-profit organization that conducts intensive research and analysis on the functions, operations, and government regulation of global energy markets.
“The reality is that the U.S. has enough recoverable oil for the next 200 years, despite only having 2 percent of the world’s current proven oil reserves,” emphasizes IER.
“Proven oil reserves are not all of our oil resources --- not even close,” continues IER. “Proved reserves represent a tiny portion of our total oil resources. Proven (or proved) oil reserves are reserves that have already been discovered, typically through actual exploration or drilling, and which can be recovered economically. That estimate does not include oil that we know about, yet are unable to access because of regulatory barriers.
“For example, the billions of barrels of oil in ANWR are not included in our proved oil reserves.”
The U.S. has 1,442 billion barrels of technically recoverable oil but only about 20 billion barrels are considered proven oil reserves, says IER.
It adds, “That is partly because the federal government is denying access to hundreds of millions of acres oil-rich federal lands: the Alaskan National Wildlife Refuge, the Naval Petroleum Reserve-Alaska, federal waters off the Atlantic and Pacific coasts, at least 45 percent of the Gulf of Mexico, the Chukchi and Beaufort Seas, and oil shale on federal lands in Colorado, Utah, and Wyoming, to name a few.”
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