http://www.eia.doe.gov/oiaf/archive/aeo07/issues.html

That’s fair enough. Yet this line of criticism seems legitimate. What DO you do for Gnome? And why don’t you ever post about it?

While I’ve had a hard time finding good numbers for how long it takes to get a rig up and running, I haven’t seen any estimates under five years (2013 is five years from now). The incentive for monetizing fields, then, is only about 10% higher under the new estimates.

I’m skeptical that would result in “much more” than .2mb/d being drilled, and within a “much shorter” time frame.

I know nothing about shale deposits, so no comment on that.

[1] http://www.eia.doe.gov/oiaf/aeo/otheranalysis/aeo_2008analysispapers/woppt.html

@jdub: You can post whatever you like on your blog.

If you can’t post something about ubuntu or linux please don’t post this garbage or get your blog off of planet ubuntu.

It amazes me how blind people can be about the US and how the economy works. Do you know that a year ago oil was around $50/barrel and gas at the pump was $2.22 at that time. and when it tripled at $150 it never went over $5 when theoretically it should have almost been $7. Most of what you see at the pump is related to futures and to what the imaginary price is or will be.

We haven’t had a refinery built in this country in over 30 years! And by beginning to we will bring up morale and we can stop subsidizing other countries oil with tax benefits and begin to be self sufficient.

WHAT A CONCEPT! Please take your left wing spin and regurgitate it on someone else!

Also, the report concludes that “Because oil prices are determined on the international market, however, any impact on average wellhead prices is expected to be insignificant. ” That conclusion seems to make moot the question of exactly how much and when OCS wells would produce.

Their access case also includes the assumption that “leasing would begin no sooner than 2012”, but the U.S. Minerals Management Service is planning on accelerating the time table in light of the drastic run up of oil prices. The current request for comments doesn’t include the land currently under a moratorium by congress, but should congress allow the ban to lapse (seems likely) those leases will likely also be offered earlier than the EIA projections.

Explotation is also “assumed to proceed at rates similar to those seen in the early development of the Gulf region” which ignores that some of the land is under existing lease and already has extensive exploration done. Some estimates peg production within a year of rescinding the moratorium.

And finally, as the MMS notes, current estimates of total reserves are very conservative as exploration has been banned in most of the areas for 20-30 years.

Is it the end-all be-all solution? Of course not, and nobody has said that it is. Will it have an immediate impact on pump prices? Debatable. Certainly not drastic, if at all. But how is that an excuse for dismissing long term gains (and other short term gains, such as job creation)?

Notice that projections like this never take into account who is in office. That’s because it doesn’t matter. Expanded offshore drilling *may* represent that little yellow sliver, but all of the Obama Facebook pages in the world aren’t going to put a dent into those hulking grey curves, either.

Don’t turn this into a McCain vs. Obama thing. Neither of them are big enough to make a dent in this, and you’re kidding yourself if you think that a politician is going to solve the problem. The market, combined with natural pressures will decide how the energy is produced, how it is consumed, and how it is conserved. PS - we control the market by what we do every day, not who we vote for on November 4th. But I guess armchair Americans won’t be voting on November 4th anyway.

However more to the point the last time i read about it, both candidates where looking at drilling in the U.S. for oil, so this is hardly a statement against one of the guys.

But like other people have already said, the problem with oil is much much larger then if we there is going to be drilling in the U.S. or not, at the current rate the finding of new oil and the amount of oil they can get from those new spots does not equal to the loss in efficiency of old spots + increase in consumption in the long run. (I don’t have a link for it, but there was a rather extensive amount of research published about this)

Unless we find some magic place where there is still massive amounts of easily (cheaply) available oil the price will keep rising, and like pvanhoof already said, this will quite literally force us to start using alternative means. Even if we do find this place (russia’s bet is apparently on the north pole) its a temporary solution, because of the simple reason that oil is a finite resource.

Now having said that, i would also like to comment on the people complaining about political posts on planets and such. If you are highly offended by political messages then you are S.O.L., its that season again so to no surprise its getting discussed everywhere. Now i can already tell you that complaining about it will simply fail, because nobody really cares. A much saner solution is to use one of the many greasemonkey scripts out there to strip away blogs you don’t like from planets. Its client side filtering so you have total control.