Graphic of the Day: Shill, Baby, Shill

Not to be a fly in the ointment, but the webpage you got that graphic from misrepresented it, and so did you. That graphic is not what impact off-shore drilling will have, but what the current administration is planning for. Bush has only been a mild supporter for offshore drilling, doing nothing but quietly asking to lift the ban on offshore drilling. He's only started pushing it because other countries are now drilling offshore in immediate vicinity of our land.

McCain's plan is to aggressively bring up offshore drilling to maximum capacity -which should be an even greater cause for alarm among environmentalists.

Are my fellow Americans so dumb, so near-sighted that they cannot understand that the simple concept that drilling in Alaska WILL NOT MAKE PRACTICALLY ANY DIFFERENCE to their gas prices? I've seen charts like this before and they all speak to the truth of my first statement.
What blows my mind is that there are people (officials worst of all) who are covering their eyes and ears to the FACTS and insist that tearing up the environment is going to make their gas a dollar again. It seriously makes me wonder about the future of our country if people CANNOT/WILL NOT understand basic math.
I'm not sure if my comment was civil, but my god, people need to wake up in this country.

And even that small amount of possible oil will not necessarily be sold to US consumers!

Wow, that's unbelievable. According to this site, it would take just FOUR DAYS for the U.S. to consume a year's worth of this oil at peak production. The environment and financial cost aside, I suppose someone will argue that this venture helps create jobs. Sigh.

That's a pretty convincing graphic.

But I have to ask. I thought that US oil production was declining since the early 1970s? Unless they're including Canadian oil as "domestic", I'm certain that the percentage of oil demand produced domestically is much smaller than that.

What's that massive jump in 2010 correspond to?

@stradric

The "massive jump in 2010" (though it looks more like 2008-ish to my eyes) actually corresponds to the recently huge spike in oil prices. Oil fields that where previously too expensive to drill all of a sudden become financially recoverable with the increase in price.

The data used for the graphic comes from the US Energy Information Administration (EIA) and is for current and projected oil production and consumption.

For an analysis of just US off-shore oil in the OCS please see the EIA DOE report here.

@Azhura
All politicians prostrated at the altar of Big Oil.

@Ernie
Yeah, what gives? Why do they think that US oil production will maintain at 5.6mbpd in 2030 when it declined from 10mbpd since 1970. Does that graph include all liquids (coal to liquids, gas to liquids, oil from shale, etc.)?

And it's pretty rosy of the EIA to assume that we'll be able to maintain our import quota, with most major oil fields in decline, few large ones coming online, and domestic production increases in major producers like Saudi Arabia and Russia. We'll be lucky to be importing 5mbpd in 2030.

Sometimes a simple visual can make all the difference in the world. Well done.

Yes this graph is misleading, or just downright wrong. There are single rigs that can produce more than 200,000 barrels per day. To say that in 20+ years only one more rig this size will be built does not seem right.

How cute! You show the overall oil production trending upward!

sadly, i doubt the most here in the US really understand what that graph means....