Oil & Gas Facts

Monday, September 21, 2009 by ShoXee

Winningreen ENERGY Alert

Oil and gas facts everyone should know

By Gretchen Randall

Date: May 29, 2008

√ U.S. production has fallen steadily for the last 35 years. Oil production in this country peaked in the 1970s. As U.S. consumption of oil has doubled, domestic oil production has fallen off nearly 40 percent. Why? In large part, this is the result of government policies that placed important oil and gas resources off limits.

√ The U.S. Government estimates that there are about 300 trillion cubic feet of natural gas and more than 50 billion barrels of oil yet to be discovered on the Outer Continental Shelf (OCS) surrounding the Lower 48.

√ When you then add in the Alaska OCS resource, you add the potential for another 122 trillion cubic feet of natural gas and 25 billion barrels of oil. Unfortunately, 85 percent of the Lower 48 resource base is off-limits because of Congressional moratoria.

√ The U.S. has more oil locked in shale than any other country on Earth. [Note: In fact, we have in shale, more oil than the rest of the world — up to 2.7 trillion barrels — mostly on BLM land in Colorado, Utah and Wyoming. A Republican Congress authorized opening leases for this oil. The current Democratic Congress blocked them.]

√ Today, national oil companies [owned by or affiliated with governments] own as much as 90 percent of the proven oil reserves in the world, while investor-owned oil companies hold just six percent of proven reserves.

√ The United States is the only country in the world that restricts the use of its own energy resources while transferring trillions of dollars of wealth to other countries in order to import energy.

√ In 2007, the average daily cost for a deepwater exploration well in the Gulf of Mexico was $759,000.