One of the arguments I just heard on CNN today was that it makes no sense to drill in ANWR because it would take years to start producing oil and it would not make a difference in the price of gasoline that we pay at the pump. That was the end of that news segment. It's no wonder why Americans are duped into the narrow minded analysist that clog the daily news. Let me tell you why we need to drill in ANWR.

We import 15 million barrels of oil a day at $115 a barrel. We produce only 5 million barrels a day. In other words our trade deficit by oil alone is over a billion dollars a day.

For those who say that all the oil in ANWR would only last a few years at out current demand, think about this. ANWR has 30 billion barrels and at most we could pump 1 million barrels a day for the next 40 years.

Drilling in ANWR is not about reducing the price at the pump. Drilling in ANWR is all about US oil companies producing more of our oil and importing less.

There is more oil in North/South Dakotas, Utah, Wyoming and Anwar than in all of the middle east.  We should be drilling for that oil right now and we should be building new refineries right now. We should change the ethanol production from corn to hemp.   But..the Democrats won't let us do any of those things.  They merely want to take more taxes and put more regulation in place.  

I think we need a new Operation.  We should call it Operation Gasbag and call upon the citizens of the U.S. to stand up to this Congress the way people did with the Amnesty bill.

Exactly!  We must dril in ANWR and everywhere else in North America.  Every barrel of oil we don't buy from OPEC is $115 fewer dollars spent to fund terrorism against us!  

The argument that we can't achieve energy independence overnight is not the same as saying we should not develop domestic resources to lessen the dependence.  The liberal argument is nothing short of moronic.  

Everything we do today helps us today and in the long run.  Doing nothing leaves us at the mercy of thugs and dictators.  The Iranian dictators have funded their atomic plans with petrodollars.  If we had developed our own domestic resources Iran would have had fewer dollars to build their bombs.  And this nation would be a safer place.

CNN = Clinton News Network or Communist News Network or Collaborators News Network - Your Choice.

I'll tell you whats wrong with the liberal argument.

First they make bad assumptions which lead to bad policy.

They assume that alternate energy sources for transportation would manifest themselves if market forces would get out of the way of order as they see it. This is a bad and bold assumption considering the same people have no understanding of what energy is. If you ask a liberal how many kilowatt hours it takes to produce one gallon equivalent of hydrogen from water, they couldn't tell you but they would swear all you needed was a solar pannel to produce sufficient electricity. Let me state the facts. It takes 67 KW-HRs to produce a gallon of gas equivalent or one kilo of Hydrogen. Now most solar panels are rated for 700 watts during peak sunlight. You need 67 KW-HRs of energy. That would take (67,000/700) or 95 hours of sun to produce one gallon equivalent. Now remember if the sun shined that long you might want some AC going on in your house while you wait for enough energy to get you to the store. Considering that most air conditioners use 4 KW, you would need 4x95 hr or an additional 380 KW-hrs of electricity to cool your home while you wait on that hydrogen.

Now I'm not saying hydrogen fuel cells can't be a marketable solution, but it will require an additional 200 gigawatts of power generation to produce the gallon of gas equivalent that we currently use for transportation.

Can you say NUCLEAR? I thought so. Yes indeed we need more nuclear power plants. The AP1000 is the new advanced boiling water reactor. Google it. Look at it on Wikipedia. Memorize it. Obama and Clinton don't even know it exist.

Now the liberals also think that we can stop using coal and natural gas. We have the largest natural gas reserve in the gulf and yet we won't use it. We can make hydrogen with natural gas much cheeper by reforming the natural gas. We could drive our cars on it for 100 years. But wait the environmentalist won't allow that because the process releases CO. We can't use coal either. So basically we can't use anything.

The problem with liberals is just plain old arrogance. To be so smart that you can make bold assumptions that take you away from reality. Then blame all the realistic problems on greedy Republicans.


Oil. We will always need it and it is not likely that we can replace motor fuel in the near future but possibly in the next 40 years. We can reduce our demand and that will happen as oil hits $200 a barrel. Those who actually need a truck will be the ones who drive a trunk. Gone will be the pimped out trucks and SUVs.

Liberals complain about the price of oil. They say that oil companies raise the price of oil and all that profit should be taxed. An oil company brings oil to the market. That is all that they do. Just like bringing cookies to a bake sale. The buyers bid on the available oil futures contracts. Those that make oil simply bring it to the market and sale it. Sure they could sit on it until the bids go up but where would they put 20 million barrels a day? Not in Cushing Oklahoma. Those tanks hold only so much. Not in a grain bin. There is no place to put it. It has to be sold. So to say that the oil companies raise the price assumes that the oil companies have some place to store the oil and will wait until the market buyers need it bad enough to up their bid.  Based on eia.gov information, inventories have been steady. Sure there are inventories because this is a batch process.

The Democrats assume that oil companies can't produce anymore oil and are going to produce the same amount here to for so they may aswell tax the profit more and use the money for alternative energy that the market apparently has gotten in the way.

This assumption is wrong for all kinds of reasons. First in order for US oil companies to produce more oil in the confined drilling areas, they need more investment to build those deep water rigs so that they can recover oil deep in the Gulf waters. They are not allowed to drill off the continental shelf. Where does this money come from? It comes from investors, venture capital. If profits are up, venture capital will be there to produce those expensive platforms. If the profit is removed, then that capital will be sold and the project and all the equipment will be sold.

What amazes me is that the Democrats love to beat up on those who provide the oil. Not so much OPEC and their freind in Venezuela. No they beat up on the three domestic oil companies. Why. Why beat the horse that got you this far. The next time you run into someone who works on an oil platform, thank them for working their butt off.

I suppose the Democrats would love to import all of our oil. I doubt that they understand that we currenly have no alternative.

FLATTAXRATE wrote:I'll tell you whats wrong with the liberal argument.

First they make bad assumptions which lead to bad policy.

Well, their bad assumptions are based on a complete lack of real-world experience.  I mean look at Bill and Hillary.  The went to college, and then grad school and then law school and then taught and then he got elected to office.  He is a highly indoctrinated person with no practical skills or understanding of how the world works.  So, he can say with a straight face that "I did not have sex with that woman, Monica Lewinsky!"  No, I mean he can say with a straight face that he and his wife and a couple of "experts" can sit around in a room and "fix" health care for the entire nation.  After all, it is just a problem that a few "expertes" can fix.  It worked for Kennedy in Viet Nam!  Why not for Clinton with health care?  Oops, well it didn't work so well for Kennedy in Viet Nam but all good libs know that Nixon really caused the war so we don't have to blame Kennedy for that one.  

I don't know that all liberals are stupid.  It is just that everything they ever learned is so wrong that it staggers the mind.  If you start out with a fatally flawed premise anywhere you go is going to get you in trouble.  As Will Rogers said "It isn't what we don't know that gives us trouble, it's what we know that ain't so."

FLATTAXRATE wrote:I'll tell you whats wrong with the liberal argument.

First they make bad assumptions which lead to bad policy.

They assume that alternate energy sources for transportation would manifest themselves if market forces would get out of the way of order as they see it. This is a bad and bold assumption considering the same people have no understanding of what energy is. If you ask a liberal how many kilowatt hours it takes to produce one gallon equivalent of hydrogen from water, they couldn't tell you but they would swear all you needed was a solar pannel to produce sufficient electricity. Let me state the facts. It takes 67 KW-HRs to produce a gallon of gas equivalent or one kilo of Hydrogen. Now most solar panels are rated for 700 watts during peak sunlight. You need 67 KW-HRs of energy. That would take (67,000/700) or 95 hours of sun to produce one gallon equivalent. Now remember if the sun shined that long you might want some AC going on in your house while you wait for enough energy to get you to the store. Considering that most air conditioners use 4 KW, you would need 4x95 hr or an additional 380 KW-hrs of electricity to cool your home while you wait on that hydrogen.

Now I'm not saying hydrogen fuel cells can't be a marketable solution, but it will require an additional 200 gigawatts of power generation to produce the gallon of gas equivalent that we currently use for transportation.

Well, I'll go out on a limb to say that it's not a marketable solution -- or even a physically possible one.

I think the important thing to remember is that if you can split H from H2O with less energy than you get from recombining the H and the O to make H2O; then what you've essentially done is create a perpetual energy machine.  In other words, it is impossible according to the Laws of Thermodynamics to get more electricity out of the fuel cell than you put into the electrolysis of the water to split-off the hydrogen.

And that's ignoring the costs of capture, containment, transport, and distribution of the hydrogen.  

I was a huge proponent of Fuel-Cell cars (I did a senior thesis on them back in undergrad), until I began to ask where we'd get the Hydrogen.  The answer, unfortunately, is either from Methane (one of those evil fossil fuels) or nowhere.


People looking for alternative fuel sources usually fail to recognize that there are only four different types of energy available to Earthlings: 1) Tidal/Gravitational; 2) Geothermal; 3) Nuclear; and 4) Solar Energy.

(geothermal could actually be considered a type of nuclear power - but I digress)

Solar Energy includes: photovoltaics, wind, biofuels like ethanol, and fossil fuels.

Let's compare the solar energy of ethanol to the solar energy of, say, oil.  How could it ever be possible to extract more of the solar energy from a single-year's plant growth, than one could get from millions of years of solar energy in plant and animal matter compressed, condensed, and concentrated for further millions of years?  That's what we're essentially talking about: the amount of solar energy contained in one year of crop growth vs. the solar energy stored by millions of years of plant/animal growth.

I think that if our Senators and Congressmen could only grasp two things: 1) the Laws of Thermodynamics, and 2) the Law of Supply and Demand; our nation would be much better off.  Unfortunately, most of the clowns we elect are lawyers to whom science and economics are as foreign as the U.S. Constitution.

Eyas,

As usual, a great post.  This link seems to support your thesis.  Making hydrogen is not an energy-free proposition.  So, until we start building A LOT of nuclear power plants we won't have the energy to generate the vast quantities of hydrogen necessary for the "hydrogen economy."  

There is the usual bow to "greenhouse gasses" but the rest seems to correctly point out the enormous amount of energy required for electrolisys.  

HowStuffWorks.com wrote:Where will the electricity for the electrolysis of water come from? Right now, about 68 percent (reference) of the electricity produced in the United States comes from coal or natural gas. All of that generating capacity will have to be replaced by renewable sources in the hydrogen economy. In addition, all of the fossil fuel energy now used for transportation (in cars, trucks, trains, boats, planes) will have to convert to hydrogen, and that hydrogen will be created with electricity, as well. In other words, the electrical generating capacity in the country will have to double in order to take on the demands of transportation, and then it will all have to convert from fossil fuels to renewable sources. At that point, and only at that point, will the flow of carbon into the atmosphere stop.

Read more here.

Refineries are also a key to energy independence. American oil refineries have been operating at max capacity for years. Rush quoted a stat awhile back that we import, I believe he said, 13% of our gasoline.
How long has it been since a new refinery was built in this country? 20, 25 years?
The Dems are all in a fit about jobs. Geez, opening new oil fields and building refineries and nuclear plants might create a job or two.

bedbug wrote:Refineries are also a key to energy independence. American oil refineries have been operating at max capacity for years. Rush quoted a stat awhile back that we import, I believe he said, 13% of our gasoline.
How long has it been since a new refinery was built in this country? 20, 25 years?
The Dems are all in a fit about jobs. Geez, opening new oil fields and building refineries and nuclear plants might create a job or two.

We have not built a new refinery or nuclear power plant in the USA for a very long time.  20 to 25 years is probably very close.  However, Rush has pointed out that oil companies have expanded the capacity of existing refineries many times.  And the US goverment just issued its first  license for a new nuclear power plant in 30 years.  See this link.

But, Katrina showed the problem of relying on a few large refineries.  I think one in the Gulf Coast area was impacted by Katrina or another large storm and shut down which caused a shortage of refine petroleum products at an inopportune moment.

Bush has recently floated the idea of building new refineries on decommissioned military bases.  It sounds interesting but I wonder how hard Bush will push for anything in his last 9 months in office.  And I wonder how likely the Dems are to cave to such a proposal when it would sell out several of their hard-left special interest groups.

Two things about the nuclear plant license. First, the squirrel kissers, I'm sure, will file injunctions in federal court to block construction or startup after construction. Second, why is an international consortium running a nuke project here? I don't like the sound of that.