Drill, baby, drill fails: Oil prices soar in spite of sharp increase in U.S. production under Obama
"Yet Haley Barbour, right wing try to blame Obama for high prices, still push policies that EIA says will have no impact on price.
US oil production last year rose to its highest level in almost a decade….
As a result, analysts believe the US was the largest contributor to the increase in global oil supplies last year over 2009,
and is on track to increase domestic production by 25 per cent by the second half of the decade.
Domestic oil production is soaring, but so are global prices. It should be obvious that yet more drilling can’t have any significant impact on oil prices — particularly since the U.S. Energy Information Administration has been making that precise point for years now (see EIA: Full offshore drilling will not lower gasoline prices at all in 2020 and only 3 cents in 2030!).
The only thing that can protect Americans from the inevitably increasing oil shocks of Peak Oil is an aggressive strategy to reduce the country’s oil intensity (oil/GDP), including a steady increase the fuel efficiency of our vehicles — policies that conservatives have fought for decades.
But that doesn’t stop those same conservatives — including former Big Oil lobbyist Haley Barbour — from trying to blame Obama for high oil prices. ThinkProgress has a rundown of all the absurd attacks:
Political opportunists in the Republican Party have already sought to blame this inherently unstable situation on President Obama. Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour (R) — a possible 2012 presidential candidate and former oil industry lobbyist — has suggested that not only are increased prices Obama’s fault, but that he desired and created them. “His administration’s policies have been designed to drive up the cost of energy in the name of reducing pollution, in the name of making very expensive alternative fuels more economically competitive,” Barbour told the U.S Chamber of Commerce last week. “Their policy is to drive up energy prices.” Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN), chair of the House Tea Party Caucus and also a potential 2012 presidential candidate, said of high gas prices, “This is exactly what the ambition of the Obama administration is, because they want to move people toward green energy.” In a post on Redstate.com titled “Blame the Democrats for High Gas Prices,” CNN political commentator Erick Erickson argued that “Democrats have been politicizing and blocking expanded oil drilling for quite some time.” Similarly, Rep. Bill Johnson (R-OH) blamed Democrats’ unwillingness to open up more domestic drilling sites for the spike. “We seem to have our hands behind our back,” Johnson said. “And this lack of permitting — this lack of going after resources that we have right here in America — is indicative of a failed energy policy.
That is all pure BS, the exact opposite of the truth. As the Financial Times reported:
The revival of US production has been made possible by a rush of small and mid-sized companies into onshore regions such as the Bakken shale in North Dakota, the Permian Basin in west Texas and the Eagle Ford shale in south Texas.
North Dakota’s production has doubled since 2008, reaching 355,000 b/d in November. Extraction of oil reserves in these regions was thought to be uneconomic, but has been made commercially viable by the transfer of techniques successfully used to extract shale gas; in particular, long horizontal wells and “fracking”, pumping water under high pressure to crack the rock and enable the oil to flow.
Dave Hager, vice-president for exploration and production at Devon Energy, one of the companies pioneering the development of the new onshore fields, said new technology had transformed production economics at its mixed gas and oilfields in north Texas.
Like it or not, Obama actually campaigned on opening up oil production in the Bakken shale, so he is delivering on a campaign promise there."
Drill, baby, drill fails: Oil prices soar in spite of sharp increase in U.S. production under Obama « Climate Progress