Oil conservation

Inflating Tires Beats Coastal Drilling

Quote:

Obama was observing that coastal drilling would save us so little oil and so little money even twenty years from now, that you can actually save more money immediately by doing "simple things" such as keeping your tires properly inflated. Where did he get that crazy idea? From George Bush's Energy Department and Environmental Protection Agency. (hat tip: Get Energy Smart! Now!) Their joint site fueleconomy.gov is loaded with fuel-saving, money-saving tips. Keep your tires properly inflated, for example, and you can save up to 12 cents a gallon. Compare that immediate savings from that single tip, with what coastal and Arctic National Wildlife Refuge drilling combined would get you two decades from now: 6 cents a gallon. And that's being generous, because Bush's Energy Department says we can't expect any impact on prices from coastal drilling until the year 2030.

If that is true, it is a nobrainer.

"If it's true" - but it's not. Read here for the debunking of the numbers used in the post above.

Quote:

... To get to the bottom of the puzzle, I tracked down the source of the statistic that Grunwald attributes to the "Bush administration." I'm pretty sure this is it: the Annual Energy Outlook 2007 with Projections to 2030, as published by the Energy Information Administration. This graph, I'm confident, is the source of the "200,000 barrels a day in 2030" claim: (graph at site) As you can see, the projected recovery from OCS drilling in 2030 is around 200,000 barrels per day. EIA projects recovery to begin around 2018, but as you can see from the graph, EIA projected that only a tiny percentage of the 18 billion barrels (minimum) under the OCS would be recovered. The explanation, obviously, lies in the set of assumptions used by the EIA in creating its forecast. The forecast was not based on the amount of oil that the OCS actually contains, it was based on the amount that was predicted to be economically remunerative at the then-prevailing price of oil. The EIA report makes this explicit: Quote: Although a significant volume of undiscovered, technically recoverable oil and natural gas resources is added in the OCS access case, conversion of those resources to production would require both time and money. In addition, the average field size in the Pacific and Atlantic regions tends to be smaller than the average in the Gulf of Mexico, implying that a significant portion of the additional resource would not be economically attractive to develop at the reference case prices. Aha! The obvious question, for anyone with the most rudimentary understanding of economics, is, What are the reference case prices? Here they are: (graph at site) That's right: the EIA, writing in early 2007, assumed that oil prices would decline from their 2006 peak; that in 2008, the price of crude oil would be around $60 a barrel; that it would continue to decline until around 2013 to a low of about $50 a barrel; and that the price would then gradually increase to a little under $60 a barrel by 2030. Those were the assumptions on which EIA concluded that it would not be economically profitable to get most OCS oil out of the ground. ...

So, the "6 cents" figure, and the 200,000 barrel figure, are based on assumptions that are no longer even close to true. Democrats should be ashamed of themselves for pushing such blatantly false numbers.