A friend of mine recently wrote (message in its entirety, ellipses in original):
Subject: Write your representatives, guys......not that it'll do much good with the idiots this state keeps sending to DC.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/7195164
Pay particular attention to the percentage difference opening up the reserves would make...a whopping 2.5%...and even the most pro-oil estimates say there's only 18 months worth of oil in there.
I'm actually rather fond of some of the people we send to DC, but that's beside the point.
We can kick the 2.5% total consumption number around for a while. What number you get depends on which estimate of the year we hit peak oil production from ANWR you match up with which estimate of our total oil consumption for that year. Taking a few at random, I'm getting numbers from around 2.5% to 5%. So I'll concede the 2.5% point.
What I won't concede is that 2.5% not being worth pursuing. Since we're tossing around percentages, we would do well to remember that "2.5% of total consumption" works out somewhere in the neighborhood of 20% of our total domestic production. Drill it, pump it, pipe it. If there's so little oil, it'll be gone in two years and that will be that.
What irked me a bit more was my friend's claim that "the most pro-oil estimates say there's only 18 months worth of oil in there." That claim is demonstrably hokum. If you refer to page 2 of the article he referenced, you will find the following:
"Only one exploratory well has been drilled, and the results have been kept secret. The U.S. Geological Survey, using seismic studies, estimated in 1998 that between 5.6 billion to 16 billion barrels of technically recoverable oil is likely to be beneath the refuge’s tundra."
Let's say they extract the oil at, oh, say 1,595,000 barrels a day (bbl/day). Why 1,595,000 bbl/day? Because that's the peak production level cited in the "high resource case" scenario in the summary of Energy Information Agency's report, to wit:
"In all three resource cases, ANWR coastal plain oil production begins in 2013 and grows during most of the forecast. In the mean oil resource case, ANWR oil production peaks at 876,000 barrels per day in 2024. The low resource case production peaks at 639,000 barrels per day in 2024, while the high resource case production peaks at 1,595,000 barrels per day in 2023."
Ok, so calculators at the ready, lets say there's only 5.6 billion barrels there, but we extract the oil as fast as the EIA thinks we'll ever be able to from day one. Silly example, I know, but it should give us the absolute least amount of time we might be able to exhaust the supply there. So we have 5.6e9(bbl) / 1.595e6(bbl/day) which yields not quite 3,511 days. That works out to ~9.6 YEARS.
How odd. That seems quite a bit more than 18 months, and that's with numbers picked to give the smallest time yield. As I told my friend, unless the definition of "most pro-oil" has changed lately, I would suggest he find a more reliable source for yield estimates in the future.
