Offshore Oil Drilling: No Need to Rush
Offshore Oil Drilling: No Need to Rush
Natural gas drilling near Florida’s coast is inevitable. After that will come offshore oil drilling. But the longer we delay, the better it will be for all Americans, not just those who enjoy Florida beaches and other waterfront attractions.
Oil and natural gas prices are rising. With increased prosperity in China, India, and other countries they will continue to rise. So the longer we wait to access our petroleum resources, the more valuable they will be.
Not only that, the more we pump out of the Middle East now, the sooner that part of the world will run out of oil, or at least find its oil market influence reduced as production goes down and extraction costs go up.
The sanest long-term strategy for the U.S. is to conserve like mad immediately to cut our dependence on foreign oil. Let other countries’ oil companies bid up prices while their consumption increases and ours decreases. This would help our economy, too, because we would spend less of our precious foreign exchange on oil.
And then, possibly decades in the future, when easy-to-extract oil becomes hard to find, we should start drilling — and reap the benefits of oil prices that will be much higher than they are now.
The only exceptions to this idea, at least along the Florida coast, are the natural gas and oil fields that are near enough to Cuba that they can be reached, possibly by “slant” drilling, from either U.S. or Cuban territorial waters. We must start exploiting these areas right away, because if “we” don’t get to them, “they” will. The U.S. oil industry may be rapacious and evil, but I believe it is a lot more likely to take anti-spill and other environmental precautions than the Cuban government.
April 24th, 2008 at 10:04 am
Are you advocating an oily Bay of Pigs (only joking)? Don’t forget that Saddam’s reasoning behind Iraq’s occupation of Kuwait was that he accused them of slant drilling for Iraq’s oil.
Not that Saddam’s word has ever been particularly golden, but imagine the dismay of other certain nations should America be caught trying to pilfer Cuba’s oil reserves.
Saying that, it is a far more economical and environmentally less destructive form of oil extraction than standard vertical wells.
You’re absolutely right about our need to cut our dependence on foreign oil, and we definitely need to be looking at ways to increase yields with more environmentally friendly oil drilling chemicals as well.