The U.S. likely just passed Saudi Arabia as the number one hydrocarbon producer, thanks to fracking - and we’re likely to become the #1 oil producer by 2017- and thanks to all the natural gas, that also means that our greenhouse gas output has dropped to 1992 levels – in other words, by embracing better technologies and drilling, we’ve been able to improve our economy while lowering our emissions, instead of cutting back our economy to lower our emissions as environmentalists constantly want to do with Kyoto and cap-and-trade.
So what’s the Sierra club’s reaction? They want to stop fracking and the use of natural gas. And Democrats? Obama’s EPA wanted to “crucify” global warming opponents and gas and oil drillers, before the official who’s tape came out saying that had to resign and join the Sierra club. And the EPA is coming out with false studies to try and shut the practice down, along with lawfare suits. And Obama himself has only allowed drilling on public lands – where the majority of the oil is – when forced to do so by judges.
I guess I like a more realist approuch(not doomer..realist).
Currently we are pumping about 87,500,000 bo/d(more or less estimate). If we divide a day into hours, minutes, and seconds we come up with 86,400 seconds in a day. Divide the total barrels by total seconds and you have 1012 barrels of oil being consumed every second of every day. Everytime we blink our eyes another 1000 barrels of oil are gone.
If we take that same figure of 87,500,000 barrels of oil a day and times it by the days of one year (365) we come up with the fact that the world consumes 31.9 billion barrels a year.
When the nightly news announces that supposedly 15 billion barrels of Oil has been found in Brazil 8 miles offshore and 4 miles deep I just wonder how we will make it. 15 billion is only a half years worth of oil.
However much we produce and find it has to equal 40% of our oil imports and I’m not convinced that we will ever make up that difference. I know that we’ve been able to find a lot of Natural Gas but Gas isn’t Oil and Oil is what we will need to keep the transportation going and thereby keep the American economy going.