McQ over at O&O made a trip to an oil platform, and relates his experiences here. [1]
There’s a lot going on in that post, but I do want to point up something that relates to a discussion we had the other day about domestic production:
I think one of the more relevant points I learned was the size of the investments oil companies like Chevron routinely make in search of product. Right now, not counting Blind Faith, it has 27 projects world wide each costing a billion dollars or more. Blind Faith is a billion dollar plus project – again, before the first barrel of oil is extracted.
Billion dollar (and multi-billion dollar [2]) projects aren’t undertaken unless you make a profit and can put that profit back into research and development and building the platforms necessary to produce the product.
[3] And the issue of not allowing exploration on something like 85% of the known oil fields we have in this country [4]aside for the moment, this is the other major issue that we face in terms of getting domestic crude going… taxes. All this investment takes a lot longer to pay off when people like Hillary Clinton come along and try to tax oil companies to death because they’re making a ‘profit’. Where does Hillary think such profits go? Instead, the left taxes the hell out of oil companies and then tries to kill off the business by claiming there’s no product left. [5] … and pushing oil’s competition… [6] leaving us with paying the freight, which at the moment comes up $3.25 a gallon. Which of course affects the prices on everything else in our economy, since everything gets transported, by whatever means.
As I said elsewhere:
After 30 years of work against domestic petroleum refiners, by the enviro-wacko left, we now find ourselves in the situation where we have Insufficient drilling capacities at home, and insufficient refining capacities at home, to meet the demand. Of course, the hope (thought they would never admit it) was that tightening the supply of oil would increase the supply of other forms of energy, such as biofuels. This was supposed to be our energy panacea.
But, like every other wet dream these people have come up with, it’s turned into a nightmare. It has become clear that we are not going to be able to do that. As a result, we now have an energy starved nation, paying $3.00 a gallon and better for the ability to drive back and forth to work… and all the economic repercussions that invokes.
Isn’t it time we took the government wonks keeping us from our own oil, in hand?
Anyway, go read McQ’s article.