Bush revives old plea for drilling in ANWR

During a press conference Tuesday, President Bush once again called on Congress to allow exploratory drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) to help reduce gasoline prices and ease America’s dependence of foreign oil. It’s an idea that has been promoted by the president and the oil industry throughout his administration, and continually rejected by through filibusters and amendments.

“If Congress is truly interested in solving the problem, they can send the right signal by saying we’re going to explore for oil and gas in the U.S. territories, starting with ANWR,” Bush declared. “We can do so in an environmentally friendly way.”

The president’s enthusiasm for drilling underneath the placid wilderness of northern Alaska makes it seem as if ANWR is the best, or only, source of domestic oil currently available, but this is far removed from reality. Bush made no mention of the oil and oil shale reserves in Colorado and North Dakota.

North Dakota has been a small oil producing state for many years. Prior estimates of proven petroleum reserves in the state were a little over 400 million barrels. But the U.S. Geological Survey recently reported that the amount of recoverable oil in North Dakota’s Bakken Formation is now estimated at 3.0 to 4.3 billion barrels, though past independent analysis has put that number as high as 300 billion barrels.

The Rocky Mountains are also an emerging source of recoverable oil. A 2005 study conducted by the Rand Corporation at the behest of the U.S. Department of Energy revealed, “oil-shale deposits in Colorado, Utah and Wyoming have technically recoverable reserves of 500 billion to 1.1 trillion barrels of oil. The estimate – 800 billion barrels – is three times the size of Saudi Arabia’s reserves and enough to meet 25 percent of current U.S. oil demand for 400 years.”

And while the emphasis has been on domestic sources of energy, the Athabascan Oil Sands in Alberta, Canada have an estimated 173 billion barrels of economically recoverable oil and proven reserves approaching 1,700 billion barrels.

For comparison, the total US petroleum reserves as of 2006 was approximately 20 billion barrels of recoverable oil. Estimates suggest that there are somewhere between 5.7 and 16 billion barrels or recoverable oil in the area around ANWR. If drilling was approved today, oil from ANWR would not reach the market for 10 years and have little to no effect on current gasoline prices.

While conservationists fight to protect ANWR, environmentalists have raised concerns about the amount of energy and fresh water required to extract crude oil from shale or bitumen. The rapid growth of the petroleum industry and the energy-intensive extraction process have resulted in proposals for the Athabascan oil sands to have their own nuclear power plant, an idea that most find counter-intuitive. But the dramatic price increases, which have nearly tripled the cost of a barrel of crude in just seven years, has made the extraction of oil from shale a profitable venture.