On Jun 9, 11:30 am, JerseyMike hotmail.com> wrote:

hmmm... not sure why Jewish World Review is posting George Will's
rather odd and incorrect view of the world... but I'll educate some
here, assuming that anybody's reading:

OPEC has something like 800 billion barrels of proven reserves. The US
has something like 20. Now, ANWR is not a "reserve" but a resource and
probably has something like 10 billion barrels of easily producible
crude, and another 10 that would be more difficult to get to. So, if
Bill Clinton had "opened" ANWR, we would now have more like 30 billion
in reserves instead of 20. We would have increased the global supply
by slightly over 1%%. Assuming that production is linear (i.e. that
proven reserves map perfectly onto production), and forgetting about
every other aspect of reality (Iraq, the dollar, Nigerian unrest, I'll
get to demand in a minute).... that means that Bill Clinton has robbed
you of 50c on every 50$ of gas. This is a "tax" if you will to (a)
keep the "1002 area" (1.5 million acres of coastal plain) from looking
like Prudhoe bay, and (b) to save our resources for a rainy day (i.e.
when we could get import no oil for a prolonged period).

You might ask why we can't consider the 20 vs. 30 billion barrels of
US oil reserves in their own right, without worrying about global
supply. To that, you'd have to say "lets get off foreign oil" - i.e.
OPEC oil. Well, since we use ~7-8 billion barrels every year this
would mean you could save a whopping 16.5$ on every 50$ tank, but only
for 3-4 years. After that we'd have no more strategic reserve, and
have to import ALL our oil.

Obviously there are more domestic reserves - deep water Gulf, oil
shales etc... - but the point is that efficiently producible crude
will from now on be dominated by OPEC, and to a lesser extent Russia
(as they exploit the arctic in years to come).

So, rather than target ANWR, why not target a country that has
potentially 115 billion barrels of reserves ... oh wait, we are trying
that .... (ugh...)

N