The Truth About Oil and Iraq    May 30, 2007 

Dear Friends,

I will invoke a rarely used House rule of personal privilege to gain
one hour of time in Congress for the purpose of discussing in
detail the Congressional and White House efforts to privatize
the oil of Iraq.

Oil was the primary reason for the invasion of Iraq. There were, of course, no weapons of mass destruction, no connection between Iraq and 911, no connection between Iraq and Al Queda’s role in 911.  Despite that, the Bush-Cheney Administration, with the approval of a Democratic-controlled Senate and the Democratic leader of the House, supported and commenced a brutal campaign of shock and awe, of bombing, invasion and then occupation of Iraq.

Dennis Kucinich

The oil companies currently hold 10,000 drilling permits right now, and have leases to 68 million acres of land that is going undrilled -- no need to "open up ANWR or the Gulf Coast right now" as Newt Gingrich would have everyone believe. (Drilling permits are apparently what happens right before the drill bit hits the ground -- so oil companies are confident that oil is there.) Check out this June 2008 report from the Committee on Natural Resources.

Among the most interesting points:

• Drilling on federal lands has steadily INCREASED since the 1990s
• Drilling permits have gone from 3,802 five years ago to 7,561 in 2007
• Oil and gas companies have shown that they cannot keep pace with the rate of drilling permits (so opening the Gulf and ANWR would help how, exactly?)
• Although permits have gone up, the price of gas has ALSO gone up, refuting the idea that more drilling will automatically reduce prices
• The Bureau of Land Management has issued 28,776 permits to drill on public land; yet, only 18,954 wells were actually drilled (a difference of 9822)
• Of the 47.5 million acres of on-shore federal lands that are currently being leased by oil and gas companies, only about 13 million acres are actually in production
• Offshore, only 10.5 million of the 44 million leased acres are currently producing oil or gas
• According to the Minerals Management Service, of all the oil and gas believed to exist on the Outer Continental Shelf, 82% of the natural gas and 79% of the oil is located in areas that are currently open for leasing
• Nearly 91 million acres are currently open to leasing in the Arctic region of Alaska, including onshore and offshore lands. Oil and gas companies have leased only 11.8 million of the 91 million acres.

The report goes on to say that just drilling in these 68 million acres (this excludes the Alaska acreage, because much of it is still unleased by the oil companies even though it is available to lease) of untapped areas without drilling anywhere else would likely produce six times the amount of oil in ANWR. Yes, that's right: SIX TIMES what ANWR is estimated to be able to produce at peak production. And if they'd bother to lease the Alaska areas that are available, that number would undoubtedly go much higher.

There's much more in the report, but suffice to say, the next time one of us hears the claim that we need to drill in ANWR or off the coast of Florida to reduce our oil dependence and affect pricing, we should (confidently!) ask why in the world we aren't making use of the 10,000 permits already issued and the 68 million acres of unused, currently leased land to drill on first, and why the additional drilling we've already done since the 90s hasn't reduced prices at all.