Boortz on ANWR

Good overview on ANWR at Nealz Nuze . Here are some of his quick facts to keep in mind:

Caribou? They don't care. The population of the Central Artic caribou herd near the oil fields of Prudhoe Bay has grown an average of 8.5% per year. The oil exploration operations don't bother them a bit.

When ANWR was created in 1980 a section was set aside for oil exploration. It is that area in which the Senate has approved oil exploration. Imagine that. Exploring for oil in a section of ANWR that was set aside for exploring for oil. Who would have thunk it?

Take the highest estimate of oil reserves from ANWR, then take the lowest. Use those numbers to come up with a mean estimate of ANWR oil potential. That figure is 10.4 billion barrels of oil. That much oil could meet the total petroleum consumption needs of the state of New York for 34 years; Georgia for 54 years, Maine for 259 years, Pennsylvania for 39 years. That is not an insignificant amount of oil.

If the most optimistic estimates of oil reserves in ANWR turn out to be true, it would be enough to replace 30 years of oil imports from Saudi Arabia. That is not an insignificant amount of oil.

Will oil production from ANWR exceed estimates? Who knows? The estimates for Prudhoe Bay were around eight billion barrels of oil. So far we've extracted 14 billion barrels .. and we're not near through.

Now we need to concentrate on building more refineries. The last refinery built in this country was in 1973:

The last oil refinery built in the U.S. was finished in 1973. We have become complacent about the gas mileage we get from the cars we buy. We have become zealous in our environmental requirements restricting oil and gas production and have needlessly increased costs to the producer. There are literally thousands of local regulations covering gasoline that make the shift from winter gasoline to summer gasoline a logistical nightmare for producers.