The irony is, we are being told the polar ice is melting at an unprecedented rate, so why are they worried about needing an icebreaker again? The whole thing is bollocks. On one hand we have Obama telling us we need to end our dependence on foreign oil…
“I will set a clear goal as president: in ten years we will finally end our dependence on oil in the Middle East,” said Democratic Presidential nominee Barack Obama. ” Source here
….then we have the EPA pulling this crap to prevent domestic oil production with the help of NGO’s.
EPA Shuts Down Drilling in Alaska
by Brian McGraw on globalwarming.org
Shell announced today, for now, it must end a project to drill for oil off the coast of Northern Alaska, because of a decision made by an EPA appeals board to deny permits to acknowledge that Shell will meet air quality requirements. This is not part of ANWR.
Companies that drill for oil must go through extensive permitting processes and invest billions of dollars as payments for leasing the land, exploring for possible oil fields, equipment, etc. This is all done with the understanding that assuming they follow the letter of the law, there is a chance that this investment won’t be flushed down the toilet at the end of the tunnel. It appears that in this case Shell has followed procedure and that emissions will be below any standards required by the EPA:
The EPA’s appeals board ruled that Shell had not taken into consideration emissions from an ice-breaking vessel when calculating overall greenhouse gas emissions from the project. Environmental groups were thrilled by the ruling.
“What the modeling showed was in communities like Kaktovik, Shell’s drilling would increase air pollution levels close to air quality standards,” said Eric Grafe, Earthjustice’s lead attorney on the case. Earthjustice was joined by Center for Biological Diversity and the Alaska Wilderness League in challenging the air permits.
Talk about moving the goalposts. They must have been really desperate to cancel this project given that this was the best straight-faced excuse they could muster. Not only do you have to be below the legally required emission limits but you must also not even be “close” to the limits, as defined by unelected officials, one of whom is a former attorney for the Environmental Defense Fund.
Events like this are a prime example of why many in Congress want to strip authority from the EPA. Shell had reportedly invested over $4 billion in this project. When companies make investment decisions, consideration is given to whether or not bureaucrats can make arbitrary decisions to shut the project down halfway through a multi-year process. There are many other countries with natural resource reserves who do not subject economic activity to such unpredictable insanity, and in the eye of a corporation, after an event like this these locations begin to look more preferable to dealing with the United States.
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Events like this are a prime example of why many in Congress want to strip authority from the EPA. Shell had reportedly invested over $4 billion in this project.
Ya think?
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@ur momisugly Catcracking and danj
Experts say 1/3rd is recoverable huh, cite that since your earlier numbers were easily blown out of the water, then knock a bunch off that due to the reduced energy content to boot. What’s the ROI look like? Pretty crappy isn’t it, and what’s that do to flow rates which you keep ignoring?
As far drilling restrictions go, sorry but not only does US oil production history make any claims of restrictions causing an artificial peak absurd but it also applies in all the other nations which have never had such restrictions. Look at the start dates, rig counts and time frames. US offshore restrictions didn’t even start till late 1969. Funny how in the late 60’s oil was still considered infinite in the US despite being told otherwise then 2 years later the US had its oh crap moment followed by a huge spike in drilling with no results. Not the first time drilling has gone nuts with production declining anyway either, that’s been going on since 1971. This exact same scenario has played out in numerous countries. Flow rate is everything, want high flow rate then you need big shallow easy to get at oil fields and the US used those up. The low hanging fruit is gone. Just to break even the US only has to replace a mere 200,000 barrels per day at current rates each year, it has been unable to regardless of price. Going back to 1971 at that stage to stave off depletion rates it only had to replace a mere 330,000 barrels per day and it couldn’t do that then either even though price went thru the roof in the 70’s. Shale oil has been available and in play the entire time, knock yourself out and give it a shot but its production history tells the story there too. Getting oil out of very hard and not porous rock thousands of feet underground is far easier said than done.
elbatrop says:
“Getting oil out of very hard and not porous rock thousands of feet underground is far easier said than done.”
That is simply Luddite naysaying. Get the government out of the way, let the free market operate, and ample oil will be produced. “Very hard” in the American lexicon is just an obstacle to be overcome. Producing energy is nothing compared to putting men on the moon.
Environmentalists attack on U.S. oil production is not limited to Alaska offshore. Take a look at http://www.regulations.gov/#!documentDetail;D=FWS-R2-ES-2010-0041-0001 which proposes endangered species status for the “Dunes Sagebrush Lizard”. Such a finding could markedly limit future production from long producing fields in Eastern New Mexico (Chaves, Roosevelt, Eddy, and Lea counties) and Western Texas (Andrews, Crane, Gaines, Ward, and Winkler counties).
Actually, they’re not. If the string-pullers of the Puppet President have their way, they’ll wreck the American economy—in the name of enviro-correctness (‘alternative’ energy, elimination of automobiles, shutting down smokestack industries, etc.)—and American demand for oil will evaporate. We won’t be dependent any more, just like all the other third-world countries.
/Mr Lynn
re: danj says:
April 26, 2011 at 6:00 pm
“There are an estimated 800 billion bbls of shale oil in a play near the Utah, Wyoming, and Colorado borders that the federal government puts off limits for drilling. In the central part of Louisiana, the Tuscaloosa Marine Shale play is now being leased. It has an estimated 70 billion bbls of shale oil reserves. None of this even includes huge reserves still left on the OCS.”
As has been pointed out previously, shale oil is not oil, but a precuror to oil known as kerogen. The energy density of shale oil is comparable to that of a baked potato. In order to be converted into useful oil, the long hydrocarbon chains of kerogen must be cracked into shorter hydrocarbons. This requires a considerable amount of energy in the form of heat.
The shale oil situation is quite different from that of the oil sands of Canada.
Wikipedia: http://goo.gl/bvemH
“The EPA’s appeals board ruled that Shell had not taken into consideration emissions from an ice-breaking vessel when calculating overall greenhouse gas emissions from the project. Environmental groups were thrilled by the ruling.”
They are talking about drilling for billions of barrels of oil and they are are shut down by the EPA because they didn’t account for the CO2 emissions of the icebreaker? That goes far beyond abuse and blatant stupidity. It is time to completely defund and defang that group of tyrants when it comes to anything remotely involving CO2..
Sun Spot: Won’t Shell just write it off as a business loss and write it off on their taxes ?
Tom in Florida: Let’s see, Shell share holders just lost $4 billion. I wonder how they will make that up?
Latitude: That will cost money…they will pass that money on to the consumers.
Either consumers or shareholders–or both. There is a widespread naive populism that says ‘Sock it to the plutocrat shareholders,’ not recognizing the extent to which corporations are now effectively owned by the average working stiff. For example, the currently reported holdings of Royal Dutch Shell by CALPERS retirement system is $489,961,936. Check it for yourself at:
https://www.calpers.ca.gov/mss-pub/SearchController?viewpackage=action&PageId=SearchCatalog&package_code=1861
And the California teachers retirement system (CALSTRS) holds $227,403,000 worth.
http://www.calstrs.com/Investments/portfolio/nonUS.asp
Considering that these are figures from just one state, and just two of the many institutional owners providing benefits to the general public, it is clear that the losses from arbitrary governmental abuse of power will be generally distributed across the population whether at the pump or in the future retirement check.
Undeveloped resources will be taken by cultures that are more aggressive than the incumbents.
Every action has an equal and opposite reaction – the EPA is creating the backlash that will destroy it.
Environmentalism is a classic malinvestment that will be unwound with the fiat currencies that are required to allow it to persist.
FoxNews also ran the story[3] about Shell abandoning drilling this summer in the Beaufort and Chukchi Seas off Northern Alaska because the EPA will not give them a critical air permit. Part of the story refers to the Trans Alaska Pipeline and how 30 years after it was built, it is running 660,000 bbl per day, < 1/3 of capacity, due to production declines from the existing North Slope fields.
Production on the North Slope of Alaska is declining at a rate of about 7 percent a year. If the volume gets much lower, pipeline officials say they will have to shut it down. Alaska officials are blasting the Environmental Protection Agency.
Why shut the pipeline down? I think it is because that over the length of the pipeline, the oil has to move above a critical velocity so that it stays warm via head loss from its viscosity. If the oil cools below its pour point, the pipeline will turn into an 800 mile long candle.
So lets suppose that we close the TAPS and lose 600,000 bbls of oil per day. What does that mean in energy loss? Let’s put it into wind turbine equivalents. One 1.5 MW wind turbine equals about 20 bbls of oil per day at the name plate rating or about 6 bbls of oil per day assuming typical energy factor for usable wind availability[1]. So closing the TAPS will be the energy equivalent of loosing 100,000 wind turbines. Over the course of 800 miles, that would be one wind turbine every four feet. Given needed separation between turbines, that would be a windfarm 800 miles long and 20 miles wide.
As of today, there are fewer than 35,000 wind turbines installed in the USA with nameplate capacity of < 45,000 MW.[2] So closing the TAPS, a 30 year old asset running at 1/3 of its capacity, will result in the loss of energy production equal to over 2 times all the wind power currently installed with GAO-knows how many billions of taxpayer subsidies. All because the EPA will not issue the air permits to allow drilling.
For the want of a permit, a pipeline may be lost.
For the want of a nail….. a war was lost.
Of course it depends on whose side of the war you are on.
[1] http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/04/01/giant-7-megawatt-sea-fan-announced/#comment-634470
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_power_in_the_United_States
[3] http://www.foxnews.com/us/2011/04/25/energy-america-oil-drilling-denial/
Just curious, but are these members of this EPA appeals board political appointees of the current administration or EPA bureaucrats?
Can you blame companies for outsourcing. Obama and company are turning every US industry into villains from oil, oil services, pharma, coal, banking until they took it over, insurance, wall street, software, semiconductors, autos until they took them over, construction, timber, nuclear, and mining. Even their pet projects of wind mills, solar panels, high speed rail, have fled or are fleeing the country — and the fleeing continues even through the recession. If the government were not spending 10% of the GDP in deficit each year, our economy would be shrinking by about 7 to 8% per year. What businessman in his right mind wants to put up with the legal threats and the unstable, costly, and lengthy permit processes?
Those EPA folks apparently don’t realize that at the end of the day they are paid by Private Industry.
This has to stop. I am beginning to think that the Administration has embarked on a scorched earth policy to do as much damage as possible in the 20 months they have left.
This is our punishment for the rejection of the progressive agenda on November of 2010.
It’s called lawfare. The deliberate obstruction of a project by every means available within the letter of the law, regardless of the intent of the law. Sierra club are experts at it. They don’t necessarily need to get a cease operations order, only to slow things to a molasses in January pace so that the investors will complain that there’s no return, and seek developments elsewhere.
Correction to the above comment about windmills along the TAPS:
So closing the TAPS will be the energy equivalent of loosing 100,000 wind turbines Over the course of 800 miles, that would be one wind turbine every forty feet. Given needed separation between turbines, that would be a windfarm 800 miles long and two miles wide.
Environmental groups were thrilled by the ruling.
These same environmental groups appear to be unfazed by the large number of Russian icebreakers that operate in Arctic waters throughout the year.
Smokey says:
April 26, 2011 at 9:07 pm
elbatrop says:
“Getting oil out of very hard and not porous rock thousands of feet underground is far easier said than done.”
“That is simply Luddite naysaying.”
I strongly agree with the Luddite analogy.
Getting stuff out of “very hard and not porous rock thousands of feet underground” is quite easy… it’s call Hydrofracking. But then, the self lobotomized naysayers have made that an evil technology buzzword as well.
When Clarita Operating and Chesapeake Operating agreed to shut down operations at two wells in Arkansas, at the behest of the AOGC and CERI who were concerned about an ongoing earthquake swarm, the crowd went wild citing it as an end to hydrofracking. Too bad they were both class II disposal wells used to get rid of the saltwater byproduct of natural gas production. See, the EPA won’t let you dump it in the local watershed. (not a bad policy). A class II well in Arkansas has stringent guidelines on the maximum insertion pressure… determined by a calculation that is based off of the fracture gradient. See, if you exceed that, you fracture that “very hard and not porous rock thousands of feet underground.”
So… in a nutshell, your statement is wrong.
[snip – just a bit to much over the top to be posted here – Anthony]
I’m afraid the truth is more terrible than anyone imagines. It isn’t just stupidity. This is a deliberate plan to strip us of independence. It is a financial and perhaps ultimately military assault.
With oil exploration comes risks and occasionally some splills. Each time it is hailed as the worst evil in the worls yet the banking industry very nearly brought about the collapse of civilization as we know it and they’re already back to their old ways of double dealing and big bonuses. When will the worlds governments get their priorites right.
The world is brimming over with governmental organizations placing restrictions on the lives of ordinary people and each time without deference to the people who voted them into power.
“When the people fear their government, there is tyranny; when the government fears the people, there is liberty. ”
Thomas Jefferson
Shell’s been trying earnestly to drill its exploratory wells since 2005. Each summer it’s something else that prevents them (last summer it was BP’s mess in the Gulf of Mexico, before that there were a number of lawsuits by environmental groups). They had finally cleared court hurdles and now this. An estimated 25 billion barrels of oil is waiting to be discovered and produced. It’ll still be there when some sanity returns.
The environmentalists are also waging a campaign to keep GoM operations shut:
http://fuelfix.com/blog/2011/04/26/feds-should-pull-gulf-permits-until-environmental-impact-clear-activists-say/
And the President continues to demonize “big oil” and to call for elimination of “these wasteful subsidies” (tax breaks) and to replace them with investments “in clean energy to reduce our dependence on foreign oil.” http://fuelfix.com/blog/2011/04/26/obama-repeats-call-to-end-oil-industry-tax-breaks/
Oh and there’s the war on hydro-fracturing: http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/business/7538620.html
Who in the world does he think is going to pay for this? He cannot conceive that ultimately, we consumers pay for corporate taxes and also for “investments in clean energy”, whether they pay off or not. Not to mention that the evil big oil companies may be the best places to “invest in clean energy”. What an embarrassment this administration has become.
Disclaimer: My spouse has worked for a quarter century as a geologist for Shell Oil. There is some amazing talent in that organization, especially on the R&D side, but the company is rapidly losing interest in US operations. There is less emphasis in recent years on replacing the rapidly retiring “Bell Labs” quality talent. Sad to watch, but a symptom of the political instability in the US.
[ Square Brackets around “b” replaced with angle brackets so your bolding would work…
-ModE ]
Understandably, by now wealth creation itself always threatens the essentially parasitic Communist/Totalitarian throwbacks because it suggests their basic lack of importance to other people within a society and to Humanity in general. Also, as effective infants, it more primarily gratifies them to vandalize, destroy and impede the workings of the wonderous and beneficial things others have produced, in contrast to spreading and encouraging their development and use.
Can Shell just “donate” the necessary materials, have relevant employees sign appropriate contracts, and just run the same project through its Canadian branch with vessels under Canadian flag and jurisdiction? It would have to go back through all the red tape, but unless I missed something I don’t see this effectively killing the project.
The ultimate goal is to nationalize the oil industry they way they’re nationalizing the auto industry and the health care industries. About all we can do is to write our congress critters – even the liberal ones – and educate people about the real reason why gas prices are going up – and vote, of course.
Thanks ModE! I meant to fix that…glad you did.
How many times have I said this?—
GET RID OF THE EPA
Then America could start to make things again instead of driving jobs overseas.