Offshore Drilling Graph Speaks for Itself

Damn. A fairly smaller difference in a fairly long time.

Clean energy and plug-in could make a much bigger difference by then.

Offshore drilling is NOT meant to have an appreciable impact on our oil dependence. It's supposed to do two things:

1. Put the decision making ability back into the hands of the states, not the Federal government; and

2. Generate lots of additional revenue for the government (drilling rights and land leases that oil co.s pay them, refinery payments, new jobs creation which means more payroll and income taxes), and of course more taxes on revenues from the $100+ barrels of oil, regardless of whether they're sold back to the US, or the highest bidder on the global market (if not the US).

Yep, they talk about this over at The Oil Drum all the time. Don't have the link handy to the particular post (it was by Jerome a Paris of kos fame), but you can search.

Right now they're talking gas shortages... :(

While these numbers don't really seem right to me (the Thunder Horse platform in the GOM produces .25 mbpd itself, for example), I'll bite. If the government got 10% of the revenue from that drilling (extremely conservative estimate), at $100/bbl, that's $730,000,000, enough for a $7,500 PHEV tax credit for 100,000 vehicles per year, a 33% tax credit on 547 MW of solar (at $4 per watt) annually, just for example.

That's revenue that could be put to good use for renewable energy.

In 2007 the US consumed 20.6mb/day. This graph only shows about 15mb/day. Something's not right.

@dave
The U.S. consumed 20.7 million barrels per day of petroleum products in 2007, not just crude oil. Part of this is refinery gain, and the rest is imports of refined products.

This is an extremely optimistic graph (put out by the US gov'ts EIA). To think we'll still have 5.5 mbpd of domestic production in 2030 is pretty ridiculous, since we've dropped down to 5.5 mbpd today from 11 mbpd in 1970.

@ Bill
You forgot #3: To make billions of dollars in profit for the oil industry. It's no coincidence that those "rogue" Republican congressmen were having a sit-in in favor of drilling over the summer. Big Oil gives to the Repubs 3 to 1 over Dems.

@ Dave
Yeah, where's the extra 5 mbpd that we use? Why aren't they counting that?

@JSDreyer Again, the U.S. did not consume 20.7 mbb/d of crude oil in 2007. Please see my comment above. Also I think the most ridiculous part of this graph is making predictions about energy, especially oil, 20+ years out. I don't see 5.5 mbb/d as unsustainable. Oil wells never run dry, they reach a point where recovering oil is not worth the increasing costs. Technology and high prices will continue to make recovering oil from places once considered impossible economically feasible.

Truth is, even if your graph was correct, it would be enough to help maintain lower crude oil prices. Which means we might get to keep eating. We are at a tipping point where we need everything.

Great post though!