U.S. Oil Production Increases In Spite of Team Obama’s Best Efforts
In the past three years the number of oil rigs in America quadrupled to 1,272. White House Press Secretary Jay Carney didn’t hesitate to boast, “Oil and gas production in the United States has risen every year since the president’s been in office. Oil production is now higher than it’s been in eight years.”
President Barack Obama pushes the same message: ”Now, we absolutely need safe, responsible oil production here in America. That’s why under my administration, America is producing more oil today than at any time in the last eight years.”
This is true. But it has little to do with anything done by Obama and his rabid anti-oil administration. In fact, we can give more credit to the Founding Fathers and President George W. Bush than the current president.
On a federal level, Obama went out of his way to limit oil production in America. The president revealed his agenda from the start, as shown by appointment of Ken Salazar as secretary of the interior. (In the summer of 2008, when Senator Mitch McConnell pushed a bill allowing drilling in the Outer Continental Shelf based on the price of gasoline, then-Senator Salazar said he would not approve of any new plan even if the price of gasoline were $10 a gallon.)
Not only did he object on the Senate floor, but after taking office, Salazar took action:
Interior Secretary Ken Salazar “canceled land leases for energy development on 77 parcels of land in Utah. Then he canceled a pending oil-shale lease sale based on his expert judgment that it ‘didn’t meet the smell test.’” Kerpen adds, “Overall there has been a steep drop-off in leasing on federal lands. … 2010 saw a 79 percent drop in leasing in Colorado, Montana, New Mexico, North Dakota, Utah, and Wyoming from 2005. Total onshore royalties dropped 33 percent in just two years.”
Salazar also imposed a six-month drilling moratorium on the Gulf of Mexico following BP’s Deepwater Horizon oil spill. The administration kept the ban in place, despite a judge overturning it. The Obama administration was later held in contempt of court.
Even though the ban was “lifted,” so few permits have been handed out that the term “permatorium” emerged to describe the administration’s attitude towards oil exploration in the Gulf.
It’s disingenuous, at best, for the president to take credit for the increase, your being kind it is more of an outright lie.
Filthy, comtemptible lie!
The regime thinks they have energy all figured out.Just send Plouffe the Magic Dragon out and say “we are for everything but want to be responsible” and all zeros polling worries will disappear!!
Trouble is they can’t even answer the simplest of questions that even metro boy chris wall- ass asked a few hours ago on his pathetic show.
When the magic dragon was asked why zero didn’t approve the North end–Canadian end, of Keystone after the state dept studied it for three years and couldn’t find “jack” to complain about he had to change the topic back to the Southern end since they have no answers for but kissing enviro Marxists at election time.
Hopefully, the regime will fold under its own weight.
It’s interesting — since Obama did his photo op in New Mexico last Wednesday — to contrast and compare the drilling activity and permitting on Bureau of Land Management areas in that state’s portion of the huge Permian Basin oilfield vs. the same numbers in Texas, where the drilling is on either private or state-owned Public University Fund Land.
One of the things area residents noted in the stories prior to Obama’s visit was how hard a slog permitting has gotten in Eddy and Lea counties, and the Baker-Hughes rig count over the past 5-6 years as shown that while drilling is still active in the BLM areas, those two counties back during the Bush years were the most active drilling areas in the Permian Basin, averaging between 30-35 rigs while counties down in Texas were in the 5-20 range (albeit most of the Texas counties involved are smaller). Now, the drilling activity really hasn’t changed in New Mexico, while the number of active drill sites in Texas has increased almost tenfold in those counties. So it’s not that there is no drilling activity in the BLM areas, just that drilling activity there has seen nowhere near the sharp rise over the past few years that the private and PUF land has reported, where permitting comes via the Texas Railroad Commission.
Low information voters will still vote for “O”. The Dems propaganda machine is still powerful.
Prescinding from, or rather, having relocated the humble _ad homunculum_, the present keyboard can agree, up to a point, with peanut-gallery peanut ‘Mike’ that America’s Otherparty does in fact do this sort of thing better. We donkeys simply do not recruit factious noisemakers in the same *depth* as Foxcuckooland. We have, as it were, first- and second- and perhaps third-string agitproppers, but that is where we stop.
Whereas the neocomrades go all the way down to seventeeth-string–or wherever one places this sad specimen, exactly–to make sure that the Party line gets ‘turf’bagged into even the meanest dittopans.
Especially admirable, it seems to me, is the cost-efficiency of it all. At no level does GHQ waste money by hirin’ the overqualified.
Happy days.
seems you didn’t grasp the significance of our message of discontent towards arrogant spree-spending donks in the landslide november 2010 elections. well, the day after another political massacre, on 11/07/2012 we will again grab the bullhorns and bellow into your smug long floppy ears, “can you hear us now?”
Obama’s penchant for taking credit for others accomplishments, makes me dislike him personally!
It certainly does seem as though the current administration is doing whatever to destroy America, with a compliant media. It is so blatant, though, that even the preoccupied not usually attentive to politics are starting to notice. How much easier it is to be glib when you really don’t care about fairness or truth or genuine solutions, just living large, paying off your pals, and basking in manufactured glory.
In the world of knee deep and endless BS, this president’s claim to some personal credit for increased oil production under his rule counts as one of his more baldfaced lies.
Total sales of all fossil fuels produced on Federal and Indian lands…dropped by about 6 percent between FY 2010 and FY 2011 (Table 1).
Salazar, Chu, Obama, Jackson (EPA)…the whole crowd is oriented towards decreased production of oil, natural gas & coal in pursuit of their common ideological agenda.
Such kinds of men (and women) should have no influence in the public sphere.
Such kinds of men (and primarily women…ain’t that sorta strange? Are there no men left in this administration?) should suffer the punishment of all traitors.
Drawing and quartering…Pay-per-View rights! I call ‘em, first!
If ya ain’t got integrity, ya ain’t got nuttin’
No one in what remains of Obama’s Washington DC cabal has integrity. Some of the not-so-dumb have already beat feet, as well as roaches like Emanuel and Axelrod. (Rahm couldn’t get along with Obama’s sycophant in waiting, Valerie Jarrett. They were always locking horns, so he had to move on to mayor of Chicagoland.)
Drawing and quartering is too good for this crowd.
President oblama
Supports OWS
Opposes Tea Party
Supports forcing religious organizations to provide birth contro
Wants Rs to sit in the back seat drinking slurpees
Supports the Muslim Sista hood
Will not back Isreal
Appoints a Communist as Green Jobs Czar
Supports GE, 2nd largest corp in the world but pays no taxes
Opposes big oil
Opposes the 1percent while pandering for their donations
Opposes and is suing right to work states
Supports Solydra and the chevy joke
Rarely goes to church but refers to God when politically expedient
Believes we cling to our guns and religion
Has out spent out flown and out partied any adm. In history with 10 percent unemployment
Nationalized GM Chrysler Student Loan Healthcare but believes in free enterprise
Feel free to add on to this doubletalking socialists accomplishments
Obama used up approx. 80,000 gallons of jet fuel on his latest 3 day jaunt to western states, touting his energy accomplishments (millions down the drain on Solyndra and related boondoggles; claiming (lying about) a republican hand in Solyndra) & to allude to his role in a pipeline, which particular pipeline doesn’t even need his approval.
He must think his supporters are really really dumb (probably not too far off the mark) if he expects these kinds of claims to fly.
(At the federal cut rate of $3 something (as opposed to commercial rate of $6 something), that’s around a quarter of a million in jet fuel.)
Obama needs to turn in the 8 mpg Barackmobile for a Chevy Volt. And turn down the thermostat in the White House, since the first thing he did on taking office was jack that thing up into the stratosphere.
‘My friends tried to tell me, but it was too late, yeah;
What a fool I was to fall for your bait, yeah;
Oh-oh-oh-oh, first you said you would, if you just could, yeah
Then you said you could if you just would, yeah
Now you said you would if you still could, yeah
I bet you probably will if I keep still, yeah
You drive me crazy, kiss-a-me baby, I don’t mean maybe
Double talkin’ baby, ple-ease make up your mind.’
Double Talkin’ Baby, Stray Cats.
Barack Obama was completely unknown when Setzer & Co. penned this, but it sure fits him. Mr. President, you’ve run out of people you can fool.
Unfortunately not. There are still plenty of people falling for this BS. They are either uninformed, blind followers, or complicit.
The deliberately uninformed, blind, deaf and& complicit aren’t being fooled – they know he lies and are part of it.
Pending yet another lawsuit by the communists, Shell is back on in the Arctic Ocean this summer, but I believe the exploratory work is off Kotzebue in Northwest Alaska, a truly remote province. The area off Kaktovik referenced in the article is in the Beaufort Sea and is relatively near the existing Prudhoe Bay infrastructure. The area off the Northwest Alaska coast is accessible only by air and summer barge, just as was the case with Prudhoe Bay until the Pipeline Haul Road was completed in the mid-’70s. The entrepot is Kotzebue, which as most amenities, as that is defined in Bush Alaska, and has jet service to Nome and Anchorage. There is no road connection and the nearest roads that connect to the US road system are 500 or so miles away in Fairbanks, which is also where the nearest oil infrastructure is – the TransAlaska Pipeline System runs near Fairbanks.
Shell must believe that there is an elephant field off Northwest Alaska because as far as I know there are no working oil wells in the Arctic Ice anywhere in the World – the wells offshore near Prudhoe are on gravel islands – though I understand the Arctic Ocean is relatively shallow in the area of interest. I understand they contemplate standard drilling rig structures either on pilings or anchored in water around 100 feet deep but which is iced eight or more months a year. Ice breaking tankers might be more practical here than they were for Prudhoe Bay development since the region is much closer to open water than Prudhoe Bay. A Russian ice breaking tanker to make it into Nome, about 100 miles or so south of Kotzebue earlier this season to make a fuel delivery after the Arctic Ocean froze earlier than expected and Nome’s fuel delivery barge didn’t make it in time. The US has no ice breaking tankers and in fact only one large icebreaker. Ice breaking could be done by foreign flag vessels but under the Jones Act, the oil would have to be taken to any American port in an American bottom with an American crew. I suspect that under even the most optimistic scenario, export of the oil would be prohibited. The most likely scenario is underwater pipelines to a terminal on the Arctic Coast and then a new pipeline to connect with the TAPS. The TAPS cost about $8 Billion to build in the ’70s. The needed pipeline would only be about half the lenght of the TAPS, but would still be several tens of billions to build. Mythology notwithstanding, the TAPS was built in about 3 years, the rest of the ten years from leases to first oil was spent in litigation with greenies and Alaska Natives. There “shouldn’t” be Native Claims issues, but who knows what lawyers and communists can cook up. There are already a spate of lawsuits over the very notion of drilling in the ice, and, frankly, there are some valid concerns; nobody knows how to handle a blowout or other spill in the ice. Nobody really knows how to fix anything much on, in, or under the ice. Offshore development in the Arctic is a wholly new enterprise. I don’t know how much was wrong with the original TAPS design, but what was actually built was much different from what was initially proposed and there is pretty much universal agreement that the original plans would have been disasterous.
Anyway, I have a chance to be the Master of a lighterage vessel out there this summer and I really hope it happens. It’ll be eating in a mess tent and sleeping in a tent or on the boat with no radio, TV, or internet, but I can content myself with dreaming of the money.
“there are some valid concerns; nobody knows how to handle a blowout or other spill in the ice.”
Art –
I read that Shell knew it would be helpless in the winter if something went wrong, so it planned for two blowout preventers for each hole drilled. This planning was way before the Gulf disaster, but showed concern that a blowout preventer might not work so a backup was needed.
I’m a firm believer in the notion that there WILL be a failure in any human endeavor. Everybody knows that pulling a supertanker out of the Valdez Narrows and past Bligh Reef is a tricky business, but if you do it every week, it is just another drive to work – until you have your head up your butt and bounce a supertanker off a marked, lighted reef and dump 11,000,000 gallons of oil into Prince William sound. The much feared and heavily modified to meet environmentalist objections has never had a real failure but it has never had the test it was really designed around; a major earthquake – hope it never does!
I did the administrative investigation when our ferry M/V LeConte hit a marked rock on a beautiful, sunny, flat calm day. The only explanation offered by an experienced Master and Mate was that they had “lost situational awareness.” I can just hear the rig boss’ similar quote voiced over pictures of an oiled Polar Bear cub.
I think the only way to get better at delivering energy — whether nuclear, oil or gas — is to do it. It’s only by doing that we learn how to overcome adversity.
“And let’s not forget how Secretary of Energy Steven Chu looked forward to the time when gas prices in America compared with Europe. That would mean a gallon of gas would run somewhere between $7 to $9 a gallon.”
This is when the Obama administration let the cat out of the bag. They are constantly following the European model on everything, from energy consumption to spending, and both are failing dramatically. One only has to look at Greece to see what our future has in store for us. And this president thinks there is nothing wrong with spending ourselves into oblivion and allowing energy prices to skyrocket, even though it will only spell doom for our economy. Well, I hope the people who elected this jerk are happy with their choice. Even if a Republican is elected in November to replace him, I don’t know if there will be that much left to save, unless spendiing is cut big time and drilling is increased dramatically. Only then will we have a chance. But following the “European model” will destroy this nation.
Sun rises in the east every day under this administration. Obama takes credit.
Sun sets in the West. Obama blames Bush.
obumble will take credit, even though they tried to stop all drilling, everywhere. He know the MSM will not call him to task, if they do finally report fairly, he will be a sad page in American history. Bad things happen when good men do nothing. Make America proud once again. VOTE obumble OUT
Taking credit where no credit is due is robbery and there is no credit due this administration seeing that from day one it has operated in opposition to coal and oil as a source of of energy in favor of niche solutions that have been available over the last number of years and have done a good job serving their niches but are not suited to supply our vast commercial energy needs. Coal and oil are.
Both produce pollution but we have learned economical ways to keep that pollution in tolerance. None of the alternatives are without pollution and some seem to have no mitigating control.
What about our much hyped wind farms that are reported as a real hazard to flying birds and bats which should put them off limits for endangered specie reasons. There are other very serious drawbacks but it seems hypocrisy is a major problem. What would you do if you could produce no garbage? Could you even eat or breath? Probably not. We deal with our garbage. So lets give Obama credit where credit is due and deal with his garbage.